"No Ric Flair tonight?" Phil asked when he pulled up a stool.

The bizarre barkeep gestured toward the TV. "Flair, the Nature Boy, the Champion of Champions? Naw, ya missed him. He's already been on, whupped the tar out of Rocky Johnson. Like he says, to be the man, you have to beat the man. Right now we got Terrific Terry Taylor mixing it up with Rick Morton."

"Ah," Phil said. "Of course."

"Bottle of Bud? Hot dog?"

"Just...a bottle of Bud."

Sallee's was buzzing, the crowd waiting for the next dancer. Phil glanced around. Well-bosomed waitresses in ludicrously tight tops wended orders between tables like tight-ropists. Same crowd as last night-Generic rednecks, Phil thought. Is that all these people do? b.u.m around in strip joints? Lights throbbed idly above the vacant dance stage, through lolling sheets of cigarette smoke. Hoa.r.s.e laughter erupted every so often, and the bar, in its casual discourse, was not lacking in foul language and bad jokes. "Hey, what are two words you never wanna hear in the men's locker room?" "What?" "'Nice d.i.c.k.'" "You got ten gals with PMS and ten gals with yeast infections, what've ya got?" "What?" "A whine and cheese party!" Brilliant, Phil thought. He didn't see Eagle anywhere, nor Vicki; he felt immediately foolish sitting at the bar by himself He frowned up at the wrestling foolery on the TV. These guys probably spend more money per year on hair bleach than I spend on car insurance. The keep was peddling shriveled hot dogs at one end of the bar, while two bearded guys at the other end nearly got into a fight arguing over whether cast aluminum engine blocks were more durable than cast iron. Next, they'll be arguing over who should win the n.o.bel Prize for Literature, Phil joked over his beer. But this night was no joke. His lame distractions coaxed him to forget he had a job to do, yet he continued to do exactly what Mullins-and professionalism in general-warned him never to do: Take things personally. His mind kept homing back-to Vicki, and the dusting of cocaine she'd left in his bathroom.

Addict, the word kept haunting him.

Eventually the next dancer came on, a blond who was surely half-inebriated as she plunged her routine into another nondescript heavy metal tune. A snake seemed to peer from her navel, but then Phil realized it was a tattoo. Small, weathered b.r.e.a.s.t.s jiggled with each high-heeled step, like slackened bags of gel, and wires of black pubic hair leaked from the seams of a flesh-colored g-string.

One thing Phil eventually came to notice, though, in spite of his despondency, was an influx of patrons crossing the bar toward the men's room but never returning, and as he became more aware of this, he tried to pay more attention without being conspicuous.

What the h.e.l.l's going on back there?

A cramped hallway in the corner led to the men's room, and right next to it stood a door. A funny-looking kid in overalls waited beside the door itself, arms crossed and stone-faced. A Creeker, Phil ascertained. The gaunt features and enlarged head left no doubt. One periodic redneck after another approached the kid, bypa.s.sed the men's room, and after a moment of discussion, was granted permission to pa.s.s through the cryptic door. It seemed almost as if the Creeker kid was guarding it.

Maybe it's a billiard room or arcade or something, Phil suggested to himself, but that wouldn't make sense.

Why would the kid be guarding it? Then Phil thought back: When he'd first started staking the lot, hadn't he heard several patrons mention something about a back room?

A hand slapped on his back. Phil jumped.

"Hey, man. How's it going?"

Eagle, his long blond hair in his face, pulled up the next stool and ordered a beer.

"Can't complain," Phil answered. "Well, I guess I could, but why bother? What's up with you?"

"Same old, same old." Eagle craned to view the current dancer, then quickly frowned. "Looks like she's dancing with cinderblocks tied to her feet."

"Give her a break, Eagle. She probably just got out of Harvard Law School but hasn't quite found the right firm."

Eagle chuckled and swigged some beer. "I don't know where they dig some of these girls up. Sure, some of them are all right, but most of 'em look like death warmed up. Vicki blows them all away."

"Yeah," Phil replied but thought: Yeah, I'll bet she does, when she's not blowing Natter's c.o.ke up her nose.

Another thrashing song thumped on the juke, waves of grinding guitars like chainsaws in tempo. The crowd haphazardly applauded when the dancer stood on her head and parted her long, pale legs, no easy task for a drunk. Phil and Eagle small-talked a while, but in the corner of his eye, Phil detected still more scruffy patrons shuffling rearward, to the door beside the Creeker kid.

"Hey, Eagle? What's in there?"

"Where?" Eagle asked.

"That door back there. I keep seeing guys walking over and talking to that kid. Then the kid lets them in."

"You don't want to know, man. It's a gross-out."

"A gross-out?" Phil pondered this, and came up with nothing. "Come on, what gives? They got pool tables back there or something? Let's go shoot a few games."

Eagle chuckled again, more darkly this time. "Ain't gonna shoot no pool in there, man. It's the back room. I been in there once, but I'll tell ya, I wish I hadn't."

Phil couldn't figure this one out. Gambling? c.o.c.k fights? He wanted to find out what was cooking. "What? I gotta guess? Fill me in."

Eagle swept some of his shoulder-length hair out of his face, to reveal the sourest of smirks. "They got a second stage back there," he replied.

"What, you mean more girls?"

"Yeah, man. More girls," he said, dour.

Why's he balking? Phil wondered. "Well, this gal here isn't exactly setting the world on fire; looks like she might die before the next set. Let's go check out this other room, see these other girls."

"It ain't like out here, Phil," Eagle finally confessed. "They got Creeker girls working the back."

Phil's beer went flat in his mouth; he nearly gasped. "Creeker girls? Stripping?"

"That's right, partner. The cream of the crop. They all look great-till you take a second glance. Believe me, man, it's a gross-out. That's the draw. The only people who go back there are kinks and sickos."

Phil eyed the door. Creeker strippers. He'd already seen some, that first night of his stakeout, with his binoculars. He couldn't imagine who would want to witness such a thing, but then he remembered what Eagle had just said. Kinks. Sickos. Yeah, Natter's really got himself a prize here. s.h.i.t. It seemed ultimately perverse, and an even more ultimate exploitation, but Phil doubted that the girls were underage. Natter would never be that stupid.

So why was there a doorman?

Only one way to find out, Phil. Ask. "How come that kid's watching the door?"

"It's private. Cody Natter doesn't let just anyone go back there, only friends or regulars. Things would get too rowdy otherwise. The kid's name is Druck, one of Natter's gofers."

This sounded too fishy to resist; Phil finished his beer. "Come on, let's go check it out."

Eagle rolled his eyes. "I just got done telling you, man, regulars only."

Phil leaned over. "Yeah, and you're a regular. You could get us in."

"Sure, I probably could, but I'm not going to." Eagle seemed exasperated by the topic...and a little nervous. "Listen to me, Phil. You'll blow chunks if you even take one look behind that door. They've got girls in there with three or four t.i.ts, triple belly b.u.t.tons, triple nostrils. Hunchback girls, girls with no ears, girls with ten fingers per hand and two elbows per arm. The one time I went back there" -Eagle swallowed hard- "this one Creeker chick walks out on the stage, and she had a body on her that would make Vanna White look like Dr. Ruth-"

"Sounds great! Let's go!"

"-but all she had for arms were these little twigs with fingers on them." Eagle paused to gulp again. "And a head the size of a basketball. I'm tellin' ya, man. It's a f.u.c.kin' freak show back there."

These, of course, were not things that Phil wanted to see... But I have to get into that room, he determined to himself. See what else is cooking back there. He persisted, feigning more enthusiasm. "What's the matter, Eagle? You scared of a few inbreds? Christ, this is Dullsville out here." He shrugged at the stage, and at the next narcoleptic dancer. "These girls are tripping over themselves, for s.h.i.t's sake. They look like they're ODing on 'ludes. But I'll bet there's plenty of spark in that back room."

"Spark, huh? That's what you want?" Eagle shook his head. "All right, you pay the tab here, and I'll try to get us in back."

"Solid," Phil said, and left a ten on the bar. "Let's go."

They got up and squeezed past the waitress station. Phil's curiosity blended with abundant disgust; b.u.t.terflies went mad in his belly. But he had to keep playing the part; he had to prove to Eagle that he'd changed, for the worst.

"Hey, Druck," Eagle greeted the Creeker kid at the door. "This here's my buddy, Phil."

"Hey, Druck," Phil said.

"We'd like to go in back," Eagle added. "Phil's a townie, he's just been away a while. But he's all right."

The kid's expression, if it could be called that, didn't waver. His stout, muscled arms remained folded like a sentinel; the scarlet eyes never seemed to even blink. He looked Phil up and down, his enlarged jaw set, the swollen front of his head shining in mushy colors from the dance strobes.

Then he nodded.

"Thanks, Druck," Eagle said.

"Yeah, man," Phil added. "Have a good one."

The music grated on. The strobe lights flashed behind them.

Then Eagle led Phil into the back room.

Sixteen.

Kinks. Sickos. Kinks. Sickos...

The words siphoned round Phil's head like a ring of scavenger birds. What he and Eagle walked into was not so much a different room but a different realm. A circ.u.mference of grainy darkness seemed draped around the single, elevated stage. Faces could not be discerned-just half-formed suggestions of faces signaled by the orange tips of lit cigarettes. Weird electronic music resounded in place of the typical fractious heavy metal, and there was none of the rowdy bar-talk, boisterous laughter, and perverted jokes.

Just human silence, and the steady electronic drone.

As a limping waitress took them around to a table, Phil nearly tripped. "Christ, this is like wearing a blindfold-I can't see a thing!"

"Shhhh!" Eagle replied. "Quiet in here. Rules of the house. They don't want no loud talk, clapping, s.h.i.t like that."

They were seated several rows back; the waitress or hostess or whatever she was seemed to evaporate. Eagle ordered two beers from another waitress who trolled through the unlit aisles; the darkness revealed only enough of her face to hint at deformities: overlarge eyes; flattened, uneven cheekbones; a bifurcated nose. She made a wan grunt in reply, and slid away. Then Eagle leaned over and whispered, "You're the one who wanted in. Beers are ten bucks a pop back here."

Ouch! Phil thought. Some scam. But was that really all that was going on here? The dusty darkness unnerved him; he wished he could see the faces of the other patrons, to compare them with the pictures he snapped while staking out the parking lot over the past few weeks. But what unnerved him more was the crowd's utter silence. Antic.i.p.ation thickened in the air; Phil could feel it, he could nearly breathe it...

The stage existed as a single colonnade of dark, roving light.

Then the light went out.

Jesus, Phil thought. They were now sitting in pitch dark; all that his eyes could make out were myriad cigarette ends rising and lowering. The music-or noise really-plunged into a barely audible suboctave note which Phil could feel rattling in his throat. Very slowly, it rose and grew louder.

And even more slowly, the stagelight-now a deep blood-red-revived itself, increasing in a lapse of time that seemed minutes long.

But now the lone stage had a host...

A woman, draped in diaphanous veils, stood immobile as a chess piece in the axis of scarlet light. The music began to throb in a diastole, like blood through a heart; the sound was somehow gelatinous.

And the woman on stage began to move.

It wasn't dancing; it was more like some macabre kind of performance art. Dexterously, she drifted along in the midst of the arcane music and light, invisibly shedding the segments of her veil. In the meantime, and in imperceptible increments, the light adopted new colors-algae greens, yolk yellows, livid purples-so languorously the entire spectacle took on the texture of a dark dream.

Eventually, the girl was naked save for a pinkish, translucent g-string.

The sludge-like light played with Phil's vision, while abyssal noise-works distracted him further. It was a trick. At first he could note nothing abnormal about the girl, but as he trained his gaze, details began to surface as uncannily as magic. Features seemed to appear rather than be noticed. The girl's left eye was tiny as a marble, the right large as a scarlet billiard ball. Otherwise her face was flawless.

But the rest of her, Phil could soon tell, was not.

Aw, G.o.d...

Her bare splayed feet divided into but a pair of squab toes. Her hands were the same: two-fingered. As she swayed her head to the sonic dirge, shimmering black hair fell momentarily away to reveal that she had no ears at all, not even holes or indentations where the ears should be. Her navel, too, was fully missing-no suggestion of any such thing on her midriff. Pert b.r.e.a.s.t.s danced in the light, each topped by a perfect, dark nipple, yet more nipples-a half-dozen on each side-tracked down her sleek torso and abdomen like teats on the underbelly of a wolf.

Phil never tasted his ten-dollar beer. The grotesqueries onstage chained his gaze; repelled as he was, he couldn't look away for the life of him. More dancers came and went, each harboring accelerated genetic deformities, which, if anything, exceeded even Eagle's previous descriptions. One girl had three arms (two of them normal, but a third tiny arm sprouting from her armpit like a dead branch), another none, and a third possessed arms that appeared totally boneless-slack tubes of flesh swaying this way and that, with shriveled fingers at their ends. Another dancer displayed multiple b.r.e.a.s.t.s, four per side, stacked like pancakes, not to mention a head that seemed clovened.

Each girl finished her set with an obligatory-and masturbatory-floor show. The three-armed woman openly caressed her pubis with two hands, while the third hand-atrophied at the end of the shortened arm-plucked at her nipples.

Phil thought he might vomit any minute.

The evening's progress seemed to drip. The dark grew more murky as cigarette smoke thickened, and eventually the room became sweltering. Phil felt narcotized, shocked to numbness, as though in the aftermath of being bludgeoned in the head. On a few occasions, his eyes had acclimated sufficiently to see that every seat in the back room was taken. What a show, he thought despondently. A packed house. Eagle was right; this was where the denizens came. People who found arousal in the tragic misfortune of others. The kinks. The sickos.

One thing he noticed right off was that each dancer wore a garter, and attached to the garter was a small white card with a number on it. What's with the numbers? he managed to wonder. What purpose could they serve?

When the show was over, Phil felt winded. I thought I'd seen everything on Metro. Boy, was I wrong. Stepping outside, into the fresh night air, made him feel released from a long sentence in jail. But he couldn't let on how revolted he was; he must maintain the pretense to Eagle, and to everyone here, that he was just another busted, bent-out-of-shape redneck looking for kicks. Obviously the back room was a magnet for Crick City's most jaded, and would provide a very serviceable fuel for his investigation. To infiltrate a crowd such as this, he must pretend to be a part of it.

"Happy now?" Eagle asked.

"That was pretty wild, man."

Eagle shook his head. "You're into that kind of s.h.i.t?"

"These days I'm into anything that's not dull. And that show definitely wasn't dull, you gotta admit."

"Christ, man, I couldn't believe that one chick with no bones in her arms."

"The gal with the eight t.i.ts was a kick, too."

Eagle gaped at him. "Man, I never would've guessed you'd be into that. Lookin' at those girls makes me wanna blow chow."

Phil feigned a nonchalant shrug. "Different strokes, like they say. One thing I didn't get, though. Why did they all have numbers on their garters?"

Eagle's smirk creased his face. "Why do you think? They ain't just dancers, Phil. They're hookers. A guy sees one he likes, he gets the number and talks to the pimp after the show."