Dating Can Be Deadly

I noticed there were a few popcorn kernels balanced precariously in my cleavage. When I looked up again he was gone.

The rest of the shift was quieter, but I was relieved when it finally ended just before midnight. Lara linked her arm in mine as we stepped out of the theatre and into the chilly night air.

“He said he’d keep it a secret, right? So what are you so worried about?”

“I dunno,” I replied glumly, as we cut across the parking lot.

“Oh. I get it.” Lara nudged me with her elbow. “This is the suit you’ve been drooling over for years, huh? Mr. Sexy Lawyer at your firm.”

I began to protest, then relented. “I was surprised he even recognized me.”

“Why wouldn’t he? You’ve been working at that firm for what? Two years?”

“Yeah, but did you get a load of his girlfriend?”

“Yeah, I see your point.”

We continued our walk. My apartment was less than a block from the movie theatre but I was accompanying Lara across the street to her bus stop.

“You don’t have to wait with me,” Lara said. “The bus will be here in less than five minutes. Go on home. You look beat.”

“I am beat. It’s just that…” My eyes were drawn to the old building behind us. It looked like it had been a store at one point, but now it was boarded up with posted signs indicating it was zoned for demolition. My heart was jackhammering painfully inside my chest.

“Oh, my God! You’re doing that thing with your eyes!” Lara grabbed me by the shoulders and shook me roughly. “What is it?” She looked around wildly.

“I’ve got a real bad feeling about that place.” I looked up the road and nodded with my chin. “There’s another bus stop a block up. I’ll walk you over there.”

She shook her head. “No way.” She pointed to the building behind us. “Besides, there’s nobody in there, it’s pitch-dark.”

“Yeah, but still…” My palms were beginning to sweat and I had more than a bad feeling now—I had an image of a woman flash in my mind. A very dead woman. “Oh jeez.” I rubbed at my eyes. “Come on!” I yanked Lara by the elbow and tried pulling her up the road.

She tugged her arm free and studied my face. “You’re really scared. Is this another cat thing? I don’t spook easily but you are making me so curious.” She headed for the main entrance to the vacant building.

My stomach was churning as I followed her. There wasn’t much to see. It was a dilapidated gray stucco building with Keep Out signs hammered to the front door and a cement lot that circled the structure. Lara walked determinedly around the perimeter of the building. At the back, where a board had fallen away, she paused before peering inside the abandoned structure.

“Nothing!” She let out a disgusted breath. “I’m telling you, Tabitha, after everything Jenny’s told me about this psychic thing you’ve got going on, I’m kinda disappointed.”

“Yeah, well, Jenny does tend to exaggerate.” I glanced around and sighed with relief that no bogeymen were lurking in the parking lot behind us either. “Guess my feeling was off.” I didn’t want to think about the image that had flashed through my mind. “Let’s go.”

“Hey, what’s that?” Lara asked before we’d taken a step.

“What?”

“Painted on that Dumpster.” She nodded to the corner of the parking lot with her chin. “Could that be…” She began walking toward it. “Oh, my God, it is! It’s a pentagram! You said there was one at the cemetery, too, right?!”

My feet froze to the pavement. A streetlight in the corner of the lot angled a dim yellow sheen bathing the Dumpster in an eerie glow. Spray-painted over the words, Pacific Refuse Inc., was a black pentagram. That real bad feeling I’d had earlier returned. Lara walked closer to the bin and was now only a couple of feet away.

“Don’t,” I said weakly.

“It’s just a Dumpster.” She looked over her shoulder at me and made clucking noises. “Unless you’re thinking there’s something in here besides trash, like maybe another mutilated cat or something.”

“It’s the or something that bothers me and I’m not hanging around to find out.” I stomped away hoping that Lara would follow, but after a dozen steps I looked over my shoulder and saw that she was not behind me. She’d done the exact opposite—she’d shimmied up the side of the Dumpster.

“You know what?” Her voice echoed loudly inside the container. She shoved herself off, landed on her feet and wiped her hands on her jacket with a look of revulsion.

“What?”

“The Dumpster’s empty but there’s a puddle of something inside there. It looks like it could be blood. Of course, it’s hard to tell in the dark.”

My throat tightened. “I’m guessing there’s a lot more blood than would come from a cat, right?”

“Yep. A lot more.”

I wanted to run. Run far. Run fast. Lara, on the other hand, did the exact opposite, again. She called the cops.

Twenty minutes later I was sitting curbside with a good view of one of Seattle’s finest shining his flashlight into the Dumpster. He pushed himself off it in much the same manner as Lara had and then his partner climbed up and did a similar look-see inside with his flashlight. Lara was pacing nonstop in front of me, her face bright with excitement.

After a few minutes, the cops strode over. One was a fiftyish Hispanic guy with a thick mustache. The other was a younger cop who was built like a refrigerator with stringy blond hair.

Refrigerator Cop spoke first, addressing Lara. “You’re right that it looks like blood but, obviously, we can’t tell just by looking at it that it’s from a human. Probably somebody just dumped some meat.”

I let out a snort from my place at the curb and Refrigerator Cop turned and narrowed his eyes at me. “Tell me again what brought you around the building to look in the Dumpster.”

“Hey, I didn’t look in there,” I protested. “I was just following her.” I indicated Lara with my chin.

“Yeah, and she wanted to check because you had a psychic vision or something,” Mustache Cop said sarcastically and he and his partner shared identical smirks.

I got to my feet and clapped my hands together. “Well, looks like you guys have everything under control, so I’m going to go home to bed.”

“We’ve got the crime lab guys on their way and they’ll check out the Dumpster to be sure,” said Mustache Cop. “And we’ve got your information, so we’ll be in touch if anything further comes up.”

The look on his face said that he didn’t believe anything further would come up. He believed the pentagram on the side of the Dumpster was teenage graffiti and that the gooey stuff in the Dumpster was not human blood. I slid my gaze to the Dumpster and fear made my nerves ping.

Lara caught her bus and I ran the rest of the way to my apartment. I spent the better part of the night not able to sleep because of an unending slide show of morbid snapshots that flashed behind my eyelids. It began with the poor mutilated kitty in the graveyard, then that picture faded and the image of a woman’s bloody torso took its place. In the final slide, I saw the inside of a dimly lit building where someone was lighting a large black candle. I could almost smell the wax at this point. That’s when I would wake up in a cold sweat. Needless to say, fighting the dreams meant that sleep eluded me until I finally helped it along at three-thirty in the morning with tequila—kept for medicinal use only.

Since my car was sick I’d set my alarm for 6:00 a.m. It was an hour earlier than usual, but it would give me plenty of time to catch a bus and get to the office promptly. However, tequila-induced sleep does what it’s supposed to do. I slammed my fist on the snooze button no less than a dozen times. When I finally did roll out of bed—groggily at that—it was after eight.

“Holy shit!” I yelped and stumbled into the shower.

My apartment was described in the ad as a cozy, metropolitan unit with a parklike view. Actually, it was a dumpy basement studio with narrow, dirty windows, one of which looked out onto the parking lot and some sparse shrubs. The pipes grumbled before spewing hot water for my five-minute shower, then I wrestled my eyelids to remain open long enough for me to impale them with contact lenses. I was hopping into pumps and running out the door a couple minutes later.

As usual, my neighbor, Mrs. Sumner, opened her door a crack and peered at me. Also, as usual, Mrs. Sumner, a stale fiftyish woman, had her hair in curlers, a cigarette dangling from the corner of her mouth and sported a ratty pink housecoat. The only time I ever saw poor Mr. Sumner, a meek whipped form of a man, was when he was sneaking out the door and tiptoeing down the hall.

“Mornin’, Mrs. Sumner.” I nodded as I passed.

“If you’re gonna be comin’ in late and leavin’ early don’t always be slammin’ your door!” she shouted after me.

“Bye, Mrs. Sumner,” I shouted back and ran as fast as I could.