Eddie caught me by the door.
“Hey,” he said.“Glad to see you up.”
“Do you ever sleep?”I asked.
“No,” he said, laughing.
“See?”O’Rourke was saying to Nagi.“Looks like one of them began to melt, and the others stepped on him.He got tracked from here to the front door.Probably ate clean through their shoes, but I suppose they’re lucky this is an industrial club.Steel-toed punker kicks sure help.”
There was another pile of bones in soup in a cordoned-off booth.
“The last one melted into a puddle on the toilet in the lady’s room,” Eddie said.
“Any witnesses?”I asked Eddie.
“The owner’s in the back,” Eddie said.“Was waiting on someone with a feminine touch to come help me convince him to roll back the security cameras for the evening.”
“Let’s go,” I said.
The owner was bald,with a bad comb-over.Chest hair stuck up out of his button-up.
“You what?”he asked.
“Need to look through the security footage,” I said.
“Ah, look, there’s a lot of sensitive stuff here,” the owner said.“Not the best idea.Especially if you’re cops.”
“We’re not cops,” Eddie said.
“Yeah, but you’re with the cops,” the owner said.“You get my drift?”
“Look, buddy,” I said, and my voice broke.“There’s at least three people that melted in your establishment and there’s nothing to prove it wasn’t something you served that did it.So if you’re in the clear, and you want it on the record you were polite and did everything you could to support the investigation?—”
“Alright, alright, I get what you’re saying.I got a lot of clients, and none of them like the cops.You find anything related to those molten people, fine, I got your back.You find anything—and I do mean anything—related to anything else—I don’t want anyone to hear about it.Capische?We good?”
“Got it,” Eddie said.
The owner sat and reversed through the roll of footage.It was digital—he just punched some numbers in, and then it reset to ten PM the night previous.
“You know who it was that melted?”I asked.
“Ah, a couple of regulars and someone I didn’t know,” the owner said.“Look.”
He sped the footage up to a few different periods.
“Stop and reverse that one,” Eddie said.
“Magnify,” I said.
“It’s just gonna get more fuzzy if we zoom in,” the owner said.
“I know, but I’ve watched a lot of CSI and I couldn’t help myself,” I said.
He shook his head and spun the dial forward.
“Look.That little crystal vial there,” Eddie said.
“Weird how we didn’t find one like that at the original crime scene,” I said.
