Stella sat up straighter. Benny had been with them? “He took pictures and video?”
“Yep.”
“Fabulous,” Wyatt said. “Now there’s proof that I acted like an ass.”
“Well, you did try on Trudy’s corset. And for the record, red is not your color.”
Huh. Stella had a hard time picturing that.
“You’re making that up,” Wyatt accused.
Stella grinned at him. “You were pretty damn concerned about your hair getting messed up this morning when I was bat-diving you. I didn’t realize you were so in touch with your feminine side.”
“I’ll touch your feminine side,” he muttered, taking a sip of the drink Nigel had put in front of him.
“So, Johnny’s girl was in here earlier,” Nigel said.
The smile fell from Stella’s face and she leaned forward so quickly, she almost fell off the cracked black vinyl of the stool. “Johnny’s girl? Who is that?” She hadn’t been aware that her brother had been seeing anyone.
Nigel looked surprised. “You haven’t met Bambi? She and Johnny were in here like two, three times a week.”
Bambi? That couldn’t be anyone’s real name. No mother was that cruel. “I’ve never heard of her.” Which was painful to admit. There was obviously a lot her brother had kept from her, and that was hurtful. Why hadn’t he felt like he could trust her? “She never came to see him at work when the band was playing.”
“That’s odd.”
Definitely.
“He never said anything to me either,” Wyatt said. “And I never saw anyone at the bar who could have been a girlfriend.”
They both looked at Saxon, who shrugged. “Don’t look at me. Nobody tells me anything.”
Stella couldn’t imagine why that would be.
“I guess a man is entitled to his secrets.” Nigel moved on down the bar. “But I’m sorry to see Johnny leave us, and Bambi seemed pretty irritated about the whole thing.”
Stella didn’t give a crap what Bambi felt. She wasn’t the one who had spent over a century with Johnny as her constant companion.
“So do you think we should see if Benny has anything relevant on his camera?” Stella asked Wyatt.
“Yeah. And we should try to find this Bambi. Maybe she knows something.”
She supposed that was rational, yet she found herself resisting the idea. She didn’t want to know that some random woman might have had greater insight into her brother’s feelings than she’d had. It took gritting her teeth to manage an, “Okay. Sounds good.”
Another chat with Nigel revealed that Bambi was a dancer at a gentlemen’s club. Just where Stella wanted to spend her night.
“I guess we can go there first,” Wyatt said. “Then on to find Benny. Where does he work again?”
“Bounce.” The idea of the band guys in a g*y strip club was highly entertaining to Stella. Just imagining their level of discomfort made her smile.
“For Christ’s sake.” Wyatt shook his head. “We have to go to two strip clubs tonight?”
“I’m down with that,” Saxon said.
Stella could think of better ways to spend a night, but they were seeking information, not stimulation, so she could live with it. “Maybe we should split up. I’ll go to Bounce, you go to Ecstasy.”
Wyatt shook his head. “No way. I don’t want you wandering around alone until we know what’s going on. We’ll go together, but man, I hate those places. There’s a sad quality to them that I don’t like. Mortals wasting their short lives.”
That made Stella like Wyatt even more. It was exactly how she’d always felt about the many strip clubs on Bourbon Street. “We’ll make quick work out of it. You guys aren’t going to embarrass me in Bounce, are you?”
“Why would we do that? And I’m secure enough in my sexuality that it’s not a big deal to me.”
“I’m not,” Saxon said. “Maybe I should stay here.”
Stella smacked his leg. “You’re just saying that because you don’t want to walk five blocks.”
“Bingo.”
“Tough tamales, you’re going with us.” If they left Saxon at Fahy’s, they might never find him again, the way things were going.
The door opened and Drake walked in. “Wassup?” he said, slurring his words as he saluted with one hand.
If Drake was drunk, Stella was going to hogtie him to a chair. “Have you been drinking?”
“No, my mouwth ith numb from da dentist.”
Excellent. Wyatt paid their tab and they set out for the club.
Stella had very little hope that this wasn’t going to result in total disaster.
* * *
WYATT GAVE A polite smile and refused the girl in the doorway who offered him a lap dance the minute he walked into the gentlemen’s club. It smelled like sweat and desperation in this particular place, and the dim lighting didn’t completely mask the grimness of the setting or the boredom of the girls dancing. He reached back for Stella’s hand, feeling the need to make it obvious they were together. Even if they weren’t together exactly. They would be. He hoped.
Though he wasn’t sure who he was trying to protect—Stella or himself. The predatory look on some of these dancers’ faces was a little scary. He had faced down thieves and guns and other vampires, yet women looking to make a buck off him were not who he wanted to deal with tonight. So he just cut to the chase. “Is Bambi here?”
The girl who had been smiling so suggestively a second ago made a face and dropped her arm from her hip to lie limply. “We don’t take personal requests.”
“I just want to talk to her.”
“She don’t work tonight. She’ll be here tomorrow.” The girl messed with the strings of her bikini bottoms and Wyatt got a flash of flesh he would have preferred not to see.
“Okay, thanks.” Dragging Stella, he got out of there. Hopefully Saxon and Drake were following them.
“You’re about to break my hand, Wyatt.”
He glanced down at Stella, whose face was pinched. “Sorry.” He loosened his grip on her, not really sure what his problem was. “We’re just getting more questions than answers, aren’t we? This is frustrating.”
They paused on the sidewalk a few feet down the uneven cobblestones from the doorway. Saxon was staring into the window of a T-shirt shop and fiddling with his bangs with one hand, applying a layer of ChapStick with the other. He must have the smoothest lips of any vampire in Louisiana. Drake looked distracted, poking his cheek with his finger and working his jaw.