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“Hey, brown sugar. You hungry? You look hungry,” Barbara said to Brooklyn with an irritating little smirk.
“Excuse me! If everyone would—Excuse me!” called a voice from behind us before Brooklyn could reply.
We all turned toward a man now standing on the deck. He was a pudgy but neat and pleasant-looking sixty-something dude in a beautifully tailored dove-gray suit. He didn’t look like a cannibal. With the white goatee he was sporting, I thought he looked very much like that nice old guy who sang “Frosty the Snowman” in that vintage children’s Christmas special.
“Thank you,” the genteel holly-jolly fat man said with a smile. “To those who have been here before, welcome back, and to our first-timers, how do you do? My name is Dale Roanoke, and I have the pleasure of being your culinary guide this evening. Any questions about any of tonight’s courses, do not hesitate to ask me. Now, without further ado, if you would follow me, culinary adventurers. Our chariot awaits.”
CHAPTER 79
OUR CHARIOT, NOW PARKED out front on Twenty-Seventh, turned out to be an antique London double-decker bus transformed into a beautiful two-level polished-brass-railed bar on wheels.
I’d seen a picture of it once in a Vanity Fair article about fancy parties out in the Hamptons. Cannibals were moving up in the world, apparently.
We decided to chill at the back of the bar on the top deck. The bus made a left on Sixth Avenue and then another quick left and then went all the way to the West Side Highway. At first, I got nervous that we were losing our backup until I spotted Arturo and the boys off the back of the bus following two cars back.
About fifteen minutes later, the bus pulled into the parking lot of a marina on the Hudson near Battery Park. It stopped alongside a dock where a hundred-foot white yacht was tied.
“As you see, our ship has come in,” came the voice of the Frosty the Snowman guy over the bus’s speaker.
“Mike, what about backup? Are we actually going to get on the boat?” Brooklyn said as the bus began to empty.
“You still have your Glock in your clutch?” I said.
“Of course,” she said.
“Well, I have mine on my ankle. That’s our new backup,” I said.
We got on the rumbling boat and were led into a dining room. The vessel was OK, I guess, but much more Circle Line than QE2. Definitely less upscale than the bus. It also had a sour cafeteria-like smell to it. It was sort of chintzy, actually.
A jazz quartet in the corner of the room started up as more waiters hustled out for even more drink orders. Why all the drinking? I wondered. Could one only consume human flesh while pie-eyed or something?
A waiter brought us two more Amstel Lights as a perfectly normal-looking couple of fine young cannibals stepped up and introduced themselves.
“Hi, I’m Steve,” said the guy with a Texas accent. “This is Gail, my baby. We just got married three weeks ago.”
Handsome and drunk in a suit with an undone tie, Steve looked like a Wall Street guy after a long day. Tall, brunette Gail baby was also good-looking and very drunk. She hummed to herself loudly as she took out her phone and started texting. Real charming couple.
“It’s my first time. Is it like they say?” Steve said to me. “Does it really taste like chicken?”
“I have no idea,” I said truthfully. “It’s my first time, too.”
“I call the penis,” Gail said with a giggle, without looking up.
“Oh my God! Do you think they’ll actually serve that?” Steve said in horror. Then he took out his own phone and started typing. Googling about it, perhaps.
I looked at the idiotic young couple in awe. I’d been doing OK up to that point, but as I stood there, I really started to become angry. This couple was actually going to eat another person. Why? So they could write about it on their Facebook wall? For nothing, I realized. For kicks.
How had they and Lucy and Barbara and the rest of the folks here become such amoral, mixed-up, disgusting, animalistic excuses for human beings? I wondered. I mean, Stone Age savages ate people because they were Stone Age savages. Or in the case of the Donner Party, it was in order to survive. That a modern person, or in this case a busload of modern people, would actually pay two grand to experience what eating another person was like was starting to piss me off like you would not believe.
There was prearranged seating, and Brooklyn and I took our places at a table with half a dozen polite middle-aged Asian cannibals as the boat pulled out. We headed south for the harbor. I could see the Statue of Liberty lit up outside the window off to my right.
It was about five minutes later when the lights dimmed and then a spotlight hit a black curtain beside the jazz quartet. I remembered what the witness to the murder in Harlem had said about a woman being bound like a leg of lamb. If that actually happened, if they actually brought someone out like that, I was going to take out my undercover Glock and start either arresting or shooting people.
Because I was sick of these freaks, just sick to my stomach.
But instead of a bound woman, a line of waiters suddenly appeared from between the parted curtain, bearing covered silver platters. As one of the platters was set down in front of me, I wondered if I was about to see a head under the silver dome like John the Baptist’s.
My head swam as I started sweating. There better not be, I thought. Or someone was seriously getting hurt.
