A Taste of the Nightlife Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Dedication

  Acknowledgements

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Teaser chapter

  A DEADLY DILEMMA

  By the time I hailed a cab to take me and my four bags of fresh produce back to Nightlife, the sun was well up and the city wore her gaudy daytime face. My sleepless night dragged at me, but fresh food and the fellowship of my peers had taken the desperate edge off my outlook. I would make myself breakfast and do some experimental cooking until noon. Who knew? Word of our little drama might actually draw in dinner gawkers. We should be ready, just in case.

  I paid off the cabbie at the front door and set down my overflowing paper bags on the sidewalk to fish my keys out of my purse. I cranked the lock, shouldered the door open, and froze.

  A man’s body lay sprawled on the floor, right in front of the host station. His arms were thrown out wide and his blue eyes stared at the ceiling. Two big red holes gaped against the white flesh of his throat.

  He was very obviously dead.

  OBSIDIAN

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  First published by Obsidian, an imprint of New American Library, a division of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

  First Printing, July 2011

  Copyright © Tekno Books, 2011

  ISBN : 978-1-101-51631-7

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  PUBLISHER’S NOTE

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

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  To Julia Child, Alice Waters, and Bela Lugosi

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  I very much want to thank Esther M. Friesner and Lisa Leutheuser for their help in making this book happen. I also want to thank Vanessa Sly for taking the time to share her experiences in the world of professional kitchens, and Chef Alex Young and the crew at Zrman’s Roadhouse (especially Javier), who let me into the kitchen to see the Friday night dinner rush firsthand. Additional thanks are due to Joseph Fodera of Worldwide Security Consulting, Inc., who helped me get Charlotte properly arrested in New York.

  In addition, and as always, I’d like to thank the Untitled Writers Group and the Excelsior Writers Group for their patient and helpful commentary.

  And finally, I’d like to thank Marty Greenberg, the wonderful person who made this book possible.

  1

  “Charlotte! We got Anatole Sevarin!”

  I replied to this news with the most reasonable words in the most reasonable tone I could manage: “Get out of my kitchen!”

  In case you think I overreacted, let me tell you that my kitchen is in the back of Nightlife, the restaurant I co-own with my brother, Chet. It was Chet who had just charged shouting past the hot line in the middle of the dinner rush.

  “Did you hear me?” My brother waved his cell phone over his head excitedly. “Anatole Sevarin!”

  I heard him. I also heard:

  “Fire two duck!”

  “Pick up twelve! Pick up nine!”

  “Where’s my carpaccio?”

  “Nineteen one and two want those specials no ’shrooms.”

  It was Friday night and the house was packed. Because we cater to vampires, paranormals and their guests, our dinner rush happens later than at most places, even in autumn, but I’d already been on my feet for eight hours. My sous chef, Zoe, was out because her mother was in the hospital (note to self: call, find out diet restrictions, send decent food), so I was doing her job as well as mine. We had way too many order tickets on the “dupe slide” over the cold prep station, and in another hour the vampire theater crowd would be out looking for someplace to eat. We had to get those full tables served, satisfied and cleared.

  So I looked up at my brother and said, “Get. Out. Of. My. Kitchen!”

  “Robert’s seating him at table twenty-four.” Chet grinned so widely I could see his fangs.

  Did I mention my brother’s a vampire? Which—aside from the fact that he didn’t belong there—was why I really didn’t want him in my kitchen; never mind if the city’s most prominent undead dining critic had just walked in without a reservation. Chet has a tendency to forget how flammable he is these days. He says I forget how fast he is. I say they’re called flash fires for a reason, and I am not going to sweep him off the floor. He can just lie there and be ashy. He says the health inspectors would write me up.

  I say then he’d better stay the hell out of my kitchen.

  You can see that of the two of us, I am the reasonable one.

  Right then, however, he just stood there grinning like an undead idiot, and I knew he wasn’t going to move until I acknowledged his news. I didn’t want to give him the satisfaction, but I could hear the ticket machine chattering away and on the stove three sauces and two gravies started to bubble ominously.

&nbs
p; “I’ll talk to you after rush!” I told “Now, get!”

  Seemingly chastened, my brother slunk toward the door, but between one eyeblink and the next, he’d whisked back, grabbed me, swung me around and set me down.

  “Yes, Chef!” he called, already gone.

  The kitchen had gone unnaturally quiet. As soon as my vision cleared, I was greeted by the unprecedented and most unwelcome sight of my staff standing still.

  “What?” I demanded. “Have we closed early?”

  “No, Chef!” the crew chorused.

  “Tonight we are perfect—get me?” Anatole Sevarin wrote the dining column for Circulation, the number one city paranormal publication, in print or online. There was no point in treating him as less than a VIP just because Chet had ticked me off. “And I see all the plates for twenty-four, before they go out and when they come back!”

  “Yes, Chef!”

  I stepped back up to my station in the middle of the hot line, ignoring some highly suspicious grins.

  The cacophony resumed.

  We got Anatole Sevarin. My heart sang as I tasted our special scarlet-eye gravy for seasoning and added a grind of pepper. We got Anatole Sevarin!

  Nightlife has come a long way from the time when Chet was sleeping days in the walk-in refrigerator to save rent and we had to deal with antivamp protesters on our doorstep. The idea of “night and day” dining establishments is still relatively new. It’s been ten years since the Equal Humanity Acts recognized vamps, weres and other “human derived paranormal peoples” as, well, people. The idea that humans and vampires might be willing to sit down together at a table, in public, is one that still gets pooh-poohed around the restaurant world. In fact, the words “freak show” have been used more than once.

  What the skeptics miss is that a growing number of families stay in touch with their relatives and friends after they’ve turned. There’s also an increasing amount of crossover in the banking and business communities. This creates a need for a place where everybody involved can socialize, entertain and be comfortable.

  Many people still think vampires only drink unprocessed blood. While it’s true vampires can’t digest solid cooked food, they do just fine with all kinds of liquids, especially those that are protein based. Broth, eggs and milk may not have the psychotropic effects that human blood has on a vampire, but they provide nourishment and flavor. This opens up a whole world for the chef. In fact, the milk-shake tasting on our dessert menu is a big hit right across the board.

  Despite our steady growth in food quality and clientele, though, we’re still the farm team. We’ve got heart, we’ve got talent, but we haven’t yet made our move to the major leagues. A good review by Anatole Sevarin could get us there.

  Another thing about Nightlife—like most other New York City restaurants, we pretty much run on the ragged edge of disaster. We’re located on Tenth Street just around the corner from Broadway, so we fork over a midsized fortune in rent. There’ve been weeks when Chet went without his salary and I cut mine so we could keep the staff paid. Those times were becoming less frequent, but we had yet to turn our first profit, a fact that was giving our accountant gray hairs. Wimp.

  A good Sevarin review could fix that too, and the whole staff knew it. Fortunately, it had the effct of sharpening their game. A professional kitchen is an assembly line with a thousand moving parts. And knives. And fire. Walking in the wrong direction can cause a serious injury. Worse, it can make someone’s dinner late. After Chet dropped his news bomb, you could feel the excitement honing the focus of the entire line. Everybody started paying extra attention to basic technique—knife skills, fire, composition, plating—like they were already onstage, which in a way they were. I felt a surge of pride in my people and my place.

  One of my jobs as executive chef is to make sure everything moves smoothly and efficiently on a nightly basis. If I have to get in there and push, that’s what I do. I cook, taste, slice, chop, pluck, simmer, butcher and plate. I shout, cajole and praise. I condemn if I absolutely have to. I never, ever compromise on a matter of quality. I revel in the noise, the steam, the scents of onion, grilling meat, fresh herbs and heady spices, as well as the whole control-freak vibe of being absolute mistress of ten people and three hundred square feet for twelve to fifteen hours a day, six days a week.

  If I am loud and less than polite, it is because my job demands it. I stand five foot four in my clogs, so I’m not exactly an imposing figure. I’m nobody’s waif, though. A lot of what I carry is muscle, but I’ve got plenty of curves. Part of that is nature and part is a combination of occupational hazard and professional pride. Like the saying goes, how can you trust a skinny cook?

  At thirty years old, I have callused hands and my arms carry half a dozen scars. My back has a rough patch that I’m told is the shape of Australia—a souvenir of the burn I got by knocking into someone who was carrying a pot of boiling veal stock. I consider these to be war wounds and wear them proudly. To complete the picture, my eyes are blue and my hair is the shade that goes by the unflattering name of “dishwater blond.” I wear my hair long—almost down to my waist, in fact. It’s the one girlie affectation that I won’t give up, even though it makes my life difficult. I can’t wear it loose on the job. Aside from sanitary issues, it’s just plain dangerous. Remember those flash fires? So every morning I braid my hair and wind it into a tight coil at the back of my head. That way, even if the roughly fifty pins I use to keep it in place fall out, the braid tumbles down my back and not into the soup.

  Which tonight was a choice of a lovely chicken-miso broth with ginger and fresh scallions or a sugar pumpkin soup with either crème fraîche or foamed veal “raw sauce.”

  “Excuse me, Chef Caine?”

  “Yes?” I said without turning around. The voice belonged to Robert, our white-haired English maître d’, who was standing back about two feet from me. A veteran of bigger and busier kitchens than mine, Robert knew better than to sneak up too close to someone working an eight-burner cooktop.

  “Table two wants to speak to the chef.”

  “Compliment or complaint? And have you sicced Chet on them?”

  “Complaint, I’m afraid. Mr. Caine’s out there now, but they insist on speaking with the chef.”

  I bit back a sigh. This happens. Sometimes it’s just somebody trying to impress a date, or a client, but sometimes—despite everybody’s best efforts—something’s gone wrong. It’s the other side of being mistress of all I survey. Mistakes coming out of the kitchen are my fault.

  Any other time it would have been no big deal. I’d just go out, smooth things over and offer a complimentary dessert. Tonight, thogh, we had Anatole Sevarin in the house, and whatever was going on out there, he was watching and taking notes. Notes for publication. Notes to go out on the blogs, and on FlashNews (Online on now!(™)), and even on paper.

  Which meant we had to squash this situation immediately.

  I motioned Reese over to cover my station, undid my apron, tossed it on the chair at my desk and followed Robert out front.

  Nightlife’s dining room is a long, narrow space with exposed brick walls, red oak floors and a pressed-tin ceiling that cost most of our meager budget to restore. The building had been a saloon when it opened back in the 1880s, and somehow its magnificent mahogany bar had survived the intervening years, political changes and food trends. The rest of our decor is simple, done in warm shades of brown, cream and gold. The lighting is low for atmosphere, but for obvious reasons we have flower vases on the tables instead of the usual candles.

  No matter what restaurant you’re in, stepping into the front of the house from the kitchen is stepping into a different world. Not only does the temperature plummet at least twenty degrees, but the noise level drops half a dozen decibels and the atmosphere goes from one of fevered activity to one of leisurely conversation and relaxation.

  Tonight, however, not everyone was relaxed. Suchai, our dining room captain, was at the back station where we kee
p the glasses, water pitchers and bread baskets. His face was screwed up tight.

  “What’s the story?” I murmured to him as I motioned for Robert to head back to his post by the door. I’d already zeroed in on the problem table. It was table two, up front by the window. When asked if we deliberately sit pretty people there, I plead the Fifth. Right now, Chet stood beside a seated couple: a male vamp with a black jacket, chartreuse turtleneck and thinning hair and an over-fluffed blond woman in white and scarlet, who I could tell, even at this distance, was a complete VT.

  That’s short for “vamp tramp.”

  “She’s got a problem with the soup, Chef,” said Suchai softly.

  I frowned. My soup? There was a problem with my soup? “Did you offer to replace it?”

  Suchai nodded. “And so did Mr. Chet, but she insists on seeing you.”

  “Okay, then. I got this. You concentrate on Mr. Sevarin’s table.”

  Suchai nodded and I squared my shoulders and put on my sober PR face. My kitchen whites attracted instant attention as I moved between the tables, and everybody in our full house turned to watch the show. I snuck covert glances around me. We had about half a dozen people seated at the bar, most of them with Kevin’s specialty martinis in front of them. A werewolf dined alone on the carpaccio at sixteen. The engagement party at twelve and thirteen looked like they were doing all right, although the air was a little strained around the live in-laws. Michele, our wine steward, was pouring more champagne, which should have helped loosen things up. At nine, a pair of African-American vamps I’d been told were up from Atlanta toasted each other with our Special Blend sangria.

  In short, except for two, everything looked great.

  Except for two and twenty-four. Twenty-four was empty. Completely empty. Absolutely empty. No food critic anywhere.

  Can’t worry about it now.