Incubus Dreams--46-47

So we are FINALLY at the plot, a little past the halfway mark. I do not have high hopes for this to last, but who knows? We might get lucky.

...LKH has a bad habit of losing track of what her sentences are about halfway through.

I actually had to park in the lot of the nearest club, the Jazz Baby, live music, and live entertainment. What could be better?

Yeah, the previous paragraph was about how the real cops took all the parking spaces, so Anita has to park one strip club over. We go from that to an add for the Jazz Baby, which actually sounds like a classy name for a strip club. My vote is for a Great Gatsby themed burlesque joint. Sadly, nothing in this book would even get THAT cool.

Anita then goes off AGAIN on how inappropriate her clothes are, as in they are cold. Also, Her shirt got all bloody so she had to borrow a white one, and her black bra can be seen, and she had to borrow Byron's jacket again. Hey, Anita? you know what would work even better? Dressing professional in the first place. Women should by god be allowed to wear whatever they want to, but if you're wearing heels, a thong and a mini skirt to a crime scene in October, expect no sympathy from me when things start going wrong. And If you're borrowing the male stripper's underwear, is there a reason why you can't also borrow their pants? "Hey, Bryon/Nathanial/Requiem/Asher/Jean Claude/Gregory/Random Male X, I have to go to a crime scene. Since we just fucked do you think I can borrow a pair of black slacks?"

Ooooh, but we get a whole paragraph dedicated to this thong. Jean Claude found it. It's made of T-shirts.

When I got up to the line, the officer closest to me didn’t really look at me. He saw a woman in boots and a short skirt and a leather jacket and said, “Club’s closed for the night, you won’t be working.”

Thank you Captain Obvious. Bonus Points: I think he knows exactly who she is, and he's trying to give her a hint that maybe she should have brought, IDK, PANTS.

Random Cop doesn't believe that Anita is a marshal. She is wearing knee-high boots, thigh-high stockings, A mini skirt, a thong, a leather jacket, and she probably looks like she just had sex and then a hasty shower because, you know, she just did. I know we're supposed to go "Random cop is a prudey prude bad guy" but I do not think Random Cop's perceptions are at fault here.

Seriously. We give freaking Power Girl a hard time for her boob window and we're supposed to take Anita Blake seriously? For not having the forethought to borrow a pair of jeans from Nathanial on her way out the door? She's basically comic nerd fan service. WHY IS SHE NOT WEARING PANTS. 

 Pissing contest, cops come in flavors again, basically Anita's is bigger than yours, Mr. Cop, step aside and let her at that dead body.

Of course, if I’d been a big, strapping guy, he wouldn’t have-had a problem with it.

If you were a big, strapping guy and you were dressed like Nathanial was when he left the house earlier? He'd probably have the same problem. Which is not your gender. It's the fact that you cannot do your job in a thong and a mini. I mean, you do know cops have to bend over and look at evidence a lot, right? They have to kneel in things that you probably don't want to kneel in? They have to climb through thorn bushes and barbed wire and used condoms/needles/razor blades, then handle body parts and blood containing god only knows what kind of disease? You cannot do surgery without rubber gloves, you should not be wandering around a crime scene effectively naked from the knees to the belly button.

Anita has to deal with cat calls. These are not cool and not good and nobody should ever be doing them. They are not her fault. But, you know. PANTS.

Besides, I’d learned the hard way that the more attention you pay to shit like that, the more you have to shovel.

Yep. Uh huh. Yeah. The cops are sexist assholes. You still really should be wearing pants. Sexism on their part does not excuse this. This is not a club, this is not a party, this is not a statement of feminine idealism, this is a murder scene and your skirt is so short you were complaining about getting goosebumps on your labia when you were at your other job. I am sure one of the forensics trucks have a pair of plastic painters pants you can borrow until you're done.

 They go inside the club, and the lead detective finally says what we're all thinking:

“You know, if you don’t want people thinking you’re a stripper, you should dress better, miss.”

You know, the whole "Strippers don't have a uniform" arguement actually makes Anita's clothing worse. See, even this book says that the dancers come in wearing street clothes and leave wearing street clothes. Anita is not dressed like a stripper. She's dressed how an idiot preppie 21 year old clubber  thinks a stripper would dress, ie in catastrophically stupid stereotypical clothing that no human being on earth would ever wear to a crime scene. I am not thinking "Ew what a (insert slur here)" I am thinking "Hepatitis B on broken glass".

PUT. ON. PANTS.

Zerbowski ends the pissing contest and drags Anita into the club. The vampires there freak out, and oh, one of them is a deacon in the Church of Eternal Life.

Anita asks to know who they fed on, and this kicks off another pissing contest. Eventually she gets a vamp to tell her who was feeding on whom, and it was basically "All the dancers".

There is something sleezy about a strip club letting vamps feed on the dancers. Just sayin.

And you know, it's been so long since the actual murder I forgot the victim was fed on by a vamp, hence the need to know who fed on whom tonight.

The victim is in the bottom of a large hole in an abandoned construction site. Anita has to climb into the hole full of potentially rusted metal, bits of broken glass, abandoned tools and bent nails. 

I shook my head. “How messy is it down in the hole?” 

“Let’s see, it’s rained, it’s frozen, it’s thawed, and it’s rained some more.”

WHICH IS WHY YOU SHOULD BE WEARING PANTS. IT MIGHT NOT BE SEXY AND IT MIGHT NOT LET YOU MAKE A FEMINIST STATEMENT OF PURPOSE BUT IT WILL PROVIDE A BARRIER BETWEEN YOU AND TETANUS.

Anita pokes around the body, and we get an awful, awful lot of "ew this mud is really icky, eww I have to kneel in it, ewwww it's really cold and yucky and my thigh-highs are no protection"

FUCKING. PANTS.

Oh, and Anita's high heeled boots are giving her concern. Because, you know, she's climbing around in the mud in an abandoned construction site with a dead body at the bottom. In knee-high leather boots with (I assume) stiletto heels.

Anita gaurentees that it isn't Jean Claude's people doing this, which would be worth exactly "Jack" and "Shit" if I were Zerbowski, but apparently they're willing to roll with it. Jean Claude is in Anita's head. She tells Zerbowski that she found out from the Church of Eternal Life dudes that the CoEL has stopped doing the blood oath thing that would keep JC's people from doing this shit, and Jean Claude freaks the fuck out inside her head, cussing in french while she tries to keep talking to Zerbowski.

...if Jean Claude is in her head, wouldn't she get the literal meanings of the french word? Merde might look nice, but shit is shit no matter what language you say it in.

Anita says that it's bad and that she'd rather kill the vamps then endure the danger they put the world in, which makes Jean Claude freak out more because they might have to kill the entire CoEL and hey, there's a typo! Cool.It's "theirs" not "Their's", Laurel.

The chapter closes with Jean Claude deciding to go visit the CoEL, Anita cussing out the universe, and Zerbowski staring directly up Anita's miniskirt.