Carole Douglas - Dancing with Werewolves

This time I parked Dolly two long Las Vegas Strip blocks away from the Gehenna, where nobody bothered with security cameras, and retraced my escapee steps. Into the laundry Dumpster and up the chute I went, crawling like an insect. I passed the churning central mechanical systems and finally arrived at the theater's backstage area.

The first show wouldn’t open for more than three hours. It was late afternoon. Everything and everybody unloosened their corsets and breathed at a major hotel and casino during the hours that change over from day to night.

I prowled the deserted backstage area, feeling an unhappy twinge of homesickness. My reflection had adapted quite well once I was gone. I sensed that. Madrigal had been thoroughly pleased at this outcome, also his pets. They had liked the Stepford Wife me. tamed, predicable, not upsetting the status quo.

Too bad. Stepford Divorcee was here now and this was Splitsville.

First, I had to confront the blue-toned front-surface mirror in which I'd split in two.

The mirror surface was inert, as it had always been. When I touched my black-gloved fingers to their reflection, my whole hand plunged right through. Whole. Uncorrupted by debased mirror images. I stepped through again. Presto-change-o, I was in Cicereau's office, the slim flash drive case flat against my hip inside the leotard, concealed. The drive was memory overkill-I was only after one image-but a CD was more difficult to conceal in Spandex and I could hardly email that damned and damning file to myself from his machine.

The trouble with breaking physical barriers is that you can't scout ahead. Even as my body emerged crouched on the wet bar, I saw that the joint was jumping.

Not only was Cicereau present, and his butch bodyguard Sansouci, but my most non-favorite wanta-meet, Detective Hardboiled, Half-balled Haskell.

At the moment I was a scintillating reflection in a dozen silver surfaces. Maybe if I kept the dazzle going, I'd be overlooked.

"You've been useful before because you were human, Detective Haskell," Cicereau was saying. "Now you are neither flesh nor foul, but a freakish half-breed. You don't even know which super bit you, half-werewolf or debased vampire or something worse."

There was something worse?

"I'm a half-were now." Haskell spat the words through distended fangs. He looked a mess. Everything human about him had degraded and mixed with the worst of beastliness. "I can do even more special work for you."

"Such as?"

"I know where to find that meddling Maggie you're missing."

"Madrigal has been here having a fit when you arrived because she'd disappeared, and I admit I'll drop a bundle in advertising, but I don't want her, Haskell. She's more trouble than she's worth. Just get out of here."

Sansouci made it happen in one muscle-bound moment.

One down, two to go.

"Scum," Sansouci said, wiping his hands on his black denim thighs. "Now half-breed scum."

"Agreed." Cicereau smiled. "Still, scum is always useful, always has been. No trace of my Margie?"

"Your little Margie has left the building. Gone." Sansouci sat in the swivel chair before the desk, then swiveled my way. I thought, Sparkle, sparkle, little reflective star. Hide me.

"Think that Madrigal had anything to do with it, despite his indignant act?" Cicereau asked.

"No. He had the perfect new trick worked up. I saw it in rehearsal. It rocked."

"Yeah, it did, didn't it? What hooked you, like, as just an audience member?"

So I had to listen to Sansouci rave about me being swathed in silk and then naked in serpent coils and elevated into thin air and having a rhinestone apple sucked out of my throat. These mob guys made a fanged Howard Hughes look enlightened, but what the hell else did they have to do?

"We're still probably better off without Margie," Cicereau concluded. "Dames will always turn on you and then you have no choice but to off them, which makes you feel bad."

I shuddered to imagine Cicereau's farewell speech to his own daughter sixty-some years ago, if he'd even bothered to be in on the kill.

"I'm gonna check on the high-roller baccarat tables." Cicereau rose from his desk and from behind his restored computer.

"I'll hold the fort, boss," the black-and-silver haired Sansouci said, standing.

He would make a damn impressive werewolf, and I didn't even want to tangle again with him in human form. I hoped "the fort" meant more than this office.

Apparently it did, for Sansouci eyed everything, then slipped out the door. I heard the security system beep into action after he left.

It hurt to stretch myself back into unmirrored form, but I hopped from the wet bar onto the floor and made for the computer on Cicereau's desk.

The flat-screen monitor showed the same wallpaper as before, a Disney forest scene teeming with rabbits, squirrels, and deer, all great prey for wolves.

I moved right to Photo Album, found the deeply buried family pic from 1949 and copied it onto my flash drive. The drive whirred as happily as Jiminy Cricket for a second or two. I was ready to chirp myself when I tucked the earring-sized portable drive into my Spandex tights.

Everything was going perfectly until all the power in the room went out, which meant all the lights too. Trouble was, I needed light to see a reflection to walk into. While I froze, being a thinking being, and realized someone must have rigged the power outage from outside the office, a huge heavy web fell atop me. Boobytrap! Also triggered from outside. A net seemed hokey for the Cicereau operation, so who would have motive or opportunity, and the nerve to use Cicereau's office for his or her own purposes? It sure wasn’t Sylphia's web, not these scratchy rope fibers. I fought the cumbersome netting, and was still fighting it when the lights and power came back on.

The office door opened and in walked…Detective Haskell in all his half-were glory.

Talk about a list of people you'd most like not to meet in heaven, or hell; Haskell was now numero uno in my book.

The lights showed that I was tangled in a huge, heavy-duty fishing net. The more I thrashed, the more tangled I became. This must have been rigged after my first break-in. Still, I didn't see Sansouci or Cicereau racing back to gloat. Believe it or not, that tightened the sulfuric acid knot in my stomach behind the hidden drive even more.

Haskell grinned, showing yellowed teeth between a pair of rusty red fangs. You could have nicknamed him Canadian Sunset. Then he spoke.

"Our friends here at the Gehenna underestimate you, and they sure underestimate me, Miss Delilah Street."

I jerked in distaste to hear my name on his peeling, blackened lips.

"You know from how I cracked Nightwine's fence security that I have my little ways of coming and going in the most unexpected places in town."

I glanced up, examining the ceiling as I hadn't before. A dark pattern of rugged wood beams suggested overarching forest branches. The net would have been invisible up there. And Haskell probably had something on a lot of local security firm personnel who would do him favors. Even now, he was exulting in what he had on me.

"The minute I saw those new Gehenna billboards, babe, I knew it was you."

He circled me and the desk, checking to see that I was tightly wrapped. Thank God I'd quit Photo Album, although Haskell might have been too stupid to figure out what I'd been doing.

"I suppose," Haskell went on, as the seldom-listened-to invariably do, "you read about my near-fatal mugging in the Sinkhole and thought you were done with Irving Haskell."

Irving! I'd forgotten it from the newspaper article. And who wouldn’t? Irma asked. Not an A-list first name. No wonder he had issues.