Carole Douglas - Dancing with Werewolves

His fingers prodded and poked me through the webbing, which made me feel even more like a snared fish.

"Thing is, girlie, does it pay me better to let the management know I got you, or are they tired of you and I can take you home and keep you all to myself?"

I didn't answer. I didn't breathe. I knew which alternative I preferred. So I screamed. I thrashed, even though it was useless. I threw my full weight on Haskell and managed to kick his feet out from under him so we were rolling on the floor together.

He actually seemed to enjoy this version of dry mud wrestling, but it was worth the nausea if I could get the big boys back in here to play. Against them I had a chance. Slim, but a chance.

I heard the office door slam against the wall. In an instant, Sansouci hauled us both upright and slammed us against the nearest wall. He hit a button on the desk, then sat against the edge, arms crossed, biceps bulging impressively, eyeing us both.

I knew what he was thinking: Which of these two would I like to skin alive the most?

From the quick glance he gave my Spandex cat burglar outfit I could tell that he liked me best, and in my skin.

Everybody hates a loser, and Haskell was a loser born, whether human or unhuman.

On the other hand, I'd made Sansouci look bad to Cicereau, and no guy likes a woman who shows him up to his boss.

I shrugged and did a little Mae West CinSim. "Get this slug off me and I'll run away with you to the Clark County jail."

"Don't listen to her!" Haskell screamed. "She's the Devil in a black Spandex catsuit."

Actually, that description didn't hurt me with Sansouci one damn bit.

He sighed, got up, wrenched the netting off us both, kicked Haskell in the stomach, and spun me against himself one-armed while he pulled the handcuffs from Haskell's belt. In a thrice I was cuffed behind my back. Sansouci pushed me up against the wall solo while he rolled Haskell into a fishnet rug on the floor.

"Mr. Cicereau," Sansouci said, "will decide what to do with both of you." He glanced at me. "Sorry that's not up to me, Snow White. The Clark County jail sounds like a nice peaceful getaway for us both about now."

As if cued, Cicereau bustled in, the busy, pudgy executive on a heartburn roll. "So what's this now?"

Sansouci stood to attention. "Haskell caught her and I caught them both. We throw 'em both over Hoover Dam, or what?"

Sansouci had not been kidding when he'd told me he was sorry! I must be losing my Maggie charisma.

"Hmmm." Cicereau strolled over to me. "She is quite a draw."

"I caught her, boss," Haskell panted from the floor.

"But you got caught." Cicereau prodded him with his Gucci-shod foot, and then lashed me with a glance that Was half-murderous, half-paternal.

I guessed he'd made a very similar decision decades before.

"You did okay," he told Haskell grudgingly. "You're still on the payroll. Now make like a wart hog and vanish. We'll call you."

Sansouci unrolled Haskell from the webbing with one long gesture. Haskell spun so fast he must have gotten rope burns as well as dizzy.

Haskell rose and wobbled out.

As soon as the door shut behind him, Cicereau turned to Sansouci. "Take her to Starlight Lodge. The moon's about to go full. I'll decide about her then and there."

I breathed a sigh of relief to be rid of Haskell until I saw Sansouci's impassive face flinch slightly. The expression was gone before he pulled me away from the wall by one arm and hustled me out.

I'd been working my black satin wrist-length gloves off behind my back since I'd been cuffed and now was glad I had them to leave a trail. What good that might do was another matter. Quicksilver could follow the scent maybe, if anyone knew where to start looking for me.

Ric might.

Going through the office door en route to the mysterious Starlight Lodge, I felt a sharp, quick pinch on the butt.

Sansouci? He was looking way too grim to indulge in anything as playful as butt pinching.

But somebody wasn’t.

Like it says in the old song, "Somebody Loves Me."

The next line is even more apropos to this situation.

"I wonder who?"

My chauffeurs to the Starlight Lodge were my not-so-old friends, Chartreuse and Flamingo. They drove a van marked "Hazardous Material."

That worried me a little. Okay, a lot. What also worried me was I'd been unable to feel my friendly neighborhood familiar. My body heat had warmed the hip chain and it was too delicate to sense.

The boys were pretty tight-lipped. It was full dark by the time we'd wound our way up into the Spring Mountains. I didn't see any signs for Los Lobos, but I did see billboards advertising the Paiute Golf Club and its famed fifteenth hole of the Wolf Course.

"Hey," I said, "you guys know a dance club called Los Lobos?"

"Not on this part of the mountain," Chartreuse said. "Sorry."

The funny thing is, he really sounded sorry. Very sorry.

"Say," I said, "you think you could get me out of these handcuffs? They kind of hurt my shoulders and wrists."

"That's for the bossman to okay," Flamingo said. "Sorry."

He too sounded very, very sorry.

Okay. What was the Starlight Lodge?

The pink-and-green watermelon boys had joked about Quicksilver being sent there the first time they'd kidnapped me. Apparently it was a perennial send-to place. Maybe it was like the Post Office. If you got sent to the wrong address, you never got returned.

But when the van drove up to a lighted porte cochere, the place looked like a five-star retreat, rustic but posh. The boys let me out of the van. One produced a key and handcuffed my hands in front, at least.

"Hope you enjoy your stay, miss," Chartreuse said, exchanging a glance with Flamingo. Then they both teared up like the doorman to the Emerald City in The Wizard of Oz.

I got it. It was "Surrender Dorothy" time and I didn't even have a straw man, a tin man, a cowardly lion, or a valiant little Lhasa apso on my side.

I walked into the place alone, head high.

I entered the ultimate National Park lodge, all soaring wood and gigantic balconies, fireplaces and leopard skin rugs. (I didn't approve of walking on dead pelts, but no one had asked me). And heads were mounted on every wall. Lions and tigers and bears. Deer. Buffalo. Even otter, beaver, and fully mounted squirrels, the cowards! Their bright-eyed animal profiles all looked way handsomer and nobler than Homo sapiens.

But this was where the wolves lived, not man. Quicksilver's ancestors had run down deer and boar and I suppose even humans on occasion.

A Latina servant girl showed me to a room. Yeah, a servant girl. You or I might have called her a waitress or a Mexican maid or even a concierge, if we wanted to get fancy. She thought nothing of my handcuffs and even less of my requests. A phone. A computer. TV remote? None of these transmitted in the mountain air, she said. Sorry.

I was really getting tired of people who had jobs that made them "sorry" all the time. Had they never heard of the union movement? Apparently not.

Time flew, as it always does when you're not having fun. I'd watched the day darken into night from the window of my room, which wasn’t merely locked, but sealed. There had been only a medicine cabinet mirror in the bathroom, although lots of polished marble. The cabinet was empty and so was the mirror. It reflected only me, looking worried. I tried my silver medium touch to turn it into an escape route, but it resisted me like Snow did: cold, hard, giving nothing back. Maybe my mirror powers had been enhanced by Madrigal's magic or presence, or the mirror itself, and didn't translate to other mirrors, other places. Darn!