Vicki Pettersson: Cheat the Grave

“C’mon, Jo.” I set my bare shoulders and knocked on the neon-trimmed door. After all, I was already here, defying a homicidal warning, and strapped into my big-girl halter top. If I could get through the first Jell-O shot, I’d probably be fine.

Then the door swung open. “Oh fu-”

A hip-hop/choir remix drowned out the rest of my curse, and my gaze caught on the turntable rising from the driver’s seat. Cher stood behind it, decked out in curvy silver satin, blond hair set in seductress waves, her right hand pressed against headphones while the other scratched a beat. She was shaking her hips in time to the needle’s drop, but she straightened and squealed when she spotted me waffling in the doorway. “Livvy-girl!”

She motioned me up the rubber steps, and I eased forward like a paranoid marine. No, I didn’t expect to find otherworldly terrorists swilling Cristal, but the two lucite stripper poles arrowing out of the vehicle’s middle were nearly as terrifying.

The bus’s other dozen occupants caught my ascension through the mirrored walls, and greetings and liquorinfused smiles burst forth in raucous stop-motion beneath the fractured light of, yes, a disco ball. I waved back, hid my wince, and they resumed imbibing, applauding, and pole dancing. The bus wasn’t even moving yet.

“Check out the old-school mixer!” Cher yelled, as I reached her side. “We’re going to sing Bollywood songs on this here bachelorette bus. I swear, Las Vegas won’t have ever seen a bash like this before!”

And the burnt-out party girl that was my beloved home-town had certainly run through a number of bashes. I glanced around warily. The lights, people, alcohol, music-a heap of sensory blocks atop already dulled senses. I began to reconsider the wisdom of coming at all. “I might have to leave early,” I told Cher.

She finally fell still. “Why, are you sick? Is it fatal?”

Potentially. “Um…tomorrow’s the big board meeting, remember? I’ve been preparing.”

And I had. Binders scattered every flat surface of my living room like giant autumn leaves. Yet despite spending weeks studying the Company Bylaws, the Shareholder Agreements, and something called a Private Placement Memorandum, I still didn’t understand half of them.

“Don’t you have people for that?” she asked, scratching another beat with long, silver nails-acrylic across vinyl.

“I’m the one taking over Archer Enterprises.” At her blank stare, I added, “And I want to, you know, make dear old Daddy proud.”

May the cruel, greedy bastard rest in peace .

“Then it’s all the more vital to your burgeoning business sense that you’re out tonight.” She tossed her hair authoritatively.

“How?”

“Because come tomorrow you’ll be sucked into the corporate machine, never to don lucite heels at nine a.m. again. No more liquid lunches. No more ‘Mimosa Mondays.’ If you think about it, this is your last night of normalcy. Ever.”

I snorted. Cher’s idea of “normalcy” had never included disemboweling a homicidal supervillain as a prelude to Mimosa Monday.

A male voice sounded in my ear. “Finally.”

Whirling to determine if this statement called for an air kiss or a death blow, I found myself within swatting distance of a pretty man wearing black wrist cuffs, eyeliner, and a fitted net for a shirt. Not kill, I thought with relief…though he probably wasn’t angling for my kiss either.

“I’m Terry,” he said, drawing close, then as if I didn’t know, “You’re Olivia Archer. I follow you in the papers. I’ve been wanting to shoot you for ages.”

I reconsidered killing him until he held up a camera and looked at me expectantly.

I unclenched my fist. “Sure.”

Terry shot off a quick series of photos as I struck poses meant to highlight certain body parts, unable to hear more than snatches of his chatter about celebrities he’d shot in L.A. before moving to Vegas. Unfortunately what I did hear included boastful accounts of erstwhile pop divas climbing from limos sans undergarments.

“The society women followed suit for a while, but then they clued in to the upkeep.”

Again that expectant look.

Not this society woman, I thought, gifting him with a closed-mouth smile. “I’ll be by the pole.”

And so I mingled, tossing air kisses, accepting a champagne flute, but painstakingly avoided the poles of iniquity. By the time the bus finally revved its engine, a professional had taken over DJ duties, Cher was at the side bar, surrounded by bottles like some glossy, gilded mad scientist, and her stepmother, the woman of the hour-or the past month, as it were-finally arrived.

“Ladies and gentlemen,” the DJ said in a streetwise baritone, “please welcome to the par-tay, the future princess of the finest fibers, the westerner who won the heart of the East, our Texan treasure, and soon to be Mrs. Arun Brahma…Su-zanne!”

The packed bus rocked on its wheels as everyone rose to their feet, cheering as Suzanne ascended to a hip-hop version of the wedding march. Terry’s camera literally went into spasms, though I couldn’t fault his excitement. Suzanne, poured into hot pink leather cut both too low and too high, was the money shot. She milked the moment, flashed a diamond to rival the Hope, and draped herself against the first pole. Her eyes caught mine and she straightened before winking and taking a quick swing.

“Oops.”

More cameras flashed.

“It’s okay, Suzie,” someone encouraged. “If you don’t fall off the pole at least once, you’re not really trying.”

Suzanne pushed herself from the lap of a thrilled “husband of” and patted her hair back into place.

It was embarrassing to fall off a stripper pole when you were twenty, but when you were forty-something? You prayed for early dementia. I grabbed a shot glass from Cher and went to assist with the murder of a few hundred brain cells. “You okay?” I asked Suzanne.

She shrugged off the shame like it belonged to another. “Yeah, I’m just not warmed up yet. It happens to me in class all the time too.”

“They have classes in pole dancing?” I asked, before giving myself a mental head slap. It was Vegas. They probably had classes in threesomes.

“It’s good exercise.”

I raised a brow. “You could go to the gym.”

“Oh, no honey,” she said in her trademark southern drawl. “Those weights are heavy. Here, help me out.”

Reaching under the giant DJ turntable, Suzanne opened a mirrored trunk. A moment later bright fuchsia feathers flew my way. “Boas?”

She tossed me a half dozen more strands, and motioned for me to pass them out. “Arun, my one true love and future king, has arranged a scavenger hunt for us. He’s giving away a world cruise on his private yacht as a prize.” The women nearest us gasped, and the news spread like a brush fire. “We have to leave the bus to collect the clues, and this is how we’re going to differentiate ourselves from the teeming masses.”

I sighed, fingering my boa. Or I could just put a bull’s-eye on my chest.

Suzanne swung a deep olive strand over her shoulders and smiled through the feathers as she led me into the throng, tossing boas left and right, and fighting for balance as the vehicle headed downtown. I watched her for a moment, wishing I could still scent emotion, though even in the dim light she glowed. She really was in love. Catching my look, she continued chatting about the scavenger’s hunt. “These will help the guides we planted in the city know who to give the clues out to as well. They’re customized for each person…though we’re going in teams.”

And just like that my paranormal bull’s-eye expanded to include Cher.