He leaned over to Fox Lisa and put his mouth close to her ear. She shied away out of reflex, then made a face.
“I made us a reservation at Galatoire’s for a late dinner,” he whispered.
That managed to surprise a smile out of her.
“Well, thank you, Griffen,” she said. “But you don’t have to do it for her.”
“I want to do it for you,” Griffen insisted. “We haven’t been there in a long time. You deserve it. Besides, you look so nice in that suit, I didn’t want to waste the opportunity for you to show it off.”
She leaned close and squeezed his arm. “I’ll look forward to it. It’ll give me something to think about beside talking points.”
“I could recite them along with Penny,” Griffen said.
“I hear them in my dreams,” Fox Lisa admitted.
A man in a headset moved into Griffen’s line of sight and gestured vigorously. When Griffen glanced at him, the man made a throat-cutting gesture with his finger. Griffen understood. He had to stop talking. Stifling a sigh, he shifted his feet and steeled himself to watch.
Griffen could have used a distraction. Politics were as dull as he had always believed. Having to smile and pretend to be supportive because of the television cameras was especially tortuous. The lights went up again for the third segment of the debate.
The moderator had reached the subject of law enforcement. Penny quivered at the podium, unable to contain herself as the other candidates took their turns speaking. Griffen knew it was only a matter of time before she interrupted one of them.
Yes, there she went.
“My dear sir,” she began, her voice full of honeyed contempt, raising her voice over Congressman Jindal, “I am certain you have misstated the statistics. I have them right here . . .”
“Representative, if you don’t mind,” the moderator said, raising his voice to be heard over her. The person running the sound board was on his side. Penny’s mike dropped to near inaudibility. The audience tittered. Her shoulders stiffened. Griffen could tell she was angry, and like the Incredible Hulk, no one was going to like the results.
To his amazement, she kept her silence. Griffen regarded her with suspicion. She was up to something.
He couldn’t say later when he became aware of the motion, but by the time his conscious mind noticed it, Griffen realized he had been staring raptly at Penny. He thought that he was immune to her, after all her complaints and subterfuges, but something about the way she swayed behind her podium was fascinating. The movement came from her ankles upward, shifting her whole body from side to side like a snake. It was subtle, but he found it amazingly sexy and compelling. Penny aggravated him. He had to force himself to keep that in mind. But it was hard. Very hard. The longer he watched, the more he wanted to believe what she said. His will was bending toward hers.
Her shoulders, hips, and legs swayed. Blood pounded in Griffen’s head. He wanted her. In his mind he saw her astride his hips, breasts swaying, writhing and tossing her hair. He couldn’t concentrate on anything but her. He had to touch her, to draw that power into himself. The other men there might get to her first. She must be his and his alone. No one would dare challenge a dragon! He strode toward her.
Shriek! The platform creaked underfoot, snapping him out of the trance. Griffen stepped back into line. He realized he had been breathing hard. He glanced from side to side to see if anyone else had noticed him.
No one was paying attention to him. He scanned the row on both sides of him. All the campaign workers, whether or not they worked for Penny, had their eyes fixed on her. Most of the men had goofy smiles pasted on their faces. Most of the women frowned slightly, as if disapproving of what they felt. Some were as agog as the men.
Griffen knew that their fascination couldn’t be because of what Penny was saying. He had heard the speech many times, with little variation. In it, Penny took credit for legislation that organized grassroots community policing and outlined bigger ideas for when she would be elected governor. Her answer to students’ getting greater value out of the local schools was to make them safer. As a strategy, it was a can’t-miss proposition. None of it cost very much to initiate, and it made for terrific photo opportunities for neighborhood leaders. It was dry stuff even to devoted followers, but he couldn’t look away. He found himself eager for her next words. He wished she would turn around and look at him.
The huge audience cheered every time she finished a sentence. If she paused for breath, they broke into wild applause. Griffen had never seen anything like it. He wasn’t close enough to smell pheromones, but it had to be some kind of phenomenon like that. Penny had a secret weapon, something magical. It worked on not just one person at a time, but dozens—maybe hundreds. He had seen her speak in many places and she had gotten a good response from the crowd, but this was different. She compelled them to come over to her side and agree. Every camera in the room pointed at her.
The buzzer went off, indicating that her time was up. Without looking at it, the distinguished newsman automatically slapped it off with his hand, letting Penny continue.
“Our children are our future!” Penny said, raising her right hand to the sky.
“Yea, sister!” a loud baritone voice bellowed from the audience. Dozens in the crowd echoed him.
Penny shook a finger at heaven.
“We let them down every day we allow violent offenders to run our neighborhoods.”
“Amen!”
“I will lead from the governor’s mansion, but I need all of you to do your part! I need you to promise me two things!” Another finger joined the first.
“Name them!”
“One, that you’ll blow the whistle on offenders in your neighborhood! Don’t put up with their bad behavior one more day! And, two!” Penny was rising toward the climax of her speech. Her hands rose before her as if she was conducting an invisible orchestra. The audience was with her like a congregation. “That you’ll go out on election day and vote! Punch that button that says . . . that says . . . !”
Her shoulders shuddered, and she fell silent.
As if someone had put a pin in a gigantic balloon, the energy burst out of the room, leaving it a deflated scrap. The audience groaned. Griffen felt the loss as if he had been deprived of something wonderful. He willed Penny to go on with her speech.
She didn’t. Her shoulders were tense and shaking. Griffen realized she was staring at someone in the audience.
Griffen looked in the direction of her gaze. He ran his gaze back and forth through the rows of people. Nothing seemed out of the ordinary. Suddenly, he felt a cold ball of slime twist in his guts. In the midst of the murmuring populace was a man, or something that used to be a man. How was it that the crowd around him didn’t see the horror Griffen beheld? His clothes, a parody of a business suit with a striped silk tie, were gray rags. Griffen couldn’t tell what color his ridged skin used to be since it was a sickly gray mottled with purple and green, like old bruises. One eye hung out of its socket and bobbed on the leathery cheek. The face wore a rictus of a grin. The teeth looked outsized in the shrunken gray gums and shriveled lips. Griffen knew to the bottom of his soul that it wasn’t a costume. He swallowed, trying to keep his gorge from rising.
“What’s wrong?” Fox Lisa hissed. She, too, had broken out of her trance. “What’s upsetting Penny?”
He pointed, trying not to make his gesture large enough to be picked up by the dozen or so television cameras. Fox Lisa followed the line of his finger and squinted into the crowd. She gasped.
“What is it?” she asked. “It looks like a zombie from the movies!”
“I don’t know,” Griffen whispered. “I’m going to find out.”
He slipped out of the group of staffers and went down the stairs at the back of the dais. Fox Lisa clacked after him and kicked her shoes off at the bottom of the flight. She scoope
d them up and grasped them so the pointed heels could be used as weapons.
On the stage, Penny was still trying to recover her wits. The crowd, brought violently out of its reverie, roiled and muttered. Griffen shouldered his way into the mass of people. He dodged camera cranes and technicians in T-shirts and blue jeans. He kept his eyes fixed on the spot where he had seen the zombie. Why was no one else reacting to the creature? One look at it ought to have cleared the arena to the walls.
Fox Lisa had broken off from his side and doubled around to home in on the creature from the other direction. He could just see the top of her head in the midst of the crowd.
Something gray caught his eye. The rough texture looked like the zombie’s sleeve. Griffen jumped toward it.
A hand caught him under the jaw and shoved outward. Before Griffen registered the mistake he had made, he was thrown roughly to the ground. A knee landed between his shoulder blades. The air whooshed out of his lungs. Griffen let out a pained OOF! He waved his hands to keep from being trampled by the forest of feet. The knee withdrew as suddenly as it had descended. The hand grasped a handful of the back of his shirt and hauled him upright. Griffen found himself eye to eye with Detective Harrison. The vice cop wore a heavy leather vest over a gray button-down shirt. His badge was on a strap around his neck. Harrison shook him roughly, then thrust him away.
“What are you doing, McCandles?” the burly man growled. “I was about to grab a troublemaker. You got in the way!”
“I was . . .” Griffen glanced at the stage. Penny stared down at him with a look of terror on her face. “I was, too.”
Without the magic to sustain her hold over the audience, the debate could go on. The outdoorsman smiled genially at the camera and tapped the top of his clock. The melodious PING! sounded. The other candidates looked relieved.
“Your time’s up, Representative. We’ll get back to you on the next question.”
Griffen returned his attention to Harrison.
Harrison eyed him sourly. “Your kind of troublemaker or mine?”
Griffen sighed. “Mine.”
Harrison moaned, the lines in his meaty face angling downward.
“Shit, I hoped you weren’t gonna say that. Do I even want to know what it was?”
“I don’t think so,” Griffen said. “I’ll tell you what I can.” He looked around. “Not here. I’ll be at the pub later.”
“All right. I want a full briefing.”
Fox Lisa squeezed between two men holding JINDAL FOR GOVERNOR flags. “Hey, Detective, how are you doing?”
Harrison smiled down at her. “Been worse, Miss Fox Lisa. You look pretty fine in that suit. Running for office?”
“Maybe next time, Detective. Taking care of another candidate here.”
Harrison glanced up at the stage. “Yeah, I’ve seen you on TV behind her. She was doing all right. Too bad she blew it.” He pulled a palm-sized microphone off his shoulder and spoke into it. “I missed him, Larry.”
A voice crackled out of the handset. “Got mine! Come on down by the forty-yard line. Ugh! Bring extra cuffs. He’s a fighter, for sure.”
Harrison punched Griffen in the shoulder. Griffen winced. Even in fun, the big man packed a wallop. “You owe me a drink later, McCandles. I’ll be by to collect it.”
“No problem.”
The detective pushed away through the crowd. Griffen sought about for the zombie. No sign of their deteriorating prey. It had vanished.
“Why didn’t anyone else see that thing?” Fox Lisa whispered, as they made their way back to the rear of the stage. The voices of the other candidates echoed from speakers over their heads.
“I don’t know. Maybe no one who—who isn’t like us can see it.”
Fox Lisa’s russet eyebrows went up. “Oh. So, it was definitely meant for Penny and no one else? It’s that person that you heard was threatening her?”
Griffen nodded. This had to be Duvallier. He was playing with Penny’s mind, to get her to resign. From the look on her face, he was succeeding.
Fox Lisa’s resentment evaporated in sympathy. “I’m damned if I’ll let that happen,” she said firmly.
Mercifully, the debate was almost over. Penny steeled herself to answer the final question, but her reply was subdued, without the usual banter and veiled insults aimed at her opponents. The outdoorsman thanked them all. Penny waited until the lights went down for the last time, then strode immediately to Horsie’s waiting arms.
The campaign manager enfolded her and stroked her golden hair as though Penny were a little girl. Griffen and Fox Lisa crowded close around her, shielding her from the reporters who streamed up onto the stage.
“Did you see it?” Penny demanded.
“Yes, we did,” Griffen said.
Horsie was puzzled. “It’s just the usual fans, honey. I don’t know why you were so tense.”
“That man, with the eye!”
“Everyone was eyeing you, honey. You’re sexy as they come. They can’t resist you.” Horsie started to escort her toward the stairs.
“No!” Penny wailed. She reached for Griffen. “Stay with me, both of you.”
“All right,” Griffen said. Penny clutched his wrist with an iron grip. Horsie held on to her other arm. Fox Lisa trotted along behind, fluttering with sympathy.
“It’s going to be all right,” she assured Penny. “No one’s going to hurt you.”
Horsie waited until they had reached the underground garage, where armed guards let them into the enclosed area reserved for the VIP vehicles. She let Fox Lisa help Penny into the limousine and dropped back to speak to Griffen.
“What did she see back there?” she asked in a low voice. “She’s never this rattled!”
“It was a warning,” Griffen said. “She must have seen him before. I need to know where.”
Horsie nodded. “When she’s calmed down a little, I’ll wheedle it out of her. Let’s not bother her now. I’ll make her some tea with whisky in it. She’ll feel better.”
“All right,” Griffen said. Malcolm was going to have to know. He helped Horsie into the front seat beside Winston, then went to slide in the back beside Fox Lisa.
He took a cautious sniff of the air. Besides the usual smell of curing concrete, trash, and rainwater, he scented cigar smoke.
No doubt about it, Duvallier had been there.
• • •
Duvallier led the way back to the limo in the far reaches of the underground garage. The two frontrunners came out smelling like roses, but Congressman Benson also looked good. Once Penny Dunbar had lost her train of thought, the crowd snapped out of her spell. They didn’t know what had hit them, but they all felt it and resented it. Duvallier grinned to himself. There had not been time left for Penny to undo the damage and leave them with a breathless memory of pleasure. No, it had snapped back on them like a rubber band. And all it took was a look at Mr. Suskind.
He stopped at the long black car, parked in the manager’s personal bay, a special favor to an old, old, old friend, and glanced back at his employer’s representative, breathless and wide-eyed.
“Gettin’ your money’s worth now?” he asked Sandusky.
“Yes, sir!” Albert leaped to open the door for him. “Yes, sir, Mr. Duvallier!”
Duvallier put his cigar in his mouth and took a satisfied puff.
“That’s what I like to hear.”
Twenty-eight
The ride back to the local campaign office felt like a funeral cortege, surrounded in darkness and silence, without any of the joyful noise that usually accompanied a New Orleans procession.
Once the Dunbar limousine pulled into the parking lot, and the office door was closed behind all but Penny’s employees and her most devoted campaign workers, she allowed herself to go to pieces. She rocked back and forth in her office chair, sobbing, as F
ox Lisa sat on a metal folding chair beside her and patted her back. The hands holding the wad of tissues to her eyes trembled. Horsie hustled to the antique wooden sideboard and poured a stiff shot of whisky into a tumbler.
“Knock this back, Penny,” she ordered briskly. “You need it.”
Penny took it. She gulped half the golden liquid and made a face.
“Burns,” she said.
“Good. It’ll melt the shakies out of you.” Horsie poured one for herself and offered drinks around. Winston grunted his refusal. Fox Lisa accepted a glass but put it down on the desk beside her. Griffen shook his head. He wanted his wits clear. Penny’s extreme reaction made him feel very uncomfortable. He knew there had to be more to the event than seeing a decaying corpse. She’d posed with uglier ones on her law-and-order beat.
“Penny, have you seen that man before?” Griffen asked.
“Now, let’s just leave her alone for a while,” Horsie said. “Come on, give the girl some privacy.” She tugged on Griffen’s arm. He stood up.
“No!” Penny said, alarmed. She stretched out a pale arm. “Don’t let them leave!”
Griffen shrugged and sat down.
“Honey, what happened to you back there?” Horsie asked.
“She saw someone,” Fox Lisa said.
“Are you being stalked, Representative?” Winston asked. “You should have informed me.”
“It’s not like that,” Griffen said.
The big man’s high forehead furrowed into deep folds over his clear blue eyes.
“If it’s not like that, then what is it? If that kind of harassment is what she brought you in to prevent, you’re doing a crap job.”
“I didn’t have anything concrete to go on before.”
“You meant you didn’t believe her?”
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