by Eve Paludan
“The jig’s up, Danny. I know.”
His form shrugged as if he were pretending not to know what I was talking about.
“I have two things to discuss,” I said. “First off, I know why you haven’t completely left this plane of existence.” I paused. “You’ve been waiting for Sam, haven’t you?”
What passed for a nod caused his particle body to briefly change shape.
“And now, you’re excited that there is a slim chance that Sam will get killed today and that the entity will get ripped out of her. You think that will mean that you two former lovebirds can go into the light together. Am I right?”
Danny’s spirit shook back and forth, vehemently.
“Don’t try to deny it. You want Sam to get killed today so you can go into eternity together.”
The ghost that passed for Danny covered his face with what might have once been very handsome hands.
“Look at me, Danny. You were an asshole to Sam in life. For God’s sake, don’t be one in death, too.”
He took those spooky hands away from his creepy eyes and there were tears shining on his amorphous cheeks. I reached out as if to wipe one away and he flew away from me, up into the corner of the men’s room, where the steam from the sinks was gathering and filling up the room in a cloud.
“Your children are her children, too, and they need her. Sam is all that Tammy and Anthony have in this world. If you’re planning to stand aside and let Morrie kill Sam so you can go into the light with her, don’t. If you betray Sam, maybe you would go into the darkness—and be separated from her for eternity, you dumbass.”
He listened intently, his chin quivering.
I didn’t back off now. “Don’t rob your children of their mother and doom yourself to an eternity of something awful.”
Danny’s ghost came down from the ceiling and floated next to me, shoulders shaking.
I continued my tirade. “For once in your life—no, for once in your death—do something for someone besides yourself.” I paused, my voice shaking now, too. “I need you to protect Sam, but if you have a chance, I want you to take Jolie into the light. Do you understand?”
He nodded contritely and ghostly sobs filled the men’s room.
“Stop making that sound. You’re giving me the willies.”
He held up two fingers.
At first, I thought he was shooting me the peace sign, but I realized that he wanted me to talk about the second thing on my mind.
“Yes, that brings us to my second order of business.” I got out my cell phone and opened the gallery of photos I had taken of the original contract that Jolie Hart had signed.
“Okay, Loophole Danny, time to step up to the plate. Sam tells me that ghosts can’t read, but I’m really hoping you can. I need your help to save both Sam and Jolie. I know the answer to saving both of them lies in this contract—probably in the between-the-lines subtext. I just don’t know what some things mean in the supernatural world, because let’s face it, I went to human law school. Will you help me?”
A moan came from him.
I nodded at Danny in the mirror. “If you can read, let me know and write something on the mirror, in the condensation. Just touch the mirror lightly. Don’t press hard or your hand will just go through the wall. Try it.”
He stuck out a glowing fingertip and drew a heart and then wrote on the steamed mirror before the heart, the letter, “I.” And then after the heart, he wrote, “SAM.”
Relief flooded me. “I know you love Sam. I love her, too. Buddy, I promise with everything in me that I will take care of her in this life, and your kids, too, for as long as she lets me exist in her universe.”
He wrote on the steamy mirror, “Good luck with that,” and drew a winky emoticon.
Someone pounded on the door. “Unlock the door. I gotta piss!”
I thought quickly and shouted, “This is the janitor speaking. There’s vomit everywhere. That’s why the door is locked. I’m cleaning! Find another restroom.”
The man apparently went away.
I looked back at Danny and his eyes no longer glowed green. They were blue.
“Help me with this contract, Danny. Help me save Sam. And Jolie.”
For the next few minutes, we went through the photos of the between-the-lines parts of the contract. When I saw his amorphous hand make a signal to stop swiping the photos to the next one, I read the text aloud:
“The outro shall turn the key that locks His portal and opens Mine.”
And then, there were some numbers at the end of the sentence and it suddenly dawned on me to Google those numbers: 36.1215N, 115.1739W
“The numbers are the latitude and longitude for Las Vegas.”
He nodded and drew a picture of a door on the steamy mirror.
“I get it, Danny. We’re in Vegas, and the bad guy downstairs has a portal here, but so does the good guy upstairs?” I didn’t want to say the devil’s name, in case I accidentally summoned him. “Now, what does the other part of the sentence mean?”
Danny was writing something in the steam on the mirror: Wiki outro
“You want me to use Wikipedia?” I asked.
Danny’s ghost did an eye roll, which looked so weird.
I looked it up. “Outro is a musical term for the end of a song, usually an instrumental part or a solo that goes to the fade out.” I paused for a minute. “I don’t understand. Help me. Time is running out.”
His ghostly hand reached in my pocket and grabbed at my car keys.
“I’ll get them.” I got out my car keys and he made a motion with his ghostly hand, turning it clockwise.
“Yeah, I know that keys lock things clockwise,” I said. “What’s your point?”
He wrote the word outro in the mirror’s steam and drew a counterclockwise arrow around it.
Impatiently, he drew the same thing over and over all the way down the mirror until something finally clicked in my head.
“She has to sing the outro counterclockwise—or in this case, backward—to lock Hell’s portal and unlock the other one? Sort of do the hocus pocus in reverse?”
Danny’s ghostly image smiled and kissed me on the cheek.
“Thank you, Loophole Danny!” I howled with glee, turned off the hot water taps, and wiped the long mirror all the way down with my sleeve.
Danny and I got the hell out of the men’s room. Outside the restroom, Danny flew into Sam’s purse and wiggled around in there, getting comfortable. Now, I knew he was really playing for our team.
Chapter 27
We walked back toward the concert hall and security was tight.
“Sam,” I said. “You’re at bat.”
“Doing what?” Sam asked.
“Vampire telepathy. Send our wannabe Blondie a message.” I told Sam what she had to tell Jolie Hart to do with her song. Dracula listened intently.
“I don’t understand, Kingsley,” Samantha said.
“I don’t have time to explain it. You’re just going to have to trust Danny. He figured it out from the contract.”
“Danny did?” Sam said, looking dubious, even as his ghost wiggled around in her purse.
“Yes. Danny. He’s never going to betray you again, I promise.”
Sam looked at Dracula.
“Don’t look at me for opinions,” Dracula said. “You’re the one who married him.”
Sam looked at me again. “I don’t get it, about the song.”
“I know,” I said. “Just send the telepathic message on the vampire network thingie to Jolie for her to do what I said and not ask questions. And tell her to block Morrie from her head.”
“Okay.” Sam closed her eyes and concentrated. “She’s not blocking transmission, but Morrie is. He has a shield up around her.”
“That piss-ant demon vampire,” Dracula said. “Let me try.”
He shut his eyes and then opened them. “I need your help, Sam.” He held out his hand and she took it. Together, they shut their eyes and loo
ked intent, straining even, as if they were both constipated.
Finally, they opened their eyes and let go of each other’s hands, much to my relief. I didn’t like another man holding Sam’s hand. Especially not Dracula.
“Jolie got the message!” Sam said.
“Is she going to do it?” I asked.
“She said it won’t be easy. She has to look at her sheet music and memorize the outro backward in the next ten or fifteen minutes,” Sam said. “Still, it could be worse. She said the outro is an a cappella solo without the guitar that leads to the fade out, so she doesn’t have to sing words backward, or play the guitar backward, only sing the notes in reverse order.”
“That still sounds difficult,” I said. “I hope she can really do that.”
“I told her the outro has to be exactly backward, every note of it,” Dracula said. “Is that right?”
“Exactly. Or it won’t work.” I hoped that I was right. That Danny was right.
“I just figured it out. What this is.” Dracula looked at Sam. “Do you know where we are?”
“Duh. Vegas,” she said.
“Samantha, Vegas is sitting on top of one of the many portals on Earth that leads directly to Hell.”
Sam said, “So, Sin City is really Sin City?”
“Duh,” Dracula echoed.
“Here it is, in a nutshell,” I said. “Jolie’s voice is a key. If she turns the key clockwise, or sings the song forward, she opens the portal to Hell and at the same time, closes the portal to Heaven. But, if she does what you told her to do and sings it backward, then the key turns the other way—and so do the locks…” My voice trailed off.
Sam gasped as she realized the implications. She said, “Oh. My. God.”
Dracula smiled at me. “Kingsley, if you care to summon someone now, I hope you’ll follow Samantha’s wise suggestion.”
Chapter 28
The Big D and I ducked into a men’s room. I finally relieved myself while he squinted at himself in the mirror. Not that it did him any good.
“How does my spray tan look? I can’t really see my reflection.”
“You look like Sid Caesar in the sixties,” I said. “Still good-looking, fit and healthy for your age. You look like you play a lot of golf.”
“Thanks for the compliment. He’s dead, though.”
“Is anyone really ever dead?” I asked, washing my hands.
“He is. Gone to the light.” Dracula paused. “You know, Kingsley, you could bat for my team, too.”
I dried my hands and looked at him in surprise. “I’m already a werewolf and I’m quite good at it, thank you very much.”
“You could be a vampire, too.”
“I didn’t know that.”
“There are many benefits to being both a werewolf and a vampire.”
“No, thanks,” I said, feeling nervous. “I have enough body issues for a gym full of insecure guys in bike shorts.”
He laughed. “Summon me if you ever change your mind.”
“With a magic ring or something?”
He laughed in his donkey-braying way. “No, just say my name aloud. I’ll come as soon as I can.”
“That’s it?”
“What, that’s not good enough for you? I could get you a souvenir ring from the World’s Largest Gift Shop and put a hoodoo on it, if you prefer.”
“No, thanks. I try not to wear jewelry that I might forget to take off during the full moon. I like keeping all of my fingers.”
“Right,” he said as we exited the men’s room.
Tonight, I had a lot of important conversations in men’s rooms.
Chapter 29
At the doors to concert hall, the ticket takers looked like normal employees, but Secret Service were everywhere, and I got a peek when someone opened a door that read ‘Backstage. Authorized Personnel Only.’
We weren’t going to see that catwalk anytime soon unless I thought of a way to sneak past eight or ten Marines.
A bomb-sniffing dog and his handler came out of the concert hall. The German shepherd nosed Sam in the crotch and then gave me a doggie smirk with his lolling tongue.
“Sorry, ma’am.” The handler pulled on the dog’s leash. “Bad boy. No biscuit.”
“Ewww. What the heck was that?” Sam asked, straightening her sparkly red evening gown and looking with dismay at the wet spot.
“He was just saying hi to you,” I replied. “And doing it to bug me.”
“Do dogs know what you are?” Sam asked.
“Of course. They can even smell that you’re my girlfriend.”
“Oh, brother,” Sam said.
The Big D chuckled. “Typical werewolf.”
“Typical vampire,” I countered.
“Stop it, you two,” Samantha said. “We’re working here.”
It was a slow process to check in and I furtively sniffed for Sam’s sister. Where the heck was Mary Lou? I still smelled faint traces of her, but she must now be in a room inside of a room. But where? I was stymied.
Finally, we made it to the door and were assigned an usher. We showed our tickets and they were matched against a list that held the names of the ticket purchasers. Security was that tight. Someone showed us to our seats and waited until we sat.
“Don’t get up for any reason until the show is over,” the usher said. I saw the bulge of a gun holster under his jacket. Even the ushers were with the Secret Service.
We nodded and he left us. Sam sat between Dracula and me.
Fang came to us in a huff, wearing his backstage pass. “They kicked me out. I was planning to stay near Jolie, but now they say no one is allowed backstage because the president is here.”
A G-man usher came to check his ticket, and Dracula handed him one for Fang. “I got you a ticket, too, just in case something like this happened.”
“Thanks,” Fang said, and sat with us. The usher left again.
Fang looked at Dracula with unabashed worship in his eyes.
“What?” Dracula said, looking back at Fang.
“I’m your biggest fan, sir. I aspire to learn all that you are willing to teach me.”
“Who do you say I am?” Dracula demanded.
“The One. The One of us.”
“You, I like,” Dracula said and the two of them firmly shook hands.
“Fang, tell me what went on backstage,” I said.
“They cleared out everyone but the cameramen and sound engineers.”
“Where’s Jolie?” I asked.
“Jolie, some dancers and the MC were chilling in the green room,” Fang replied.
“Where’s Morrie?”
“Green room, with her,” he said. “Marines are backstage, every one of them packing heat. Security is tight.”
“It’s not good that we’ve lost access to backstage,” Sam said. “I could still sneak back there, but I don’t want any Marines to get hurt by accident. If they confronted me, I’d have to defend myself.”
“Forget it, Sam. Backstage isn’t an option,” I said. “Stay here where it’s safe, with me, Fang and the Big D.”
“I make my own decisions,” Dracula said.
“Sorry,” I apologized. “What do you want to do, sir?”
“Stay here,” he said.
I shook my head. He was such a curmudgeon.
Dracula grinned his terrible grin, one that could only come from a vampire patriarch who also had a secret life as a dragon. It brought to mind images of the way he’d been hanging in the air beyond the balcony, his lizard-like mouth open wide.
The Secret Service finally got the President, the First Lady and his entourage seated, before moving off to pat down more people who came in, the late arrivals. So it was me, Dracula, Sam and Fang sitting together in the front row and the President and the First Lady about five seats to the right of us. How was the President even here at a recently booked show? The White House set up his calendar months ahead of time. I got such a prickly feeling about his presence here.
They looked at Fang with suspicion. So much so that Fang had to compel them to think he was legit.
“ID, sir,” one of them demanded.
Fang’s eyes glowed in a creepy way. “You don’t need to see my ID.”
“I don’t need to see your ID,” the man repeated, zombie-like.
“Tell me to sit down. I’m not a person of interest.”
“Sit down, sir. You’re not a person of interest.”
Very Alec Guinness. They left us alone after they learned that Sam was a private investigator who used to be a federal agent for HUD. Then there was me. A prominent attorney from Yorba Linda. And of course, there was Dracula posing as ‘Sid Caesar,’ a guy who was actually dead, if they’d bothered to read the entertainment magazines.
“Where’s your flask?” I asked Dracula.
“Locked in the hotel safe. I thought it would be prudent in case we saw action tonight. I don’t want to lose it.”
“Good thinking,” I replied.
My three partners in anti-crime looked fairly normal, if pale. If anyone looked out of place, it was me, a hairy, tanned guy in a custom-made tux who could have been a linebacker… or two linebackers. I barely fit in the concert seat.
It was time to go to work. I wrinkled my nose, flared my nostrils and inhaled deeply.
“I smell your sister strongly now,” I whispered.
Sam looked around the audience. “You’re kidding. What row is she sitting in?”
“You misunderstand. She’s on stage behind the curtain.” Just then, the house lights went down and the audience quieted.
“You have got to be kidding,” Sam said.
“Shhh!” said the man behind us.
“You shush,” I said, turning around my big head and giving him the stink eye. “It hasn’t even started yet.”