Silver Zombie dspi-4

by Carole Nelson Douglas

  “Wear your on-camera suit. We’ll have to grab a late lunch after the next assault on Mrs. Haliburton and her minions.”

  “And you’re not going to tell me whom you’re picking up at the airport?”

  “Whom? Guess,” he challenged on the way out the door after snatching Dolly’s keys from the dresser top. “I’ll honk when I’m back.” He flipped the Do Not Disturb sign to the outside knob as he left.

  Hmm. He was looking way too polished for Mrs. Haliburton.

  Quicksilver finished his loud lapping and came to where I sat on the foot of the unmade bed, remote in hand.

  “You want to see where Mommy used to work?”

  He made that doggy gacking sound, too conveniently for it not to be a comment on my phony tone.

  “I’m looking for anything suspicious about my former newscast co-workers,” I told him. “Feel free to add any of your opinions. Gacking is okay.”

  Actually, I was glad to be alone for this chore. It took my mind off what Ric was bound and determined to do, for my own good: uncover the source of my phobia against lying on my back.

  Men can be so singled-minded. It had never occurred to him what I might most be afraid of now, even more than finding myself in my must-not-do sleeping position, a possible memory of rape. Childhood rape. I’d reported on such atrocities, and there was no way the word “survivor” could ever undo the reality of having been a “victim.”

  “IN OR OUT?” I asked Quicksilver when I heard Dolly’s mellow Miss Piggy scream for attention, otherwise known as a horn, ninety minutes later.

  He was at the door before me, so out we went, after I’d turned over the Do Not Disturb card. Actually, I was pretty disturbed when it came to the butterflies in my stomach region doing a maraca rumba.

  Sure enough. Ric was watching for me with his arm thrown over Dolly’s front seat and an expensively high-lighted blond head of hair sitting in the passenger seat. He was either using Dolly to chauffeur a glam rock ’n’ roll dude or … another woman.

  Dog, I thought. Whoops. I’d never known I was the jealous type.

  Quicksilver didn’t pause in shock. He lofted over Dolly’s polished black side into the backseat and arfed loud and sharp right into the nape of the blonde’s neck.

  That turned her around pronto.

  Oh. Ric’s mother. Foster mother. The star psychoanalyst and Washington, D.C., professor. Georgetown University and all that jazz.

  I raced to the passenger seat. “Dr. Burnside! I must apologize for my dog.”

  She turned around again to regard his now-grinning face. “My, what big teeth he has. But he also has his mother’s eyes,” she added wryly. Then she got a good look at my undercover gray contacts. “You certainly can hide your lying eyes, Delilah. Ric’s explained the situation to me.”

  “He shouldn’t have. I mean, he shouldn’t have dragged you into this, Dr. Burnside.”

  “I thought I was ‘Helena.’ Has something changed?” Her eyes were a paler shade of blue than mine, but they narrowed with understanding into the transparency of water. “Ah. Goldilocks is sitting in your chair, Mama Bear.”

  She pushed the heavy door open and stepped onto the parking lot asphalt. “You sit up front. I’ll take the rear.”

  “But … the dog.”

  Ric spoke for the first time. “I suppose he doesn’t want to wait and scare the maid?”

  “No,” I said.

  “That’s fine,” Helena said. “I go for younger men. What is he, three or four? That would be the twenties in human years. Move over, bud. Ladies last. And last.”

  Quicksilver gave a small whimper of confusion and edged over … to the middle.

  “Like that, is it?” Helena said. She reached into the side door pocket. “These yours, fellah?” She held up the extra-large sunglasses.

  Quicksilver bowed his head so she could slip them on his long snout.

  “Ric,” I said warningly in a low tone as I sat in the passenger seat. Now I knew why dogs growled softly.

  “Wait and watch,” he said. “You clean up nice too.”

  So I shrugged. I’d let my hair grow from its TV-reporter neat bob since moving to Vegas, and the ends were waving a bit so I got some blue-black highlights to match my eyes. Which were now hidden, of course. Still, my clipped-back bun had some oomph and the silver familiar had made itself into a three-inch-long piece of vintage Eisenberg Ice rhinestones on my tame navy lapel.

  “Where are we having that late lunch?” I asked.

  “Closest decent place,” he answered. “I’m starved, but on to Mrs. Haliburton first. I want to be hungry when I back her into a corner.”

  “She so does not deserve us,” I said.

  Chapter Sixteen

  THREE MOLDED-WOOD CHAIRS were now lined up before Mrs. Haliburton’s desk, Ric and I flanking Helena Troy Burnside, whose suit was a smashing power red, probably Prada.

  Quicksilver was guarding Dolly in the parking lot, but he’d made his druthers clear. He’d rather be intimidating the bureaucrat in the office above.

  Mrs. Haliburton shifted on her wheeled desk chair, which squealed like a little boy. She didn’t quite glance at anything but the computer screen facing her.

  “All the proper authorizations have reached your email address?” Helena inquired.

  “Yes,” Mrs. Haliburton murmured, her pink face turning fuchsia. She licked pale, dry lips. “From the secretary at the Department of Human Services in Washington, the assistant director of the FBI.” She frowned at Ric. “And the lieutenant governor. This is most unprecedented, but I’ll download the files to any device you wish, Dr. Burnside.”

  Helena extended a business card across the desk that Mrs. Haliburton whisked into her custody. “Both addresses?” she inquired.

  “I always like a backup, don’t you?” Helena replied.

  Mrs. Haliburton ignored her while clicking in the e-addresses. She hit enter with the high-handed flare of a concert pianist, totally unlike her tightly wired self.

  “I think you will find that this young woman, Delilah Street,” she spat out, still addressing her computer screen rather than our party, “will be very sorry indeed to have the contents of these files in anyone else’s hands, even hands with so many highly placed connections. I know your specialty, Dr. Burnside, is severely damaged, and damaging, children, but you will have those therapeutic skills sorely tried in this case, as our social workers here in Wichita did thirteen years ago.”

  Gulp, Irma whispered. And she doesn’t even know about me.

  “Gulp” was right. I was sitting with the two people in the world whose respect I most wanted.

  Ric laid his arm across the back of my chair, standing and drawing me up beside him.

  “Thanks for your cooperation, Mrs. Haliburton, but warnings are unnecessary. I’ve found in my FBI work that files are sealed more often to protect the holders, not the subjects.”

  Helena was checking her mini-netbook. She looked up and nodded. “Mission accomplished.”

  Ric escorted me to the door, opened it for his foster mother, and ushered us into the hall.

  “She’s shaking, Helena,” Ric told his onetime therapist in a furious undertone.

  “Don’t let that harpy frighten you, Delilah,” Helena consoled me. “Little people like to make big threats.” She took my other arm. “Now, Ric tells me you’ve invented another fascinating cocktail, the Brimstone Kiss. I know where you got the idea for that one.” Helena smiled and added, “Let’s find a well-stocked bar that can make it, where we can munch on a sinfully caloric bar menu.”

  She could make happy talk; it wasn’t her secret file that was heating up her personal computer.

  Ric knew how to calm my nerves. He let me drive again, with Helena in the passenger seat while he and Quicksilver occupied the rear.

  Ric searched his phone screen. “Here’s the place for us. The Petroleum Pavilion on Polo Drive. Delilah’s cocktails always use exotic and expensive ingredients,” he expl
ained to Helena, about to pass me the GPS.

  “Dolly and I don’t need that high-tech aid,” I said. “Any description of the physical neighborhood?”

  “Um,” Ric said, “the usual waterfront, probably a lake, near an exclusive gated community, riding stables, the ubiquitous golf course designed by the world’s finest over-paid landscaper—hey!”

  His recital broke off as Quicksilver whapped the cruising sunglasses off his snout and leaped out of the convertible, running ahead of Dolly on the street.

  “I don’t have to squint at some tiny screen in the sun like a vampire in extremis,” I told my passengers. “Quick loves to find lost golf balls in Sunset Park. I’ll just tail him as he follows his world-class nose.”

  “HOT DAMN!–BRAND CINNAMON schnapps,” Helena mused over our glasses in the mahogany-paneled, crystal-lit bar.

  “How,” she persisted, “did you come up with such off-beat ingredients for your Brimstone Kiss, my new favorite drink, Delilah?”

  Blush modestly … not. Helena was a psychotherapist whose already acute insights could pick up random visualizations from people’s minds and subconscious after the Millennium Revelation. I did not want Ric’s onetime “mother” glimpsing my forced interlude with Snow. She even knew who and what he was. Well, the albino rock star–hotelier part, anyway. Nobody really knew what brand of “super” Snow was.

  “I’m self-blocked, Delilah,” Helena assured me, already betraying that I was an easy read at the moment. “Believe me, I can feel the heat between you and Ric without any amplification, and I couldn’t be happier for the both of you.”

  What luck that she couldn’t tell my mental reruns right then had been about Snow.

  I consigned thoughts of that bastard to the Inferno Hotel’s subterranean Nine Circles of Hell attractions and explained.

  “The Brimstone Kiss concept begged for a liquor brand with a ‘hot’ taste and name. I think Vegas pretty much twenty-four/seven these days, and it is truly Sin City now.”

  “I saw that on my brief visit,” Helena said. “So … this is an ultra-Goth cocktail with a sweet undercurrent of innocence lost.”

  “You could write ad copy in today’s Las Vegas,” I agreed with a forced smile.

  In the middle of our granite-topped table sprawled a platter of tomatoes and mozzarella, crab-stuffed mushrooms, and angel-winged shrimp, a post-Revelation delicacy discovered in the deep sea. Food definitely took the edge off my nerves.

  Ric and I slipped into feeling triumphant and mellow, while Helena was scanning her screen between bites and sips.

  “Okay,” she said finally. “I’ve got the gist of the files.”

  “Should Delilah be shaking in her pump heels?” Ric wondered. “They’re really not her style.”

  “Not,” Helena said, “unless she has multiple tattoos.” She turned the screen toward us.

  “Me? Tattoos?” I demanded.

  “Ric?” she consulted him.

  He liked playing with the idea, and my skittish state. His eyes warmed as they met my startled expression.

  “Tattoos? Oh, not a one, Dr. Burnside. I swear.” His hand slipped under my social services’ bun to caress the “love bruise” on my nape. “I don’t like the idea of anybody or anything else, especially a needle, coming between my baby and me.”

  “I would say, ‘Get a room,’” Helena commented, “except you kids already have one at that dreadful motel.”

  “Dolly and Quick are the reason,” Ric explained. “We needed dent-free parking, which eliminated ramps, and a place that doesn’t ban hybrid wolves. Don’t worry. I booked you into the downtown showplace.”

  She nodded approvingly. “We need to go somewhere private to discuss these files. Your place or mine?”

  “Yours,” Ric and I answered as one.

  “I’m so relieved,” Helena said. “I haven’t been in a motel since before the Revelation. I shudder to think what vibes I might pick up in that tacky room of yours.”

  So did we.

  SUNSET WAS THINKING about taking a bow by the time we ambled out of the fancy bar. Fountains gushed like Old Faithful through the trees, probably installed in “water features,” as they were in Las Vegas. The rich loved gushers on their property.

  I was feeling calm, although edgy and curious about the tattoo remark. I’d been an overly careful girl, dodging preteen trouble from the “bad boy” half-vamps on my trail, studying and moving on, hoping not to get noticed, hiding in the midnight dens or dorm rooms where the TVs blared all night, blocking out danger and questions.

  We ambled toward the parking lot, Ric and me an openly entwined couple, Helena still cruising her backlit screen with a frown I didn’t like the look of, but was too happy to worry about.

  The sound of a sustained, deep, threatening growl interrupted our separate reveries. We stopped and looked ahead to the isolated, distant spot where Ric had parked to avoid door nicks.

  A group of six men surrounded Dolly.

  Ric’s hand left my waist to push his suit coat aside and reach for the firearm at the small of his back. Yep, my guy “carried concealed,” thank, uh, thank my recent friend of a friend, Anubis, Egyptian god of the underworld. (My religious high school education made me take God too seriously to invoke Him for any minor life crises.)

  Wait. These guys dressed like Vegas werewolf mobster Cesar Cicereau’s tame “small job” muscle. They were probably dead men, and they wore plaid, all right. Green and yellow and blue plaid baggy trousers now in danger of a thorough ripping, along with said contents.

  Quicksilver was standing in Dolly’s backseat, his thick fur raised in a fearsome Mohawk from between his flattened ears to his seriously bushed-out tail. His snout was curled back, black-lipped to display the formidable mountain range of his wolfish fangs.

  I rushed to put myself between Quick and his gentleman callers. That allowed me a glance into the backseat. Which was pretty much filled with small, dimpled white balls bearing three gilt initials on each one.

  “Those are our balls,” a tremolo tenor announced behind me. “Is that your … dog?”

  “Your balls?” Helena intoned curiously, moving past the late-middle-aged men with a well-preserved wiggle. She turned to confront them. “I am so sorry. What shall you do without them?”

  They gaped, open-jawed like Quicksilver, but not nearly so formidable.

  I started shoveling golf balls out of Dolly’s pristine red upholstery. “Teeth okay, not claws,” I instructed Quick. “This is not Sunset Park. Down. Back. Leave kitty!”

  Men in checkered caps topped with white fuzzy balls scrambled at my last silly command to reclaim airborne presents from Christmas Past.

  Ric leaned against Dolly’s side, eyes buried in his hand, trying not to laugh, but utterly failing.

  THIS TIME I let Ric and Helena use their high-tech toys and Ric drive.

  A not-too-chastened Quicksilver ran alongside Dolly, giving chase to bad drivers in Ford 350s who cut off good drivers at every opportunity. I wondered where the motorcycle cop genes had come from. Maybe he was an escaped K-9 dog, who knows?

  We reached the Old Town in no time. I sat in the back-seat and consulted Ric’s phone. A nineteenth-century warehouse had been gutted to house the boutique hotel, with soaring atrium and piano bar, but it was no Marriott, nor did it have Billy Joel live.

  Like all hotels now, especially in Vegas, it boasted wireless access everything and all-suite rooms. The surrounding city center featured restaurants, shops, and Indian artifact museums.

  The ambiance was charming, but Quicksilver was confined to the parking garage and Dolly. Downtown Wichita, no matter how restored, was not post–Millennium Revelation Las Vegas.

  Good lord, I was homesick for Vegas.

  “Very nice,” Helena said, giving her foster son positive reinforcement for his choice. “We can order room service while we study the files.”

  My stomach started calisthenics again.

  “The files” were my fi
les. Were I tattooed. Which I wasn’t. What was that about?

  Maybe you got all the tattoos, Irma cooed. And I got all the men.

  In Helena’s room, we all doffed our hot, sticky business suit jackets and sat at a slate-topped table near a sink/small refrigerator unit.

  Helena’s phone buttons linked her net-comp to the room TV screen.

  “Some of this is very puzzling,” she warned us. “Most of it, in fact. Ric, take Delilah’s hand in yours. Delilah, let him.”

  “What is this,” Ric asked, now uneasy too, “a shotgun wedding?”

  Helena’s face looked a little old for the first time, shadowed by the suite’s trendy spot-lighting.

  “I can’t say it’s good, but I can say this is not the Delilah we know. And love.”

  She punched a tiny button on her keyboard, and scanned copies of printed pages hit the big screen.

  Most were tiny-typed reports. A few photos flashed by: me looking like a deer in a police lineup spotlight, front and profile. I gasped audibly.

  Helena clicked into close-up. “No panic. See the tattoo on her neck? Almost lost under the hair at her nape? A coiled snake, I think. It looks like you, but the expression is defiant and knowing. Not you, Delilah. Or the photos have been manipulated. Easy to do. Look. Here’s a from-the-hip-up photo. You can see the twin cobra tattoos on her biceps. Definitely not you, even I can see that.”

  I eyed the loose-limbed, gaunt version of me in a raw preteen ranginess I didn’t remember, wearing a Rolling Stones wife-beater tee-shirt, a chain hip-belt, and stone-washed jeans.

  Young Lilith. It had to be.

  I shook my head, feeling Ric’s hands compulsively running over my arms and hands, circling my hips, covering—sheltering, claiming—the parts of my screen-revealed body.

  “Honest, Mom-doc,” he said, sounding like a defensive teenager for the first time in my hearing. “No marks on her that I haven’t put there. I swear.”

  “TMI,” Helena said, raising her palms.

  She shut her eyes, revealing azure eye shadow gathering like a glittering monochromatic rainbow in a few faint age creases.

  “I said this was a puzzle,” she reminded us. “These images are not Delilah. Not only do my eyes and your joint testimony tell me that, but my … amplified insight. This might explain why Delilah had a difficult childhood. She had, at times, a supernatural shadow persona. This girl. This very disturbed girl. No girl is bad, but this one had very little good shown toward her and returned it in kind to others.”