Silver Zombie

by Carole Nelson Douglas

Chapter Fifteen

   

  A SCRATCHING SOUND, like a cat claw raking across a hard surface, awakened me from dreams of being bound to an ancient Egyptian mummy preparation table.

  Not only a dream. A memory.

  I’d been sleeping on my side, as usual, so in one motion I rolled out of bed and was standing on my feet in the shadowy room, my bare toes curling into nylon shag, something unlikely to carpet any ancient chamber. The silver familiar filled my right palm with a cold metal weapon of some kind.

  “Del,” Ric’s sleep-slowed voice drawled from behind me. “Where’s the fire?” He was half-sitting on the … yes, bed—not a stone table edged with a slim gutter for draining blood—behind me.

  “I heard something,” I said.

  “I guess,” Ric said as he turned on the bedside lamp. “What’re you carrying?”

  I turned my hand over in the weak light. “A humongous biker switchblade. The haft is etched with a screaming dude face wearing buffalo horns etched like a bad tattoo. ”

  “Place-appropriate, I’d say,” Ric said, yawning and checking his watch. It was so multifunction I couldn’t even find the time display. “Ten a. m. I didn’t hear any—”

  The scraping sound came again, longer and louder. From the motel’s metal door. I went to the curtained picture window and peeked out the side.

  “Quicksilver wants in. ”

  “That’s new. Tallgrass must have dropped him off as a wake-up call. ”

  “They’ve both had enough of our long, luxurious coed bedroom time,” I guessed, going to undo the chain lock that was shimmying like a stripper from Quick’s latest “knock. ” Luckily, even his big nails couldn’t etch steel.

  I looked around before I opened the door wide enough to admit him. Most of the parked cars that were here when we came back for the evening were gone. The motel was in the dead zone between guest shifts.

  Ric had already retreated to the bathroom, so Quick gave my weaponless hand a lick in greeting and headed for the stainless food and water bowls next to my side of the bed. I hid them under the chintzy chintz dust ruffle when we were out during the day. No problem. The maids never cleaned in the closet or under the bed, and, frankly, I didn’t blame them one bit. I hurried to the bedside to slide my feet into my cowboy-boot mules.

  Meanwhile, I’d lost the awesome knife, replaced by a bicycle chain–style bracelet.

  I put kibble in Quick’s bowl and turned on my bedside lamp to use my first chance to inspect him for damage, although he’d probably licked it all away at Tallgrass’s place. The big black leather collar he’d come with at the Sunset Park adoption event had a few more fang scratches between the silver circles that never dented, although they changed shape with the moon cycles and were now nicely three-quarter shaped.

  “You’re my Moondoggie,” I told him, causing his perpetually perked wolfish ears to flatten a bit. Quicksilver wasn’t one for mush. “I wonder what this collar is about?”

  I gave his hackles a rough fluff with both hands and ran them deep into the thick silvery gray hair of his back and chest. It’s unusual that a big dog, a dog with both wolf and wolfhound genes, would tolerate being petted or even touched while eating. Quick continued gulping.

  He’d seemed fine after the Zombie Cattle Company jamboree. Of course, he was the first of our partnership to exhibit a healing tongue, and I was not about to try mine out again on anyone but Ric. I leaned down to murmur, “Physician, heal thyself,” in one big-bad-wolf-large ear. He was too busy wolfing his food to react to my little nothings.

  Just then, Ric came out of the bathroom, and I turned to look. A new man, freshly showered, bare-chested and barefoot, contact lens inserted, and jaw shaved so close he must have lost half of his follicles.

  “First,” I suggested. “I’d get your baby-pink bottoms off that unsanitary motel carpet and into some shoes, then I’d tell me why the super-close shave. I know you had to have one yesterday for your new girlfriend, Mrs. Haliburton, but today?”

  “Today, I’ve got to make the Wichita Mid-Continent Airport in less than an hour to pick up a big gun I had flown in. ” He frowned at my wrist. “Lost the switchblade. Too bad. ”

  “Yeah, I feel naked without major edged weapons too. ”

  Naked we were not. Quicksilver had a prudish streak for an unfixed dog, but that wasn’t why both Ric and I, without consulting each other, had brought along jogging outfits for pajamas. We needed to be action-ready in case something big and bad besides Quicksilver wanted into our motel rooms along the way. Stray supernaturals of exotic ilk were still turning up all across America.

  Like us.

  “We need to talk about those fast-forward zombies and company,” I told Ric.

  “Yeah, but not until we settle Mrs. Haliburton’s haughty hash. We’re not leaving the Child Protective Services building today without more answers than are in your skimpy file. ”

  He was at the tiny closet, donning his one French-cuffed silk shirt. White, that made his Latino skin gleam like a bronze god’s.

  “I could steam out the wrinkles over a tub of hot water. ”

  “No time, although I’d enjoy watching you be domestic. Wrinkles will ease out with my body heat and won’t show under the suit jacket. Trust me, I’ve traveled before. ”

  “You tempt me with bare cheeks and references to body heat and are ready to bolt out the door. You are sure all business this morning, Montoya. ”

  “Don’t whine,” he said with a grin. “You’ll get yours later. You have anything to do here while I’m gone?”

  I gestured at the wireless router I’d bought and installed yesterday beside the small flat-screen TV. “Going to catch up on the local news. ”

  Ric thoughtfully pulled on his suit pants under his shirttails, whether in deference to Quicksilver or me, I wasn’t sure. He grabbed his conservative diagonal-stripe tie and bureaucrat-navy jacket.

  “You okay with me taking Dolly solo?”

  “Now you ask? Guess I gotta be. ”

  “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 sit
ting 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.