GOING DOWN IN the speeding elevator, I pondered the fact that I’d grown up twenty to fifty miles from The Most Wanted Vintage Film in the World.
I’d expected it to be found, if ever, in someplace exotic like Rio, but Augusta, just outside Wichita, Kansas?
Umhmm, Irma agreed. I wouldn’t expect you to practically lay Snow in Wichita, either. You sure got hyper once you resolved your supine position issues.
We have some kind of weird power struggle going, I told her. Seeing Metropolis was a teensy overexciting, and so was seeing that silver metal superwoman, even if the plot destroyed her at the end. They always do that to independent women.
I hugged the glitzy green bag to my navy chest. Snow obviously couldn’t be trusted around me when I was wearing vintage evening gowns. His problem. And then … getting my very own ruby red slippers.
You are so typical of the modern female’s bad media image, Irma huffed. You want it all. Sex, power, rock ’n’ roll, and girly accessories.
Even as I savored the recent, unexpected triumphs, reality was starting to drop over me like a gray wool cloak of conscience, a descending storm cloud of regret. I’d been up in La-la Munchkinland, carried away by the Emerald City makeover.
This was not an episode I could explain to Ric. Or mention to Ric, although Snow had given him some major compliments. I let myself bask in those positives. Even Snow had called Ric my “true love.” Why, then, had he let me … goaded me … seduced me … into, ah, behaving badly? And, what was worse, predicted more of the same?
Time to stow the self-reflection and get back to what was happening on ground level. Were the boys having any luck tracking El Demonio from WTCH? Did I want them to? He was the Boss of Bosses now and mucho bad medicine.
The elevator opened on the ground floor and I strode out, the green foil bag swinging from my hand.
Somebody grabbed that wrist and swung me around by it.
“Not so fast, puta.”
Puta? Maybe a bit misguided sometimes, but hardly a prostitute.
As my attacker swung, I swung. My free hand, now accessorized at the wrist by a sawtooth silver cuff, slashed open his cheekbone.
The man dropped my wrist to stanch the flood of blood, so I skittered down the yellow brick road for the safety of Ben Hassard’s office, only realizing as I crashed through the slightly open door that it was Siege Central.
By the look of the unwelcome guests, I was back at the Cold Creek Drive-in Midnight Horror Show.
A metal-collared chupacabra on a chain dragged its spined tail back and forth over the floor in one corner, its red eyes gleaming in defiance of the Emerald City’s all-green ambiance.
Ben Hassard slumped in his desk chair, his limbs bound to it by silver duct tape, a beaten, bloody parody of himself. Meanwhile, a group of squat, amphibian-faced men with pitted skin and totally black eyes prowled his office, every knuckle on their pudgy hands scraped bloody, their mustachioed upper lips lifting in almost a communal hiss as they spied me.
Certainly they weren’t zombies or any other unhumans, but they were even worse. I’d seen this subhuman type on TV and internet news sites being taken away by small armies of international law enforcement. These were the terrifying drug cartel musclemen, the men who prefaced hits with unimaginable tortures, offed whole innocent families, and killed by gruesome beheadings and acid baths.
They were all looking at me now.
Freshhhhh meat, Irma echoed my fears.
I immediately adapted my modestly high heels to a useless bimbo-spike stutter and ran into the danger instead of away. Time to embrace Dumb Blonde Gringa mode.
“Oh, gosh, Ben,” I breathed. “Am I interrupting an important business meeting? So sorry.”
All he could do was cough up blood, which I appeared to be too ditsy to see.
“Say, Ben. Got a minute? Here are some goodies from upstairs. Everything looks good to go for the hotel opening.” I gazed around, blinking vacantly. “So these guys here are the new security crew masquerading as bellboys and parking valets? Wow. They really set the tone. Speaking of ‘tone,’ I left my phone with all my listed shopping destinations in here.”
I scooped up my cell phone from the desk.
On I babbled. “And, Bensy, you promised, promised, promised to have this phone covered in Austrian crystals at the hotel shopping promenade by now.” Stamp of klutzy pump heel as I dumped the bag under a guest chair. I cradled the phone to my cheek and eyed the screen. “I’m so disappointed.”
A text message from Ric read “W. Goose chase. Back ASAP.”
“Look, this stupid phone won’t even work,” I whined, punching my fingernails against the phone screen’s keyboard like a demented typist. I managed to get off “Prisoners at EC” before one of the Reptilian Guard smacked the cell phone out of my hand to the floor.
I blinked at them, mainly because they didn’t seem able to.
“Twist-tie the stupid bitch,” my abrupt personal phone operator barked.
Two of the poisonous toads jumped me. I resisted taking a bow before I was smashed to the floor with my wrists and ankles bound by wire cable.
“Now,” said one of the thugs, circling Ben. “You’re gonna tell us who got the Augusta Theater goods the boss wanted.”
The film? Metropolis? These bozos were after the film? Why?
Ben’s unresponsive eyes had rolled up in his head like a saint’s ascending to Heaven. I hoped he was just unconscious, not dead.
Half of me wanted to sic these creeps on the penthouse suite, where Snow was alone and rapt in his landmark film and maybe the … aftermath of me. Serve him right. I also suspected Snow could unleash some nasty containment spell on them. My other half knew that my quota of guilt over Snow was full up for the moment.
So, only I could get Ben and me out of this murderous mess. To do that, I had to unravel why Torbellino wanted or needed the Metropolis film more than Snow.
What would link Ric and his ancient enemy, El Demonio, to a rare film now bound to become an unbeatable attraction for Snow’s Vegas empire?
Besides me?
UNFORTUNATELY, A FEMALE presence did not encourage the drug cartel thugs to restrain themselves.
Their flaunted lighters and straight razors, though, could only produce bloody gurgles from Ben Hassard. These minions were too stupidly brutal to get any answers that would satisfy their absent boss. So, they were primed to commit mass slaughter to take their minds off El Demonio’s reaction to their failure. I didn’t want Ben to die.
I had few options, but at least I was being ignored. I’d be safe until they decided to off witnesses, or play games with the helpless girl. I really had nothing to lose here but time to act.
So, I baaed softly. Baaaa-maaa.
Call me goat-girl.
The chained chupacabra in the corner perked up.
My, what a multibreed beastie it was seen close-up, a little like Barney the purple dinosaur if one wanted to put a soft and cuddly spin on it. The leathery gray-green skin and the quills defining its spine and tail gave it a lizard-like quality, and its blunt-snouted and fanged face flaunted a black forked tongue. Every exhalation broadcast the reek of sulfur. Too many bean burritos for lunch? Or was “dragon” a part of its pedigree? I gathered it would eat me rather than fry me long-distance. Chupacabras were notorious for draining the blood of goats, and I was certainly tied up like a Judas one.
I’m a versatile chick. I puckered my lips and made sucking noises. Snow one hour, a chupacabra the next. Dolly and I have dual exhausts and aim to please. Come on, Chupie, come to maaa-maaa.
I saw the creature make a mighty lunge forward, straining the chain.
Behind me, Ben Hassard was groaning unintelligibly.
Bastards!
My low-key baas only spoke Chupacabra and I repeated them mindlessly, until the creature broke loose with a snap of its chain and a weird baying sound.
That’s when I rolled under the knee hole in Hassard’s desk, pushing his chair toward the back wall, hearing the unleashed monster behind me pinning the first responders in his path and sucking their blood with mucho gusto … a Dios, El Demonio’s henchmen. …
My silver familiar shifted into a workman’s switchblade—an X-Acto knife. In my fingers the heavy blade sawed through my wire wrist and ankle bindings.
Still curled in the shelter of the desk’s knee hole, I managed to grab the star-shaped rays of Ben’s desk chair base and spin it like a lazy Susan until his duct-taped ankles came my way. An X-Acto knife would mangle the rubbery tape. The familiar morphed into heavy pinking shears and snapped its edged jaws right through.
By the time I dragged myself up to look over the desk, the once-captive chupacabra was ranging free and dining on drug cartel muscle. Literally. Its fangs pierced major arteries in their fat-solidified bodies as its black tongue sucked up the pooling blood like a straw.
The familiar was just chomping off the bonds on Hassard’s wrists when the outside glass window shattered. Quicksilver leaped through to knock down the last retreating thug and run to me, leaving the downed man for the oncoming chupacabra.
I grabbed Quick’s collar.
An instant later, Ric waded through the shards of broken glass to sweep us both to the back wall while Tallgrass edged around chupacabra and victim to pull Ben Hassard’s rolling desk chair back to our defensive position.
The chupacabra celebrated its freedom by draining every last drop it could from the last downed thug. With loud, impolite slurping sounds.