“Ouch!” the bad Jane said, as my reflection made a particularly nasty cut across Doyle’s scalp. “You know, I don’t know what Love’s orders to you were, Jane, but I’m pretty sure he didn’t tell you to do this…”
Unable to take the pain anymore, Doyle tried to pull away. Instead of shooting him, my reflection bent forward and slashed his throat. As blood geysered from the wound, I felt real wetness splash me in the chair.
“Oops!” said the bad Jane. “You really want to stand behind the person when you do that…” She clucked her tongue as the vision in the mirror faded. “So what do you suppose Dixon is thinking right now?” As if in answer, the elevator dinged off in the distance. “Uh-oh. This can’t be good…” I heard the suite’s outer door burst open. Footsteps echoed in the hall of mirrors. “All right, Jane, you’re on. Think fast.”
She slapped the back of my neck, and I could feel my arms and legs again. I dove for my gun, but by the time I got turned around in the chair she’d disappeared, and I found myself drawing down on a pair of harlequins. They were armed with horns: rifle-length, brass-belled instruments with rubber squeeze-bulbs.
“Put down the weapon, Jane,” the lead harlequin said. Then he clapped a hand to his head and dropped dead of an aneurysm.
“I didn’t do that!” I shouted at the remaining harlequin. Weirdly enough, he believed me. Instead of blasting me with his horn, he pivoted towards the mirror wall.
Then he was dead, too.
The bad Jane’s gun hand extended from a ring of ripples in the mirror glass. “There are more of them on the way,” I heard her say, as the hand withdrew. “You’d better get out of here.”
I tried to find my comm unit, but she’d taken it. “If you can hear me,” I told the nobleman’s portrait, “I didn’t do this!” The nobleman stared back skeptically.
I left the suite and ran to the elevator. When the doors opened on the lobby a minute later, the corpse of Bozo the bellhop fell into the car. I stepped over the body and saw two more harlequins coming for me. I ran the other way.
A flight of stairs brought me up beside the Grand Canal. A gondola floated by, the tourists inside it all staring. Although I’d tucked my NC gun back in my jacket, my hands and face were still covered with John Doyle’s blood spatter. “It’s just ketchup!” I called to them. Hurrying along, I rounded a bend in the canal and came face-to-face with a mime, who immediately drew a hatchet from his belt.
“Wait!” I said. “I surrender!”
The hatchet clipped a lock of my hair as it flew past my head.
“I surrender, God damn it!”
The air behind the mime shimmered. The bad Jane reached around with her knife, and the front of the mime’s white blouse turned red.
“You see?” the bad Jane said, as the mime crumpled. “Not a drop on me!”
Wink. Gone again.
And I ran on, past more staring tourists, through a door marked NO ADMITTANCE, down another hall and some more stairs, coming out finally on an underground loading dock.
A sports car idled at the dock’s edge. “Get in,” the bad Jane said.
I felt the weight of my NC gun pressing against my ribs. My hand twitched.
“Try it and I’ll leave you here,” she said. “You don’t want that.”
Behind me, a door banged open.
“Last chance…”
I got in the car. An ax blade kissed the back bumper as we pulled away.
“Better buckle up,” the bad Jane advised, steering us up a ramp and out onto the Strip. As I clicked my safety belt into place, I heard a squeal of tires and looked back; a subcompact stuffed with Scary Clowns was coming up fast behind us.
The bad Jane saw them too. “All right,” she said. “Let’s play.” She shifted into a higher gear and began zigzagging through the traffic. The subcompact, nimbler than it looked, kept right on our tail. Hatchets started thunking off the sports car’s trunk.
My hand was twitching again. I asked myself: if I could get my gun out from under my seatbelt, and if I managed to shoot the bad Jane before she shot me or stabbed me in the neck, and if I brought the car to a stop without crashing it, would the Clowns let me live long enough to explain what had really happened?
“I wouldn’t put money on it,” the bad Jane said. The rear windshield exploded, and a hatchet buried itself in the back of her headrest. I screamed; she laughed.
Up ahead, two identical trailer trucks rode side-by-side with an open lane between them. The trucks’ back panels were unmarked, but as we got closer, I saw that their mud flaps were decorated with mandrill faces.
“Pattycake, pattycake,” the bad Jane said, and flashed her high beams. The trucks began drifting towards each other. The bad Jane floored the accelerator and zipped through the narrowing gap; when the Clown car tried to follow, the trucks swerved aside, causing their trailers to swing together like clapping hands. The subcompact was caught and crushed.
That took care of the pursuit, but not the threat of looming death: the sports car was doing like a hundred and ten, and the light at the approaching intersection had just turned yellow. “What do you think?” the bad Jane asked me. “Can we make it?” Laughing hysterically, she took her hands off the steering wheel. The light turned red. I covered my eyes.
When the car jerked sharply to the right I was sure we’d been hit. The seatbelt cut into my waist and chest; the shift in g-forces combined with a sudden loss of friction was the cue that we’d left the ground and were tumbling through space. I braced myself for a final impact that never came.
Slowly the car leveled out. There was a light jolt as the tires reestablished contact with the road, and our speed began to drop back into a saner range. The blare of horns had already faded, leaving only the purr of the motor and the steady rush of air through the broken back window.
When I pried my hands from my face, we were out in the desert under a starry sky. The lights of Vegas and the last rays of sunset were just a glow on the horizon behind us. The bad Jane wore the satisfied smile of someone who’s just had amazing sex.
“Evil,” she said, in answer to my stare, “is just so much cooler than even you know.”
The road we were on led to a ramshackle house that stood alone in the middle of the wasteland. The bad Jane parked the car and got out. By the time I staggered from the passenger side, she was at the front door with her back to me, which would have been a perfect opportunity if my NC gun hadn’t disappeared. “Sorry,” she said, without bothering to turn around. “I’m a little too tapped out to play hide-and-seek right now, but if you give me a chance to recharge, I’ll be happy to go again.”
The house was just a shell; beyond the front door, metal steps led down into an underground complex. The first room we came to was a cross between a bomb shelter and a den: the walls were reinforced concrete, but there was a gas fireplace and a fully stocked bar.
“I’ve got sandwiches in the refrigerator if you’re hungry,” the bad Jane said. “And mineral water and juice to drink—I’d offer you something stronger, but I’m guessing your head’s in a weird enough space as it is.” When I didn’t answer, she shrugged and said, “Suit yourself. I definitely need a little something…”
While she rummaged in the fridge, I went over to the shelves that flanked the fireplace, drawn by a familiar row of yellow book spines: Nancy Drew mysteries. Tucked into a gap in the line of books was an autographed photo of Pamela Sue Martin.
“There you are,” the bad Jane said, holding up a glass vial filled with clear liquid. She fitted it into an auto-injector and shot the full dose into her arm. “Ah-h-h…” Her outline got fuzzy, then snapped back into sharp focus. “That’s better.” She ejected the empty vial into a trash bin. “You wouldn’t believe how expensive this stuff is…And before you get any ideas, you should know that it’s DNA-specific. If you’re not me, all it’ll do is give you a really bad trip, the kind you don’t come back from.”