Epunamlin dropped the Lugers, lunged at me, and reached with his wooden hands. I had a hunch it was to lift me up to make it easier to wrap his tail around me. I screamed, stiffened my hand, and stabbed my fingertips into his eye.
He let out a rasping screech and jerked backward. The grip on my ankle tightened to the point of agony for an instant, but then loosened. I kicked free and floundered backward.
Epunamlin didn’t follow. He stayed where he was and clapped one hand over his eye.
“Are we done now?” I panted.
“Yes. I think you scratched the brille.”
“The what?”
“The membrane that covers my eye. It hurts. I need to see my vet.”
I smiled. “Well, if you’ll just stop being an asshole, we can take care of that.”
We collected Sylvester, told him the fight was over, then hurried to the truck. A’marie climbed out of the cab, and Epunamlin looked her over with his good eye. “What was she going to use to incapacitate the truck?” he asked.
“She was supposed to have a screwdriver or something,” I said. “But I didn’t see one during the second I was inside the trailer. You just have to give us credit for having the right idea.”
Sylvester gave A’marie a hangdog look. “I really didn’t want to hurt you,” he said.
“Sylvester,” she said, “you wrecked my car.”
He broke down crying. She sighed, hugged him, and told him it was all right. Epunamlin and I traded looks of disbelief.
Then we hurried them through their Dr. Phil moment, and we all piled into the cab. With the modifications, Sylvester’s king-sized seat took up most of the space, but there was room for the rest of us if we didn’t mind the squeeze. Figuring that if he and Epunamlin still meant to kill me, there wasn’t much I could do about it now, I gave back the scarves. They tied them on, and I wondered which was really less conspicuous, a truck with a weeping willow man for a driver or one that looked like it was driving itself.
We got out of there before the cops showed up and had a chance to take a look at either. Then I explained my plan.
No one else who’d heard it had offered to put me up for a Nobel Prize, and Sly and Epunamlin were just as unimpressed. The snake started to tell me everything that was wrong with it, and I cut him off.
“Tough,” I said, “it’s what we’re doing. And I do mean we. Because I’m drafting you.”
They thought about it for a second, and then Epunamlin said, “Agreed. We believed our moment had come, and perhaps it really has. Just not quite the way we imagined.”
“Great. You can celebrate making the team by explaining how you tracked us down. I’m guessing the Pharaoh. White and gold are his team colors.”
“Yes,” Epunamlin said. “He told us he’d found out you and A’marie were sneaking out together during the day, so he had his servant plant a transponder on her car.”
“Then he gave you the receiver and the matching scarves,” I guessed, “along with a pep talk about how if you just killed me, it would get rid of Timon, too.”
“Essentially, yes.”
“Are you mad at us?” asked Sly. He sounded like a little kid despite his deep, slow voice.
I sighed. “I probably should be, but I’m not. How would I even know I was in hobbit land if somebody wasn’t trying to kill me, or mess with me somehow?”
“‘Hobbit land?’” repeated Epunamlin. “Are you an admirer of Professor Tolkien’s oeuvre?”
“Sure,” I said, stretching a point for the sake of male bonding. “You?”
“There was a time when I considered changing my name to Smaug.”
I didn’t tell him I didn’t know who that was.
Sylvester dropped A’marie and me off in the alley, and we sneaked back into the Icarus the same way we’d gotten out. She begged a passkey from another member of the Tuxedo Team so I could get back into my room.
“Well,” she said, “I need to change, too. And then spread the word.”
“I really am sorry about your car,” I said.
“It wasn’t in the best shape,” she said. “But it was the nicest thing I had. But if you can make this work, it’ll be worth it.” She took my hand, gave it a squeeze, then left me standing beside the service stairs.
I groped my way up and made it back to my room without anybody else trying to whack me. I showered the smell of the bay off me, dressed, and took a couple of my Tylenol 3’s to kill the ache in my head and feet. I could have asked Red to do it. By then, the mojo tank was filling up again. But I was liable to need it for other things.
When I was ready to go out, I had to decide who to track down first. I decided to let anger be my guide and find the Pharaoh.
I found him playing billiards.
The pool, snooker, and billiards room, with one table for each, was on the first floor, and candle-lit like the rest of the hotel. The Pharaoh looked better than the last time I’d seen him. Somehow he’d reattached his head and leg, or Davis had done it for him. Fresh bandages, looking very white on top of the dirty, ragged old ones, wrapped the joins. He also had a steel head brace, and extra plastic splints to immobilize the leg. He was sucking on a cheroot and sitting in a wheelchair.
That all makes it sound like he shouldn’t have been able to play. But magic made his cue float around and shoot on its own. As I came in, he made a semi-masse.
When he saw me, his shriveled lips quirked into a smile. “Billy,” he said in his high-class, jolly British voice. “Would you care to join me?”
I glared at him. “Listen, you son of a bitch.”
That brought Davis surging up out of his chair. But the Pharaoh lifted a hand to signal him that he didn’t need to kick my ass just yet.
“I take it that you not only survived your encounter with Epunamlin and Sylvester,” the mummy said, “you prevailed on them to disclose who set them on your trail.”
“Bingo,” I said.
“Then let me offer my sincere congratulations. I found myself quite uncharacteristically ambivalent about dispatching them in the first place. But it’s pointless to play unless one does one’s very best to win. Wouldn’t you agree?”
“Here’s how it is,” I said. “You can take your best shot at me. But when you put somebody else in danger, that’s over the line. If you do it again, I’ll find those special jars of yours, break them, and piss all over what’s inside. Are we clear?”
“Entirely,” the Pharaoh said. “If I apologize, and agree to your stipulation, can we put the incident behind us?”
I hesitated. I still had mad in me that wanted to come out. But I realized that, like most of the time at the poker table, there was no advantage in letting it out. “I guess.”
“Then, assuming you care for the game…?”
I picked out a cue from the rack. Since I was more used to pool cues, the shorter, lighter stick felt a little funny in my hands. I chalked it and lined up a shot.
“Did all of Timon’s servants survive the encounter?” the Pharaoh asked.
“Everybody’s fine,” I said. I shot, then smiled when my cue ball clacked into his and the red ball, too. Maybe I wasn’t as rusty as I thought.
“That’s all for the best,” the Pharaoh said. “I don’t suppose I’d look like an especially gracious guest if I were getting my host’s subjects slaughtered willy-nilly.”
“Probably not.” I used some outside English to make another shot.
“Where exactly did they catch up with you?”
I grinned as I bent back down over the table. “What you really want to know is why I left the hotel.”
“True. Can you blame me? I know Timon must have explained that you’re safer here, yet you persist in slipping off anyway. You decamped with the little horned nymph again today even though rumor has it that she played you false yesterday. To say the least, it’s curious.”
“Oh, not really. I like fresh air, and she’s hot.” I hit his cue ball but missed the red ball by a quarter of an inch. “Your turn.”
His stick floated around the table, then swung down and lined itself up for the stroke. “You realize,” he said, “I can simply ask Epunamlin or Sylvester where you went.”