I'd been working my black satin wrist-length gloves off behind my back since I'd been cuffed and now was glad I had them to leave a trail. What good that might do was another matter. Quicksilver could follow the scent maybe, if anyone knew where to start looking for me.
Ric might.
Going through the office door en route to the mysterious Starlight Lodge, I felt a sharp, quick pinch on the butt.
Sansouci? He was looking way too grim to indulge in anything as playful as butt pinching.
But somebody wasn’t.
Like it says in the old song, "Somebody Loves Me."
The next line is even more apropos to this situation.
"I wonder who?"
Chapter Fifty-Four
My chauffeurs to the Starlight Lodge were my not-so-old friends, Chartreuse and Flamingo. They drove a van marked "Hazardous Material."
That worried me a little. Okay, a lot. What also worried me was I'd been unable to feel my friendly neighborhood familiar. My body heat had warmed the hip chain and it was too delicate to sense.
The boys were pretty tight-lipped. It was full dark by the time we'd wound our way up into the Spring Mountains. I didn't see any signs for Los Lobos, but I did see billboards advertising the Paiute Golf Club and its famed fifteenth hole of the Wolf Course.
"Hey," I said, "you guys know a dance club called Los Lobos?"
"Not on this part of the mountain," Chartreuse said. "Sorry."
The funny thing is, he really sounded sorry. Very sorry.
"Say," I said, "you think you could get me out of these handcuffs? They kind of hurt my shoulders and wrists."
"That's for the bossman to okay," Flamingo said. "Sorry."
He too sounded very, very sorry.
Okay. What was the Starlight Lodge?
The pink-and-green watermelon boys had joked about Quicksilver being sent there the first time they'd kidnapped me. Apparently it was a perennial send-to place. Maybe it was like the Post Office. If you got sent to the wrong address, you never got returned.
But when the van drove up to a lighted porte cochere, the place looked like a five-star retreat, rustic but posh. The boys let me out of the van. One produced a key and handcuffed my hands in front, at least.
"Hope you enjoy your stay, miss," Chartreuse said, exchanging a glance with Flamingo. Then they both teared up like the doorman to the Emerald City in The Wizard of Oz.
I got it. It was "Surrender Dorothy" time and I didn't even have a straw man, a tin man, a cowardly lion, or a valiant little Lhasa apso on my side.
I walked into the place alone, head high.
I entered the ultimate National Park lodge, all soaring wood and gigantic balconies, fireplaces and leopard skin rugs. (I didn't approve of walking on dead pelts, but no one had asked me). And heads were mounted on every wall. Lions and tigers and bears. Deer. Buffalo. Even otter, beaver, and fully mounted squirrels, the cowards! Their bright-eyed animal profiles all looked way handsomer and nobler than Homo sapiens.
But this was where the wolves lived, not man. Quicksilver's ancestors had run down deer and boar and I suppose even humans on occasion.
A Latina servant girl showed me to a room. Yeah, a servant girl. You or I might have called her a waitress or a Mexican maid or even a concierge, if we wanted to get fancy. She thought nothing of my handcuffs and even less of my requests. A phone. A computer. TV remote? None of these transmitted in the mountain air, she said. Sorry.
I was really getting tired of people who had jobs that made them "sorry" all the time. Had they never heard of the union movement? Apparently not.
Time flew, as it always does when you're not having fun. I'd watched the day darken into night from the window of my room, which wasn’t merely locked, but sealed. There had been only a medicine cabinet mirror in the bathroom, although lots of polished marble. The cabinet was empty and so was the mirror. It reflected only me, looking worried. I tried my silver medium touch to turn it into an escape route, but it resisted me like Snow did: cold, hard, giving nothing back. Maybe my mirror powers had been enhanced by Madrigal's magic or presence, or the mirror itself, and didn't translate to other mirrors, other places. Darn!
Otherwise, the suite was palatial, but not my style. The long-haired white goatskin rugs on the exotic wood floors, the black mink throw on the California king-size bed and pillow shams were all too furry for me, though they reminded me that I was in the hands, or soon-to-be paws, of predatory carnivores, not just your run-of-the-mill ruthless mobsters. In the ranks of villainy, these guys offered a fabulous two-fer.
I stood, still handcuffed, on the balcony of another huge room, but more intimate than the vast main hall. Below me gathered a company of men. drinking and smoking and talking. I recognized Cicereau and Sansouci, but none of the others.
Two half-were "escorts" had hauled me before them like a delinquent daughter. Maybe I was playing the role of Jeanie with the light brown hair from my enchanted mirror and from less enchanted Sunset Park, at least for Cicereau. Or Norma Jeane. Or even St. Jeanne d'Arc. Think of every female martyr on the roll call of saints and sinners, and I was probably a stand-in.
No thanks.
While on trial, I noticed some things I hadn't before.
If the Starlight Lodge was a luxe hideaway for high rollers, it was indeed huge and luxurious. But it was the heads on these particular walls that bothered me. Sure, hunting was a long-time necessity and then a sport in the West, but…people's heads decked these walls, going back to what was labeled as First Kill. I recognized him from my online info search into the kingpins of early Las Vegas development: Bugsy Siegel.
So he'd been hit by the werewolf mob, not the Chicago "Outfit." That had caused a lot of bloody retaliations on the wrong parties. Thinking of wrong parties, I sure was one here and now. And it wasn’t much of a party.
While I tried to avoid eye contact with my eye-level predecessors-this little balcony was apparently a prime viewing station of the mountees-a lively debate was going on below. About me.
My captors were clearly torn about my fate. All agreed I was too hard to control to have a future as a major Strip hotel attraction, no matter how hot the Maggie mania.
Some of Cicereau's party wanted to keep me prisoner as a lucrative source of black market Maggie tapes. This would require impressing me into the blue-movie industry, and require a lot of nude lying around on dead animal skins on my part. Among other things I didn't want to think about.
Some wanted me dead but killed in a way to fill the ravening coffers of the snuff film industry. Slowly and gruesomely. Some of the werewolves actually objected to that solution on moral grounds.
Others just plain wanted me dead the way all of those sent to Starlight Lodge become dead: because the moon was full and they craved chasing down fresh human meat on the hoof. This place was, after all, a retreat-cum-holding pen for mob enemies or turncoats. After living in pampered luxury until the next full moon, the "guests" would be turned loose in the surrounding mountains for the werewolves to hunt down. Call it the ultimate in extreme sports for harried executives needing to unwind.
Unlucky me, the moon was already full, so I won't get much luxurious living time before being hunted down.
What could I do? I'm stuck in future tense, very tense, no matter what. Ric hadn't answered his cell phone and must still be in D.C. (and incommunicado) on the Juarez business. Nightwine and Godfrey sure didn't know I'm not snoozing at home in my cozy little cottage. My desire for discretion and hatred of being monitored now looked foolish. Quicksilver was out on the town on big dog business, the last I knew.