Death's Excellent Vacation (4 page)

“What you got?” I asked. She dropped the garments into my hands. She’d snagged a glittery gold spandex bandeau to go around the chest and a matching—well, it was flattering it to call it a thong. There was a pair of translucent heels to wear with it. Then there was a sort of sky blue leotard with black trim: a former leotard, since most of it had been snipped away. A little swath of blue for boob coverage, descending in a tiny strip to the bottom part, which was like an abbreviated bikini. Black heels and thigh-high black hose completed the look.

Pam sat down on a chair, hard. She giggled again. “Get ready, buttercup! I’ll take the gold; you take the blue. It’ll look great with your tan.” She shrugged off her coat, and when the speckled blouse came into view, she read the alarm on my face correctly. She turned her back to the room to unbutton it, then turned it inside out and tossed it on the floor, close to the vamp. To my amazement, the vamp waited for a moment, then in one quick movement picked up the blouse and stuffed it into her huge bag.

Pam was out of her clothes and into the costume as if it were her daily routine.

I turned my back on the room, though no one seemed in the least bit interested in my goodies. In the course of wriggling into the thing, I found out the descending strip Velcroed to the bottom of the costume. Convenient.

I looked at us together. “Wow,” I said. “Pam, we look
great
.”

“We do,” Pam agreed, with no attempt at modesty. We gave each other a high five. “I’m coming down,” Pam said. “Really, I’m feeling almost like myself.”

Mohawk called from the door. “Okay, the doubles act!”

I had no idea how we were going to get out of this, so we started toward the door. Even drugged, Pam managed walking in her platform shoes without a wobble in her step, but I had to concentrate ferociously to master the spike heels.

“What’s the names?” Mohawk asked.

“Sugar and Butterscotch,” I said, and Pam turned her head to give me a look that clearly said she thought I was an idiot.

“Cause she’s white and you’re brown,” Mohawk said. “Cute.”

I hadn’t spent all that time tanning for nothing.

“Okay, you’re on,” Mohawk said, opening the door at the end of the corridor to reveal a short flight of steps leading up into darkness. The noise surged out at us. A Latina blonde stomped down the steps, topless, followed by the sound of whistles and catcalls. She looked sweaty and bored.

The cops were still in the hall.

“Shepherd of Judea,” I muttered, and Pam and I looked at each other and shrugged.

“New skills,” she said. “Eric told me you are quite the dancer. You just have to try doing it naked.”

So we went up the steps, teetering in our high, high heels, to begin our careers as strippers. Suddenly we were on the stage, which was simply wood painted black, punctuated with three stripper poles.

The emcee was a brunette guy with a big white smile. He was saying, “Remember, gentlemen! The applause each girl gets is measured with our applause-o-meter, and out of all our dancers tonight, the three girls getting the most audience response will be hired to appear right here at Blonde!”

So we were supplying the audience with free entertainment in the faint hope that we might get a job out of it. Michael was an even bigger asshole than I’d thought, which was saying something.

“Here, straight from their record-breaking engagement in Vegas, I give you Sugar and Butterscotch!” the emcee said, with considerable drama. I figured he took drugs.

I put on my biggest and emptiest smile, and managed to make it to the front of the stage without falling down, thanks to Pam’s sudden grip on my hand. Together, we looked out at the men hidden in the darkness, catching a glint of beard here, shine reflecting off a belt buckle there. The hoots and whistles were deafening.

We hadn’t specified a song, of course. Justin Timberlake’s “SexyBack” came blaring over the sound system, and that was all right with me. “Move it,” yelled a rough voice.

We had to
dance
.
NOW.
And then we had to get the hell out of here before Michael and Rudy recovered enough to come after us.

I half turned to look at Pam flirtatiously, and she stared blankly back at me until she got my drift. “The pole,” I muttered, and she gave the audience a saucy smile and wound herself around the nearest pole. The cheering started. I felt the lust begin to dominate the men’s minds as I hugged Pam from behind. Pam got with the program, and we swung around the pole together as if we’d been glued. I caught a glimpse of Pam’s face. She was licking her lips in a lascivious way.

“You go, Pam!” I said.

“They want a show, we’ll give them a show,” she said. She bent me over her knee and pretended to spank me in perfect time to the music. In fact, Pam got a little carried away. But the guys loved it; oh boy, did they. I got spanked, licked in the ear, had Pam’s hands running over my barely covered chest, and more stuff I just won’t mention. We both ended up doing things the stripper pole had probably endured many times.

You know, it was kind of fun after I got the hang of it.

I wouldn’t go close enough to the side of the stage to get grabbed. And since I already felt naked, I wouldn’t take off my top. Since that was something the audience clearly expected us to do, it was lucky that at that moment the police pulled the plug on the music and switched on the house lights.

They weren’t the cops who’d been in the hall. “All right, everyone!” called a tall detective in a blue Windbreaker. “There’s been a murder here, and we need to talk with all of you.”

“Murder,” I said to Pam. “Murder?”

As our eyes met, I could see she was just as bewildered as I was. And I have to say here: With the lights up, we could see our audience, and they looked even worse than I’d expected.

OFFICER Washington, neat and shiny in his brown uniform, tried to look anywhere but at my chest. He’d been on the force long enough to have a kind of worn-out face, but he hadn’t become so world-weary as to be able to completely ignore the abundance of Pam and me that was on display. I learned that the idea of being with a white woman didn’t do a thing for Officer Washington, which helped him do his job.

“You ladies talked to the manager of this club earlier, I understand?” he asked. He had a pad and pencil out. By now we knew that the victims were Michael and Rudy.

“Yes, we had an appointment,” I said.

“What for? None of the other strippers had to talk to the manager.”

“We used to work at another vamp-owned club,” I said, improvising. I could give Fangtasia’s phone number. “We hoped if we told him that, we’d get the job. He said he’d take it into account.”

Pam and I shrugged, at very nearly the same moment. Pam seemed to be a little high even now, but there was more control in her movements and she was keeping her mouth resolutely shut. She was still holding my hand, though.

We’d waited our turn in the bigger room where we’d left our clothes. We’d been allowed to change, thank goodness. Pam was still wearing her gold bandeau top. In sympathy, I’d only pulled on my slacks.

Our friend the stripper vamp had passed by the door on her way out. She was escorted by a cop. She glanced our way, her face composed and indifferent. I finally remembered where I’d seen her: working at Harrah’s, carrying drinks, when we’d checked in. Huh. She had a sizable purse hanging from her shoulder; I wondered where the big bag was? Pam’s bloodstained blouse was in it . . .

As the other strippers had been questioned, they’d been released. We were the last ones to be brought to this room, which I figured had been Rudy’s office. Officer Washington had been waiting for us there.

“What else happened while you were in there? They want you two to give them a free sample?” Washington was young enough to look faintly self-conscious.

“They seemed more interested in each other,” I said carefully.

The policeman glanced at our linked hands and didn’t comment. “So they were both alive and well when you left the room?”

“Yes, sir,” I said. “In fact, they wanted us to hustle out of there because they were about to talk to someone else, had a guy coming in from out of town, they said.”

“That right? Did they say anything else about this man? Vampire or human?”

“No,” Pam said, opening her mouth for the first time. “They were just anxious for us to leave so they could get ready.”

“Get ready? How?”

We shrugged simultaneously. “They wouldn’t hardly tell
us
,” I said.

“Okay, okay.” Officer Washington snapped his notepad shut and stowed away his pencil. “Ladies, good night to you. You can go pick up your personal items.”

But we didn’t have any. Pam only had the car keys in her pants pocket and her white trench coat. We had nothing we could have brought costumes in. Would Officer Washington or Windbreaker Guy wonder about that?

Now that the big room was empty, it looked even more depressing. Only a litter of tissues and cigarette butts showed that the women had been here at all. That, and the big bag the vamp stripper had carried, sitting on the chair that was draped with Pam’s white coat and my jacket. Windbreaker Guy was staring at the bag. Without hesitation, Pam strode across the floor in those incredible shoes and scooped it up by the shoulder strap.

“Come on, Butterscotch,” she told me, “We need to hit the road.” Her voice had no trace of the faint English accent I was used to.

And just like that, we left Blonde, doing our stripper walks all the way out to Pam’s car.

Mohawk was leaning against the driver’s door.

He smiled at us as we approached. His smile was not dim or goofy or naïve.

“Thanks for giving me the opening, ladies,” he said, and there was nothing slow in his speech, either. “I’ve been waiting a year to have them down long enough for me to finish them off.”

If Pam was as shocked as I was, she didn’t show it. “You’re welcome,” she said. “I take it you’re not going to tell the police anything about us?”

“What’s to tell?” He looked up at the night sky. “Two strippers wanted to tell the boss and his buddy something before they tried out. I’m sure you explained that. When you went on stage, that asshole Michael and his buddy Rudy were alive and kicking. I made sure the cops knew that. I’m betting you also told them something about Michael mentioning he was expecting someone else or expecting trouble.”

Pam nodded.

“And stupid, slow me, I was cleaning the toilet, like my boss Michael had told me to do. No one was more surprised than me when I went in the office later and found Rudy dead and Michael flaking away.” Mohawk rolled his eyes theatrically. “I must have just missed the killer.” He grinned. “By the way, I threw the gun in the ravine back there, right down into the kudzu, before I called the local law. The skinny blond vamp did the same thing with your blouse—Sugar.”

“Right,” Pam said.

“So off you go, ladies! Have a nice night!”

After a moment of silence, we got in the car. Mohawk watched us as we drove away.

“How long do you think he’ll last?” I asked Pam.

“Russell has a reputation for acuity. If Mohawk is a good club manager, he’ll get away with killing Michael, for a while. If he doesn’t earn money, Russell will make sure he doesn’t last. And Russell won’t forget that Mohawk is patient and wily, and willing to wait for someone else to do the dirty work.”

We drove for a few minutes. I was anxious to get back to my room and wash away the atmosphere of the Blonde.

“What did you promise the vamp that helped us?” I asked.

“A job at Fangtasia. I had a conversation with Sara—that’s her name—after you went to bed last night. She hates her job in Tunica. And she used to be a stripper, which gave me the idea of planting her here in case we needed some help. Besides extra costumes, she brought a number of handy items in her bag.”

I didn’t inquire as to their nature. “And she did all that for us.”

“She did all that because she wants a better job. She doesn’t seem to have much . . . planning ability.”

“In the end, the trip was for nothing. It was a trap.”

“It was a bad trap,” Pam said briskly. “But it’s true that because of Victor’s greed, we were almost in serious trouble.” She glanced over at me. “Eric and I never thought Victor was exactly sincere about his motives in sending us here.”

“You think he was trying to hamstring Eric by getting rid of both you and me? That he knew Michael really wasn’t going to defect?”

“I think we’re going to keep a very sharp eye on our new master’s deputy.”

We rode in silence for a couple of minutes.

“You think Sara would mind if we kept the costumes?” I asked, now that Eric was on my mind.

“Oh,” said Pam, “I’m planning on it. Without some souvenirs, it’s not a real vacation.”

Sarah Smith’s YA ghost thriller,
The Other Side of Dark
, will be published in November 2010 by Atheneum. She has written the modern stand-alone
Chasing Shakespeares
, about the Shakespeare authorship controversy, and three historical mysteries:
The Vanished Child
,
The Knowledge of Water
, and
A Citizen of the Country
. Two of her books were named
New York Times
Notable Books of the Year. They have been published in twelve languages and have reached bestseller status in the United States and abroad. She is working on a novel about the
Titanic
and another YA thriller,
A Boy on Every Corner
.

for Yuki Miuma

TIME could lie lightly on Mr. Green. He could choose to be young, his face smooth, his hair black. He could catch an explosion in a force-field container. But under the weight of loneliness he is just another old man.

His friends have gone. Robin grew up, came out, moved to San Francisco, he’s in politics now. The Bat retreated into “scientific experiments.” The last time Green saw him, the Cave smelled and the Bat looked like Howard Hughes: long fingernails, dirty beard. Iguana’s dead. Atom, dead. Thunderbolt, dead.

And Lana. His girl, his only girl. He remembers every moment they spent together, but the good times are fading. They’re places he’s gone to in his mind so often he can’t see them anymore. The bad times don’t fade at all, the sonsabitches. Toward the last, when she could barely speak, he visited her in the hospital, changed his face and hair back to what he’d been, changed into the costume, the whole thing, the mask, the green cloak. “I remember you,” she whispered. But she really didn’t know him.

Sometimes it isn’t worth getting up in the morning.

“I need your help,” says the red-haired girl.

Her knocking wakes him. He squints out the door of his cabin into early-morning sunlight, sees a face that reminds him of girls in old comics. The sultry Chinese villainess. But the sultry Chinese villainess would wear a red silk dress cut up the side and she’d have black hair. This one has hennaed hair, cut spiky, and is wearing a parka from L.L. Bean.

The Thompson brothers’ rental SUV from town is parked by the fence. Whatever she wants from him, she drove forty miles on logging roads in the snow to get here.

Which means she’s trouble.

“Whatever it is, I don’t do it anymore.”

“Hi, I’m from Worldwide Travel? I left you voice mail?”

He doesn’t check his voice mail.

“I have a job for you. From some special fans.”

Special
has only one meaning for him now. “I don’t do hospitals.” Never hospitals.

“Not that kind of special.”

“Or comic book conventions. Or”—he curves quotes with a finger—“ ‘media conferences.’ And I don’t talk with people who use the word
special
. Or
supernatural powers
or
superhero
. Town’s back there, you can get going.”

“You take people fishing,” she says. “They just want to go fishing.”

It’s been his cover for the past forty years: ice fishing. Up here, northern Maine, the lakes region. He doesn’t do summers, never joined the Ice Fishing Association, doesn’t have a Web site. People hire him, they don’t, it’s all the same to him.

Back when Lana was alive, he pissed clients off regularly, so none of the fishermen kept coming long enough to notice that Lana got old and he stayed young. Now he pisses folks off out of habit.

“They want to go fishing with you.”

He stands in the doorway, keeping her outside.

“They’re Talents,” she says.

“No, they aren’t. Those days are gone.”

“They are real Talents.”

“What do they do?” he jeers.

“They don’t know.”

This tugs at him. He knows about that kind of talent. Strength and special powers don’t cure AIDS or end a war, and they don’t keep a woman from dying. What does a Talent do, these years?

“I heard the story,” she says. “I heard about you and the other superheroes going fishing, once.”

For a moment he visits a worn old place in his perfect memory. He’s among old friends, laughing friends.
Let’s go fishing like superheroes, boys.
And they did, for the only fish worth having.

“Yeah? So?”

“They’ve heard, too,” she says.

“We were showing off.”

“Talents were heroes once,” she says. “Talents knew what to do with their powers.”

Super cleanliness isn’t one of his talents. He points back into the cabin at the pile of gear in the corner. “Auger,” he says. “Ice adze. Ice saw. That thing in the box, portable cabin. The ice gets thick. Fisherman bores holes in the ice. Cuts a bigger hole. Shines a flashlight through the hole. Waits for a fish to come investigate. Ice fishing. Boringest thing known to man unless you fall through the ice. ’S what I do now. That’s what I know to do with myself. They want to go ice fishing? I’ll take ’em ice fishing.”

She crosses her arms, purses her lips a little, disappointed.

“No,” he says. “They want pow, bang, thump. Big fights with big fish. Superhero fishing. There’s no fishing like that anymore.”

“Let’s just say they want pointers,” she says. “They’re looking for advice.”

“I don’t give advice.”

“What’s your rate?” she asks.

“For Talents? There’s a special rate.”

She nods. “They have money.”

“Not money,” he says. He knows what he wants. It’s what Atom got, the Captain. What Lana got.

“I want somebody to kill me.”

The little cabin gets airless. She opens her mouth to protest. Shakes her head. Closes her mouth.

“All right,” she says. “It’s a deal.”

He pads over to the stove, leaving her at the door. Pours cold coffee, scratches his bristly chin with his white china diner mug. (What does the last superhero drink his coffee out of? A diner mug. They really are unbreakable.)

“Yeah?” he says.

“I promise you. You will die.”

“Who’ll do it?”

“Me,” she says.

He figures he has a foot of height on her, a hundred pounds, a thousand years.

“You and who else?”

“Me.”

“How?”

She shakes her head. “No proof until it happens.”

He figures he’s being scammed.

Life is a scam.

Remembers his manners belatedly.

“You want coffee?”

“Do you have tea?”

“Nope.”

She looks around. The back ends of her hennaed hair waterfall to her shoulders. Green eyes, strange for Chinese, a green that reminds him of the color of the cloak gathering dust in his closet. He becomes suddenly conscious of dirty laundry on the sofa back and a winter’s worth of mud on the floor. He moves molecules, sorting for dirt, inching it toward a corner. He wonders where he put the laundry basket.

Special powers. Hah.

THE Fort Kent airport has the welcoming charm of a VA hospital morgue. She’s set up a chartered plane for them. The engines chatter like false teeth. They’re alone in the passenger cabin.

“So where do you fit in this?”

“I’m their travel agent.”

“Talents need travel agents?”

“It’s not a full-time job.”

“You fly up on this?” he says. He’s asking if she can fly.

She smiles and shakes her head. “Yes, I took the plane.” No, she can’t fly.

“Hope it’s safer than it looks.”

Green eyes and red hair: Back then, if she wasn’t the Oriental villainess, she would have been the sort of girl he’d have rescued from an airplane crash. Back then, he’d have cradled the plane in a force field, smiled for the cameras, never worried about air traffic controllers or incident reports or finding another identity someplace even farther off the map than the unincorporated townships.

Back then, he wouldn’t have been in the plane. He hates flying.

“So what’s your Talent?” he asks.

“Nothing really.”

He waits.

“Organization.”

He makes a noncommittal noise. Her cheeks go a little rosy.

“You try parking a tour bus outside Rockefeller Center at noon. Organization
helps
.”

“Helps to kill me?”

“Maybe.”

“You do lots of tour buses?”

He thinks about tour buses parked at the end of the driveway and shudders. See Mr. Green at home. See Mr. Green do his laundry. See Mr. Green tie one on.

She can’t help him. But she could blow his cover. “One thing straight,” he says. “It’s—”

“Only this once,” she says. “Right? You do this one thing, and even if I can’t help you, except I can, I never bother you again. That’s OK. There won’t be any more kids like these.” She reaches into her purse, brings out a compact, powders her nose. He can’t remember the last time he saw a girl do that; no call for powder in the townships. She smiles up at him. “Organization is the ability to foresee the future. Just a little.”

“I foresee they’ll be bored and you’ll be pissed off and I’ll be cheated.”

Her eyes turn from green to the color of smoke over the woods in fire season: dangerous, challenging.

“Do you want a real foreseeing?”

Out of the purse—it’s a little purse—she pulls a wooden flute. An old flute, dark and smooth with fingering, so long and thin and curved it looks like a piece of the edge of the world. Too big to fit in the purse. She puts it to her lips and begins to play. He looks out the scratched green plane window, out at the snowy fields. Barren lines of black. Dark and sparse like her music. The landscape of loneliness.

“Stop that,” he says.

But she keeps playing. The flute song changes, creeps around him like green tendrils.

“Stop.”

She takes the flute away from her lips.

“I won’t cheat you,” she says.

“GIRLS?”

“Young women,”
she says.

There are eight of them. Foreigners. Japanese. And five of them are teenaged girls. There are two older men, one tall with a mustache and long hair, one round and dense and lazy. One of the kids is a boy, he guesses, though the kid has a long pigtail down his back. The rest are wearing pink ribbons and plaid skirts, and they’re giggling and nudging each other and pointing at him. They all look alike. Spiked hair. Pointed faces like foxes.

They’re tiny. It’d take two of them to haul in a minnow.

“Talents?”
he hisses.

“You’ll see.”

One of the older men comes forward and bows and says a name Mr. Green doesn’t catch and says he’s honored and all that, or something. Languages aren’t one of Mr. Green’s skills. “I am head of dojo ‘Do Anything Martial Arts.’ These my students. Also are my daughters.”

The five girls giggle. High school at best. One of the girls curtsies and begins flailing around with a set of pink ribbons. “Flying Beauty Martial Arts!” she chirps. One of them has a pink backpack with a picture of a white cat and the words
Hello Kitty
. Hello Kitty Martial Arts? The girl blinks at him with big eyes and twitches her nose speechlessly. The other three try to hide behind each other. The boy preens like the only rooster in the henyard.

“We are very honor for you take us fishing,” says the lazy man. He’s wearing a too-loose Red Sox cap turned backward and a Red Sox jacket much too big for him. The effect is oddly dangerous, as if he’s about to spring back to a much bigger size.

They gaze at him as if he’s supposed to say something.
Pointers,
he thinks.
I’m supposed to give them pointers. Advice.
They all have big eyes. It’s like being surrounded by black-velvet pictures of kittens.

They look at him.

He looks back. The only advice he can think of is
Don’t eat yellow snow
.

He clears his throat. “Come on. You’re going fishing. Don’t fall in.”

They all giggle. Aargh.

“Come get baggage,” the tall man tells the kids, and he and the compressed man trundle off toward the baggage carousel. The kids follow him in a whispering herd, looking back at Mr. Green.

The girl with the pink ribbons whispers to the boy-rooster.

“Secret-u identity,” the boy whispers back.

Good, they’re disappointed. Mr. Green scowls at the red-haired travel agent, prickly-proud of himself.

“Guess they expected—”

“Green mask and cloak, glowing force field—”

“I can finish my own sentences.” They expected the Green Force, Atom, Astounding, the Bat, Iguana, all grinning with perfect teeth and washboard abs. They expected to go fishing for the Fish, the Monster. Not a weather-beaten old fisherman in a plaid shirt and jeans with a bucket full of farm-raised trout. “What do they do? Giggle the villains to death?”

“Please,” she says.

He clears his throat, looking at the strutting boy trying to take all the heaviest luggage himself. “That boy and all the girls? I’m not having hijinks.”

She looks at him like she’s about to burst into laughter. There’s something sad behind it. “Throw cold water over him,” she says.

The kids and the men come back, lugging the gross national product of Japan on wheels.

In the plane, on the way up to the lake, the red-haired Chinese girl gets them all singing old songs. He watches her. Red-haired like a flame, short-lived as a match. To care about humans is to care about leaves, about the frost on the glass in the morning. Breathe and it’s gone.

Still, he surreptitiously cradles the overloaded plane.

THERE is ice on the lake, thick, hard ice, no fog. The kids wrap themselves up like packages in parkas, hats, mittens. Mr. Green takes the girls out back and gets them to make a shelter. He does something he hasn’t done in years, gestures a hemisphere of glowing green. “Pile snow over that.” “Oooh,” the kids go.
“Ano ne!”
When they cover it with snow, there’s nothing but an igloo glowing faintly like a neon light in a snowstorm.

Advice: “Anyone know why we cover it up? You protect your secret identity. You don’t want to advertise.”

They bob their heads in agreement.