Once I had the names and titles, my reporter self could call and find out what the hell was going on.
Figuring out what was going on in my dreams was another matter.
I didn't wake up the next morning with the usual nasty fragments floating around in my head. Instead, I had a vivid scene right out the Wizard of Oz movie.
I saw Achilles standing, wagging and waiting for me, on the yellow brick road. Only he was white instead of black like Toto, and the whole scene was black and white and gray, like the opening part of the film set in Kansas, not wildly Technicolor like the "merry old land of Oz'" sections.
I looked down to sparkly sequined pumps on my feet. Black and to die for. Maybe I was going somewhere unexpected. Soon. But not into Dorothy's Oz. Someplace darker, a Wonderland all my own.
And Achilles was waiting for me somewhere out there.
Chapter Six
“Can that piece." Fuck-up Freddy was standing by my desk at work, in blowsy mode with The Front Page shirtsleeves from the classic forties newspaper movie, a caricature in the flesh. The only thing missing was the green eyeshade and a garter on his flabby biceps.
"The old dame is dead," he said. "Pulled the plug on herself this morning. Cancelled the contract."
Oddly enough, I was sorry to hear that. "Maybe her death, the reason for it, is a story."
"Nah. The feature's name is 'Good Living After Death,' not 'Death After Death.' I need someone downtown to do a stand-up for a Cub Scout camp-out in the main park."
"That's about as exciting as filming an anthill."
"A good reporter can make a great story out of anything. Jeez, are you losing it, Street, or what?'
I drove home from the station that night with a dopey new assignment sked riding shotgun on the passenger seat of the Caddy, just as Achilles' "documents" had accompanied me away from the vet's office.
It was beginning to feel like "loss" was my middle name. I had no other, anyway.
What more could go wrong?
I had not counted on the Revenge of the Weather Witch.
I had some trouble finding my bungalow on Moody Road. Because it wasn’t there anymore.
I got out of the car, slammed the heavy door shut, and stared at the empty, aching socket of dirt where my house had been. All that was left was my refrigerator, lying on its massive metal side, looking like a heavy-metal porcupine.
I approached it over the lumpy ground strewn with toothpicks splintered from the wood and spine of my rental bungalow. It wasn’t merely a rental. It was my first real home. It was a lost relative, and it was totally gone, sucked up into some passing tornado funnel.
Other houses of that era stood whole and sturdy on either side of it. My house was the only molar that had been pulled. Freak tornadoes, they were called. Unpredictable.
This one wasn’t.
When you piss off a weather witch, she can make her wrath known.
My refrigerator lay there like a beached steel whale. Barnacled to its side was my metal clothes cabinet crammed with vintage duds and every last freaking piece of sterling silver I had ever collected at an estate or garage sale. Victorian fork tines bristled like WWII underwater mine prongs. Mexican jewelry draped the handles. Nineteen-twenties marcasite batted its steel eyelashes in the clear sunlight. The sky was blue, like my eyes; the clouds were white, like my skin. No black thunderclouds, like my wild Irish hair, appeared.
This was a very specific tornado.
At that moment a Fed Ex truck pulled up, white and gleaming in the sunlight. The tiny woman behind the wheel hopped down.
"Street residence?" she asked.
"What's left of it."
"Too bad! Was this house a tear-down?"
"Kinda."
"Sign here."
I did. She handed me a box stamped "Smokerise Farm" and a padded envelop large enough to hold a videotape and a newsy letter about Nightwine Productions from Annie in Bismarck.
I stood there, on the wind-blown prairie, contemplating my losses.
The fact was, my cup was overturned, but I wasn’t. We were both half-full, and maybe the half-empty part wasn’t worth keeping.
I had Achilles' ashes in a dragon vase and a lock of his hair in a silver Victorian locket. I had Dolly Parton, a running vintage car with 28,000 miles on it, mean-looking fins, and chrome bumper bullets the size of- Well, you know Dolly: talent, guts, and up-front plastic surgery. I had some money in the bank. I had a smattering of borrowed glitz and an empty refrigerator. And I had a shockingly large number of pretty, prickly Victorian sterling flatware sharp enough to function as martial arts throwing stars.
I was taking them all to Las Vegas, where they carved up way-too-familiar corpses on CSI and where a writer-producer named Hector Nightwine had a lot of explaining to do. Never trust a man with hyphenated job title. Or artificially extended fangs. Or both.
And I wasn’t leaving Sin City until I knew…who I am. Or who I am not.
Chapter Seven
Dolly and I were stopped at a gas pump somewhere off of Interstate 70 in Colorado, where the whole world was trees and sun-sparkled creeks that shadowed the highway curves. The state also offered long, lonesome stretches with towns so sparse that a girl had to pee by a backcountry gravel roadside if she missed a freeway rest stop.
In the cities, you could get by driving all-electric or electric-gas hybrids, plug in at home and refuel at sleek, almost odorless ranks of compressed-gas dispensing stations. Vintage car enthusiasts operated all-gasoline throwbacks like Dolly for an extra fee or for free if you were poor enough. But out here in the boonies all you could get was pungent, pricey gasoline in old-fashioned pumps. You still couldn't beat fossil fuel for distance driving. And no farmer would run a hybrid tractor.
This shabby retro gas station (Deliverance West) had rest rooms, but I didn't like the look of the grinning yokels in the Ford 350 across the concrete island from me. Since I'd been on the road two days from Wichita I'd learned that guys with super-charged pickups were aggressive on the highway. On solid ground they were as untrustworthy as vamps with artificially extended fangs.
"Hey! We can help you with that great big hose, little lady."
That taunting, pseudo-friendly threat gave me the same cold internal paralysis I felt at the orphanage when the older boys cornered me in a deserted hallway, against the wall, on my own, needing to bluff and bully my way out of the trap. Sweat prickled my scalp and sopped my palms. Despite all the time I'd spent on a workout mat in college, learning self-defense, the instant purgative spasms of visceral fear never retreated one step.
And I couldn't either. Surprise was my shadow partner. So was bluff. I eyed them, then cocked the nozzle on the gas pump over my shoulder, like an Uzi.
"You've got it all wrong, boys. I'm not little. I'm not a lady. And the help you need with your hoses is something you should consult a plastic surgeon about."
They took about ninety seconds to decipher my comment. By then I was topping off the tank and not concerned about milking every drop from the nozzle, despite the highway robbery price of gas. Just get me outa here, Exxon, with no untidy oil spills. Particularly mine.
The mountain men's bearded faces were finally falling as their grins grew feral.
"We seen ya on TV. Looked mighty good nekkid. Come on, Maggie doll, let us show you a real good time."
Nekkid? What lame dialogue! And who the heck was Maggie? Not me!
They were right about one thing. This little lady needed to hop into her driver's seat and hit all the door locks. But one man had vaulted around the pumps and was blocking the driver's side door. The other had penned me in at the car's rear.
One thing about growing up vamp bait in an orphanage where bullying is the house rule: you learn how to think on your feet if you don't want to be someone else's steak tartare.