"Oh, no, sir, it'll just be a moment!" The Djinnie fluttered after him, trying vainly to catch his hand, the one holding the Skeeve credit card. Once Wassup was over the threshold she had to abandon the chase. Those were the rules, written and unwritten. He hadn't taken the merchandise with him, and he was outside the store, so he was no longer the clerk's problem. He strode away as fast as his long shanks would carry him. Being a Klahd was like trying to balance a bag of groceries on stilts. Mall-rats were much more aerodynamic in shape, being low to the ground, but he had to admit this body had a pretty decent turn of speed.
"What's wrong?" a low voice hailed him.
Wassup's ears perked up. "Hey, Oive," he chirped. Mall-rats recognized one another no matter what faces they were wearing. His fellow thief had on a teenage Dragonet body, a power shopper she particularly liked impersonating. Her arms were full of bags. "Man, I am bummed. That was the fifth place in a row where they tried to bust me for being this guy."
"Bummer," Oive agreed. "Hey, want some of this stuff?"
"What have you got?" Wassup asked.
"I dunno. I just look at the price tags. Let's see: high- heeled boots, a power saw, an enameled altar set, and a commemorative plate for the Diamond Jubilee of King Horace of Mindlesburonia."
"Where's that?" Wassup asked.
"Never heard of it. But it's pretty."
"Good stuff, man," Wassup praised her. Oive preened.
"And it only took me an hour! Hey, there's Garn."
"Word up," Wassup hailed him, or rather her, since Garn was in the shape of a young and attractive Flibberite Mall employee.
"Hail to thee," Garn replied.
"Where'd you get the cool phrase?" Oive demanded, admiringly.
"Like, there was this guy, you know, actually reading out loud to an audience?" Garn related, his eyes wide with disbelief. "I mean, words off a page! They sounded neat, like music without a tune."
"How come you went into a bookstore, man?" Wassup asked, curiously.
Garn shrugged. "They were playing The Mall's sales music. Had to go, man. Had to be there."
"Cool," Oive and Wassup breathed in unison.
"I liked it. Otherwise, the day's been dry, dry, dry. I was following the visitors, like the Big Cheese told me? You know? I was trying to get facts about them so Ratso could make a card out of them? I'd like to be the green guy. He's as strong as a horse, man. But no-ooo-oo. They wouldn't give me names, or anything."
"Tough nuts," Oive offered, sympathetically.
"They're totally nuts, man," Wassup complained. "Hey, you hear? Like, they cut off my Skeeve account!"
"What?" Garn exclaimed, outraged.
"I know." Wassup sighed. "The Big Cheese isn't going to like it. But I better tell him before he picks it out of my mind. He's going to have to come up with something else." The Deveel spa owner picked up a hank of Massha's hair and examined it critically.
"Darling, you're overprocessing this poor stuff just hideously," he proclaimed. "You need a hot oil treatment." He aimed a casual hand toward the sinks, where an Imp was boiling a barrelful over a salamander-controlled flame. "You, too, tall, dark, and hairy," the Deveel informed Chumley, walking around him. He tilted an avid glance up and down the Troll's huge body, to Chumley's embarrassment. "You're just letting yourself go to pieces. I hate to see a big, good-looking Troll like you neglecting that pelt. Come in in the morning when I give this little girl her treatment, and I'll condition the both of you. Friend-of-the-family rates."
"Thanks," Chumley grunted out.
"Sorry I couldn't help you find this fellow," the Deveel added, tapping the portrait of Skeeve with a long, pointed fingernail. "I certainly never did his hair, because if I did, he wouldn't be wearing his hair like that. Cute, though."
"What's wrong with my friend's hair?" I demanded. Chumley put an arm around my shoulders and hauled me out into the corridor.
Eskina tittered. "Broscoe is very scathing about anyone's talent but his. I thought it was very funny when he wanted to give Aahz a facial right there."
"Like he'd understand about Pervects and being stylishly scaly," I grumbled.
"If we have a moment, I might let him do my hair," Massha mused. "To be honest, Queen Hemlock's too cheap to attract really first-class stylists to the capital."
"I will, too," Chumley confided. "Can't get back to my barber for ages. May as well take advantage of the local talent."
Eskina's eyes flew wide open. "Did you just say all that?"
"Please, keep your voice down," Chumley whispered. "As long as we are to be allies, we must lay all our cards upon the table." "One thing I would have thought you'd have figured out," I added, "is that not everything is always as it seems." Eskina regarded us all with respect. "I see," she said.
Eskina was a pretty quick learner. I began to feel a lot of respect for the intrepid little investigator. She'd put up with a lot of hardship in pursuit of her case. I could tell from Par's nonstop gibes as she led us from one establishment to another that Mall security had not given her any kind of a hand, but she'd pretty much made her own way, making friends with most of the longtime owners. Besides the Deveel barber who let her use his spa every morning, the Djinni cousins furnished her with clothing samples, cast-off books, shoes, and other merchandise they claimed that otherwise they "couldn't sell." The Shire horses who'd given me a hard time let her cadge free meals once in a while. So did most of the other restauranteurs. Out of admiration for her devotion to her mission, which incidentally would help keep them in business, they kept her housed, fed, and groomed. I was impressed; I'd before never seen a Deveel part with anything for which he wasn't well paid. Either he was soft, which I doubted, or she made him and the others feel safer than Mall security did. Par didn't like that aspect a whole bunch. He had to stand back and let the Ratislavan look like a hero or diminish his own status in their eyes by making a fuss about it.
"Let us go on," Eskina proclaimed, leaping up as soon as she had finished a snack furnished by the owner of the Jolly Dragon pub on the corner across from Troll Music, a huge bardic emporium which sold little magikal boxes that played dozens, even hundreds of songs when opened. I hadn't finished the rest of my fifth beer, but I was glad to get away from the racket pouring out the door across from us. The way the cacophony blended or, rather, failed to blend with the bands within earshot made me lose my appetite. Not that a ham, a dozen-egg omelette, and a broiled half pineapple was more than a light snack.
"You don't sit down long," I observed, as we strode out again. The innkeeper had promised to keep a discreet eye out for the fake Skeeve. "This must be an exciting new case for you."
"No," she contradicted me. "I have been on this assignment five years. We of the Ratislavan Intelligence are nothing if not... dogged." She grinned, showing her sharp little incisors. "I pursue Rattila, and I will continue until I have arrested him and brought him back to face Ratislavan justice. Many leads have come and gone, but I am sure mine is right, and I shall be vindicated. That is what gives me energy."
"Mmmph," Parvattani grunted, skeptically. But no matter what he thought, most of the denizens of The Mall were on his rival's side.
"Any friend of Eskina's a friend of mine," was a litany we heard over and over again. And we heard plenty of stories about how the shapechangers had ripped them off. If they'd been in the Bazaar, the Merchants' Association would have caught up with the thieves and traced them back to their master in nothing flat, with none of this five-year delay because of a mental turf war.
"There are procedures," Parvattani argued, as we left another stall.
"Tell me," I confronted Par, "if you'd figured out yourself there was a foreign master criminal running a crime syndicate in your Mall, you'd go after him mach schnell, wouldn't you?"