raffle off the evening’s door prize, I’d like to turn the microphone over to Christopher Nordine, who has an announcement to make.”
Zorro climbed the steps to the stage. Christopher looked great, slender and dashing in his black clothing. He was wearing a pencil-thin mustache beneath his mask, and it emphasized the strong curve of his jaw. I sagged against my post at Bernadette’s font and searched the room for Spurrier. Not at the bar, which was something.
Blonde hair across the room.
“Most of you know me,” Christy began. Then he stopped and looked up at the lights as though he’d lost his place. After the time it took him to draw three deep breaths he hooked his thumb under the black mask and pushed it up onto his forehead so the crowd could see his face. “You probably wonder what Max saw in me. Well, now that I’ve had a little time without him, a little time to think about it, so do I.”
I worked my way toward the bright head of hair.
Noise from the door, a sudden loud voice.
“You’re a good guy, Christy,” someone called. There was a smattering of applause.
“I’ve been a sorry excuse for a human being,” he said. “I’ve been a taker and a user.”
“And a whiner,” someone suggested, but not harshly, and Christy grinned and nodded.
The blonde hair belonged to Marilyn Monroe, in her Seven Year Itch white dress. I’d checked her three times already.
“And you know what?” Christy was visibly gaining confidence. “That’s what Max saw in me. Room for improvement. Miles of room for improvement. Enough potential for improvement, considering where I started from, to make it worth his time. Max wanted to fix everybody’s life.”
A sudden ripple of movement from the direction of the street, jostling its way into the center of the room, and someone shouted again. I went up on tiptoe but couldn’t see anything.
“Max left some money behind,” Christy said, squinting through the lights toward the door. “More money than-well, enough money to fix a lot of lives. And I’ve figured out a way to use it that will keep Max’s memory-
A folding chair sailed over the heads of the crowd and smashed onto the floor of the stage. Christy jumped back at the same time that I jumped forward, toward the door.
I couldn’t get there. People had turned their backs to the stage, trying to see what was happening, and they were being pushed backward into the room. I shoved my way through until I came up behind a kimono-clad geisha who must have weighed three hundred pounds.
“Sorry,” I said. I put my hands on the small of his/her back and pushed, using her as an icebreaker, and we plowed through six or eight densely populated yards before the crowd suddenly gave way and she pitched forward, barely remaining upright, and collided with a very wide young man wearing a plaid shirt and oil-stained blue jeans who grabbed her by the shoulders, spun her around, and brutally threw her back into the crowd.
He had at least a dozen friends with him. Some of them had tire irons and some of them had baseball bats, and all of them had shaved heads and glum, glowering expressions. They were all white and all young, and all larger than I would have liked them to be, and they stood in the center of a wide circle of partygoers, scowling into the room and tapping their bats against the floor with a sound like the first drops of heavy rain.
None of them was Darryl Wilder.
The geisha had taken four people down with her when she smacked into the crowd, and as they got up I saw that one of them was the deputy who’d struck up an acquaintance with Tallulah. He stepped into the middle of the circle. His drugstore sunglasses had been knocked crooked, and he looked very young.
“You guys had better turn around and get out on the sidewalk,” he said.
“Look here,” said the wide one who had tossed the geisha. “It’s officer Florence.” He took two steps toward the deputy, who didn’t move.
“I’m ordering you to disperse,” the deputy began nervously, and the wide man swung his bat.
It caught the deputy on the side of the neck, and he went over like a tree, hit the crowd, and bounced back again. The bat struck him beneath the rib cage this time, folding him in half. He emitted a strangled grunt and sank to the floor.
“Home run,” said one of the skinheads.
Three of them broke from the group and grabbed a nun, pulling her into the circle. Two of the three pinned the nun’s arms while the third seized the cloth over her head and yanked it down, revealing a crew cut with a bald spot at the back of the head. Suddenly the nun-Sister Victima, I recalled-was a struggling middle-aged man in an absurdly ostentatious habit.
I turned to get back into the room so I could signal the Seven Dwarfs and get Spurrier’s attention for his fallen deputy, but the crowd was too thick. I was pushed back into the circle, just in time to see one of the bashers, a pig-faced baldie with a Hitler mustache, bring a tire iron around with both hands against the nun’s left arm. I could hear the bone break ten feet away.
“You leave that nun alone,” said a familiar voice, and the tragic Supreme stepped out from the crowd, her sequins glistening in the light. “Y’all should be ashamed of yourself.”
The wide man tapped his bat against the side of his leg, major-league style, and said, “Well, well. A boogie. Double points.”
“Pretty little boogie, too,” said the man who had swung the tire iron. He stepped up to the Supreme and put his hand flat against her crotch. “Nothin’ here,” he said, playing to his friends. “You cut it off?”
“Maybe she’s a girl,” said another, a man fat enough to sustain a tribe of cannibals through a long winter. “You a girl, sweetie?”
“You got to check that yourself,” the Supreme said coyly. She hiked her dress and extended a long, shapely leg. The skinheads watched the dress inch higher. The Supreme wrapped carmine-tipped fingers around the arm of the man who had swung the tire iron and guided his free hand toward her crotch. At the last moment, she sidestepped, put a hand on his shoulder, and flipped him over her leg onto the floor.
“Motherfucker,” she said, raising a high-heeled foot.
The wide skinhead lifted his baseball bat, but he hadn’t gotten it any higher than his shoulder before three hundred pounds of geisha sailed into him, knocking him over the fallen deputy and into his friends. Someone shoved past me, and I saw Little Bo Peep going in low and planting a shoulder into the gut of the nearest of the intruders, who tried to back up, bumped into the man behind him, and got hoisted four feet from the floor and dropped on his back. Behind Bo Peep came her sheep, slashing at every shaved head in sight with the spike heels on his hands.
He landed one on the cheek of the pig-faced thug with the Hitler mustache, opening up a red slice from eye to chin. The wounded man stumbled back into his pals, who separated and let him fall and then converged on the attacking sheep.
They didn’t get a chance to do him much harm. A nearby cowboy raised his branding iron and imprinted the old Rocking-D brand on one shaven scalp, and after him came the deluge: A gaily dressed mob of Rockettes, vampires, Roman centurions, football players, cheerleaders, vestal virgins, Boy Scouts, killer bees, multiple Carol Channings, and Liza Minnelli clones charged the intruders with a roar. The last thing I saw, as I forced my way back through the crowd, was the three-hundred-pound geisha, kimono flying, planting both heels dead center in a plaid chest.
Hanks was calling for order from the stage, patting the air soothingly above the heads of the crowd with his free hand while Henry tried to stay in front of him. I waved for Henry’s attention and yelled for him to keep an eye on Christy, who was trying to climb down off the stage and get into the action. Henry reached down and scooped Christy up by the back of his shirt, like he was picking up a puppy, but Christy twisted around and knocked Henry’s hand away. Henry dropped him, and Christy, Zorro’s cape flying behind him, headed for the brawl.
Darryl Wilder hadn’t come in the front door; if he was here, that left the back. I passed Mickey Snell’s office, looked in long enough to see Mickey snoring on his desk, before I threw open the back door.
The door caught partway, and Batman looked in at me.
“Anybody come in back here?” I asked.
“Not yet,” Batman said. I pushed the door farther, struck an obstruction again, and looked down at a pair of bare feet. The screams behind me reached a crescendo.
“Simeon?” Batman asked.
“What is it?” I gestured at the feet. “Who’s that?”
