miserable.
She had known Amanda since they’d both been astronauts working for Astro Corporation. Pancho had been there when Mandy had first met Lars Fuchs, and when Fuchs proposed to her. They were old friends, confidants —until Amanda had married Humphries. For the past eight years she had seen Mandy only rarely, and never alone.
“Congratulations, Mandy,” Pancho said to her, grasping her hand in both of her own. Amanda’s hand felt cold. Pancho could feel it trembling.
“Congratulate me, too, Pancho,” said Humphries, full of smiles and good cheer. “I’m the father. She couldn’t have done it without me.”
“Sure,” Pancho said, releasing Amanda’s hand. “Congratulations. Good work.”
She wanted to ask him why it had taken eight years, but held her tongue. She wanted to say that it didn’t take skilled labor to impregnate a woman, but she held back on that, too.
“Now I’ve got everything a man needs to be happy,” Humphries said, clutching Amanda’s hand possessively, “except Astro Corporation. Why don’t you retire gracefully, Pancho, and let me take my rightful place as chairman of the Astro board?”
“In your dreams, Martin,” Pancho growled.
With a brittle smile, Humphries said, “Then I’ll just have to find some other way to take control of Astro.”
“Over my dead body.”
Humphries’ smile turned brighter. “Remember, you said that, Pancho. I didn’t.”
Frowning, Pancho left them and drifted off into the crowd, but kept an eye on Amanda. If I can just get her alone, without the Humper hanging onto her …
At last she saw Amanda disengage herself from her husband’s hand and make her way toward the stairs that led up to their bedroom. She looked as if she were fleeing, escaping. Pancho slipped back through the bar, into the kitchen and past the busy, clanging, complaining crew that was already starting to clean up the plates and glasses, and went up the back stairs.
Pancho knew where the master suite was. More than eight years ago, before Mandy married Fuchs and the Humper was pursuing her fervently, Pancho had broken into Humphries’s mansion to do a bit of industrial espionage for Astro Corporation. With the noise of the party guests filtering up from below, she slipped along the upstairs corridor and through the open double doors of the sitting room that fronted the master bedroom.
Holding her long skirt to keep it from swishing, Pancho went to the bedroom door and looked in. Amanda was in the lavatory; she could see Mandy’s reflection in the full-length mirror on the open lavatory door; she was standing in front of the sink, holding a small pill bottle. The bedroom was mirrored all over the place, walls and ceiling. Wonder if the Humper still keeps video cameras behind the mirrors, Pancho asked herself.
“Hey, Mandy, you in there?” she called as she stepped into the plushly carpeted bedroom.
She could see Amanda flinch with surprise. She dropped the vial of pills she’d been holding. They cascaded into the sink and onto the floor like a miniature hailstorm.
“Jeeps, I’m sorry,” Pancho said, coming up to the open lavatory door. “Didn’t mean to scare you.”
“It’s all right, Pancho,” said Amanda, her voice trembling almost as much as her hands. She began to scoop the pills out of the sink and tried to return them to the little bottle. She dropped as many as she got in.
Pancho knelt down and started scooping the oval, blood-red lozenges. No trademark embossed on them.
“What are these?” she asked. “Somethin’ special?”
Leaning on the sink, trying to hold herself together, Amanda said, “They’re rather like tranquilizers.”
“You need tranquilizers?”
“Now and again,” Amanda replied.
Pancho took the bottle from Amanda’s shaking hands. There was no label on it.
“You don’t need this shit,” Pancho growled. She pushed past Amanda and started to pour the pills down the toilet.
“Don’t!” Amanda screeched, snatching the bottle from Pancho’s hands. “Don’t you dare!”
“Mandy, this crap can’t be any good for you.”
Tears sprang into Amanda’s eyes. “Don’t tell me what’s good for me, Pancho. You don’t know. You have no idea.”
Pancho looked into her red-rimmed eyes. “Mandy, this is me, remember? You can tell me whatever troubles you got.”
Amanda shook her head. “You don’t want to know, Pancho.”
She clicked the bottle’s cap back on after three fumbling tries, then opened the medicine chest atop the sink to return the bottle to its shelf. Pancho saw the chest was filled with pill bottles.
“Jeeps, you got a regular drug store,” she murmured.
Amanda said nothing.
“You need all that stuff?” “Now and again,” Amanda repeated.
“But why?”
Amanda closed her eyes and took a deep, shuddering breath. “They help me.”
“Help you how?”
“When Martin wants some special performances,” Amanda said, in a voice so low that Pancho could barely hear her. “When he invites other women to help us in bed. When he wants me to take aphrodisiacs to enhance my response to him and his friends. Some of them are video stars, you know. You’d recognize them, Pancho. They’re famous.”
Pancho felt her jaw drop open.
“And when Martin brings one or two of his strange young male friends to join us, I really need pills to get through that. And for watching the videos he projects on the ceiling. And for trying to sleep without seeing all those nasty, horrible scenes over and over again…”
Amanda was sobbing now, tears streaming down her cheeks, her words incomprehensible. Pancho wrapped her long arms around her and held her tightly. She didn’t know what to say except to whisper, “There, there. It’ll be all right, Mandy. You’ll see. It’ll be all right.”
After several minutes, Amanda pulled away slightly. “Don’t you see, Pancho? Don’t you understand? He’ll kill Lars if I don’t satisfy him. He’s got me completely under his control. There’s no way out for me.”
Pancho had no response for that.
“That’s why I agreed to have the baby, Pancho. He’s promised to stop the sex games if I bear his son. I’ll have to quit the drugs, of course. I’m already started on a detox program.”
Pointing to the bottle of red capsules, Pancho said, “Yeah, I can see.”
“I’m weaning myself off them,” Amanda protested. “It’s just that tonight… I need one.”
“What the news nets would give for this story,” Pancho muttered.
“You can’t! You mustn’t!” Desperate alarm flashed in her tear-filled eyes. “I only told you—” Pancho gripped her quaking shoulders. “Hey, this is me, remember? I’m your friend, Mandy. Not a peep of this gets past that door.”
Amanda stared at her.
“Not even if it could save Astro from being taken over by the Humper. This is between you and me, Mandy, nobody else. Ever.”
Amanda nodded slowly.
“But I’ll tell you one thing. I’d like to go downstairs and punch that smug sonofabitch so hard he’ll never be able to smile again.”
Amanda shook her head slowly, wearily. “If only it were that simple, Pancho. If only—”
The phone in the bedroom buzzed. Amanda took a deep breath and walked to the bed. Pancho swung the lavatory door halfway shut, hiding her from the phone camera’s view.
“Answer,” said Amanda.
Pancho heard Humphries’s irritated voice demand, “How long are you going to stay up there? Some of the guests are starting to leave.”
“I’ll be down in a moment, Martin.”
