RAZZLE DAZZLE

by Lisa Hendrix

  “Isn’t it appropriate for Raine and you?”

  “I have a different relationship with her than I do with Caroline,” he said, sidestepping again.

  “Because of Gran and Aunt Randi?”

  “Why do you keep making them a part of this?”

  “Because they were out in the garden last night, trying to make you fall out of love with Raine.”

  Mason’s hands curled into fists. So they’d done it. They’d tried to reverse the potion. He’d suspected as much—hell, he’d done everything he could to force them into it—but the news that they were actually so arrogant as to try to continue to manipulate his life, without regard for him or Raine, still sent his blood pressure climbing through the roof.

  Damn them. What business was it of theirs whether he was in love with Raine Hobart or Caro or the goddamn Duchess of York.

  He wanted to take them apart, and when the time came he would, but right now Samantha was sitting there, waiting for him to sort this out for her.

  First things first, though. “What were you doing out in the garden at midnight, Samantha?”

  “I heard them chanting, so I sneaked out. I wanted to see what witches do.”

  “Sneaking out of the house by yourself is dangerous. I’m not happy, but we’ll deal with that later. What exactly did you see?”

  “Nothing gross. They don’t kill chickens or anything. They just said some poem to Mighty Aphrodite and broke a little blue bottle and an arrow and buried them. It was all kind of silly anyway. All those weird chants and herbs and ‘so mote it be’s,’ whatever that means. They’re stupid.”

  Mason felt himself relax a bit. As similar as Sam was to her aunt, he’d been afraid she’d buy into witchcraft, but he was pleased to learn that at least one Alexander female had some common sense.

  “You’re right,” he agreed. “It is kind of silly. But I don’t want to hear you call your grandmother and your aunt stupid. You still have to respect them.”

  “But they said you shouldn’t be in love with Raine and they were trying to make you stop. It made me so mad!” she blurted.

  “It makes me mad, too, squirt.” That, at least, he could be completely honest about.

  “I didn’t even talk to them today,” she said. “It’s not fair for them to try to say who you should love. You ought to just go ahead and marry Raine, just to show them.”

  “But I’m—” not in love with her, he intended to say, but his throat tightened around the words. “I’m working things out.”

  “Are you going to marry her?” she asked.

  “You like Raine, don’t you, Samantha.”

  She chewed on her bottom lip as she thought. “I think she’d be okay as a stepmom.”

  “She probably would be,” he agreed. “But so would Caroline. You know, Sam, when you run a large company and have a family and thousands of employees that rely on you, you have to take those responsibilities into consideration. I have decisions to make, a lot of things to weigh to figure out what’s in the best interests of you, and the family, and the company, in that order.”

  “You think about that stuff all the time, don’t you?” Sam cranked the window down a few inches. “Mom doesn’t worry about responsibilities so much. She just has fun.”

  There was an understatement. Mason kept his mouth shut.

  Sam sighed. “I think I’ll be somewhere in between when I grow up.”

  He thought of next week, when Caro would be back and he’d have to say goodbye to Raine forever.

  “That’s probably not a bad idea, squirt.”

  *

  “God, I love the smell of bagels,” said Zoe to the world at large. “If I could afford to come down here every morning, I’d have to start wearing pants with elastic waists.”

  Raine knew exactly what she meant. They were standing on the sidewalk in front of the bagel shop at five-thirty on Wednesday morning, waiting for the doors to open. The yeasty aroma of baking bagels wafted around them, as sweetly seductive as the smell of poppies.

  But despite the temptations awaiting her stomach, Raine’s mind was only marginally interested in food. Sleep ranked higher, as in the sleep she hadn’t gotten last night, thinking about what Mason had revealed during the great video game debate. He just might have handed her the key to getting his attention.

  She was still turning over the possibilities and the options as the other FUSE members trickled up from various directions. Traffic was starting to pick up, both on the roads and on the water, and the air vibrated with the rumble of heavy trucks and marine engines. A few blocks away, the klaxon sounded as the Fremont Bridge prepared to rise.

  Zoe nudged her arm. “Looks like almost everyone’s here. If John B. won’t open three minutes early, maybe we should start the meeting out here on the walk without him.”

  Raine looked around. “Where are Arne and Fred?”

  “I don’t know,” said Zoe. “They both said they’d come. Let’s go ahead and I’ll fill them in later. Who has an idea worth some lasagna?”

  “A big, old-fashioned protest march,” said Pauly. “We could shut down the bridge.”

  Zoe sneered. “Oh, that would make us popular.”

  “What about painting the whole lot black, warehouse and all, like the blight it will be? We could find one of those big spray trucks and do it in under thirty minutes, I think.”

  Raine closed her eyes and listened as her crew swapped ideas and shot each other down. They had some great ideas. Some of them were feasible, and a couple might even be legal.

  John B. showed up at the door, and FUSE members poured inside. The next few minutes were lost to shouted orders and the general hubbub of getting twelve people organized at tables designed for only four.

  When everyone was busy smearing cream cheese on warm bagels, Raine stood up.

  “Okay, troops. I’m really proud of you. These are all great ideas. But I’ve rethought our strategy, and, well”—she took a deep breath—“I’ve decided we shouldn’t stage another raid.”

  “What?” The tables exploded with argument, and it took Raine several minutes to wave everyone quiet.

  “I don’t get it.”

  “We just started getting some press.”

  “I know,” she said. “But I don’t think it’s going to get us very far. At least not as far as we could get other ways.”

  “Rainey.” Zoe looked worried.

  “Geez, Zoe. Not that way.”

  “What way?” demanded Theresa.

  Raine pushed her hair back out of her face and ignored her. “Okay, the thing is, I’ve gotten to know Mason Alexander over the past week. For those of you who missed the line in the paper, Alexander Industries is the owner of MMT.”

  “Aah.” The restaurant resounded with the clatter of conclusions being leapt to.

  “So you’re selling out on us,” accused Pauly.

  “Caving about the building,” added Mark.

  “No,” she said firmly. “Canal Place

  is as much of a hazard to Fremont as ever, and I’m going to do everything I can to stop it. But I had a discussion with Mason—”

  “Mason? That sounds pretty friendly.”

  “Don’t be nasty, Mark,” said Zoe.

  “I talked to Mason last night,” repeated Raine. “He said some things that led me to think that making a big scene is probably not the way to get through to him. He doesn’t like spectacles, as he puts it. The Wall was okay. It got us some attention, but Mason is going to close right off if we embarrass him and his family any more. I think if I present the whole case to him in a calm, logical way, he might just consider what we have to say.”

  “You tried talking for a year already.”

  “Sort of.” She nodded and took a sip of her mocha. “I sent out letters and talked to people until I was blue in the face, but I don’t think any of it ever got to Mason. At least not directly, and certainly not the way I can explain it to him in person. I can ease him into it.”

&nb
sp; “Wait a second,” said Zoe. “I thought you were trying to ease him into it all week. Wasn’t that part of why you went out with him?”

  “You mean you knew she was consorting with the enemy?”

  “Shut up, Marcus.” Zoe didn’t even bother to look at the heckler. “You told me you couldn’t even talk about feng shui without him going ballistic.”

  “I didn’t do a very good job,” Raine said. “I tried to slide it in a few times, but the timing was all off and his family was there, and it just … well, let’s just say it didn’t work. But if I sit down with him now, alone, with all the charts and maps and calculations, and present it like a business report—”

  “Hey, where’s our Fearless Lasagna Lady?” Arne burst through the door carrying a stack of bright yellow paper. He walked straight to Raine and gave her a squeeze. “Hope you’ve got the fixings, because I have won the prize.”

  “Sit down, Arne,” said Zoe. “There’s not going to be any prize.”

  “Huh? You promised. And I did the work already, so I want my prize.”

  “Raine is going to try talking one more time.”

  “She may be talking, but my feet done did the walking. Well, mine and my buddies. Check these out.”

  Arne set the stack on a table and pulled off the top sheet, which began unfolding accordion-style. With Pauly’s help, he held up a six-foot strip of paper upon which foot-high black caps screamed, “GOING OUT OF BUSINESS!”

  It took Raine several seconds to notice the much smaller, fainter line above that read, “If Canal Place

  comes in, we may be…” A few more seconds passed before she spotted the tiny line at the bottom encouraging readers to “Light the FUSE.”

  “Wow,” said Zoe. “That cuts right to the heart of it, doesn’t it?”

  No kidding. Raine wished they’d thought of that a week ago. With a few modifications, it would have been better than the Wall.

  Several of the gang stood up and reached across tables to shake Arne’s hand. “Masterpiece, man.”

  “Just picture those all over Fremont,” said Theresa. “People would be ready to storm the barricades.”

  “Man, you don’t have to picture them,” said Arne, his chest swelling with pride. “Just walk outside and take a look.”

  “What?” asked Raine.

  The tables emptied.

  Zoe grabbed Raine’s hand. “Come on.”

  They pushed their way to the knot in front of the door. Raine groaned. Every storefront on the street had a sign, except the bagel shop. From a distance of more than forty feet or so, she couldn’t make out the top line at all, and the signs appeared to trumpet “GOING OUT OF BUSINESS.”

  Raine’s stomach slid sideways. “Arne, what did you do?”

  “Cool, huh?” said Arne. “The whole block took me under five minutes. Slap on some paste, stick it up.”

  “Arne, you boob,” said Zoe. “You were just supposed to come up with an idea.”

  “Yeah, but I knew it was right, so I figured, why waste time? We ran a couple hundred copies and this is all that’s left. We’ve got them up everywhere.”

  Raine looked at the stack in his hand. Allowing for six or eight sheets of paper per banner, he had maybe twenty banners left.

  “Please don’t tell me you put up almost two hundred of those things.”

  “Sure. My buddies helped. It didn’t take long.”

  “Where are they? What businesses did you do?”

  “Man, everywhere and everything. We even got a few up on the Adobe building without their security people noticing.”

  Raine took a deep breath and tried to stay calm.

  “Arne?” she said sweetly. “Did you bother to, oh, I don’t know, ask any of the business owners before you put them up?”

  “Nah. They were all closed by the time I thought of it last night. But it’s cool. I stuck a note under the doors to explain it. You might get a few calls, but—”

  “I might?”

  “Hey, all I’ve got is the phone at the bar. They can’t call there.”

  “So you put my phone number on these notes.”

  Arne looked confused, like he wasn’t quite sure why her voice had gotten so murderously low. “And your name, Batch.”

  “Oh, God.” Raine looked skyward. “Give me the forbearance not to kill him.” She looked back to Arne and the others. “They’ve got to come down. Now. Every one of them.” She ran to the nearest shop and ripped the sign down.

  Everybody stood there, watching her.

  “Come on, people,” she shouted. “Get ‘em down.”

  “But they look pretty good, Rainey,” said Zoe. “And it’s all done already. I know it’s not what you think is best, but can’t we just—”

  “Zoe! He didn’t get permission,” she said clearly as she marched back to the group. “These store owners are going to show up and find Going Out of Business signs on their windows. They’re going to be pissed. Half of them are going to sue. And thanks to Arne, they’re going to know exactly who to come after.” She tapped her chest. “Right here. And we won’t even talk about the fact that ‘Light the FUSE’ might be interpreted as incitement to arson and bombing.”

  “Holy shit,” said Pauly. Zoe and several others groaned.

  “Who-o-a,” said Arne, finally getting it. “Sorry. Like, skip the lasagna.”

  “Come on,” said Mark. “We’ve got to get Raine out of this. Terri and I will take Fremont Avenue

  .”

  “I’ll get Thirty-fourth,” said Pauly.

  Galvanized, the group split into pairs and dashed off in different directions. All except Arne, who stood there, cogitating.

  “Get a move on, Granola Boy,” said Zoe.

  He blew out a breath. “I was just thinking. You probably want the big banner down, too, huh?”

  Raine closed her eyes, counted to five, and opened them. “What big banner?”

  “On the building. My buddies are down there now putting it up. And Fred’s supposed to be down there with all the news types by now.”

  “Fred? He was in on this?”

  “I just told him to get everybody there by six.”

  “Come on, Zoe.”

  They ran the two blocks to Thirty-fourth, but even before they got there, they could see a huge, triangular banner fluttering over the old building. It was suspended about thirty feet up, between two huge silver weather balloons that were being let out on ropes.

  “Is that a sail?” asked Zoe.

  “Yeah. One of my friends owns a sail loft,” said Arne. “He gave me a dead sail and I got a sign-painter friend of mine to stay up all night enlarging one of Fred’s cartoons.”

  Fred was an aspiring political cartoonist, waiting to make his name. This might be his day.

  The sail displayed a huge human heart in garish red and black paint. A knife was raised above it and, below, the words read “Alexander Industries and MMT. Carving the heart out of Fremont.”

  But the real piece of work, the one that might make Fred’s reputation and ruin Raine’s, was the figure holding the knife: a huge and exceptionally well-drawn caricature of Mason Alexander.

  *

  Seventeen

  « ^ »

  Victory Security Services Officer Roger Sproat sat at the stoplight tapping impatiently on his steering wheel. He was supposed to make a run past that old warehouse in Fremont every thirty minutes, but he was running late, the result of a quick stop at Donut Delite that had turned into twenty minutes of flirtation with Carmen the filling girl. He wasn’t too concerned—he could always pass the delay off as a dead battery or traffic—but the Fremont stop was the last of the night, and he wanted to get home to Nadine.

  It was still early, but the sun was climbing over the mountains and as he crossed the Fremont Bridge, a silvery glint of light off to the left caught his eye. He stared, slack-jawed, at a pair of what looked like weather balloons rising over what he calculated was the old warehouse. Then at the end of the br
idge, he started spotting the signs: huge, yellow suckers that said the whole freakin’ town was Going Out of Business.

  A ripple of excitement ran down Sproat’s spine. His boss at VSS had said to watch out for some wackos that had a vendetta against the owners of the warehouse—like wackos would stick out in Fremont. If it was them and he got the bust, maybe he could get that raise Nadine had been bugging him about. He cruised past the signs up to Fremont Place

  , hung a left, and drove out Thirty-sixth a few blocks, then turned back toward the warehouse, ready for bear.

  It was the wackos, all right, and they were definitely on the warehouse roof. He spotted them and their freakin’ weather balloons and what looked like a painted boat sail as soon as he made the corner. There were also a bunch of cars and a couple of TV trucks parked on Thirty-fourth Street

  above the warehouse. Some guy was already snapping photos with a still camera while the TV people got their gear ready.

  He had to hand it to the wackos: they knew how to attract attention, but why the hell did they have to do it on his shift? He was going to have to do some fancy dancing to explain how they’d gotten all this done between rounds, but he could handle it.

  But he’d never explain it if these clowns got away. He got on the radio to HQ right away to run down the situation and ask for backup.

  “Your supervisor is rolling. ETA twelve minutes,” said the dispatcher. “And city officers will be right behind him.”

  “Copy. Have ‘em bring a truck. There’s a herd of ‘em,” said Sproat as he watched three more—a guy with long frizzy hair, a pretty blonde, and a curvy little brunette—run across the street. The blonde and her friend started waving off the reporters, while the long hair climbed up on the railing and stepped out into space.

  “Jesus! Oh. Hey, they’ve got a plank or something running out to the roof. Tell the city boys to hurry before one of them kills himself.”

  Engine idling, he sat back to wait for the cops to show. About then, the trio on the roof started hauling on the ropes that held the balloons and sign.

  Hey. Wait a minute. They were taking it all down. Out of the corner of his eye, he noticed a couple of other people ripping down the yellow posters up the street.