Silver Zombie

by Carole Nelson Douglas

Chapter Sixteen

   

  THREE MOLDED-WOOD CHAIRS were now lined up before Mrs. Haliburton’s desk, Ric and I flanking Helena Troy Burnside, whose suit was a smashing power red, probably Prada.

  Quicksilver was guarding Dolly in the parking lot, but he’d made his druthers clear. He’d rather be intimidating the bureaucrat in the office above.

  Mrs. Haliburton shifted on her wheeled desk chair, which squealed like a little boy. She didn’t quite glance at anything but the computer screen facing her.

  “All the proper authorizations have reached your email address?” Helena inquired.

  “Yes,” Mrs. Haliburton murmured, her pink face turning fuchsia. She licked pale, dry lips. “From the secretary at the Department of Human Services in Washington, the assistant director of the FBI. ” She frowned at Ric. “And the lieutenant governor. This is most unprecedented, but I’ll download the files to any device you wish, Dr. Burnside. ”

  Helena extended a business card across the desk that Mrs. Haliburton whisked into her custody. “Both addresses?” she inquired.

  “I always like a backup, don’t you?” Helena replied.

  Mrs. Haliburton ignored her while clicking in the e-addresses. She hit enter with the high-handed flare of a concert pianist, totally unlike her tightly wired self.

  “I think you will find that this young woman, Delilah Street,” she spat out, still addressing her computer screen rather than our party, “will be very sorry indeed to have the contents of these files in anyone else’s hands, even hands with so many highly placed connections. I know your specialty, Dr. Burnside, is severely damaged, and damaging, children, but you will have those therapeutic skills sorely tried in this case, as our social workers here in Wichita did thirteen years ago. ”

  Gulp, Irma whispered. And she doesn’t even know about me.

  “Gulp” was right. I was sitting with the two people in the world whose respect I most wanted.

  Ric laid his arm across the back of my chair, standing and drawing me up beside him.

  “Thanks for your cooperation, Mrs. Haliburton, but warnings are unnecessary. I’ve found in my FBI work that files are sealed more often to protect the holders, not the subjects. ”

  Helena was checking her mini-netbook. She looked up and nodded. “Mission accomplished. ”

  Ric escorted me to the door, opened it for his foster mother, and ushered us into the hall.

  “She’s shaking, Helena,” Ric told his onetime therapist in a furious undertone.

  “Don’t let that harpy frighten you, Delilah,” Helena consoled me. “Little people like to make big threats. ” She took my other arm. “Now, Ric tells me you’ve invented another fascinating cocktail, the Brimstone Kiss. I know where you got the idea for that one. ” Helena smiled and added, “Let’s find a well-stocked bar that can make it, where we can munch on a sinfully caloric bar menu. ”

  She could make happy talk; it wasn’t her secret file that was heating up her personal computer.

  Ric knew how to calm my nerves. He let me drive again, with Helena in the passenger seat while he and Quicksilver occupied the rear.

  Ric searched his phone screen. “Here’s the place for us. The Petroleum Pavilion on Polo Drive. Delilah’s cocktails always use exotic and expensive ingredients,” he explained to Helena, about to pass me the GPS.

  “Dolly and I don’t need that high-tech aid,” I said. “Any description of the physical neighborhood?”

  “Um,” Ric said, “the usual waterfront, probably a lake, near an exclusive gated community, riding stables, the ubiquitous golf course designed by the world’s finest over-paid landscaper—hey!”

  His recital broke off as Quicksilver whapped the cruising sunglasses off his snout and leaped out of the convertible, running ahead of Dolly on the street.

  “I don’t have to squint at some tiny screen in the sun like a vampire in extremis,” I told my passengers. “Quick loves to find lost golf balls in Sunset Park. I’ll just tail him as he follows his world-class nose. ”

  “HOT DAMN!–BRAND CINNAMON schnapps,” Helena mused over our glasses in the mahogany-paneled, crystal-lit bar.

  “How,” she persisted, “did you come up with such off-beat ingredients for your Brimstone Kiss, my new favorite drink, Delilah?”

  Blush modestly … not. Helena was a psychotherapist whose already acute insights could pick up random visualizations from people’s minds and subconscious after the Millennium Revelation. I did not want Ric’s onetime “mother” glimpsing my forced interlude with Snow. She even knew who and what he was. Well, the albino rock star–hotelier part, anyway. Nobody really knew what brand of “super” Snow was.

  “I’m self-blocked, Delilah,” Helena assured me, already betraying that I was an easy read at the moment. “Believe me, I can feel the heat between you and Ric without any amplification, and I couldn’t be happier for the both of you. ”

  What luck that she couldn’t tell my mental reruns right then had been about Snow.

  I consigned thoughts of that bastard to the Inferno Hotel’s subterranean Nine Circles of Hell attractions and explained.

  “The Brimstone Kiss concept begged for a liquor brand with a ‘hot’ taste and name. I think Vegas pretty much twenty-four/seven these days, and it is truly Sin City now. ”

  “I saw that on my brief visit,” Helena said. “So … this is an ultra-Goth cocktail with a sweet undercurrent of innocence lost. ”

  “You could write ad copy in today’s Las Vegas,” I agreed with a forced smile.

  In the middle of our granite-topped table sprawled a platter of tomatoes and mozzarella, crab-stuffed mushrooms, and angel-winged shrimp, a post-Revelation delicacy discovered in the deep sea. Food definitely took the edge off my nerves.

  Ric and I slipped into feeling triumphant and mellow, while Helena was scanning her screen between bites and sips.

  “Okay,” she said finally. “I’ve got the gist of the files. ”

  “Should Delilah be shaking in her pump heels?” Ric wondered. “They’re really not her style. ”

  “Not,” Helena said, “unless she has multiple tattoos. ” She turned the screen toward us.

  “Me? Tattoos?” I demanded.

  “Ric?” she consulted him.

  He liked playing with the idea, and my skittish state. His eyes warmed as they met my startled expression.

  “Tattoos? Oh, not a one, Dr. Burnside. I swear. ” His hand slipped under my social services’ bun to caress the “love bruise” on my nape. “I don’t like the idea of anybody or anything else, especially a needle, coming between my baby and me. ”

  “I would say, ‘Get a room,’” Helena commented, “except you kids already have one at that dreadful motel. ”

  “Dolly and Quick are the reason,” Ric explained. “We needed dent-free parking, which eliminated ramps, and a place that doesn’t ban hybrid wolves. Don’t worry. I booked you into the downtown showplace. ”

  She nodded approvingly. “We need to go somewhere private to discuss these files. Your place or mine?”

  “Yours,” Ric and I answered as one.

  “I’m so relieved,” Helena said. “I haven’t been in a motel since before the Revelation. I shudder to think what vibes I might pick up in that tacky room of yours. ”

  So did we.

  SUNSET WAS THINKING about taking a bow by the time we ambled out of the fancy bar. Fountains gushed like Old Faithful through the trees, probably installed in “water features,” as they were in Las Vegas. The rich loved gushers on their property.

  I was feeling calm, although edgy and curious about the tattoo remark. I’d been an overly careful girl, dodging preteen trouble from the “bad boy” half-vamps on my trail, studying and moving on, hoping not to get noticed, hiding in the midnight dens or dorm rooms where the TVs blared all night, blocking out danger and questions.

  We ambled toward the parking lot,
Ric and me an openly entwined couple, Helena still cruising her backlit screen with a frown I didn’t like the look of, but was too happy to worry about.

  The sound of a sustained, deep, threatening growl interrupted our separate reveries. We stopped and looked ahead to the isolated, distant spot where Ric had parked to avoid door nicks.

  A group of six men surrounded Dolly.

  Ric’s hand left my waist to push his suit coat aside and reach for the firearm at the small of his back. Yep, my guy “carried concealed,” thank, uh, thank my recent friend of a friend, Anubis, Egyptian god of the underworld. (My religious high school education made me take God too seriously to invoke Him for any minor life crises. )

  Wait. These guys dressed like Vegas werewolf mobster Cesar Cicereau’s tame “small job” muscle. They were probably dead men, and they wore plaid, all right. Green and yellow and blue plaid baggy trousers now in danger of a thorough ripping, along with said contents.

  Quicksilver was standing in Dolly’s backseat, his thick fur raised in a fearsome Mohawk from between his flattened ears to his seriously bushed-out tail. His snout was curled back, black-lipped to display the formidable mountain range of his wolfish fangs.

  I rushed to put myself between Quick and his gentleman callers. That allowed me a glance into the backseat. Which was pretty much filled with small, dimpled white balls bearing three gilt initials on each one.

  “Those are our balls,” a tremolo tenor announced behind me. “Is that your … dog?”

  “Your balls?” Helena intoned curiously, moving past the late-middle-aged men with a well-preserved wiggle. She turned to confront them. “I am so sorry. What shall you do without them?”

  They gaped, open-jawed like Quicksilver, but not nearly so formidable.

  I started shoveling golf balls out of Dolly’s pristine red upholstery. “Teeth okay, not claws,” I instructed Quick. “This is not Sunset Park. Down. Back. Leave kitty!”

  Men in checkered caps topped with white fuzzy balls scrambled at my last silly command to reclaim airborne presents from Christmas Past.

  Ric leaned against Dolly’s side, eyes buried in his hand, trying not to laugh, but utterly failing.

  THIS TIME I let Ric and Helena use their high-tech toys and Ric drive.

  A not-too-chastened Quicksilver ran alongside Dolly, giving chase to bad drivers in Ford 350s who cut off good drivers at every opportunity. I wondered where the motorcycle cop genes had come from. Maybe he was an escaped K-9 dog, who knows?

  We reached the Old Town in no time. I sat in the back-seat and consulted Ric’s phone. A nineteenth-century warehouse had been gutted to house the boutique hotel, with soaring atrium and piano bar, but it was no Marriott, nor did it have Billy Joel live.

  Like all hotels now, especially in Vegas, it boasted wireless access everything and all-suite rooms. The surrounding city center featured restaurants, shops, and Indian artifact museums.

  The ambiance was charming, but Quicksilver was confined to the parking garage and Dolly. Downtown Wichita, no matter how restored, was not post–Millennium Revelation Las Vegas.

  Good lord, I was homesick for Vegas.

  “Very nice,” Helena said, giving her foster son positive reinforcement for his choice. “We can order room service while we study the files. ”

  My stomach started calisthenics again.

  “The files” were my files. Were I tattooed. Which I wasn’t. What was that about?

  Maybe you got all the tattoos, Irma cooed. And I got all the men.

  In Helena’s room, we all doffed our hot, sticky business suit jackets and sat at a slate-topped table near a sink/small refrigerator unit.

  Helena’s phone buttons linked her net-comp to the room TV screen.

  “Some of this is very puzzling,” she warned us. “Most of it, in fact. Ric, take Delilah’s hand in yours. Delilah, let him. ”

  “What is this,” Ric asked, now uneasy too, “a shotgun wedding?”

  Helena’s face looked a little old for the first time, shadowed by the suite’s trendy spot-lighting.

  “I can’t say it’s good, but I can say this is not the Delilah we know. And love. ”

  She punched a tiny button on her keyboard, and scanned copies of printed pages hit the big screen.

  Most were tiny-typed reports. A few photos flashed by: me looking like a deer in a police lineup spotlight, front and profile. I gasped audibly.

  Helena clicked into close-up. “No panic. See the tattoo on her neck? Almost lost under the hair at her nape? A coiled snake, I think. It looks like you, but the expression is defiant and knowing. Not you, Delilah. Or the photos have been manipulated. Easy to do. Look. Here’s a from-the-hip-up photo. You can see the twin cobra tattoos on her biceps. Definitely not you, even I can see that. ”

  I eyed the loose-limbed, gaunt version of me in a raw preteen ranginess I didn’t remember, wearing a Rolling Stones wife-beater tee-shirt, a chain hip-belt, and stone-washed jeans.

  Young Lilith. It had to be.

  I shook my head, feeling Ric’s hands compulsively running over my arms and hands, circling my hips, covering—sheltering, claiming—the parts of my screen-revealed body.

  “Honest, Mom-doc,” he said, sounding like a defensive teenager for the first time in my hearing. “No marks on her that I haven’t put there. I swear. ”

  “TMI,” Helena said, raising her palms.

  She shut her eyes, revealing azure eye shadow gathering like a glittering monochromatic rainbow in a few faint age creases.

  “I said this was a puzzle,” she reminded us. “These images are not Delilah. Not only do my eyes and your joint testimony tell me that, but my … amplified insight. This might explain why Delilah had a difficult childhood. She had, at times, a supernatural shadow persona. This girl. This very disturbed girl. No girl is bad, but this one had very little good shown toward her and returned it in kind to others. ”

  “An evil twin?” Ric put my thoughts into words.

  I’d never told him about Lilith, another dirty little secret kept to ensure his peace of mind and my keen sense of privacy.

  “The TV soap operas are dead, Helena,” he said, dismissing his foster mother’s theory. “They lost their audience years ago. Evil twins have been a hokey plot device since forever. ”

  “Call me hokey. Few would dare, young man. ”

  How fascinating to watch the two revert to a non-blood-kin parent/son mode. I liked Ric going hot-blood and testosterone-y in my defense, something he’d never do if we were facing real danger. I’d never had an inner teenager— except for Irma, come to think of it, who acted like an eternal teenager—but I felt like a prom queen now.

  Wichita was peeling off all my hard-won defensive layers. I couldn’t indulge that luxury for too long.

  “I’m talking about a post–Millennium Revelation effect,” Helena said. “The dates when ‘Delilah’ was picked up for juvenile delinquency are after January first, two thousand. ”

  “I was never ‘picked up’ for anything,” I protested.

  “You admit you don’t remember a lot about your childhood, until after high school, really,” Helena pointed out.

  “Who does?” Ric argued. “You remember the high and low points. I know I do, and I’m a star graduate of your methods, Helena. ”

  She sighed. “The records show her—you, Delilah— with a history of running away from the group homes and hanging out at pool parlors, garages, tattoo and piercing shops with ‘a bad crowd. ’”

  “No,” I said, shaking my head. “I hid out in plain sight, in the group homes. I had a metal nail file for a weapon, yes, but it was against those creepy half-vamp punks who gave me a hard time. I wasn’t even menstruating then, but they still came after me. ”

  Helena’s lips folded tight. Then she said, “I believe you, Delilah. I believe you had your own history in your mind, and … this person in the police photographs w
as never a conscious part of yourself. ”

  “Or an unconscious part,” Ric insisted. “She was a virtual virgin. Only it was real. She had a lot to overcome before we … became a ‘we. ’”

  “Did she bleed the first time, Ric?” Helena sounded all cold-blooded physician.

  He glanced at me, embarrassment a no-show in this emotionally charged conversation.

  “Why should she, Helena? Did you?” he fought back for me. “Modern girls are way more active than some kind of … Victorian fading flower. The hymen can break in school sports, horseback riding—” He turned to me. “Does Our Lady of the Lake have riding stables?”

  I nodded numbly. Some of the girls were even rich enough to keep horses stabled there; some of us just snuck in and patted them, or were occasionally invited to ride. I didn’t feel these details merited breaking into this semi-mother-son debate.

  “Ric. ” Helena’s gaze turned steely. “You know and I know and Delilah knows she’s got a deeply ingrained phobia against lying on her back, in bed or out of it. I can literally see the black cloud of suppressed fear hovering at the rear of her brain, and that’s a formidable barrier to sexuality. You’ve done an admirable job of easing her around that barrier, but you can’t change the underlying pathology. ”

  “It’s no ‘job,’” Ric exploded. “It’s a labor of love, and I can live with that black hovering ghost without knowing its name forever. ”

  “Can Delilah, Ric? The files show an off-the-books medical ‘procedure’ when she was twelve. With an obgyn. Mrs. Haliburton can lie, but the files can’t. It’s against the law to destroy them, although they can be censored and blacked-out and buried in bottomless circles of bureaucratic hell. Somebody came along later and knew they’d be liable for something. The trouble is, whatever went so very wrong is also buried in Delilah’s psyche. ”

  “I don’t care what those files blacked out,” he answered. “I’ll find every last blotted-out name—doctor, lawyer, Indian chief, ‘bad crowd,’ whatever, including supernatural stalkers. I’ll track them down and I’ll take that wolf-hound with me to gnaw the balls off them until they squeal their guts out. ”

  I believed every word, remembering how Ric had gone after Haskell, the rogue cop who’d roughed me up. And maybe my big dog had too.

  “You have to face it,” Helena said. “Revenge won’t erase whatever it is Delilah confronted at a way-too-early age, likely rape. ”

  Rape. The only four-letter word that rocked my world off its axis. I’d sensed the ugly word circling and hovering in my blacked-out history and now it was in the open, slavering for my will and soul.

  “Thanks, Ric and Helena. ” I finally spoke for myself. “I’m perfectly capable of decoding those defaced files. I’m an ex-reporter, remember? I know Wichita history, names, and places. ” Then I looked only at Ric. “I’m pretty damn good at fighting impossible odds. And Quicksilver will get his teeth into any dirty work required more enthusiastically for me than for anyone else on the planet. ”

  He stopped cold, unable to keep up the façade that I hadn’t been seriously damaged, here and then. In Wichita, years ago.

  “Now, let me see those files,” I told Helena. “I appreciate your help, Madam Freud, but they are mine, you know. I’d like a printout to take back to the motel room. Can you manage that without letting the hotel staff get a duplicate file, or snoop? I don’t trust anyone about now. ”

  “WE NEVER HAD a decent real meal today,” Ric commented from Dolly’s passenger seat as I drove us back to the Thunderbird motel, a sheaf of rare hard copies in a folder on the red leather seat between us.

  “Takeout time,” I said. “Let Quicksilver choose. ”

  We passed a Wendy’s, a McDonald’s, and a Captain Kirk’s before a sharp bark came from the backseat. Red Riding Hood’s, wouldn’t you know? We got the family basket. Brisket and cottage fries.

  Leaving Quick on night duty with the bulk of the basket, we brought the remainder inside to pick at.

  I fanned through the folders.

  “I love you, and I don’t want you hurt, now or in the past,” Ric said.

  “I know the feeling,” I pointed out, with feeling. “That’s why I was leery about coming back to Wichita. ”

  “I was so sure you were haunted by just a natural, general fear because of the Revelation hitting when you were only a preteen. ”

  “Maybe that’s all it is. I do know if an abscessed tooth is a constant pain, you need to pull it out before it poisons you. ”

  WHEN RIC FINALLY fell asleep, I got up and went to the cheesy medicine cabinet over the sink mirror I’d avoided seeing myself in.

  I really didn’t want to mirror-walk in Wichita. That disconcerting new option was a Vegas wrinkle. Helena was right that the Millennium Revelation revved up paranormal powers in ordinary people.

  I suspected now that I’d never been ordinary, the thing I’d longed for most as a kid. I wasn’t worried about facing Loretta Cicereau, the vengeful ghost I’d bound. She was in mirror-suspension back in Sin City. I was beginning to see that even supernatural power depended on places as well as people.

  Wichita had its own circuit box. Power could travel from node to node, but you could tap into only what mojo you had built up in various locations. Here, I was more plugged in than I wanted to be.

  I took out my gray contact lenses, although they could be worn for weeks without changing. Then I leaned the heels of my hands on the cold sink surround and pushed my trademark blue eyes close to the cheap-grade mirror.

  “So you had to stick me with a sealed juvie record, Lilith? You sure weren’t borrowing my clothes in those days. They were all Goodwill and buttoned up to here and down to there to keep the creepy boys away. How did I get funneled into a socially and psychologically deviant population? I was just an orphan. And you did everything you could to hurt me. ”

  The blue eyes in the mirror blazed with anger and angst. Me, or Lilith, or Memorex?

  “It ever occur to you, Dee,” my mirror lips curled in answer, “I was taking the pressure off you?”

  Her glossy black head of hair shimmered like Midnight Cherry as she shook it. We really had great hair. Why I had never seen that? Because Lilith was hot, and I was not.

  Now she was saying she took the … heat … off, so I could remain safe behind my defensive devices, my solitary ways, my old movies, my wounded shyness?

  “So hopelessly naïve,” she went on. “The times they were a-changing, but you just wanted to soldier on in your stupidly smart, safe, low-profile way. ”

  “Your escapades gave me a record. ”

  “Everybody wanted to pin a case file on you and forget you. I met their expectations and then they left you alone. ”

  I could feel my fingernails trying to dig into fake stone.

  “Lilith, did you get me raped?”

  The blue eyes in the mirror shut.

  Funny, I could see that.

  Was this denial or …

  “Lilith, did you get raped in my place?”

  She tossed that superstar hair of ours, and flashed our ultrabright baby blues.

  “A little. ”

  Oh, my God.

  She shrugged and sneered and went on. “But the system got you, after all, in its own way. It always does. ”

  “I’m so sorry. ”

  “Don’t say that. Don’t ever say that. I’m not. And that’s why I’m in here and … you’re not. ”

  “You have more than a mirror existence,” I told her even as I realized it. “You have powers. You didn’t really kill yourself to get autopsied on CSI V Las Vegas?”

  “TMI, Delilah Street. I can see why you wanted to disown me, though. ” She turned her half-profile to me. I could see the tiny blue topaz in her right nostril. “The only personal distinguishing mark you ever voluntarily went for. And you lost it fast. Because of me. ”

  Had I lost more than a subtle pie
rcing, because of her?

  I sighed. “Lilith, I don’t like where this road trip to Hell is leading. ”

  “It’s not a theme park joyride, Dee, but you have way more allies than I ever did. ”

  “You’re not one?”

  “You want to claim the tattooed lady with the smokin’ past?”

  “Hey. I can always use chutzpah in Mirrorland. ”

  “Yeah. But where you need it is here and now, baby. Kiss the past and my baby blues good-bye. And screw Ric for me while you can. ”

  My fist headed for her face on that last taunt, but my knuckles stopped on cold mirror and at the brink of my own confused, angry image.

  Lilith was right. The only way of going forward to the future was back to the past.

  It was a paradox, and my vehicle was not a DeLorean car, but one of Detroit’s nostalgia best, Dolly. Frankly, the vintage past I so loved in general had been pretty much a real-time bust in my case.