Robert Asprin's Dragons Run (19 page)

Griffen
stood at the back of the stage, his arms folded. Fox Lisa, beside him in a chestnut brown suit that made her red hair glow, radiated hurt. Penny had brushed both of them off the morning after the Bad Beth concert. Griffen’s demands for an explanation as to why Penny hadn’t been in the office when Fox Lisa had made the trip to do some work with her were ignored with extreme prejudice. Over the course of the next several days, Fox Lisa had yet to get an apology or any kind of acknowledgment that there had been some kind of misunderstanding. Penny’s sweetly sarcastic tone made Griffen want to throttle her or walk out the door. At least, once she was in front of the cameras, she wasn’t irritating either of them.

“I hope someone does throw a whammy on her,” Fox Lisa grumbled, her arms folded around a clipboard she clutched to her chest. She stood rigid, refusing to acknowledge anyone else from the campaign. The hot lights shining at them from the foot of the stage made them both sweat and squint against the glare. Griffen felt the back of his long-sleeved silk shirt sticking to his back. “I will buy him a drink.”

Fox Lisa had been so upset that night that when she finally had arrived at Griffen’s apartment, he had had to spend hours consoling her instead of coaxing her into some mutual fun. Griffen blamed Penny for ruining his love life as well as the end of the concert. Fox Lisa was despondent, wondering over and over again if Penny had decided her input just wasn’t worth her while and had left rather than wait for her. Griffen could not tell her what had happened at Yo Mama’s. Penny knew he had kept the interplay to himself and kept shooting glances at him that were mockingly seductive. She knew anyone who saw them would misinterpret the expressions. Winston had imported a fresh set of indignant glares that he used on both Griffen and Fox Lisa. In the days since the slight, Fox Lisa had moved on from blaming her own shortcomings to cold anger. From long experience, Griffen knew that mood was much more dangerous. He wished he didn’t have to be there.

He had promised his uncle to stay with the campaign until Malcolm could relieve him. It was beginning to look as if Penny’s fears were groundless. She was manipulating all of them. Griffen was getting tired of dancing to other people’s tunes.

Horsie, in the thankless role of apologist for her candidate, caught Griffen’s eye and offered him yet another friendly grin.

“I thought she was there,” she whispered. “I swear to God. She called me on her cell phone. I’m so sorry, honey. I’ll make it up to you.”

“You can’t,” Griffen pointed out. “It has to come from Penny.”

Horsie opened her eyes wide.

“Oh, but she’s so busy. Don’t mention it to her. She must have been somewhere else working and just flaked on that. It happens. Please, honey. This is a make-or-break event for her. Don’t back out on us now.” Horsie smiled, hoping to mend the situation. It didn’t work. Fox Lisa’s trust was broken. Griffen was relieved, but he was sorry her idealism had taken a hit. Horsie retreated, looking rueful.

He leaned over to Fox Lisa and put his mouth close to her ear. She shied away out of reflex, then made a face.

“I made us a reservation at Galatoire’s for a late dinner,” he whispered.

That managed to surprise a smile out of her.

“Well, thank you, Griffen,” she said. “But you don’t have to do it for her.”

“I want to do it for
you
,” Griffen insisted. “We haven’t been there in a long time. You deserve it. Besides, you look so nice in that suit, I didn’t want to waste the opportunity for you to show it off.”

She leaned close and squeezed his arm. “I’ll look forward to it. It’ll give me something to think about beside talking points.”

“I could recite them along with Penny,” Griffen said.

“I hear them in my dreams,” Fox Lisa admitted.

A man in a headset moved into Griffen’s line of sight and gestured vigorously. When Griffen glanced at him, the man made a throat-cutting gesture with his finger. Griffen understood. He had to stop talking. Stifling a sigh, he shifted his feet and steeled himself to watch.

Griffen could have used a distraction. Politics were as dull as he had always believed. Having to smile and pretend to be supportive because of the television cameras was especially tortuous. The lights went up again for the third segment of the debate.

The moderator had reached the subject of law enforcement. Penny quivered at the podium, unable to contain herself as the other candidates took their turns speaking. Griffen knew it was only a matter of time before she interrupted one of them.

Yes, there she went.

“My dear sir,” she began, her voice full of honeyed contempt, raising her voice over Congressman Jindal, “I am certain you have misstated the statistics. I have them right here . . .”

“Representative, if you don’t mind,” the moderator said, raising his voice to be heard over her. The person running the sound board was on his side. Penny’s mike dropped to near inaudibility. The audience tittered. Her shoulders stiffened. Griffen could tell she was angry, and like the Incredible Hulk, no one was going to like the results.

To his amazement, she kept her silence. Griffen regarded her with suspicion. She was up to something.

He couldn’t say later when he became aware of the motion, but by the time his conscious mind noticed it, Griffen realized he had been staring raptly at Penny. He thought that he was immune to her, after all her complaints and subterfuges, but something about the way she swayed behind her podium was fascinating. The movement came from her ankles upward, shifting her whole body from side to side like a snake. It was subtle, but he found it amazingly sexy and compelling. Penny aggravated him. He had to force himself to keep that in mind. But it was hard. Very hard. The longer he watched, the more he wanted to believe what she said. His will was bending toward hers.

Her shoulders, hips, and legs swayed. Blood pounded in Griffen’s head. He wanted her. In his mind he saw her astride his hips, breasts swaying, writhing and tossing her hair. He couldn’t concentrate on anything but her. He had to touch her, to draw that power into himself. The other men there might get to her first. She must be his and his alone. No one would dare challenge a dragon! He strode toward her.

Shriek!
The platform creaked underfoot, snapping him out of the trance. Griffen stepped back into line. He realized he had been breathing hard. He glanced from side to side to see if anyone else had noticed him.

No one was paying attention to him. He scanned the row on both sides of him. All the campaign workers, whether or not they worked for Penny, had their eyes fixed on her. Most of the men had goofy smiles pasted on their faces. Most of the women frowned slightly, as if disapproving of what they felt. Some were as agog as the men.

Griffen knew that their fascination couldn’t be because of what Penny was saying. He had heard the speech many times, with little variation. In it, Penny took credit for legislation that organized grassroots community policing and outlined bigger ideas for when she would be elected governor. Her answer to students’ getting greater value out of the local schools was to make them safer. As a strategy, it was a can’t-miss proposition. None of it cost very much to initiate, and it made for terrific photo opportunities for neighborhood leaders. It was dry stuff even to devoted followers, but he couldn’t look away. He found himself eager for her next words. He wished she would turn around and look at him.

The huge audience cheered every time she finished a sentence. If she paused for breath, they broke into wild applause. Griffen had never seen anything like it. He wasn’t close enough to smell pheromones, but it had to be some kind of phenomenon like that. Penny had a secret weapon, something magical. It worked on not just one person at a time, but dozens—maybe hundreds. He had seen her speak in many places and she had gotten a good response from the crowd, but this was different. She compelled them to come over to her side and agree. Every camera in the room pointed at her.

The buzzer went off, indicating that her time was up. Without looking at it, the distinguished newsman automatically slapped it off with his hand, letting Penny continue.

“Our children are our future!” Penny said, raising her right hand to the sky.

“Yea, sister!” a loud baritone voice bellowed from the audience. Dozens in the crowd echoed him.

Penny shook a finger at heaven.

“We let them down every day we allow violent offenders to run our neighborhoods.”

“Amen!”

“I will lead from the governor’s mansion, but I need all of you to do your part! I need you to promise me two things!” Another finger joined the first.

“Name them!”

“One, that you’ll blow the whistle on offenders in your neighborhood! Don’t put up with their bad behavior one more day! And, two!” Penny was rising toward the climax of her speech. Her hands rose before her as if she was conducting an invisible orchestra. The audience was with her like a congregation. “That you’ll go out on election day and vote! Punch that button that says . . . that says . . . !”

Her shoulders shuddered, and she fell silent.

As if someone had put a pin in a gigantic balloon, the energy burst out of the room, leaving it a deflated scrap. The audience groaned. Griffen felt the loss as if he had been deprived of something wonderful. He willed Penny to go on with her speech.

She didn’t. Her shoulders were tense and shaking. Griffen realized she was staring at someone in the audience.

Griffen looked in the direction of her gaze. He ran his gaze back and forth through the rows of people. Nothing seemed out of the ordinary. Suddenly, he felt a cold ball of slime twist in his guts. In the midst of the murmuring populace was a man, or something that used to be a man. How was it that the crowd around him didn’t see the horror Griffen beheld? His clothes, a parody of a business suit with a striped silk tie, were gray rags. Griffen couldn’t tell what color his ridged skin used to be since it was a sickly gray mottled with purple and green, like old bruises. One eye hung out of its socket and bobbed on the leathery cheek. The face wore a rictus of a grin. The teeth looked outsized in the shrunken gray gums and shriveled lips. Griffen knew to the bottom of his soul that it wasn’t a costume. He swallowed, trying to keep his gorge from rising.

“What’s wrong?” Fox Lisa hissed. She, too, had broken out of her trance. “What’s upsetting Penny?”

He pointed, trying not to make his gesture large enough to be picked up by the dozen or so television cameras. Fox Lisa followed the line of his finger and squinted into the crowd. She gasped.

“What is it?” she asked. “It looks like a zombie from the movies!”

“I don’t know,” Griffen whispered. “I’m going to find out.”

He slipped out of the group of staffers and went down the stairs at the back of the dais. Fox Lisa clacked after him and kicked her shoes off at the bottom of the flight. She scooped them up and grasped them so the pointed heels could be used as weapons.

On the stage, Penny was still trying to recover her wits. The crowd, brought violently out of its reverie, roiled and muttered. Griffen shouldered his way into the mass of people. He dodged camera cranes and technicians in T-shirts and blue jeans. He kept his eyes fixed on the spot where he had seen the zombie. Why was no one else reacting to the creature? One look at it ought to have cleared the arena to the walls.

Fox Lisa had broken off from his side and doubled around to home in on the creature from the other direction. He could just see the top of her head in the midst of the crowd.

Something gray caught his eye. The rough texture looked like the zombie’s sleeve. Griffen jumped toward it.

A hand caught him under the jaw and shoved outward. Before Griffen registered the mistake he had made, he was thrown roughly to the ground. A knee landed between his shoulder blades. The air whooshed out of his lungs. Griffen let out a pained OOF! He waved his hands to keep from being trampled by the forest of feet. The knee withdrew as suddenly as it had descended. The hand grasped a handful of the back of his shirt and hauled him upright. Griffen found himself eye to eye with Detective Harrison. The vice cop wore a heavy leather vest over a gray button-down shirt. His badge was on a strap around his neck. Harrison shook him roughly, then thrust him away.

“What are you doing, McCandles?” the burly man growled. “I was about to grab a troublemaker. You got in the way!”

“I was . . .” Griffen glanced at the stage. Penny stared down at him with a look of terror on her face. “I was, too.”

Without the magic to sustain her hold over the audience, the debate could go on. The outdoorsman smiled genially at the camera and tapped the top of his clock. The melodious
PING!
sounded. The other candidates looked relieved.

“Your time’s up, Representative. We’ll get back to you on the next question.”

Griffen returned his attention to Harrison.

Harrison eyed him sourly. “Your kind of troublemaker or mine?”

Griffen sighed. “Mine.”

Harrison moaned, the lines in his meaty face angling downward.

“Shit, I hoped you weren’t gonna say that. Do I even want to know what it was?”

“I don’t think so,” Griffen said. “I’ll tell you what I can.” He looked around. “Not here. I’ll be at the pub later.”

“All right. I want a full briefing.”

Fox Lisa squeezed between two men holding
JINDAL FOR GOVERNOR
flags. “Hey, Detective, how are you doing?”

Harrison smiled down at her. “Been worse, Miss Fox Lisa. You look pretty fine in that suit. Running for office?”

“Maybe next time, Detective. Taking care of another candidate here.”

Harrison glanced up at the stage. “Yeah, I’ve seen you on TV behind her. She was doing all right. Too bad she blew it.” He pulled a palm-sized microphone off his shoulder and spoke into it. “I missed him, Larry.”

A voice crackled out of the handset. “Got mine! Come on down by the forty-yard line. Ugh! Bring extra cuffs. He’s a fighter, for sure.”

Harrison punched Griffen in the shoulder. Griffen winced. Even in fun, the big man packed a wallop. “You owe me a drink later, McCandles. I’ll be by to collect it.”