“My sire, Gabriel Nightengale, does he know I’m here?” I asked as she opened my cell door.
She nodded. “You’re not allowed visitors,” she said, shutting the very solid door behind her.
And for the first time since being shot and left for dead, I was truly frightened.
Whenever those horrible “women in prison” movies were played on Lifetime, I thought, what’s the big deal about prison? I could handle solitary. Even if I couldn’t read, I could daydream. I could write. I would take naps.
Well, like many of my predeath preconceived notions, that one was destroyed.
There was no window, so I couldn’t tell whether it was night or day. There was no clock, so I never knew what time it was. I couldn’t sleep, because the healing burns on my arms itched like crazy. And my daydreams were interrupted by pesky questions such as, “Where is Gabriel?” “Why does this keep happening to me?” “Am I going to die for real this time?”
I spent half my time trying to figure out where the hell I was. When I pressed my ear against the wall, I could hear traffic. I heard voices at least twenty feet above my head, but I couldn’t make out any actual words. And there was a rat somewhere in the plumbing.
The only good thing I could say about the clink was that the blood (served in a paper cup shoved through a slot in my door) was fresh and tasty. It was also of an indeterminate origin, but I decided not to ask questions.
I was halfway to drawing “LOVE” and “HATE” on my knuckles, when Ophelia returned. She was wearing black silk pants and a top that may, at one point, have been a handkerchief. I stood up, grateful for any sort of interaction, even if it could mean I was facing a spookily titled punishment.
“Are you comfortable?” she asked, not sounding as if she actually cared.
“Bored, mostly. How long have I been in here?” I asked. “Two days, three days?”
“Nine hours,” she said, looking as if she were suppressing a giggle.
“Well, that’s embarrassing,” I muttered, scratching at my arms.
We sat there and stared at each other. It was like a staring contest with a really hot statue.
Finally, she said, “The tribunal has voted against a trial.”
I sat up, feeling something like hope rising. “Really? That’s good news.”
“They voted against it because Missy has challenged you to trial by battle, which is her right as Dick’s consort.”
“You guys are just making this up as you go along!” I cried. “Dick and Missy weren’t even in a real relationship. Hell, if everyone he slept with could challenge me to a duel, I’d be fighting half the county. You could challenge—” She crossed her arms and glared at me. Probably not good to give her ideas.
“Never mind,” I said. “Is it going to be pistols at dawn? Swords at sundown? How does this trial-by-battle thing work?”
“The last battle was fought with sharpened snow shovels,” she told me.
“Now I know you’re screwing with me.” I snorted. Her expression didn’t change.
“Oh, come on!”
“Missy will choose the weapon,” Ophelia informed me.
“She’s going to accessorize me to death?”
“Or she can choose hand-to-hand combat.” Ophelia nodded.
“I stand by my statement,” I deadpanned.
My arms finally healed up about an hour after Ophelia left me. She said she would come back an hour before my appointment with Missy the grieving ex to let me feed and update me on the duel arrangements. She even promised to serve as my second. How did I get to a point in my life where I needed a second?
Semierotic fisticuffs with Gabriel aside, I didn’t have any faith in my fighting skills. Walter had nearly splintered my skull with his bare hands, and from what I heard, he’d spent most of his time watching Battlestar Galactica in his mother’s basement.
After pacing, humming, yoga, and playing Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon with the entire cast of Good Times, exhaustion finally got to me, and I managed to fall asleep. I dreamed that I was walking along that long, dark country road and felt the pain of Bud McElray’s bullet all over again. Only instead of finding me and turning me, Gabriel drove by in a big black Cadillac. He laughed and pelted me with cigars and drove away.
Anyone care to interpret that?
I jolted awake, yelling, “Freud!” Dick was sitting in the corner of my cell, smirking at me. “I can’t leave you alone for two seconds, can I?”
“Dick?” I said, wiping an alarming amount of sleep drool from my cheek. “Wait, are you a ghost?”
He sat on the cot and grasped my knee, so I could feel he was substantial. “Nope, still as undead as ever.”
I removed his hand and put it back on his own knee. He gave me a blithe grin, which, Lord help me, made me hug him. He was clearly caught off guard by this and, after hesitating, gave me a completely innocent squeeze.
“Hey, you’re not trailer dust!” I exclaimed. “And your hand is on my knee again.”
“Sorry,” he said, not looking the least bit so. “And no, I’m not dust. I had a fireproof sleeping compartment built under the trailer a few years ago. I smelled the gas and jumped into it just in time.”
“Your sleeping compartment is fireproof?”
“I have my reasons,” he said, feigning indignation. “I just figured my place got torched by one of my less than civically minded associates. I laid low for a while. I didn’t know you’d been blamed for the whole thing until this evening when I heard about the duel. I couldn’t leave you locked up. With the public showers and the shackles—”
“Shh,” I said, holding a finger to his lips. “I’m glad you’re OK. Let’s not ruin that.”
He kissed the fingertip, which I then used to tweak his nose. He caught my hand and smelled my skin. He cocked an eyebrow and smirked, then rolled his eyes. If he could smell Gabriel on my hair before we had sex…
“If you say what is in your head right now, I will rescind my previous statement and kill you. For real this time,” I told him.
“Speaking of that, how about I give you a ride home?” he said. “There’s some stuff we need to talk about in private.”
“The stuff you cryptically referred to during your call? How did you get my cellphone number, anyway?”
“We’ll talk about it later,” he said, dragging me to the door.
“Dick, they’re not going to just let me walk out of here. They think I tried to kill you. It’s apparently one of the big no-nos.”
“And obviously, I’m not dead. No harm, no foul,” Dick said.
“That doesn’t change the fact that someone tried to kill you and I’m still a prime suspect. I’m actually the only suspect, which I find insulting and surprising.”
“Look, I vouched for you, OK? I said there was no way you could have done this.
It took some convincing, but Ophelia has agreed to release you into my custody. They figure if you really did try to kill me and somehow you end up mysteriously disappearing, it’s a wash.”