“How long we got to stay?” he asked.
I gave him my very best smile. “It is a bit much, isn’t it? All this happiness and fun—it must make you nervous.”
“Makes me want to wash my hands,” he said. “I’ll wait outside.”
“Is that really a good idea?” I asked.
He tilted his head at Vince’s conga line, which was collapsing in a heap of spastic hilarity. “Is that?” he said. And of course he had a point, although in terms of sheer lethal pain and terror a conga line on the floor couldn’t really compete with Dr. Danco. Still, I suppose one has to consider human dignity, if it truly exists somewhere. At the moment, looking around the room, that didn’t seem possible.
The front door swung open. Both Doakes and I turned to face it, all our reflexes up on tiptoe, and it was a good thing we were ready for danger because otherwise we might have been ambushed by two half-naked women carrying a boom box. “Hello?” they called out, and were rewarded with a ragged high-pitched roar of “WHOOOO!” from the conga line on the floor. Vince struggled out from under the pile of bodies and swayed to his feet. “Hey!” he shouted. “Hey everybody! Strippers are here! Banzai!” There was an even louder “WHOOOO!” and one of the cops on the floor struggled to his knees, swaying gently and staring as he mouthed the word, “Strippers . . .”
Doakes looked around the room and back at me. “I’ll be outside,” he said, and turned for the door.
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“Doakes,” I said, thinking it really wasn’t a good idea. But I got no more than one step after him when once again I was savagely ambushed.
“Gotcha!” Vince roared out, holding me in a clumsy bear hug.
“Vince, let me go,” I said.
“No way!” he chortled. “Hey, everybody! Help me out with the blushing bridegroom!” There was a surge of ex–conga liners from the floor and the last standing cop by the fountain and I was suddenly at the center of a mini–mosh pit, the press of bodies heaving me toward the chair where Camilla Figg had passed out and rolled onto the floor. I struggled to get away, but it was no use. There were too many of them, too filled with Vince’s rocket juice. I could do nothing but watch as Sergeant Doakes, with a last molten-stone glare, went through the front door and out into the night.
They levered me into the chair and stood around me in a tight half-circle and it was obvious that I was going nowhere.
I hoped Doakes was as good as he thought he was, because he was clearly on his own for a while.
The music stopped, and I heard a familiar sound that made the hairs on my arms stand up straight: it was the ratchet of duct tape spooling off the roll, my own favorite prelude to a Concerto for Knife Blade. Someone held my arms and Vince wrapped three big loops of tape around me, fastening me to the chair. It was not tight enough to hold me, but it would certainly slow me enough to allow the crowd to keep me in the chair.
“All righty then!” Vince called out, and one of the strippers turned on her boom box and the show began. The first stripper, a sullen-looking black woman, began to undulate in front D E A R LY D E V O T E D D E X T E R
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of me while removing a few unnecessary items of clothing.
When she was almost naked, she sat on my lap and licked my ear while wiggling her butt. Then she forced my head between her breasts, arched her back, and leaped backward, and the other stripper, a woman with Asian features and blond hair, came forward and repeated the whole process. When she had wiggled around on my lap for a few moments, she was joined by the first stripper, and the two of them sat together, one on each side of me. Then they leaned forward so that their breasts rubbed my face, and began to kiss each other.
At this point, dear Vince brought them each a large glass of his murderous fruit punch, and they drank it off, still wiggling rhythmically. One of them muttered, “Whoo. Good pu
nch.” I couldn’t tell which one of them said it, but they both seemed to agree. The two women began to writhe a great deal more now and the crowd around me began to howl like it was full moon at a rabies convention. Of course, my view was somewhat obscured by four very large and unnaturally hard breasts—two in each shade—but at least it sounded like everyone except me was having a great deal of fun.
Sometimes you have to wonder if there is some kind of ma-lign force with a sick sense of humor running our universe. I knew enough about human males to know that most of them would happily trade their excess body parts to be where I was. And yet, all I could think of was that I would be equally pleased to trade a body part or two to get out of this chair and away from the naked squirming women. Of course, I would have preferred it to be somebody else’s body part, but I would cheerfully collect it.
But there was no justice; the two strippers sat there on my lap, bouncing to the music and sweating all over my beauti-
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ful rayon shirt and each other, while around us the party raged on. After what seemed like an endless spell in purga-tory, broken only by Vince bringing the strippers two more drinks, the two roiling women finally moved off my lap and danced around the circling crowd. They touched faces, sipped from the partyers’ drinks, and grabbed at an occasional crotch. I used the distraction to free my hands and remove the duct tape, and it was only then that I noticed that no one was paying any attention at all to Dimpled Dexter, the theoretical Man of the Hour. One quick look around showed me why: everyone in the room was standing in a slack-jawed circle watching the two strippers as they danced, completely naked now, glistening with sweat and spilled drinks. Vince looked like a cartoon the way he stood there with his eyes almost bulged out of his head, but he was in good company. Everyone who was still conscious was in a similar pose, staring without breathing, swaying slightly from side to side. I could have barreled through the room blasting away on a flaming tuba and no one would have paid me any attention.
I stood up, walked carefully around behind the crowd, and slipped out the front door. I had thought that Sergeant Doakes would wait somewhere near the house, but he was nowhere to be seen. I walked across the street and looked in his car. It was empty, too. I looked up and down the street and it was the same. There was no sign of him.
Doakes was gone.
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