We'll Always Have Parrots(85)

Of course, all this silent creeping might prove useless. Maybe tigers relied more on smell than hearing. If I’d known I’d be trying to elude one, I could have looked it up before coming to the convention.

I glanced into the dealers’ room. No sign of Salome.

Of course there were things she could hide behind. Just a few, but still.

I heard a faint noise in the hall. Monkeys, chattering softly.

Chattering at what?

I slipped inside quickly and closed the door. I’d have felt better if some idiot hadn’t left a door at the other end of the room hanging wide open.

I half-ran over to the booth and grabbed a sword—one of the ones I’d sharpened because, crazy as it had always seemed to me, some customers wanted them that way.

Not so crazy now. I felt suddenly, though quite irrationally, safer. Stupid; what could I really do with a sword if Salome came at me? But I didn’t put it down, even though it hampered me a bit when I searched the booth.

Alaric Steele’s side of the booth.

I might be risking my neck for nothing. He might have already gotten rid of the sketchpad, the one containing the off-white paper with the colored flecks. Of course, I still had the sheet of paper in my pocket, the paper on which Steele had done his estimates for the producer on making armor and swords for his TV show. Neat, legible letters and numbers—his printing had an almost calligraphic elegance. Several very deft sketches—I wished I could draw designs for potential customers that well. It looked quite good on that sheet of pebbly, color-flecked drawing paper. More like fine art than a craftsman’s sketch. But he could always claim he’d found the paper somewhere. It would be so much more satisfactory to find…

The pad. He’d hidden it among the packing materials, sandwiched in between several sheets of cardboard at the bottom of a box filled with Styrofoam peanuts.

Inside, I found pages of the same rough-toothed paper, covered with sketches. I hadn’t seen him sketching at the booth, but suddenly I could see him sitting alone in his room, drawing. Just him and the sketch pad.

He was good. Hell, he’d been good thirty years ago. He was brilliant now. His figures, always strong, were cleaner, simpler—now but just as subtle and lifelike, as if he’d learned to achieve the same results with fewer lines.

The first few pages contained small sketches of various people at the convention. You could tell at a glance how he felt about each subject. He mocked the costumed fans, but gently, as if their antics amused him. He wasn’t quite so kind to the bearded professor or Walker. I was relieved that he hadn’t drawn Michael.

He liked Maggie. He didn’t idealize her, didn’t remove any lines or gray hairs, and yet the sketch of her had a warmth and vibrancy that made you smile just to look at it. It wasn’t unlike the glow Porfiria had in those early comics. Yeah, he liked Maggie.

He liked me, too. The sketches of me didn’t quite have Maggie’s warmth, but they did have their own kind of heat. I didn’t think my Renaissance wench costume was quite as low cut as he’d drawn it, and I knew perfectly well he’d exaggerated my figure. Nice to know I retain my appeal to the criminal element.

But the QB—he’d sketched her, more than anyone, and the pictures radiated a cold hatred that made me hesitate to touch the page. And they made her look startlingly ugly and repulsive. The more startling because they didn’t seem distorted. More like photo-realism, and yet through some subtle alchemy, he’d made the seemingly straightforward lines and curves reveal not only the outer shell but the cruel soul inside. I found myself staring into the eyes of one sketch and thinking that Medusa must have looked just like this, to turn her viewers into stone. I certainly stood staring down at the page for far too long.

A monkey chattered overhead, and I snapped out of it.

“I need to get out of here,” I muttered.

But which way? Back the way I’d come, or out the other side of the dealers’ room?

I should have paid more attention to which way Salome was going. Or, for that matter, where Steele went when he left the dealers’ room a few minutes before Francis turned Salome loose.

“Lady killer or tiger?” I muttered, looking back and forth between the two escape routes. Though for all I knew, if I chose the wrong path, they’d both be lying in wait.

Maybe I could sneak out the back way while they were fighting over who got to finish me off.

“Chill,” I told myself. Odds were Steele was outside, with the rest, waiting to hear that Salome had been recaptured. The last time we’d talked, I’d been busy explaining why I suspected Nate. He had no way of knowing that his producer friend had just handed me the clue that gave him away.