I leveled my gaze on Steele.
“Supposedly tigers have very bad eyesight,” I said, very quietly. “They attack on motion. Maybe if we both keep very, very still.”
The parrot conveniently practiced its growl again. I imitated Steele’s menacing smile.
Steele stayed very, very still.
Now what? We couldn’t stand here forever, me holding the sword pointed at Steele’s throat. Sooner or later, my arm would get tired. Or the parrot would switch from menacing growls to knock-knock jokes and give the game away. Or the real Salome would turn up.
Just when I was about to turn and make a run for it, I saw Steele begin to move. I stepped out of the line of his attack and was aiming a thrust at his midsection when I realized he wasn’t lunging at me—he was falling. I barely avoided skewering him as he flopped face first to the floor, with a small projectile protruding from his left buttock. A dart.
“Got him!” came a voice.
A woman in some kind of uniform appeared over the edge of the stage.
“Roger,” came a voice from the back of the ballroom. “You stay there; we’ve got a location on the tiger.”
“You can put the…weapon down now, ma’am,” the woman said. “He’ll be out for a while. We calibrated the dosage in the tranquilizer dart to knock out a two hundred pound tiger for an hour. I figure he’s in about the same weight range.”
I dropped the sword.
She wasn’t the cops, I noticed. The patch on her sleeves said “Loudoun County Animal Control.”
“I’m just glad you tranquilized him instead of me,” I said. “After all, I was the one holding the sword.”
“Yeah, but we saw what he was up to before that,” came another voice. “We caught most of it.”
Detective Foley.
“Caught most of it?” I said. “You mean you were watching somewhere and just let him chase me all over the room trying to cut my throat?”
“Relax, d’Artagnan,” he said, chuckling. “I meant we caught it all on camera.”
He pointed to the balcony. Yes, the cameras were there, pointed at the stage. I supposed that the little blinking red lights meant they were running.
“A whole bunch of people locked themselves in the Rivendell Room when the cat got loose,” Foley said. “They were watching the whole thing, and when they realized it wasn’t a skit, one of them called 911 on a cell phone and got patched through to us outside. Luckily the animal control truck had just pulled up; I felt a whole lot better coming in with them and their tranquilizer darts than I would have with just our guns.”
I glanced up at the balcony again and saw Foley’s partner appear.
“Of course, the sound quality’s probably pretty poor, but they can enhance that in the lab for the trial,” Foley said. “You want to say anything to your fans before we shut the cameras off and seize the tapes?”
“Shut the damned cameras off, Foley,” I said, sitting down on the stage. “What I have to say I don’t want on tape.”
“Yeah,” Foley said, nodding. “You can probably turn them off now, unless—”
“Freeze, Steele!”
We all whirled at the sound, and saw that Michael had burst out onto the ballroom stage from the door leading to the kitchens. He looked around at the half-dozen police officers aiming guns at him, glanced down at Steele’s unconscious body, and then his shoulders slumped, and he lowered the fire extinguisher he was holding.
“I thought I told you to stay out in the parking lot and let us take care of the situation,” Foley said, holstering his weapon and nodding to his troops to do the same.
“I would have, except your idea of taking care of the situation was to sit around watching while that lunatic killed Meg,” Michael said.
“Oh, Meg’s not as easy to kill as all that,” Dad said, following Michael onto the stage. “Though I would like to take a look at that cut.”
He was, of course, toting his small traveling doctor’s bag.
“Can you take a look at this guy while you’re at it?” the animal control officer asked, indicating Steele.
“How much longer will he be out, anyway?” Foley asked, glancing down at Steele.
“Beats me,” the officer said, shrugging. “We’ve never used the tranquilizer darts on a human before.”
“What kind of tranquilizer?” Dad asked.
While they fussed over Steele, Michael put down the fire extinguisher, walked over, and put his arms around me.
“Do you know how I felt when they told me what was happening?” he said.
“Hold that thought a second,” I said. “Foley! Are those damned cameras off yet?”