The Devil May Dance - Tapper, Jake (short novels in english .TXT) 📗

in what she hoped would be a comforting signal. Hubbard put a beefy paw on Margaret’s shoulder. His bluster was suddenly gone, replaced by an oily concern.

“I could sense your trauma when you walked in the door.” He put a finger under Margaret’s chin and tilted her face up to his, as if he were a grandfather trying to comfort an upset child. She tried to hide her revulsion. “We can help rid you of it.”

He pulled her to her feet and embraced her. Margaret leaned into him, her arms at her side, her head bowed against his chest. She had to suppress every impulse to recoil.

“There, there,” he said. He squeezed her harder.

And then Hubbard suddenly convulsed, his shoulders spasming and his head thrust back.

Julius raced to him, crying out, “Are you all right? What’s wrong?”

Hubbard fell, and his body seized up; his legs kicked spastically, as if he were swimming.

Margaret grabbed Sheryl Ann’s hand and ran; the two women were out the door and onto the street by the time Julius realized Margaret had grabbed the tin cans from the E-Meter and shoved them under Hubbard’s arms after cranking up the electronic dial to jolt his body with a temporarily debilitating current.

Margaret and Sheryl Ann raced through the empty foyer, skidded down the snowy stairs, and almost tripped several times as they ran to their locked car. Two young men with crew cuts emerged from the house, shouting and coming at them like Olympic sprinters, followed by Julius, barking orders. Julius tripped in the slush and fell but the other two were fast; Margaret wasn’t sure they were going to be able to get away.

She looked to her left when she heard another car approaching. Amazed, she saw Charlotte Goode screech up in her blue Chevy Bel Air and open the passenger door. “Get in, get in!”

Margaret was stunned, but there was no time for questions. She scrambled into the Bel Air with Sheryl Ann right behind her, and Charlotte hit the gas.

Chapter TwelveLos Angeles, California

January 1962

They raced down the street.

Charlotte attempted to speed her junky car through the snow but it was like her tires were inner tubes. The car kept skidding, dinging parked car after parked car, nearly mowing down pedestrians.

Margaret sat shotgun. In the back, Sheryl Ann looked through the rear window. The church thugs—Julius in his Hawaiian shirt and the two crew-cut young men—trailed a block behind them, also skidding all over the road, in a blue Ford Galaxie. An actual car chase. They had become a Hollywood cliché.

Margaret looked out the side window and saw pump jacks in the distance. An oil field. Could this be Inglewood? She had lost all sense of space and time.

Goode’s car hit an icy patch and they spun out, slid through an intersection, and careened into a telephone pole. The three women were jerked violently toward the pole, then back toward the front of the car.

“Jesus fucking Christ!” Goode yelled.

The car was now aimed in the wrong direction, toward where they had come from. The Galaxie slowly drove toward them.

“You okay, Sheryl Ann?” Margaret asked.

“I think so,” Sheryl Ann said, patting her chin, which was bleeding.

“That’s a nasty gash,” Margaret said. She removed a handkerchief from her purse and dabbed her friend’s cut.

Goode struggled to kick her car back to life.

“Fuck!” she yelled.

The Galaxie began speeding up.

“Why are they even—” Sheryl Ann said. Her unfinished question made perfect sense to Margaret: Why were these thugs chasing them? Because they’d tried to get information about Powell? Because they’d lied about who they were? Because Margaret had stolen that document?

“The goddamn shifter’s jammed,” Goode said.

The Galaxie was now close enough that Margaret could see the furious faces of the young men.

Finally, Goode got the car in gear. She slowly moved forward, then began U-turning. The Galaxie hit the same ice patch Goode had and slid across the intersection, only to be suddenly T-boned by a Chevy. There was a horrific metal crunch. The two cars skidded to a stop as Goode’s car chugged away.

Dean Martin left the Compound for Los Angeles shortly after lunch; he had to catch a flight to Pebble Beach for the Bing Crosby pro-am golf tournament. About an hour after that, Charlie was downing yet another screwdriver and enjoying a cigarette on the front porch when Lawford’s red Ghia L6.4 screeched around the circular driveway and came to an abrupt stop at the front door. Lawford and several attractive young women spilled out of the Italian coupe like it was the world’s most glamorous clown car.

Lawford and his entourage swarmed past Charlie on a cloud of cigarette smoke and Arpège. “What are you doing out here by yourself, old sport?” Lawford said with a wink. “Join the party!”

He did. Within minutes, the young women, seemingly impervious to the brisk air, had stripped down to bathing suits, slinky one-pieces in a dizzying array of colors. Jacobs materialized with more cocktails. Sometime later they escaped the chill by migrating to the small gunite spa containing a Jacuzzi whirlpool, a new trend sweeping the estates of Southern California millionaires.

Sinatra, Judy, and two of the new arrivals—one had an impressive and loud Texas twang, the other had a delightful explosion of freckles that reminded Charlie of a Jackson Pollock—took their drinks to lounge chairs. On her way to the chairs, Lola stopped at Sinatra’s impressive outdoor hi-fi and turned on the radio; “Runaround Sue” began blasting, and some of the young women started dancing. Charlie looked at their host; he seemed okay with Dion, but soon enough the song ended and another one began, and before Elvis Presley could even utter the words When we kiss, my heart’s on fire from his hot single “Surrender,” Sinatra’s placid smile melted into a look of disgust and he threw his drink at the nearest speaker.

“Turn off that goddamn mumble monkey!” he yelled, and Jacobs quickly restored order to the universe by putting his boss’s Swing Along with Me on the