Dressed as the Wicked Witch, wearing a skintight black gown, and sparkly red high-heeled shoes, and pale white makeup and blood-red lipstick, and dancing with— Arthur Crandall.
Who looked portly and pompous and pleased as punch, which was probably the way most fat men looked when they had slender gorgeous blondes in their arms.
“Long time no see,” Michael said.
The self-satisfied smile vanished. Perhaps Crandall had expected Michael to be in handcuffs by now, in a holding cell at one or another of the city’s lovely police stations. Or perhaps he’d expected him to be in a garbage can behind one of the city’s many beautiful little McDonald’s locations, which was where Alice might have left him, given her wont. But wherever he’d expected him to be, it was certainly not here in a smoke-filled disco called Oz at twenty minutes past three on Boxing Day.
He went immediately pale.
But not because he thought Michael was a murderer. Oh, no.
That would have been good enough reason to have gone pale, oh yes, a wanton killer here inside this nice noisy club, a cold-blooded murderer here inside this jewel of a joint, good enough cause for Crandall’s eyes to have grown round with fear. But whereas Michael had bought Crandall’s little act in the St. Luke’s Place apartment on Christmas morning—” Careful! He’s a killer!”—he now knew far too much to accept it all over again. Green lights blinking on his round, sweaty face, Crandall was realizing that somehow Michael had tracked Mama here. Which meant that he had also tracked Mama to Crandall himself.
“May I cut in, please?” a voice said, and suddenly Michael was in the arms of a short, thin, mean-looking man with a thick black mustache, wearing a shiny silk gray suit that was supposed to make him look like the Tin Man.
“This is a knife,” he said, and Michael suddenly detected the faint Spanish accent, and realized at once that this was the man Mama had sent to meet Crandall on Christmas Eve. The knife was in the man’s left hand. The point of the knife was against Michael’s ribs. The man’s right arm was around Michael’s back, pulling him in tight against the knife. The man danced them away from Connie, who stood looking puzzled as a swirl of Dorothys and Cowardly Lions and Wicked Witches flowed everywhere around her in the dense green fog. Michael suddenly remembered that his bomber jacket was draped over the back of the bar stool. All the way over there, the pistols were of no use to him. The man smiled under his mustache.
“I’m Mario Mateo Rodriguez,” he said.
“You dance divinely,” Michael said.
“Thank you.”
“But I wonder if …”
“Mama for short,” the man said.
Michael looked at him.
“Mama,” the man said. “For Mario Mateo.”
“You’re a man?” Michael said.
“Nobody’s perfect,” Mama said.
Michael winced. Not because Mama had just quoted the best closing line of any movie Michael had ever seen in his life, but only because he accompanied the line with a quick little jab of the knife. Michael was suddenly covered with sweat. He did not know whether Mama planned to kill him right here on the dance floor under all these swirling green lights or whether he planned to dance him out of here at knife point, onto the yellow brick road, and over to the Hudson River, where once stabbed he could be disposed of quite easily, but either way was a losing proposition. Crandall and his Wicked Bimbo of the East had vanished into the green fog. So had Connie. There was only Michael now, and Mama, and the knife, and the pounding music and the swirling green lights and the enveloping smoke, and all of it added up to being in death’s embrace for no damn reason, no damn cause.
“May I?” the voice asked.
The voice belonged to Phyllis in his blue Glinda gown and his diaphanous wings. He held his magic wand in his left hand, and his right hand was gently urging Mama back and away from Michael. He was attempting to cut in, the dear boy, which Michael considered infinitely preferable to getting cut up.
There was a sweaty, uncertain, awkward moment.
Mama naturally resisting any intrusion at such an intense juncture.
Phyllis naturally intent on dancing the light fantastic.
Michael naturally wishing to stay alive.
The scream shattered the hesitant moment.
High and shrill and strident, it cut through the din as sharply as the word that defined it.
“Knife!”
Someone had seen the knife.
“He has a knife!”
Mama froze.