Mirror Image

tiresome. She wasn’t in the mood. The drinks no longer tasted good. This wasn’t as much fun as it used to be.
    I thought we were friends.
    Carole’s voice seemed to speak to her above Rod Stewart’s overamplified, hoarse sexiness and the din the happy hour imbibers were creating.
    Carole had treated her decently in the last few months—in fact, since she’d come home from the hospital. Some of the things she’d said about self-respect were beginning to make sense. How could she have any self-respect if she let guys pick her up in joints like this—this was classy compared to some of the dives she’d been in—and do anything they wanted with her, then dispose of her as easily as they threw away a used rubber?
    Carole didn’t seem to think she was a dimwit. She’d entrusted her to run an important errand. And what had she done in return? She’d let her down.
    “Say, I gotta go,” she said suddenly. John had leaned over to lick her ear. She nearly knocked him off his stool when she reached for her purse and the padded envelope still lying on the bar. “Thanks for the drinks.”
    “Hey, where’re you going? I thought, well, you know.”
    “Yeah, I know,” Fancy said. “Sorry.”
    He came off his stool, propped his hands on his hips, and angrily demanded, “Well, what the hell am I supposed to do now?”
    “Jerk off, I guess.”
    She drove toward the hotel with indiscriminate speed, keeping an eye out for radar traps and cruising police cars. She wasn’t drunk, but alcohol would show up on a breath analyzer. Downtown traffic made the irregular maze of streets even more of a nightmare, but she finally reached the hotel garage.
    The lobby was packed. Campaign posters bearing Tate Rutledge’s picture bobbed above the press of people. It seemed that everyone in Bexar County who had voted for Tate Rutledge had come to celebrate his victory.
    “Excuse me, excuse me.” Fancy wormed her way through the crowd. “Ouch, dammit, that’s my foot!” she shouted when someone backed over her. “Let me through.”
    “Hey, blondie, you gotta wait on the elevators same as everybody else.” The complainer was a woman wearing a veritable armor of Rutledge campaign buttons on her chest.
    “The hell I do,” Fancy called back. “Excuse me.”
    After what seemed like half an hour of battling through the crowd as alive and working as a bucket of fishing bait, she stood up on tiptoe and was dismayed to find that she still wasn’t anywhere close to the bank of elevators.
    “Enough of this shit,” she muttered. She caught the arm of the man nearest her. “If you can get me into an elevator, I’ll give you a blow job you’ll never forget.”
    * * *
    A sudden hush fell over the room when the parlor telephone rang. All eyes swung toward the instrument. The mood was collectively expectant.
    “Okay,” Eddy said quietly, “that’s him.”
    Tate picked up the phone. “Hello? Yes, sir, this is Tate Rutledge. It’s good of you to call, Senator Dekker.”
    Eddy raised both fists above his head and shook them like a winning boxer after a knockout. Zee clasped her hands beneath her chin. Nelson nodded like a judge who had just been handed a fair decision from the jury. Jack and Dorothy Rae smiled at each other.
    “Yes, sir. Thank you, sir. I feel the same way. Thank you. I appreciate your call.” Tate replaced the receiver. For several seconds he sat with his hands loosely clasped between his knees, then he raised his head and, with a boyish grin, said, “Guess that means I’m the new senator from Texas.”
    The suite was instantly plunged into chaos. Some of the aides jumped into chairs and began whooping like attacking Indians. Eddy hauled Tate to his feet and pushed him toward the bedroom. “
Now
you can go change. Somebody go catch an elevator and hold it. I’ll call downstairs and tell them to give us five minutes.” He yanked up the telephone.
    Avery stood wringing her hands. She wanted to cheer and shout with joy over Tate’s triumph. She wanted to throw her arms around him and give him a kiss befitting the victor. She wanted to share this jubilant moment with him. Instead, she shook like Jell-O, congealed with fear.
    When she joined him in the bedroom, he was already stripped to his underwear and was stepping into a pair of dress slacks. “Tate, don’t go.”
    His head snapped up. “What?”
    “Don’t go down there.”
    “I can’t—”
    She grabbed his arm. “The man I told you