“Pam? It’s Chris. Where are you?” Burman must have answered, for a moment later he asked, “Is Louis with you? Where is he…? We’ll be right there.” Chris paused, listening. “No!” he shouted. “Just stay put.” He dropped the telephone back down. “Goddamn her!” he said and turned to Becky. “She’s on her way to Carlos’.”

  “Is everyone all right?” Becky asked.

  “Are you kidding?” Chris responded, his eyes darting about the room. “Troy?” he yelled. “Where did you put the car keys?”

  “In the kitchen,” said Troy as he emerged from the hallway.

  “Answer me!” Becky demanded.

  But Chris had darted into the kitchen and was rummaging madly among the piles of newspaper and packing material until he came up with the keys.

  “Let’s go,” he said, pushing past Becky and grabbing Troy by the arm.

  “What’s wrong?” Troy asked as he was being dragged out the front door.

  “Take the stairs,” Chris yelled back. “It’s quicker.”

  “Maybe for some people,” Becky grumbled as she ran down the hallway as fast as her chubby thighs could move. The other two had already vanished into the stairwell. She followed quickly and began to pound down the stairs as fast as she could, wincing and knowing her legs would feel like hell tomorrow morning.

  “They’ve been attacked.” Chris’ voice floated back up the stairwell.

  Becky froze for a moment and, then, fear providing her with a second wind, began to descend the stairs, two at a time.

  The front door split down the middle with a horrifying snap and part of the door was ripped from the frame, landing in the bushes outside with a discernable crash. Shanda froze with panic and Louis grabbed the silver tray with his insulated hands and forced her to take it.

  “Don’t wait,” he growled softly, taking a firm grip on one of the candlesticks. “Clobber him the minute he gets inside.”

  “This is crazy,” Shanda whispered back. “I’ve got a butcher knife in the kitchen. Will that work?”

  He shook his head no.

  “I didn’t think so,” she said absently. “Honey, I just want you to know, whatever happens…”

  Her little speech was cut short as a huge, talon-tipped paw appeared in the open area of the doorway, clutching at the remaining half of the door and ripping it away.

  “Oh God,” she moaned and, the next instant, a huge, hairy form burst through the door, bounded over the couch and landed in the middle of the room, demolishing the coffee table. It paused for a moment, gathering its bearings, and growled ominously.

  “Allergy, my ass,” Shanda mumbled as she got a good look at the thing. Then, before her fear could get the better of her, she stepped forward, pushed Louis aside out of harm’s way, and slammed the silver platter onto the creature’s head with all her strength.

  Guy Chartreuse paused, his head reeling from the burning pain of the platter. He was confused. Louis was supposed to be queer, for Pete’s sake! What the hell was he doing with a woman in the room? Even Becky had confirmed that his cousin was seeing a man. For a moment, the strength of his hatred ebbed. Had he been wrong? Good God, if any mistake had been made, if he had killed humans without reason, Etienne would have his hide for a rug.

  He growled uncertainly in the back of his throat, sniffing the air and trying to focus on the scent through the pain in his head. Strange, but his nose seemed to lying to him. He’d distinctly smelled two males in the room; one was Louis, he’d recognize that odor any time. But the other was definitely human, although it was masked slightly by some kind of flowery perfume.

  Baffled, angry and not a little frightened at the possibility of having made a tremendous — and potentially fatal — error, he threw back his head and howled. Then, with a mighty leap, he knocked the woman aside and threw himself at his cousin, claws fully extended. Woman or no woman, Louis had ruined the good name of the pack. That, Guy simply would not tolerate!

  Shanda was thrown to the floor and screamed as Louis went down under the monster’s attack. The two grappling bodies tripped over an end table, destroying it as they smashed into the wall with enough force to send every one of Shanda’s framed prints crashing to the floor with a tremendous shatter of glass. Without thinking, she crunched across the broken glass and hit the monster with the tray again. With a roar of pain and a single sweep of its powerful arm, Shanda was thrown across the living room into a tea cart next to the dining table. Falling painfully for the second time, Shanda was stunned for a minute and, seconds later, received another shock. Louis and the creature had separated; they were circling each other in the center of the living room. With every revolution, the monster would reach out its paw and smash or tear anything in reach. But, Louis, to Shanda’s confusion, seemed to be devoting his best efforts to, of all things, taking off his clothes!

  He’d kicked his shoes off, making certain to aim them at the beast’s head. He’d also removed his belt and unzipped his fly. His attention was diverted for a minute as he tried to skin out of his trousers. The monster seized the opportunity and launched itself at him. Louis was thrown backwards against the heavy curtains of the living room window, his back shattering the glass. He twisted about, thrashing wildly as the curtains wrapped around his body. He was, however, able to manage to free one leg from his pants.

  The beast clawed wildly, reducing the curtains to so many dust rags, in its efforts to get at Louis. Louis ducked between the thing’s legs, shaking his right leg like a dog, trying to shuck his obstinate trousers, and came up behind it. The monster whirled around and, with a resounding thump, the two bodies came together, chest to chest, in a bizarre parody of a bear hug. Shanda watched, aghast as the creature’s claws shredded the skin on her lover’s back. She was even more horrified when she realized that Louis, incredibly enough, had his teeth buried firmly in his hairy assailant’s throat.

  The two of them wrestled, rolling across the floor and wiping out more of Shanda’s furnishings. Suddenly, the werewolf broke the clinch and backed away from Louis, bleeding from the neck and coughing and yelping with pain, the silver candlestick sticking out of its belly. It grabbed the protruding candlestick in one paw, accompanied by a hiss as its flesh seared upon contact. With a roar, it yanked the candle free and threw it across the room.

  Louis, now naked from the waist down except for the obstinately clinging pants, scrambled to his feet and crouched for the next attack, pausing only to rip open his shirt and send buttons flying. But the creature seemed confused. It turned, looking first at Louis and then at Shanda where she stood, silver tray poised for another blow. Suddenly, with a tremendous roar of outrage, it launched itself directly toward Carlos.

  Chris drove the Cabriolet like a madman. He barreled through the red light at Sweetzer and almost turned two young men on their way home from the gym into hood ornaments, missing them by scant inches. He ignored the Holloway jughandle, instead making an illegal left turn off Santa Monica Boulevard south onto La Cienega — on two wheels.

  Becky had driven with Troy a few times and had thought no experience could match it. She was wrong. She debated asking Chris to slow down, but her own panic at Pamela’s telephone call kept her quiet. Instead, she merely braced her arms against the dashboard and silently promised God, all the Saints and her mother’s rabbi that, if she survived the trip, she’d reinstate her diet — maybe sometime next week.

  Troy, on the other hand, seemed to be having a grand old time in the back seat. Each time, Chris asked for directions, Becky’s reply was punctuated by Troy’s suggestions that “cutting across the median strip would be faster” and his repeatedly urging Chris to “Pop another wheelie.” Becky was not amused.

  “Make a right!” she yelled and acting on her command Chris hauled on the wheel.

  “I meant at the corner!” Becky had time to add as the Cabriolet jumped the curb onto the median strip and headed right toward one of the most controversial items to have graced West Hollywood’s city council agenda in the past year.

  Several years ago, Daniel Eversleigh had founded a Fine Arts Commission, chartering it with the jurisdiction to decide what the city should or should not display as municipal art. The Commission members all had two things in common: an undying dedication to the beautification of West Hollywood and a commitment to Art for the sake of Art and to the artist’s right to express himself, or herself, without the slightest regard to the aesthetics of the finished product. Whenever work was submitted for consideration for public display, the Fine Arts Commission would put their collective heads together and indulge in arduous debate about the worthiness of the artistic intent, trying to ignore the fact some of the proposed Art was horrifically ugly. Sadly, the works of some artists were, even for the Fine Arts Commission, simply too wretched to display. Since they were unwilling to make an aesthetic judgment, the commissioners developed the concept of “dangerous art” to provide an excuse for rejecting truly hellacious, pieces.

  The theory was that a school-aged child — in a town with a thirty percent male homosexual populace and which boasted not a single grade school — playing on the median strip of Santa Monica Boulevard, might dart through rush hour traffic to clamber up onto the Art, fall off and injure itself. Alternatively, a sculpture might be so abysmally repulsive that a motorist, gaping in shock at the artistic outrage, would take his attention from the road and smash into another car.

  The Art toward which Becky, Chris and Troy were barreling, was a hazard to neither the mythical school children nor to the traffic patterns along Santa Monica Boulevard. Nevertheless, it was a huge subject of controversy. “Those Less Fortunate” consisted of twenty sixteen-foot high, stainless steel, plastic and wood torsos, purporting to honor those West Hollywood citizens who, through no fault of their own, were deemed to be less fortunate than their neighbors. Some of the honorees had lost their businesses in earthquakes, others had lost lovers or spouses to AIDS, some were merely popular bag people who had caught the public fancy. Whatever the underlying sob story, each fall, Daniel Eversleigh would issue a proclamation honoring the truly wretched of West Hollywood, and the names would be inscribed on the side of one of the sculptures.

  “Those Less Fortunate” was a magnificent idea — until the bill came in.

  Although each sculpture could be built for about five thousand dollars, the cost of installation was triple the cost of construction. Pamela Burman, faced with the prospect of storing the twenty monstrosities indefinitely or coming up with an additional quarter of a million dollars to have the damned things set up, publicly advocated piling them in West Hollywood Park, tossing the Fine Arts Commissioners in for good measure and utilizing Daniel Eversleigh as a human torch to set the whole mess aflame. The Environmental Protection Commission, another of Daniel’s institutions, stepped in and dissuaded her, claiming that the fumes produced from burning Mylar and Plexiglas would have an adverse effect on the ozone layer. Livid, Burman juggled the city budget and came up with the money and “Those Less Fortunate” had become a West Hollywood institution.

  At the moment, Becky O’Brien was wishing fervently that Pamela Burman had not been so adept in her accounting. One of “Those Less Fortunate” was coming closer to the Cabriolet’s front bumper with each second.

  “Oh shit!” Becky had time to shout as Chris’ foot moved from brake to accelerator in a futile attempt to zoom past the looming sculpture. But, fate had decreed that the Becky and her fellow passengers were to be less fortunate still.

  With a sickening crunch of metal, the shrieking rip of shattering Plexiglas, a splintering of wood and the soft whoosh of tearing Mylar the Cabriolet collided with the effigy honoring “Crazy Maude,” a notorious West Hollywood homeless woman. The Cabriolet smashed head first into the sculpture and bounced off, spinning completely around and, as Chris had not yet taken his foot off the accelerator, zoomed off the median strip on the far side and shot out into oncoming traffic.

  Becky closed her eyes and prayed as Chris, with surprising expertise, hit the brake briefly, threw the car into reverse and, leaning into the gas pedal once again, yanked the wheel to the left. Becky was thrown against the door as the VW retraced its path. She braced herself against the dashboard as the Cabriolet smashed into the sculpture again, this time from the rear.

  Chris hit the gas but the rear bumper of the car was wedged tightly into the sculpture.

  “Just stop!” Becky screamed, trembling.

  “You okay?” Chris asked and she nodded, scarcely able to believe they were all alive.

  “Boy! That was fun,” Troy added, but his enthusiasm seemed a little subdued. “Let’s not do it again.”

  Chris jumped out of the car. “Where’s Carlos’ place?” he demanded.

  “Chris! For God’s sake!” she shouted back. “We just had an accident!”

  “Tell him something he doesn’t know,” Troy said.

  One of the passing motorists, a young, attractive Hispanic man, stopped his car and came running over to the VW, eager to help.

  “Jesus!” he shouted. “Everyone okay?”

  “We’re fine,” Chris yelled back. He turned to Becky, “Now where is Carlos’?”

  “I called 911 on the cell phone,” the Good Samaritan said as he approached.

  “That’s all we need,” Becky said, staring at the wreckage dumbly. “Pamela’s gonna have a bird. Do you have any idea how much these things cost?”

  “I don’t give a shit what they cost!” Chris roared. “Where the fuck does Carlos live!”

  Becky pointed off to the right. “West Knoll. Northwest corner. Second bungalow.”

  “Thanks,” Chris said and, ignoring the outraged shock of the Mexican man as he pushed him out of the way and tore off down the street.

  Becky rummaged around in the remnants of the glove box and, in less than five seconds, came up with an envelope neatly labeled Registration/Insurance in Chris’ antiquated, flowery script. “Here,” Becky said, and added her own card to the documents and handed them to the young stranger. “When the sheriffs get here, give ’em these.”

  The man looked at her, puzzled, as she got out of the car. “But…” he began.

  “Oh, for Christ’s sake!” she yelled at him. “I don’t have time to argue!” She snatched the envelope back and thrust it at Troy, who was just getting out of the car.

  “Wait here,” she commanded. “Tell the deputies to call Clive. Don’t talk to anyone else,” she cautioned. “Got it?”

  “They’ll put you in jail, leaving the scene of the accident,” the man protested.

  “Jail!” Troy was not pleased. “Ugly people fuck you in jail!” He was momentarily stunned by the visions of himself as Linda Blair, wearing a tacky prison issue denim outfit.

  “Just do it!” Becky yelled at him. “We’ll bail you out before Bubba gets to you!” So saying, she hitched up the front of her slacks and waddled off after Chris’ vanishing form leaving whichever deputy first showed up in the awkward position of having to get insurance information from Troy who, Becky was willing to bet, had absolutely no idea of what insurance was in the first place.

  With a shock of realization, Guy Chartreuse realized that, in fact, there were two men in the room. But one of them, to his disgust was dressed as a woman! His animosity for Louis, always intense, had worsened at the discovery of his cousin’s sexual proclivities. But now, faced with the aberration that his cousin had chosen to mate with, his hatred and rage boiled over.

  Guy felt a roiling in his stomach as he gazed at his cousin’s bizarrely dressed catamite with loathing. Relieved that he had been correct all along about Louis, he growled with satisfaction. Tonight, he would wipe both his deranged cousin and his sickening mate from the face of the earth. He flexed his claws and leapt toward the perfume drenched male.

  Burman drove like a madwoman and arrived at Carlos’s house less than twenty seconds after the mating of the Cabriolet and the municipal Art — maybe a minute and a half after the monster had figured out that Shanda was, in fact, a man.

  She screeched to a halt, in the middle of West Knoll Drive, totally ignoring the mandate that cars be parked within eighteen inches of the curb and, for once in her life, forgetting the “cramp wheels to curb” law. Grabbing her sack of silver from the passenger seat, she practically flew up the front path, mentally thanking God that she’d continued her daily jogging well into her seventies.

  The scene greeting her looked like something out of The Poseidon Adventure with Benji playing the Stella Stevens role. The living room had been figuratively turned upside down; overturned furniture, shattered glass and wood were scattered everywhere. At the far end of the room, Burman saw to her horror, Shanda’s legs peeping out from underneath both the dining room table and the huge bulk of a very angry werewolf. Louis, bare-assed with his pants wrapped around one ankle, was hauling on the beast’s tail and growling, trying to pull it away from her.

  As Pamela watched, Louis gained a slight edge and the creature was slowly dragged from under the table. But, with a splintering sound, its front claws scrabbled on the throw rug, wadding it up and then digging into the hardwood floor, enabling it to slowly pull itself forwards toward the helpless drag queen once again. Without thinking, overcome with horror, Burman opened her mouth and emitted a deafening roar, half in fear and half in anger. The tableau froze for an instant and, suddenly, the werewolf twisted around, fixing Pamela with a baleful glare and, with one last, almost casual, slash at Louis’ chest, advanced on her menacingly.

  “C’mere you son of a bitch,” Burman shouted. “I’ll teach you to fuck with my kids!”

  “No!” Louis cried and, with a tremendous tug, he hauled on the monster’s tail yet again. The werewolf turned and, lifting one of the armchairs over its head, brought it down full on top of Louis, the crunching of bone could be heard, ominously echoing through the apartment. Shanda shrieked with alarm and emerged, looking much the worse for wear, from under the table.

 

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