Vodka Sting

It suddenly clicked in my brain. Boris had no idea who I was. He'd never seen me without my clown makeup. The Ivans knew I was a clown though; they'd seen the outfits in my apartment.

He pushed me weakly towards the door. "You leave. The Ivans find out you came here, they decide I'm lying, they kill me." He paused and looked at me sadly. "Pretty girl like you, they do much worse, then they kill you. This is what they do."

I backed out fast, feeling sick to my stomach. I practically ran to Bjorn's place, pausing to catch my breath on the stairs leading up. I shivered and looked around then pulled my card out. I needed to get out of here. I reached for the door and caught my reflection. I was even paler than usual, stress written all over my face. Lines I'd never noticed before were etched on it. I blinked and reached out. Some of the lines were really etched and scored; carved into the door. Weird rows of scratches.

I ran my fingertips along the scratched glass, suddenly feeling like I was about to fall into a bottomless pit.

Not much scratches glass.

Björn had braced me against that door with my legs around his waist, right there.

Swarovski crystals don't scratch glass.

Shaking myself out of my shock, I slammed the card into the reader, then bolted up the stairs as fast as I could, slamming the door and latching it behind me.

I stumbled out of the Crystal Bolt jeans as fast as I could, holding them up and staring at the back pockets.

Several of the crystals were the size of my thumbnail.

Twitching, I reached over and pulled an empty beer bottle off of Björn's project table.

Mumbling a prayer, I dragged it across the pocket of the jeans. Just from the feel, I knew what was happening.

Thinly etched lines on the bottle told me everything I needed to know.

Swarovski crystals don't scratch glass.

Diamonds do.

****

Panic filled my thoughts. Vegas. I needed to take Punchy's offer, head to Vegas and drop out of sight. Maybe just do magic shows. Not as a magician. I could do street magic, but I'd learned the big set-pieces as well. I could work set up for the big shows. Punchy could make that happen.

I needed to disappear.

I'd have to say goodbye to Björn.

To Punchy, Lulabelle, all of the crew.

Bobby and Anna. I needed to warn them. They had already asked him about me.

I tried to call Bobby, but he didn't answer. Two more times. Nothing.

I needed something to ground me, to let me catch my breath. I remembered the card from Lisa's mom. I looked wryly at my phone.

Calling Lisa's mom was always tough. I never knew quite want to say, and I felt like a hypocrite because she thought the world of me.

She'd asked me to come to Lisa's funeral in my clown gear. She'd even called my parents and convinced them. Mom had bought me a real blue wig just for the funeral. I'd felt the stares of her extended family the whole time, but when she'd delivered her eulogy, she talked about me and how much Lisa had depended on me to get through every day. After the funeral, dozens of family members came over to tell me how grateful they were.

And all I could think of was how I'd deserted her until that birthday.

I picked up the phone twice before I took a deep breath and dialed. It rang twice before it picked up.

"Laura Richmond."

"Hey, Mrs. Richmond, It's..."

"Sparkle!"

I felt myself break into a smile. Lisa's mom had never called me anything but "Sparkle" after the first day I showed up in that goofy mop head wig.

"I'm so glad to hear from you, honey. I tried to call but your phone kept saying it was disconnected."

"I, um, lost my phone and had to get a new one." It'd actually been disconnected due to a few missed payments, and I'd had to switch to the pay-by-the-minute phone I had now, which I'd rarely had minutes on for the same reason.

"Are you still with the circus?"

"No, I'm kind of between gigs right now. I have a lead on a job, though."

It got quiet on the other end. "Oh. I was kind of hoping you'd be looking for an off-season job."

I sat back. "Why?"

"Well, I know this might be too much, but we've been looking into emotional support therapies for some of our children, support dogs and...and...." She paused, and I could hear a deep breath on the edge of tears. "I can't forget how..." Her voice cut off in a choke.

"You want me to help?" I tried to ignore a tear that suddenly slipped out and ran down my cheek.

"It wouldn't be a huge amount of money, but it'd be enough to live on, and you...you could do so much for them." She said that last in a desperate rush, and I knew I'd have agreed even if the circus was still running, even if it didn't pay anything.

I closed my eyes. "When do you need me?"

"We should have started this years ago. I told the board about you as part of the emotional therapies pitch. You're the reason I know how important it is." She took a deep breath. "Not just for the children either. What you did for Lisa kept me afloat sometimes. It was getting so hard, and nobody seemed to be in it with us anymore. We were so alone."

I thought about how empty and hollow she'd looked the day of the birthday party, and felt a fresh rush of guilt at abandoning them.

She continued, and I wasn't sure if she was even talking to me anymore. "Then one little blue-haired clown showed up and kept showing up, over and over again, every day. Making her smile and laugh, even on the worst days. You have no idea how much that meant and still means to me."

I choked on a sob, wanting to tell her I wasn't the angel she was picturing, but I couldn't make myself talk.

She took a second to get herself under control. "At least think about it? Please?"

"I don't have to. I'll get out there as soon as I can."

*****

I tried to call Bobby again, to warn him, but nobody answered his cell, so I finally called Anna's family's restaurant. I kept getting "Anna's not here" over and over until her mother finally came on the line.

"She's with Bobby; he's at the hospital. He's been hurt." I thought she sounded stressed, but it was hard to tell.

I managed to convince them to tell me which hospital.

It didn't take a genius to realize that it probably wasn't a coincidence, and even though I hoped for a case of food poisoning or a traffic accident, I wasn't as surprised to see that Bobby had been beaten badly. Both eyes swollen shut, oxygen tubes, IVs. I was kind of prepared for it.

I wasn't prepared for Anna. She hadn't been beaten, her eyes weren't swollen shut. It was the anger in her eyes that took me by surprise. "You did this!"

I shook my head. "No, I didn't..."

She stuck a finger in my face, tears streaming out of her eyes. "They told me! You stole from them!"

"I swear, Anna, I didn't know."

"You didn't know!" Her face twisted in rage. "They said they'll kill him, then..." She shuddered. "I'm pregnant Kelsea. I couldn't let them do that to me. Our baby..."

She suddenly slumped, crying hard. I reached out to her, but she pushed my hand away. "I told them where to find you. I told them where your apartment was."

I pulled back in shock and she looked up at me, hard-eyed. "You brought this. On everyone. They told me that if I see you, I need to tell you. You call them, or they find everyone you know and do what they did to Bobby, only it will get worse each time."

She shoved a piece of paper at me and looked down, her voice dead, barely above a whisper. "You have to call them, Kelsea." She looked over at Bobby's still form on the bed, and the sound of the machinery filled the room for a moment. "He'll be okay this time. There's some bleeding on the brain, but they said..."

She stopped and started crying softly. I reached out to her. I touched her shoulder, and for a moment, she let me. Then she pushed my hand away and turned silently toward Bobby.

I headed out of the hospital, the piece of paper in my hand felt like it weighed a hundred pounds.

*****

I ended up sitting by the Duck Pond, trying to figure out what to do. I knew I had a way out.

It would be easy.

I could escape. I could just disappear.

But the Ivans would just keep looking, just go on hurting anyone they thought I cared about because they couldn't find me.

They had all the time in the world. Sooner or later, they'd find the others, find my friends.

It would get worse and worse.

I was no expert on diamonds, but the blue jeans had to be worth millions. They'd never give up.

I fantasized about killing them, but even if I could figure out a way and even if I could make myself do it, the Ivans were just tools for the organization, Russian Mafia or whoever they really were.

They probably had whole teams of Ivans ready to come over to enforce their will.

Every way I looked at it, everybody was just better off if I just died.

Except me.

A sullen kid glowered at the crowd from the other side of the duck pond, then faded away. Punchy probably looked a lot like that back when he was a kid, when he was one of the feared Ducky Boys.

Punchy had warned me about getting in trouble, he'd warned me about not taking the risks seriously enough. Now I needed to warn him. And everyone else.

I slowly got up and started walking to Punchy and Lulabelle's, bracing myself to lose my circus family.

Three hours later, in a room full of people I'd always assumed would be my friends to the end of days, I finished my tale and sat back, miserable. All I'd done was shoplift a pair of jeans. But now Bobby was in the hospital, Anna hated me, and everyone around me was probably at risk.

Punchy sighed and I braced myself for the bad news. He looked over at Lulabelle. "Okay, that's a 'hey Rube' if I ever heard one." He looked around the room at the silent crowd of clowns. "Where do we get a Geiger counter?"

*****

I slipped into Björn's apartment and sat at his rough wood table, running my fingers over it. It was so much like him. I pulled my note out of my pocket and looked it over again.

It's not easy to tell someone you're running away, especially if it's someone you don't want to run away from.

I didn't have a choice, and I needed him to understand that. I needed him to understand that I was doing it to keep people from getting hurt. I needed him to know I wanted to see him again, but it would be up to him.

I pulled what I hoped was something that would really mean something to him and used it to weigh the note down.

As I walked out, I glanced back, feeling like I was stepping off a cliff.

*****

Charivari

My stomach was wrenching as I staggered into the bistro. It was empty except for the Ivans, who watched me contemptuously from the table in the center of the room.

I stepped closer, gasping out a hard breath as I felt my gut twist again. There was nobody else in the place at all. No witnesses. That told me what was going to happen. I could barely stand.

The Ivans had decided that I needed to be an example. I rubbed my eyes with the back of my hand.

Blinking back tears, I held the shopping bag up. "It's here. I'll just give it to you and..."

The smaller Ivan smiled. Maybe the word "sneer" was a better choice. I realized he was enjoying this, that tormenting people who couldn't defend themselves was his idea of fun. He saw the cold sweat and clammy skin and enjoyed the idea that he could terrify someone this much and there was nothing they could do about it. "I don't think so. We've been 'inconvenienced.' Too many people know and we need to make an example."

Before I could even think of what to say, the door slammed open behind me.

"Freeze!"

Two guys in dark suits came through the door, fast and fluid, each one holding a large automatic.

Leveled at me.

I twisted to look at them and felt my legs just give out. I collapsed and curled into a ball, clutching my stomach.

One of the two half-crouched next to me. "It's her."

The other looked from him to the Ivans, flashing credentials up. "Homeland Security. Just stay right there." He pulled out a radio handset. "Sir. It's definitely her; we've got her." He waved the other man back away from me. "Get away from her."

"I think..."

"You're not thinking." An older man, with an air of authority, came through the door, followed by two paramedics. And a woman in what looked like a bright yellow space suit.

"Back away from her." The older man gestured the woman forward. "Check her."

I felt warm fluid fill my mouth and coughed it out. The agent near me back away hurriedly looking down at the spray of blood on the tile. "Shit."

A sizzling sound filled the air as the woman stepped toward me with a yellow box in hand. The closer she got, the louder the machine crackled. She carefully scanned it over me, then the bag, each time the wave of sound crested loudly.

"This is it. Rads are through the roof." She pulled an odd yellow backpack off and dropped it next to me. The strangest thing about the backpack was the large obnoxious red radiation hazard symbol. She gingerly slid the shopping bag into the pack. "Idiot."

The older man shook his head. "She didn't know."

While I retched again, the paramedics stepped over to me. The larger one glanced back at the woman in the spacesuit. "Is this safe?"

"The stuff is in the bag; everything on her is residual. I wouldn't give her a hug and kiss, but you should be okay."

My eyes were starting to tear up as he rolled me onto my back. "Eyes are full of blood..." He checked me over gingerly and began to count off statistics to his partner. "Christ, this isn't good."

The woman in yellow leaned over us for a moment. "She might have a couple of hours, but that's pretty optimistic."

"What a goddamn mess." The man in charge looked over at the Ivans. "You know her?"

"No. She just walked in and kind of...fell down." The smaller Ivan studied him for a second. "Who are you?"

"Senior Agent in Charge Brogan, Homeland Security. We've been chasing her for weeks. Sensor at one of the ports of entry picked up a radiation spike. A bad one. We've had vans out with detectors all over the city, trying to hunt her down."

"She's a terrorist?" The Ivan looked at him in disbelief.

"Don't think so. Probably part of a smuggling ring. We've had a couple of these in the last year or so. You can use radiation to improve the quality of diamonds. Problem is if you do it wrong, you end up with radioactive diamonds. It's usually not that bad, but somebody out there really screwed up. Damn things are hot as hell. She didn't give you anything did she?"

Both Ivans shook their heads like ugly puppets. The woman in yellow stepped over and scanned them. "They're clean. Not even residual."

"She's...gray." The smaller Ivan was fascinated.

"Sweats, pallor, all side effects of it. Look, we need to keep this out of the news, it'd practically crash the diamond market. I need some kind of contact information in case my superiors want to talk to you..."

I coughed, a mist of blood coloring the paramedic's shirt. The Senior Agent wheeled on the smaller paramedic, the Ivans forgotten. "Damn it. Get the goddamn stretcher."

The larger Ivan leaned cautiously for a better look. "So she's..."

The Senior Agent shook his head. "She's pretty far gone."

"Coughing blood. That means the respiratory system is almost done. If we can get her to the hospital before the seizures start you can at least ask..." The bigger paramedic tried to straighten me out, but my gut was rebelling and I could barely keep my breathing under control.

I arched my back, writhing and kicking, teeth chattering.

"Fuck! She's flatlining. Get her on the damn..."

"It's too damn late."

Through tear-blurred eyes, I could see the Ivans watch in transfixed horror as I was strapped onto the stretcher and wheeled out.

*****

The Blow-Off

I sat up as soon as the ambulance stopped and spat the blood capsule out. "Did they buy it?"

"Senior Agent" Punchy chuckled as he peeled off his false nose. 'Every damn bit of it. Nobody's going to convince them you didn't die of radiation poisoning right in front of them."

He pushed a sandwich into my hands. "Eat that. The effects are probably wearing off but this will help."

A few cautious bites of the sandwich later, my stomach relaxed and the chills stopped completely. "What the hell did you give me?"

"Doxycycline. It's an antibiotic used for malaria. It's pretty safe, but the one thing you don't do is take it on an empty stomach. Cold sweats, stomach cramps, chills. Makes you look and feel like death warmed over. You can't fake feeling that bad."

"You're sure they bought it?"

He snorted. "They're Russians; paranoia is in their DNA. They'd rather believe a secret government conspiracy cover-up than anything else. If they ask around and can't find any record of what happened, well, that would just confirm what they want to believe."

I pulled some wet wipes out and cleaned the raw onion juice off the back of my hand; I'd needed something to make my eyes red and watery.

Jojo walked around from the front, peeling off his 'bloody' shirt with its fake station patches and shaking his head. "Get your butt out of the rig, Sparkle; we gotta get this thing cleaned and back to the station house before anyone starts to wonder why maintenance is taking so long with it.'

Lulabelle walked up, lugging the Geiger counter. "Good things those idiots didn't know the difference between a biohazard suit and a radiation suit. You'll need this, Jojo."

He nodded. "We'll get it back in the locker. Where are the test pads?"

I pulled the test pad out of my jacket and Lulabelle pulled the other out of the pocket of the diamond-studded jeans. Jojo gathered them all up and began getting everything into cases while I slid out of the ambulance.

Punchy looked at the jeans. "It will take a while to move these. Diamonds this size are a bit touchy if you want anything like a good price for them. I still have a contact in one of the merchant houses. He owes me a couple of favors. Probably reset it all in old settings and claim they're old family pieces."

"I trust you, Punchy. Just get half of whatever my share is to Bobby and Anna when you can."

"I will; it's time for an exit. Everybody is scattering."

"Sorry. I didn't mean to do this."

He gave a tight half-smile. "Everybody needed the push, Sparkle. We were just getting stale here. Now everybody will have seed money to get started. Jojo and Boots are headed to Vegas. Lulabelle and me are headed to Florida to retire for good. You still headed to the West Coast?"

"I have to, a woman I know said she talked about me to some people and they're interested in me. I might just be able to go back to being a real clown."

"You'll never be anything else, Sparkle. It isn't in the paint, you know."

I smiled, even though I felt like crying. "Yeah, I remember, it's in the heart."

He smiled, maybe a touch sadly. "Make 'em laugh, kid."

*****

A little girl eyed me cautiously and I gave her my best friendly smile and scrunched my nose. It worked perfectly. She giggled.

Her mom looked at me trying to decide what my angle was. "Did you lose some kind of bet?"

"Not yet. I think I'm going to win this one."

"I thought, you know, you had to dress up as a clown."

I tilted my head. "I'm not dressed up as a clown. I am one. I'm a full-time medical clown. I work at some of the hospitals in the children's wards."

"They have those?"

"The pay is better than you think, and the perks to being a clown are amazing."

"Huh."

Winking at the little girl, I popped a carnation into my hand. I looked at the mom. "Do you mind?"

She shrugged and nodded. She tried to look unsurprised but I could see she was just as amazed by the sudden appearance of the flower as her daughter.