Free Duncan Delaney and the Cadillac of Doom by A. L. Haskett Page A

me. So buzz off. I’m talking to someone.”
    Sheila Rascowitz glared at Duncan. He smiled uncertainly. She shouldered him aside and joined a woman dressed like a member of the Hell’s Angels ladies’ auxiliary. The other woman’s name was Samantha MacDonald, and she was an outwardly feminine accountant by day and butch dyke on a Harley by night. She never hooked up romantically with Sheila because neither was willing to sit on the back seat of the other’s bike. Sheila gestured and Samantha stared. Pris took Duncan’s hand.
    “I need a drink,” she said.
    They walked to a table where croissants and crackers lay beside paté and cheese. A white jacketed waiter supplied plastic glasses of Chardonnay, though at the time Duncan could only distinguish with limited success between Mexican and American beers.
    “She makes me so mad sometimes,” Pris said.
    Sheila found the doorman and spoke in his ear. Sven studied the room.
    “Let’s get some air,” Duncan said.
    Outside a string quartet played Bach. Women wearing pearls wandered around a fountain, arm in arm with men brandishing checkbooks.
    “My dad used to call daisies sunshine on sticks. You look like that.” Pris looked confused. Duncan felt clumsy. “I meant it as a compliment.”
    Pris smiled. “Then I’ll take it as one.”
    Duncan peered into the galley. Sheila and the Swede were nowhere in sight. “Would you like to see my paintings?”
    “I’d love to.”
    They found his canvases in an alcove by the toilets. The cards beneath read Roscoe and Drive By, with his name below the titles.
    “They should have hung them above the urinals,” he said. “At least then someone might see them.”
    Pris squeezed his arm. “I think they’re wonderful.”
    Duncan’s annoyance evaporated. His heart sprouted wings and fluttered up his chest to lodge in his throat.
    “I’d like to paint you,” he chanced.
    Pris shook her head. “I don’t think so.”
    Duncan felt as if his heart had been pierced by twenty gauge bird shot, as if the giddy wind stirred by her proximity had been knocked from his punctured lungs by her denial, like his wings were ripped off and his carcass had fallen bloody to be trampled in the gutter.
    “Could we at least have dinner sometime and talk about it?”
    “No!” Pris yelled.
    Duncan doubted the invitation merited so harsh a response, and he quailed at the severity of the rejection. When he was lifted into the air and thrown bodily into the men’s room, he realized her exclamation was not meant for him. He hit the tiles with a squeak. He rose as Sven came at him, eyes angrily furrowed. Duncan hit him as hard as he could across the jaw with absolutely no effect.
    “Uh oh,” said Duncan.
    The Teutonic giant lifted him like a sack of rice. “You are not welcome here.”
    Sven was preparing to throw Duncan head-first into a urinal when Pris kicked him square between the legs from behind. His eyes crossed and he dropped Duncan. Sven grabbed his genitals and sank gasping to the floor, his face white as mold on last week’s bread. Sheila grabbed Pris from behind. Pris elbowed her in the gut. It degenerated from there. Angela, on her way to show Duncan’s paintings to the gallery’s owner, found the four tangled on the floor as Sven applied a choke hold on Duncan.
    “Duncan!” Angela cried.
    “You mean …” the gallery owner was a small, well-dressed man of sixty, with worried eyes and expensively coiffed and dyed hair.
    “Yes! That’s Duncan Delaney!”
    “Sven!” the owner cried. “What have you done?”
    Sven relaxed the choke hold. “I thought he was an intruder.”
    “No,” Angela said, “he’s one of my artists.”
    Duncan stood and helped Pris up. Sheila slapped his proffered hand away. Sven tried to rise, but Pris’s kick had caused minor structural damage to the genitals.
    “You’re fired,” the owner said, adding the insult.
    “He thought he was doing his job,” Duncan said. “That’s all.” He