Neffi seemed pleased and relieved that business had returned to normal. The withered unwrapped mummy languidly leaned against the door to her office and bedroom. “No waiting over here, boys, if you’re looking for someone with experience.”
Conversation in the parlor paused for an instant before everyone went back to talking with the other girls.
Neffi saw me enter. “Mr. Chambeaux, you certainly are a frequent sight, though not much of a customer. Is that about to change tonight? Treat yourself?” She eyed me up and down with her burnt-ember eyes. “You look like you’ve had a rough day at the office.”
“Not just at the office. I’d like to see Ruth, please.”
The stretched, petrified brown skin covering Neffi’s skull bent back in a smile. “It’s about time you made up your mind. This is Ruth’s last night.”
“Has she found another job?”
“Don’t know, don’t care, but she’s on her own as of dawn.” She whistled a piercing note, like a hyperactive kid tooting on a broken flute. Ruth came out of the back room, looking small and defeated. She’d been crying, though her green eyes still caught the attention of everyone in the room. When she saw me, she brightened.
I pulled the wad of bills from my pocket. “I’ve got something for you.”
Naturally, that was the exact moment Sheyenne’s ghost drifted through the door, her face already angry and hurt. She took in the scene with a glance. “Why couldn’t you be honest with me, Beaux? You’re worse than Travis. At least his lies are so clumsy he might as well not even try.”
Before she could flit away, I said, “Wait, Spooky! I want you to see this.”
She hovered, held there by a thread of feelings for me, a thin thread that was likely to snap like a cobweb any second.
Ruth withdrew quickly, confused. “I don’t want to cause any trouble. I’ve already—”
I handed her the bills. “This money is for you to take a bus out of town. Leave the Full Moon, set up a new life for yourself. I want you to have a clean slate.” I turned to Sheyenne. “She didn’t mean to hurt your brother.”
“I never blamed her for Travis,” Sheyenne said. “He’s always been his own worst enemy. But you . . . you keep coming here.”
“Chambeaux may keep coming here, but he never does any . . . coming here.” Neffi cackled. “Never once hired any of my ladies. He might as well be a piece of furniture, like Mike over there.”
The golem’s clay face formed itself into a grin as he stood holding my hat over one upraised hand.
“It’s the truth,” I said. “Cross my heart.”
At that moment, somebody called in a bomb threat, which distracted us all.
Cinnamon had taken a break between clients. She answered the phone, then sat staring and growling until she slowly hung up. “There’s a bomb in the brothel—and it’s set to go off in fifteen minutes.”
“A bomb?” Neffi demanded. “Which one of you brought a bomb in here?”
“I didn’t,” said a hunchback and a ghoul in unison.
Cinnamon’s fur stood on end. “The caller said he was sending a warning from Senator Balfour—out of the goodness of his rotten little Grinch heart.”
Already skittish from being in the unnatural brothel in the first place, the human customers bolted out the door as Mike waved a polite farewell.
I started yelling. “Everybody evacuate! We need to clear the building.”
The mummy madam was enraged. “If there’s a bomb here, we need to find it right now!”
Hemlock and Nightshade pounded on the closed doors where the two zombie girls were currently occupied. “Come on, we gotta go!”
Aubrey’s muffled voice came from behind the door. “Just about finished!”
I looked at my watch, saw it was almost midnight—happy hour, the busiest time at the Full Moon. Someone had planned this well.
“We can’t risk searching the place,” I said to Neffi. “Get everyone out into the street. It’s too dangerous.”
“Fifteen minutes is fifteen minutes, if the timer is accurate,” Neffi insisted. “We’re going to look, and you’re going to help me. Girls, all of you—search your boudoirs for anything that looks like a bomb.”
None of us was an expert in explosives, but I hoped a ticking time bomb would be obvious. We yanked red velvet cushions off the sofas, looked in the drawers of the front desk.
Ruth and Sheyenne went together to search the back rooms. The two zombie girls poked their heads out of their rooms upstairs. “Nothing here—all clear.”
“It could have been a prank call to disrupt our business,” Neffi said. “That’d be par for the course for Senator Balfour.”
“Can’t risk it.” I looked at the madam. “How could someone get in here and plant a bomb?”
“We had a big night, more customers than ever before. Too many people to watch every minute.” Neffi overturned a wastebasket, looked behind a potted cactus. “But you can ask the girls—everyone who came in tonight left a satisfied customer. Do you think Balfour’s fanatics would go that deep undercover?”
I admitted it didn’t seem likely. Considering how much they despised monsters of all kinds, posing—and performing—as a randy client with one of the unnatural ladies did not seem like their style.
A few minutes later, Sheyenne appeared before me, her face urgent. “I hear a ticking sound—it’s coming from back there!”
We turned toward Neffi’s office and the bedroom beyond. “That’s just my grandfather clock,” the madam said. “Wait . . . that stopped a year ago.”
“No, this is something else,” Sheyenne insisted. “I can hear it.”
I did mention that she has good hearing for a ghost.
We followed her into the office, past the metal file cabinet, past the fish tank with dead fish, the silent grandfather clock, and into the old mummy’s bedchamber. Sheyenne circled the room, pausing at the bulky gold-encrusted sarcophagus where Neffi slept, the rocking chair, and finally she zeroed in on the last intact cat-sized sarcophagus.
“It’s here! And it’s ticking.”
“That’s Whiskers,” Neffi said. “Whiskers doesn’t tick.”
Then I spotted the yellowed package of a withered mummified cat tossed unceremoniously behind the rocking chair. “I think that’s Whiskers.”
Sheyenne slowly opened the cat coffin to reveal a small bundle of dynamite sticks wrapped with wires and duct tape, fastened to an old windup alarm clock. The hands were only a few minutes away from midnight.
Mike the golem stepped up to the office door, and as soon as Sheyenne revealed the bomb, he clomped forward and picked up the bundle of dynamite. “Let me take that. I’m just a golem.” He plodded away, carrying the bomb as it ticked inexorably toward its midnight detonation.
I ran after him. “Wait, Mike—when that explodes, it’ll destroy you.”
“That’s my job. Better me than anyone else.” He stepped out the door to where the other four golem guards had taken position, keeping customers from entering.