I am Baaack! Part 13

In cold-blooded fury, Joan tensed, preparing to launch herself at Ed. Ed noticed, smiled viciously, and started to squeeze the trigger. Ed died, smiling with a bullet hole right in the middle of her forehead. When Joan looked down in surprise, Ed was sprawled on the ground on her back with her right arm outstretched. Her hand was covering the left hand of her partner, Lou; partners in death, as in life. Where had the bullet come from?

But then she thought of Dainie. The child must be terrified! She whirled around to find a man standing where Dainie had been. Oh, he was a man wearing makeup with his hair in twin ponytails. He was a man wearing a little girl's pink party dress and rather large Mary Jane shoes on his feet. He was a man clutching a doll in his left hand. But he was VERY definitely a man, and he was holding a VERY lethal derringer in his right hand, pointed toward the floor. "Hello, Joan," said Adain Ben Hariesh.

When Lou burst through the mirror door, Virtual Dainie, being a little girl with a great deal of common sense, had rushed to the virtual rec room, flung open the virtual door, and in a very unladylike manner shouted - virtually - "Uncle Adain, get your butt out here and take over!" - which he did.

As Adain surveyed the scene, he realized that Dainie was being discounted by the only bad girl left alive. Still clutching Sukie in his left hand and using her as cover, he used his right to reach inside the collar of his dress, down under his lacy cami, down to his left breast form and into the unadhesived pocket left there, the pocket where his Glockenspiel 5mm two-shot derringer rested. Taking another look, he noted that Dainie was still being ignored by Ed, who was concentrating on Stella's death scene. He drew the derringer, and it cleared his dress collar just as Joan tensed to attack. He smoothly aimed and fired in one swift motion.

"Better check." Adain smiled, ".Aunt Robbie." He pointed, and Joan, her mind in turmoil, let the doctor part of her take over. She knelt by Robbie and checked her breathing, which was even. She pulled her eyelids back and noted that her pupils were not dilated.