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The door next to her opened abruptly, and the two tough-faced women came in. “Look what we got here, Bonni Lynn,” the one named Cleo sneered.
“Well, if it ain't Miss Rich Bitch,” Bonni replied. “What's the matter, honey? Did you get tired of working the hotel trade and decide to come down here to slum it?”
Francesca's jaw tightened. These awful women had pushed her far enough. Lifting her chin, she stared at Bonni's harsh plum eye shadow. “Have you been this rude from birth, or is it a more recent occurrence?”
Cleo laughed and turned to Bonni. “My, my. Didn't she just tell you off.” She studied Francesca's cosmetic case. “What do you have in there that's so important?”
“None of your business.”
“Got your jewels in there, honey?” Bonni suggested. “The sapphires and diamonds your boyfriends buy you? Tell me, how much do you charge to pull a trick?”
“A trick!” Francesca couldn't mistake her meaning and before she could stop herself, her hand shot out and slapped the woman across her pancaked cheek. “Don't you ever—”
She didn't get any further. With a howl of rage, Bonni curled her fingers into talons and whipped them through the air, ready to grab two handfuls of Francesca's hair. Francesca instinctively thrust her cosmetic case forward, using it to block the other woman's movement. The case caught Bonni at the waist, knocking the wind out of her and forcing her to teeter for a moment on her imitation alligator heels before she lost her balance. As she tumbled to the floor, Francesca felt a moment of primitive satisfaction that she'd finally been able to punish someone for all the dreadful things that had happened to her that day. The moment fled as she saw the look on Cleo's face, and realized that she had put herself in actual danger.
She rushed out the door, but Cleo caught her and grabbed her wrist before she reached the jukebox. “No, you don't, bitch,” she snarled, pulling her back toward the lavatory.
“Help!” Francesca cried, as her entire life flashed before her. “Please, someone, help me!”
She heard an unpleasant masculine laugh, and as Cleo shoved her forward, she realized that no one was leaping to her defense. Those two awful women planned to physically assault her in the lavatory, and no one seemed to care! Panicked, she swung her cosmetic case, intent on pushing Cleo away, but hitting someone's tattoo instead. He yelled.
“Get that case away from her,” Cleo demanded, her voice harsh with outrage. “She just slapped Bonni.”
“Bonni had it coming,” Pete called out over the final chorus of “Rhinestone Cowboy” and the comments of the interested onlookers. To Francesca's overwhelming relief, he started toward her, obviously intent on rescue. And then she realized the man with the tattooed arm had other ideas.
“Stay out of this!” the tattoo called over to Pete as he wrenched the case from her hands. “This is between the girls.”
“No!” Francesca cried. “It's not between the girls. Actually, I don't even know this person, and I—”
She screamed as Cleo sank her hands into her hair and began twisting her head in the general direction of the lavatory. Her eyes began to tear and her neck snapped backward. This was barbaric! Awful! They would murder her!
In that instant, she felt several strands of her hair being pulled from her scalp. Her beautiful chestnut hair! Reason left her and blind fury took over. She went wild, releasing a screech as she swung out. Cleo grunted as Francesca's hand caught her in an abdomen that had lost its tone. The pressure on Francesca's scalp immediately eased, but she had only a moment to catch her breath before she saw Bonni coming toward her, ready to pick up where Cleo had left off. A table crashed to the floor nearby, glass shattering. She was dimly aware that the fight had spread, and that Pete had leaped to her rescue, wonderful Pete of the plaid shirt and beer belly, wonderful, marvelous, adorable Pete!
“You bitch!” Bonni cried, reaching out for anything she could grab, which happened to be the pearl buttons set into the cocoa trim on Francesca's greige Halston blouse. The front gave way; the shoulder seam split. Once again Francesca felt her hair being pulled, and once again she swung, locking her other hand around Bonni's head and grabbing some hair herself.
Suddenly it seemed as if the fight had surrounded her— chairs scraped over the floor, a bottle flew through the air, someone screamed. She felt one of the fingernails on her right hand tear. Ribbons of fabric hung from the front of her blouse, exposing her ecru lace bra, but she had no time to worry about modesty as Bonni's sharp rings scraped her neck. Francesca gritted her teeth against the pain and pulled harder. At the same time she had the sudden and horrifying realization that she—Francesca Serritella Day, darling of the international set, pet of the society columnists, almost Princess of Wales—was at the heart, the very center, the absolute core, of a barroom brawl.
Across the room, the door of the Blue Choctaw swung open and Skeet walked in, followed by Dallie Beaudine. Dallie stood there for a moment, took in what was happening, saw the people involved, and shook his head with disgust. “Aw, hell.” With a long, put-upon sigh, he began to shoulder his way through the crowd.
Never in her entire life had Francesca been so glad to see anyone, except at first she didn't realize it was him. When he touched her shoulder, she released Bonni, swung around, and hit him as hard as she could in the chest.
“Hey!” he yelled, rubbing the spot where she'd landed. “I'm on your side... I guess.”
“Dallie!” She threw herself into his arms. “Oh, Dallie, Dallie, Dallie! My wonderful Dallie! I can't believe it's you!”
He pulled her off. “Easy, Francie, you're not out of here yet. Why the hell—”
He never finished. Someone who looked like an extra in an old Steve Reeves movie came at him with a right hook, and Francesca watched in horror as Dallie sprawled on the floor. Spotting her cosmetic case sitting in splendid isolation on the jukebox, she snatched it up and banged it into the side of the awful man's head. To her horror, the clasp gave way, and she watched helplessly as her wonderful blushers and shadows and creams and lotions flew about the room. A box of her specially blended translucent powder sent up a scented cloud that soon had everyone coughing and sliding and quickly put a damper on the fight.
Dallie staggered to his feet, threw a couple of punches of his own, and then grabbed her arm. “Come on. Let's get out of here before they decide to eat you for a bedtime snack.”
“My makeup!” She scrambled toward a cake of frosted peach eye shadow, even though she knew it was a ridiculous thing to do with her blouse falling off, a bloody scratch on her neck, two fingernails broken, and her very life in danger. But recovering the eye shadow suddenly became more important to her than anything in the world, and she was willing to fight them all to get it back.
He whipped his arm around her waist and lifted her feet off the floor. “To hell with your makeup!”
“No! Put me down!” She had to have the eye shadow. Little by little, every single item she owned was being taken away from her, and if she let just one more thing disappear, one more possession slip out of her life, she might very well disappear herself, fading away like the Cheshire cat until nothing was left, not even her teeth.
“Come on, Francie!”
