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She’d scampered to her bedroom like an excited child, yanked open her dresser drawer, snatched up her standard set of black cotton panties and a matching tube-bra that held her small boobs firm against her lithe body.
And as she felt the lining of her panties press tight against her pussy, Scarlet knew exactly where the LSD would go.
It was perfect. The vagina was an excellent entryway to the body, a hungry little mouth that would easily and efficiently absorb the colorless, odorless, non-staining, non-burning, undetectable dose of LSD needed to send O’Donnell on a one-way trip to hell.
Within minutes Scarlet was dressed and ready, a massive dose tucked away in her pocket in an easy-to-dispense silicone squeeze-tube, a pair of almost-invisible transparent polyurethane gloves snapped on tight.
And now here she was at the Raj Palace Hotel.
Scarlet stepped out of the laundry-room shadows, checked the service-desk computer again, her heart thrumming when she saw that her number had been called.
O’Donnell’s clothes were ready for pickup.
Scarlet feverishly checked the lot number, then hurried to where the ready-to-deliver packages of plastic-wrapped clothes were stacked. She quickly found the right package, scanned her surroundings to make sure nobody was watching, then carefully peeled open the edge of the plastic and slipped out O’Donnell’s panties.
They were a black cotton blend with a reinforced panty-lining. Perfect, Scarlet thought as she deftly dribbled the liquid LSD lengthwise along the absorbent cotton lining that would press up against O’Donnell’s slit. Scarlet emptied the squeeze tube, watching with a tingle of anticipation as the shiny drops disappeared into the black fabric like depth-charges sinking beneath the dark waves of a night-sea.
O’Donnell would lose her mind within thirty minutes of putting on those panties, Scarlet thought as she re-folded the underwear, slipped them back between the blouse and the bra, sealed the plastic with her gloved fingernail, and placed the package back on the stack.
Then Scarlet slunk away into the shadows, took the service elevator up, got off two floors beneath Wagner’s room, then padded up the service stairwell. She took a position at the top of the stairwell, peeked through the small glass window cut into the metal fire-door, scanned the empty carpeted corridor lined with closed room-doors.
Wagner and O’Donnell’s room was in plain sight, across the corridor from the stairwell, two doors down.
Almosttooclose. She’d need to be careful.
Scarlet took a long breath, exhaled slow and easy to calm her racing heart. She touched the four-inch killing blade nestled in its resin sheath at the small of her back.
Then she leaned against the wall behind the metal fire-door, her body angled so she could just about see O’Donnell and Wagner’s room door, keep an eye out for when the unwitting attendant showed up with the dosed payload.
Now all she had to do was wait.
Wait as time counted itself down to zero.
To that moment when Scarlet would get her first glimpse of the poor doomed girl named India O’Donnell.
That doomed girl whose eyes still felt strangely familiar.
Too damn familiar.
And that sickening sense of familiarity only rose as the cosmic clock ticked silently away in the shadows of Scarlet’s mind, and when the hourglass-sand ran out and the heavenly chimes of fate sounded, Scarlet watched that door open down the misty corridors of lost time and realized with heart-stopping certainty that this wasnother first glimpse of that dark eyed, raven haired, doomed little girl named India.
Because there was no mistaking that dreadful sense of returning.
Returning to something or someplace or someone.
Scarlet had seen those eyes before.
Seen them looking up from a tiny round face pressed tight against Scarlet’s milk-heavy left breast once upon a long time ago.
Looking up at Mama, those eyes big and wide and alive.
Big with awe and adoration.
Wide with wonder and expectation.
Alive with anger and accusation.
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