She gave a cry of dismay and reached across the vast front seat for her purse, only to have it slip off the edge and tumble into the Grand Canyon below. The light at Halsted and Chicago turned red. Her hair was sticking to the back of her neck, and more curls were springing up. She tried to do her yoga breathing, but she'd only been to one class, and it wasn't effective. Why, when Annabelle's economic future was at stake, had Mouse picked this day to pass out under her car?

She crawled into the Loop. 10:59. More of Chicago's permanent road construction. She passed the Daley Center. She didn't have time to follow her customary practice of cruising the streets until she found a metered parking space large enough to accommodate Sherman's bulk. Instead she wheeled into the first exorbitantly expensive parking garage she could find, threw Sherman's keys at the attendant, and took off at a trot.

:05. No need to panic. She'd simply explain about Mouse. Surely the Python would understand.

Or not.

A blast of air-conditioning hit her as she entered the lobby of the high-rise office building. 11:08. The elevator was blessedly empty, and she punched the button for the fourteenth floor.

"Don't let him intimidate you," Molly had told her over the phone. "The Python feeds on fear."

Easy for Molly to say. Molly was sitting at home with a hottie football player husband, a great career of her own, and two adorable children.

The doors crept shut. Annabelle caught sight of herself in the mirrored wall and gave a hiss of dismay. Her raw silk suit had turned into a limp mass of buttercup wrinkles, dirt smudged the side of the skirt, and the lipstick smear on the lapel stood out like a light-up Christmas pin. Worst of all, her hair was uncoiling from the Aqua Net curl by curl, with the hair spray weighing it down just enough so that the escaping locks hung lank around her face like bedsprings that had been tossed from a tenement window and left in an alley to rust.