And Chelsea is still doing Merry Gentry, here
So Jason is so fucking stupid it literally takes Anita the good part of two chapters to help him put on latex gloves.
Dolph shows up. He's another one of those characters where LKH tries to give him a personality by assigning him arbitrary physical and/or mannerism traits. In Dolph's case, he happens to be 6'8. That and hating like every supernatural creature out there is the entirety of his character, which is especially offensive considering he heads the woo woo department. That would be like if a white supremacist presided over a case of racially motivated police brutality...oh wait. Sorry LKH, maybe you're on to something here.
That said Dolph is also the only sane one, because he recognizes how ridiculous it is to have this random civilian at his crime scene. Not that anyone will use this juicy fact in court later, since court never seems to happen in these books, and even if it did everyone is dangerously incompetent anyway. Like, I'm pretty sure they all need to live in a totally round room where the only toys are stuffed animals and you're only allowed plastic cutlery to eat with.
Jason has this remarkable insight to share with us, re: the gloves which are practically a character in and of themselves at this point: "how come it feels wet and powdery all at the same time?"
Now, I am a huge White Wolf fan. I mean, shit's crazy. I have like three hundred World of Darkness books. In their Werewolf: the Apocalypse line, they had three breeds of werewolf. One of them was called the lupus, i.e. a werewolf that began life as a normal wolf. If Jason were a lupus, this scene might be at least understandable, if inane. Presuming this concept doesn't exist in Anitaverse, though, there's really no excuse for this display. Especially since it's sheer bland idiocy is turning my brain in to a particularly thin and unappetizing gruel.
So Anita tries to tell Dolph that she can't have Jason just go sit on the porch because "what if someone recognizes him? Do you really want the headlines to read werewolves attack suburbia?"
YOU JUST WALKED THROUGH A FIELD OF REPORTERS WITH HIM YOU GODDAMN FOOL WHAT IS THIS BOOK
Okay but the awesome thing is that Dolph is not having any of Anita's shit. She won't be parted from Jason so he bounces them both from the scene.
Oh, except I'm supposed to think Dolph is a nasty bigot because he's sick of Anita's shit. Anita delivers the line "you bastard" which reads to me as completely emotionally dead.
Anita tries to tell Dolph he can't do that shit at his own crime scene. Dolph grabs her and drags her upstairs to see whatever the murderer left. There's a bunch of blood and gore. Whatever. Things apparently smell like hamburger, but that is definitely not what death smells like. The dead void their bowels and bladder, for one thing, and if your hamburger meat smells like fecal matter and rotting viscera then you need to find a new butcher.
Dolph is manhandling Anita and practically rubbing her face in the blood, because "one of your friends did this." This is not cool. But here comes Clive Perry, Darky McSoftspoken, to tell Dolph the little lady has had enough. You see, he's "African American" and "one of the most soft-spoken men I'd ever met." So basically Clive is a privileged white lady's fantasy about what a good black man should be, that is, soft spoken, light skinned, submissive, and only on stage when Miss Anita needs rescuing. Funny how LKH never bothers to describe anyone as white, isn't it? That's just assumed to be the case.
Dolph keeps jerking Anita around because every male in this series is a gross stereotype of one kind or another. Clive tries to intervene again and Dolph emphasizes that the crime appears to have been committed by some type of shapeshifter, which he's hell bent on holding Anita personally responsible for. Here's a thought: if you think she's compromised because of her ties to the supernatural world, why don't you just fucking fire her instead of assaulting her?
Anita hits Dolph till he lets her go. She falls in the blood, which almost soaks through her panties.
"then my knee smeared in something that wasn't blood."
This is so horrifying Anita scrambles out in to the hall and throws up on the "pale" carpet, because that's a necessary detail when your MC is hoarking all over the place. So what is this thing that isn't blood? A liver? Eyeballs? A spot of tea? Tapioca pudding?
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