And most vamps still suffered from that twelve-hour-a-day “impotency handicap,” not that I’d dare use the phrase with Sansouci. Being an ex-reporter, accuracy was my middle name. Any one who survived as a vampire gigolo was good to go 24/7. His breed of New Model Vampire had been in the making since the 1930s, a daylight vamp who sipped from a willing harem of female donors. Killing them softly with sex, not death, and they loved him for it.
Not I.
“Why’d you come all the way over to the Inferno,” I prodded Sansouci, ”where you’re not welcome, from the Gehenna hotel, where you’re really not welcome?”
“We have a problem.”
We? I lifted my eyebrows.
Nick Charles, the official Inferno bar fly, rushed to my side. Yeah. That Nick Charles, the 1930s book and movie lush-detective with the witty wife and hyperactive terrier, Asta.
The entire trio was there, black-and-white and gray-all-over.
They were Cinema Simulacrums, aka SinCims. Vegas throngs with black-and-white movie characters overlaid on zombies to give the tourists some semi-“live” entertainment you could not only gawk at, but actually talk to. Which was happening right now.
“Look here, my good man.” Nick Charles accosted Sansouci with a hand on the concealed gun in his tuxedo jacket pocket. “You’re not to pester our Inferno patrons.”
Asta’s teeth were tugging on one leg of Sansouci’s black designer jeans while Nicky’s sleek wife, Nora, was running a languid hand inside his jean jacket and down his firm pecs and abs to frisk him. Friskily. Face it, Nick Charles has a retro-cool pencil-thin mustache, a tipsy wit and ace deductive ability, but he’s not exactly buff in modern terms.
“You have the most annoying allies, Street,” Sansouci said with an impressive shrug. “Get these reanimated vintage-film freakos off me. You and I have business to discuss.”
“I’m okay, Family Charles,” I assured my friends.
Then I ordered Brimstone Kisses from the human barman and Sansouci and I adjourned to a table for two.
“I’m actually celebrating a private party here with some of my CinSim pals,” I said, sipping the spicy cocktail of my own concoction. “What’s going wrong at the Gehenna Hotel now?”
“Yeah,” Sansouci agreed, “After the incident when you last visited, Cicereau does seem accident-prone, particularly when it comes to the supernatural set.” He slugged down my liquor-loaded concoction in three gulps. “When are you going to invent a cocktail in my honor?”
“You don’t claim the Vampire Sunrise?”
“I’m not that kind of vamp.”
“The ‘Sansouci’ sounds comatose. Hardly you.”
“More like Cicereau lately,” Sansouci said.
“You saying he’s comatose?”
“That would be nice, if you could arrange it. I know a few dozen vamps who’d like to catch him snoozing and kill him without tasting a drop of his rotten blood. But, no, he’s the same power-hungry, brutal, dumb mob boss as ever. Except he’s been cursed.”
“Cursed? Like bespelled?”
“Maybe that way. On the surface, it looks like a vengeful dead dame’s got him on her radar.”
“And I can help...how?”
“You got rid of the daughter he offed. He thinks you’re the one to banish this new dame.”
“What do you mean, me? I know what crimes against women Cesar Cicereau is capable of. He tried to force me into his Gehenna magic act when I first hit town, playing on my exact likeness to that hot CSI corpse, Lilith, but he gave up that idea.”
“You weren’t as cooperative as he likes his women to be.”
“You mean alive and kicking.”
“I do. Not a problem for me, though.”
“Why can’t you handle this?”
“He won’t listen to any of his pack, and I’m the hostage help, so I rank even lower. You’re the perfect undercover operative to figure out what’s going on.”
“But you’re still his top enforcer.”
“Because I can still out-kick werewolf pack butt. Just because my...dining partners are voluntary doesn’t mean I can’t unleash the vampire bloodlust that kept me alive, so to speak, for seven centuries or so.”
“A real Jekyll and Hyde.”
Sansouci nodded. “The best…and worst…of both worlds. Don’t forget that, Delilah, while you admire my designer sunglasses.”
Sansouci had pulled out opaque-black Gucci shades with titanium frames. Dark glasses only began to be commonly used during the Great Depression, when some vampires learned that keeping their eyes shaded allowed them to stroll around unsizzled by broad daylight. Once unhumans went public after the last Millennium, the vampires were even more eager to live “normal” lives without being labeled as serial killers, which tended to get them hunted down, staked, and beheaded.
“Let’s take a trip down the Strip,” Sansouci suggested.
“Cicereau’s still got it in for me, and I’m not dressed for work.”
Sansouci eyed my party get-up. “The boss is so many decades behind the times that outfit will lull him into thinking you’re a nice girl. This looks to be another corporate exorcism job. He’ll pay you well to get the freaks off his back.”
“Like the teenaged daughter he murdered back in the forties?”
“Like Loretta, yeah. With werewolves, alpha pack power is thicker than blood.”
“I’ll do a meet with Cicereau,” I said, “but that’s not saying I’ll take the job.”
Still, I wondered what fresh “ghosts” were bugging the Vegas mogul. And I knew my carotid artery was safe in Sansouci’s company, if not much else.
“YOU WANT YOUR CAR?” asked Manny, a demon formally known as Manniphilpestiles, and my Inferno parking valet buddy. His goatish yellow eyes sized up Sansouci. “The visiting Gehenna Hotel fur-back owns wheels?”
“At least I don’t leave scales on the leather upholstery.” Sansouci eyed Manny’s case of all-over orange psoriasis. “Off-black Porsche Boxter with terra-cotta-leather interior,” Sansouci spit out, handing Manny a claim ticket.
“Shallow and overrated,” Manny sniffed. “Figures.” He jumped into an idling Lamborghini and raced it up the ramp.
Vegas supernaturals can get edgy with each other. Being in an entertainment venue usually keeps that under control. I could charm or bribe the lower-order supers to my investigative causes. Manny was a demon who’d made it all the way to “pal,” like the Invisible Man CinSim, who’d also saved my skin. I wouldn’t trust Manny with my soul, though, a recognizable commodity in Vegas long before the Millennium Revelation had brought the supers out of the closet.
“Minor-order demon punk,” Sansouci muttered.
“A poor thing, but mine own,” I agreed. “Your red-orange car interior color screams uber-carnivore. Manny will certainly know whose name to shout around if I turn up missing.”
Sansouci shook his head. “I’ll get you back here in one untoothed piece, if Cicereau’s newest problem children don’t do you in.”
THE GEHENNA WAS A sprawling hotel-casino that rose from the flat Nevada landscape, a dark, glassy tidal wave frozen in mid-crash. It seemed poised to devour, like huge wolfish jaws. Inside, an elegantly dark and menacing forest theme prevailed, interpreted in green marble, wood tones from black to gilt, and lurid lighting glittering like migratory flights of fireflies in the casino areas. There was where Theme Décor met Taking Care of Business.
Even today you can’t enter a Vegas hotel without the raw sights, sounds, and smells of a casino assaulting your senses from the common business areas of the registration desk to the theater and restaurants.
More than drink glasses are sweating in these dark, icy mazes of flashing lights and chiming slot machines spread across acres of puke-patterned carpeting. Greed is the color of money in Las Vegas. The overpowering smell is well-salted deodorant.
Over the clanging, chiming, whooping, coins-colliding noises programmed into the slot machines came a faint, high, s
weet trilling that made me look up to find the source.
I backed out of the casino’s clang into the main aisle to hear it better, so mystified and eager to trace the sound that Sansouci had to jerk me out of the way of an oncoming luggage cart.
“So you’ve noticed it already,” he said.
“Noticed what?”
“That’s what you’re here to tell Cicereau.”
I also noticed that even slot machine patrons were looking up for the source of the singing after every button push, not staring at the reeling blurred icons that would tell them whether they’d won or not.
“That sound is…oddly angelic,” I said, “for an enterprise sporting the hellish name of Gehenna.”
Sansouci shrugged. “That sugary-sweet high pitch drives the werewolves crazy. Their hearing is acute and this stuff never stops.”
“And you? You don’t find it…mesmerizing?”
“I do the mesmerizing,” he said with a mock-modest smirk. “Besides, I dig smoky altos. Coo ‘I’ve Got You under My Skin’ at me and I’ll listen. Otherwise. It’s all noise.”
“I can’t even pick up a tune as a hitchhiker,” I said. “My tin ear tells me we’re hearing a heavenly…soprano.”
“Thin soup. Sopranos always sound to me like they’re being throttled,” he added.
“That’s because most guys don’t like opera.”
“Do you?”
“Uh, no,” I admitted, “but I must confess I find this endless…aria-like perfume in the air addictive.”
“Good,” Sansouci said. “Find out where the sonic Chanel No. Five is coming from and end it. You’ll get Cicereau’s eternal thanks—for about five minutes and a few thou—and I’ll be glad to have him off my back, totally non-hairy, despite the demon parking punk’s jibe.”
“As if I’d care to know. This trilling sound isn’t coming over the hotel sound system?”
“First place I looked. No. And I checked the security control room too. You pioneered those routes when Cicereau’s daughter’s ghost took over the hotel audio-visual systems until you exorcised her.”
“Loretta had good reason to haunt her murderous father, and I’m no exorcist. I just figured out how to make some other supernatural gag her. That’s what I am, a lowly human problem-solver. Who is this superb-voiced siren?”
“Someone or something that will shortly drive away the paying customers and the Gehenna’s wolf pack mad. I wouldn’t care, but the vampires aren’t ready to move on Cicereau yet.”
“Some are planning to?” This was hot news in the old town tonight.
Sansouci’s grin was wicked. “That’s for me to know and you to find out. You’re the paranormal investigator. Investigate.”
He gave me a little shove in the taffeta bustle, so I was propelled back onto the marble-floored hotel concourse. Sansouci. Always the gentleman vampire muscle.
I hopped into line behind another bellman-propelled luggage cart, protected from the milling crowds, and headed for the main atrium circled by elevators to the Gehenna’s various hotel floors and condo towers.
The haunting soprano voice kept me gazing up and around like a geek at an electronics exposition tripping over my own feet, even though being gauche enough to tangle your killer heels is a Vegas mortal sin.
Being tone deaf doesn’t make for musical expertise. Yet this eerie, sweet as Heavenly Hash soprano voice had me hooked. Since I’m also Black Irish, I was a Celtic woman deep down. I didn’t even notice that I’d slowed to a stop again to listen until a couple dozen tourists dragging wheeled bags jammed up behind me, screeching annoyance at my back.
Before the rude crowds could mess my crinolines, they suddenly stared upward too, shouting and pointing and then diving onto the marble floor all around until I was the only upright long-stemmed rose in the garden.
That’s when I spotted a large, dark blot streaking down toward me—an ape in a Mad Hatter outfit wearing a fright wig of coarse hair instead of a hat swung near on a bungee cord.
Before I could duck away, a huge hairy hand snagged me around the corseted Audrey Hepburn waist and swung us both up, up, up several floors to the sustained high-note accompaniment of the heavenly voice and my furious alto aria of protest.
In seconds, my powerful captor used the upper body strength of a circus strongman to perch us like gargoyles atop the last railing of the Gehenna Hotel’s towering atrium.
First, I checked his grip on the thick brass rail. His feet curved like talons around the metal, but wore soft black leather shoes curled up at the toes and down at the heel, slippers Santa’s elves would wear.
My gaze inventoried the odd bits of wardrobe clothing his squat distorted body, then studied a pale bony array of bulbous cheeks and forehead and forked chin, every feature somehow pulled off center like a melted plastic mask.
One eye was a blank bulge. Rather than a mouth, the creature had a broken-toothed maw. A bushy eyebrow over that maliciously bright single eye finished off a face twisted into a grimace a gargoyle would flee, shrieking.
Even at this suicidal height, I’d have pushed off from my captor just to avoid an inescapable double jeopardy of death by asphyxiation—the mixed reek of garlic and onion breath.
While I calculated how to tip us backward onto the safety of the balcony fronting the elevators, the powerful arms spun me sideways to lift me above the misshapen head like a trophy.
While my stomach made an imaginary drop of forty stories and the siren’s voice soared to higher melodic peaks up here, my captor’s terrifying maw shouted a word over and over to the crowd below.
“Sank you, Harry!” or some such gibberish, spewed from his harsh throat.
He snarled down at the gaping crowd, repeating the word or phrase as a boast…or challenge. I clung to the sleeves of his long arms as my personal King Kong brandished my helpless torso like a weapon.
Then he swept me down again, clasping me doll-like to his barrel chest. In a moment his apelike feet had pushed off the railing. We swung out over the gaping crowd on the hard marble hundreds of feet below.
My stomach did another swan dive.
DEATH BY IMPLOSION WAS not on my adventure travel wish list. My fingers clutched the wide lapels of his organ grinder’s monkey jacket. He seemed eerily at home swinging apelike on a rope, and was still gabbling that guttural challenge to the gawkers below.
In times of unthinkable danger, the mind decides to sweat the small stuff. All I could focus on was that the crowd sure could see up my full skirts and crinolines to…my—good thing I’d been brought up to anticipate a sudden car accident and always wore clean underwear.
Only then did I see what we swung from…not a Cirque du Soleil bungee cord, but an untethered…steel elevator cable. Oh, lord. Were innocent civilians in one of the elevator shafts dangling from the other end of the snapped steel thread?
I needed to get free and find out. So, for motivation and an adrenaline surge, I ramped up the indignation of it all. I’d been swept off my feet before by far more attractive and supernaturally powerful forces than this scruffy tent-show acrobat.
I grabbed tight to the nearest long, powerful forearm and twirled head over heels like a trapeze artist. That broke his grip and spun us into a tangled bundle. I hadn’t expected the creature’s response.
Instead of dropping us to the nearest balcony like any rational madman, he swung us back over the railing, past the exposed solid ground of the hallway…through a pair of open elevator doors…and into the naked elevator shaft.
No enclosed car awaited inside…only empty space.
Screeching triumph, the creature swung from one rising or lowering elevator cable to another, ducking under or sailing over the stately sinking and rising cars, his rhythm sure and athletic. He Tarzan of the Apes, me Jane.
That was a distracting fantasy, but I remained in mortal danger, and I was one of the few mortal forces still left around this town since the supernaturals had come out to play.
Visions of
imminent collision with speeding elevator cars made me again clutch the demented monster for dear, if questionable, life....
At last we’d descended to the deserted equipment bays below the elevator shafts. Here, all was as dark and empty and cold as the hotel-casino’s public spaces had been crowded and brightly lighted. The icy artificial air-conditioning up top had been replaced by a subtle subterranean chill.
Solid ground was the ancient limestone that underlies the desert sand.
As I caught my breath, I heard the unknown siren’s unearthly song, trilling madly. I now thought of it as a melodic scream for help. Soon I might be making such noises myself.
While rows of elevator cars clanked continually above us as they came and went, I spied some pine-scented Gehenna bed linens nudged into a nest on the hard ground, and room service plates and food stockpiled by the same limestone wall.
“Safe. You. Here,” the creature grunted. “Thank-you-very.”
Thank-you-very. Was that the gibberish he’d bellowed from the peak of the atrium?
I suspected his mumbled signature phrase was a clue. This mind-boggling, impulsive creature must be a key to the mystery I’d been hired to solve.
So what if that notion was only a hunch. That’s what I’m paid to follow.
Right now, he was shoving the trays of room service leavings toward me. This must be what he subsisted on, poor inarticulate thing. I eyed the fag ends of cocktail shrimps and the abandoned crescents of gnawed cheeseburgers and pizza crusts. I supposed other handicapped persons on the fringes of the Las Vegas Strip survived on such leavings of the rich and famous.
His huge hands thrust a tray of the “choicest” pieces at me.
I’d only just now been kidnapped. I’d had no time to develop the hunger of the truly needy, but I always had time to appreciate the generosity of the easily ignored.
“Thank you very,” I said, smiling and nodding, as I plucked a couple brown-edged celery sticks from the array and nibbled politely.
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