Neon Noir

by Carole Nelson Douglas

  I sighed. Deeply, madly, truly. Snow and I had cherished a heavy-duty mutual loathe-hate relationship since I came to Las Vegas several months ago in search of my double, my possible sister, Lilith Quince. She was my mirror-image and mirrors had turned out to be my medium after the Millennium Revelation pulled back the curtains on the supernaturals co-existing among us.

  Call me one weird sister, but I’ve never been into male sex symbols. I’m not talking about the planet Mars with the provocative little arrow. It’s blatant booty calls to screaming female fans for profit that insult my intelligence.

  Elvis would have swiveled in vain and the latest rock god would have to get his swoons and squees from some other chick.

  Cocaine, aka Snow, played Pride incarnate as lead singer in his Seven Deadly Sins band. He ended each show by enslaving his mosh-pit groupies with a post-concert Brimstone Kiss that had them fainting and coming back again and again—and never getting another smooch.

  What a racket to sell tickets. He thought he was so hot. And so did legions of women, drat them for mindless zombies! I’m no prude, just against con artists. The least he do was could sleep with the poor love-sick fans, but he never did, just teased them and left them panting.

  Jerk!

  This was not about Snow, I reminded myself while squirming into the steel-studded vampire-fighting catsuit I owed to the Inferno security wardrobe and a previous job. The shiny black fabric was ultra-Kevlar, suppler and stronger than leather and up to facing down any wayward supernatural capable of turning an entire hotel and all its contents…well, upside down.

  My silver familiar, a souvenir of my ongoing war with Snow, left its default position as a thin hip chain under the James Bondish wetsuit and eeled down a skin-tight sleeve. It emerged clamped on my left wrist as a pair of handcuffs locked onto the same arm.

  A real “statement” look. “I’m coming to lock you away.”

  I stuffed my feet into Ed Hardy motorcycle boots and emerged through the closet door as the pixie winked out. The Invisible Man, a learned scientist in his day, gave a piercing wolf whistle.

  “Quicksilver, leave kitty!” I called my dog off just as his very visible fangs neared Dr. Jack’s very invisible throat.

  “Toss me my fedora,” I told Dr. Jack. “I like to look professional going to a job.”

  “My work here is done.” His voice was a rasp. “May you and the very big doggie live long and prosper.”

  Quick let his forelegs click to the floor. He picked up one wet paw and wrinkled the top his muzzle.

  “Yes,” I told him. “I spilled your water dish contents in order to out the Invisible Man. Not your mess. And, yes, we’re walking into a much bigger one. What’s your position on anyone or anything who mucks with our CinSim friends?”

  He lifted a rear leg and did nothing more.

  I nodded. “That’s right. Let’s go see what’s shaking at the Inferno Hotel and find out who needs pissing on now.”

  I looked around. My slightly used fedora now topped my uninhabited bedspread, now a rumpled pyramid of folds on the floor. I decided I could leave home without it.

  JUST DRIVING UP TO the Inferno in my black vintage Cadillac convertible, Quicksilver riding shotgun in sunglasses, almost shocked the catsuit off of me…not that anybody on the Vegas Strip would much notice a naked woman these days.

  They sure couldn’t miss the hotel’s drastically altered façade. I parked on the curved driveway well before the entrance canopy to gaze up at the hotel. As the sun set behind the Western mountains, major Strip neon was busting out all over.

  Not at the Inferno, though. Tonight the erupting volcano of Technicolor excess was a smoldering ruin. The usual exterior fireworks had faded to cold, colorless flames the shades of ashes…as gray and black and white as a vintage film, like the CinSims inside.

  Tourists elbowed in and out of the massive front doors, eyes on free-offer flyers, oblivious to the racket, bustle and anyone else, as usual.

  So I was only secondarily shocked almost out of my butt-stomping booties when my parking valet pal, Manny, opened the Caddy’s driver’s-side door.

  Good grief! Manny’s usual vibrant orange demon scales were a dull, dolphin-blue-gray and his mood was as subdued as his coloring.

  “Dolly’s looking a bit lackluster, Miss Street,” he said.

  “Well, sure. Her paint job isn’t reflecting the neon-bright flames ringing the hotel for sixty stories up. You look a bit down in the forked tongue and tail yourself.”

  Manny shrugged as he slid into her red leather upholstery. “Somethin’s different about the hotel? You got me.”

  Beside me, Quicksilver whimpered his suspicions.

  “You’re right,” I told my dog. “The Invisible Man wasn’t wrong.”

  We left Manny punked out behind the steering wheel as we hoofed it along the crowded sidewalk. I looked back to see the speed-demon valet putt-putting Dolly’s three hundred horses up the parking ramp. I’d never let Manny floor it like the regular lead-foot valets, but this exit was seriously lame.

  Every hair on Quicksilver’s body stood on end the moment the hotel’s entry doors whooshed shut behind us. My studded wet suit felt warm and cozy, but the skin of my exposed face and hands tightened as if plunged into ice-water.

  The usual over-air-conditioned casino atmosphere had gone totally arctic.

  Quick clung to my left hip, Mr. Service Dog incarnate.

  I plunged through any opening paths, heading straight for the Inferno Bar, where my favorite tipsters hung out. A tall dark-haired man in white tie and tails caught my eye.

  Nick Charles, the famous detective, was still at his CinSim post. My relief eased out in a sigh. If Nick Charles was on duty at the Inferno Bar, all was right with the post-Millennium Revelation world.

  He turned to greet me, one eyebrow arched toward his receding hairline of wavy hair. “Miss Delilah Street, as I don’t live and breathe. Aren’t you a treat to see in your upscale if aggressive long johns?”

  He hoisted his continual prop, a martini glass that was perpetually half-empty or half-full, depending on your life philosophy.

  “I’m so glad to find you here, holding forth as usual,” I said.

  “That goes double for me, as my vision often does. Maybe you can help me solve a mystery that has me hammered. There is swill in my glass,” he complained.

  “There’s always expensive swill in your glass,” I pointed out.

  “This stuff is undrinkable, and from me that’s saying something.”

  I leaned forward to sip from the rim that swayed to and fro with his well-oiled sense of balance. We could have been on the QE II. A wavelet washed into my mouth.

  “Oh, Nicky. This won’t hurt you. It’s just…water.”

  Nick’s dapper shoulders shuddered. “Water? Poison! His voice lifted to summon his wife. “Nora darling! I’m being poisoned.”

  “Hang on a minute, Nicky dear,” she trilled from the other side of bar. “I’m coming, but Asta is being a perfect beast!”

  Quicksilver was not an Inferno Bar regular, but he sensed when things were awry. He gave his yard-troll-at-the-cottage-door growl that was half inquisitive and half desirous of a snack.

  Nora came jerking around the bar’s other side in all her willowy high-fashion glory, up to an impudently tilted and veiled hat overshadowed by a large gray ostrich feather.

  Quicksilver leaped forward with a pounce that indicated nearby prey.

  I had no leash but my voice. “Leave kitty,” I ordered. It worked in Sunset Park. Here he’d stopped on a whisker, although his discontented growl kept going and growing until the sound of a squalling baby rose to my ears.

  How odd for Quicksilver to carry on like a coyote pup.

  I looked down. Quicksilver was silent, but his blue-eyed gaze also fixed on something…a critter the size of a wire-haired terrier but with huge-clawed paws that churned the carpeted floor while a sound like an angry monkey grated through its fangs.

/>   My jaw dropped and then stood to attention again in amazed speech. “That’s…not…Asta.”

  “Of course it is,” Nora cooed fondly. “He’s just throwing a tantrum. Isn’t he, dear?” she asked Nick.

  No, it was a real “kitty,” sort of. I recognized the white-and-black striped coat of Grizelle’s white tiger form, but now she was just a…baby, a still-blue-eyed, fifty-pound cub staring straight at me as if ready to tear my heart out.

  What was going on here?

  Nick’s martinis turned to tap water? Awesome security chief Grizelle reduced to a leashed tiger cub? Nick and Nora not noticing the major family pet switch? What else was wrong at the Inferno Hotel?

  “Why didn’t you tell me Miss Street is trespassing again?” asked a resonant baritone that could strike twenty-five thousand people silent…or set them screaming mindlessly.

  I turned faster than a burning pancake flipped on a griddle to look behind me. The Inferno owner, operator and rock-star mogul stood so close I almost got leather burns from his black jumpsuit. Quicksilver had pushed against my right side, his hackle hair rising. About now we could have gone on the Inferno stage with Snow’s tiger cub and my dog as an animal act.

  Curiouser and curiouser, with neon on it.

  The suspected albino vampire’s skin and shoulder-blade brushing hair were both as white as white could be, but tonight he was not the usual mono-vision wearing signature white with a blindfold of dark glasses the only off-color note. His usual white leather stage jumpsuit was now dead black, as black as his signature sunglasses, and, perhaps, his soul.

  “It’s our bar.” Nick Charles’s voice came over my shoulder in a grumpy slur. “We were leashed here first.”

  “You tell him, Nicky.” Nora struggled to untwine the tiger cub’s lead from around her gray silk hose without suffering major claw snags.

  “I believe you mean ‘leased’,” Snow corrected Nicky.

  I tried not to ogle Snow’s skin-tight Elvis-comeback black leather outfit, although he outdid Elvis in one respect. This jumpsuit opened to his naval like a Red Carpet starlet’s dress, where the usual bejeweled fly began. Even the rubies, sapphires and emeralds on it were onyx-colored.

  Wait. Only I knew Snow had a CinSim double, because I’d recently caught him taking care of business elsewhere during his onstage show hours in Vegas. This must be the CinSim Snow only the rock-god himself could commission. Simple for an albino, who was all white to begin with and who hid his hot-pink, light-sensitive irises behind perpetually black sunglasses.

  Snow only needed to have himself shot on a bit of rare surviving silver nitrate film, then have that image was impressed onto a fresh 3-D zombie body canvas through the Immortality Mob’s so-far-secret process.

  Today’s Las Vegas was the cusp where cutting-edge science and paranormal-fueled magic met…and was turned into pure old-fashioned profit. But only vintage silver-nitrate film would work. Buy a precious piece of it on the black market, and…presto change-o, you had an exact reproduction, on cue, on tap, at Snow’s command. He’d bought and manufactured his dark double. He hadn’t grown his own in the mirror, as I apparently had with Lilith Quince.

  Cheater.

  I wondered what immortal bit of lost vintage film-making had been sacrificed to Snow’s desire for a double and his deal with the Immortality Mob, not to mention what poor dead schlub got to power the mogul’s needs.

  Some people might get the idea that I didn’t like Snow, but they’d be wrong.

  I despised his blatant rock-star appeal to the “weaker sex” almost as much as I despised myself for having to deal with him. If he wasn’t the albino vampire rumor made him, he was some new variety of potent supernatural. Finding out exactly what was number one on my bucket list.

  There was no arguing that Snow wasn’t a Darkside darling and an American idol. His pale skin was also as muscular as Michelangelo’s major-hot statue of a white-marble naked David duplicated at Caesars Palace just up the Strip. And I could see why, when Snow’s pelvis was onstage working his white Stratocaster Fender guitar like a giant screaming electric fig leaf, the mosh-pit groupies swooned.

  So why was the CinSim Snow coming out to play when the original was still in town? Was this part of the Inferno ‘haunting’?

  Meanwhile, Nick was showing off for Nora by wobbling up to Snow’s black cowboy-booted physique and going nose to nose.

  “Those ‘leases’ that confine all us CinSims are leashes,” Nick said. “And we don’t like it. We’ve got a right to roam, like any Mickey Mouse cell phone.”

  Nick’s film-white finger tapped Snow right between the pecs, dead center of the Jack-Frost scars etched like lace and lightning bolts on his bare chest.

  I caught my breath. My theory was the scars were either souvenirs from the finger of God casting him down from heaven or souvenirs of some evil entity shocking him back to life in the heart he didn’t have.

  Snow’s broad shoulders and schooled torso-twist literally shrugged off Nick.

  “How you can stay drunk on plain water I’ll never know, Mr. Charles” Snow said. “Your lovely wife is having trouble controlling the family pet, as usual, only the pet in question is a juvenile version of my security chief, which is not as usual.”

  I realized CinSim Snow knew the score. He turned to me. Wearing boot-heels, I was almost Nick Charles’ six-foot height. Snow still towered.

  “You’re the investigator, Miss Street. May I suggest you do your job?”

  He walked away from the bar area, the crowds parting as if sensing the passage of the Invisible Man. Once offstage, some secret mojo allowed Snow to move around the hotel-casino unrecognized by the masses.

  Obviously, the CinSims saw him. And Quicksilver sure had. I hoped I wasn’t the only human so honored. I’d discovered I had a couple of weird talents involving silver, but nothing any true paranormal worth his or her superpowers would covet.

  I eyed the jumbo HDTV high above the bar area. The Seven Deadly Sins band was rocking out in instrumental fury, but their lead singer/guitarist was nowhere in sight onstage.

  I turned back to my CinSim pals, admiring Nora’s veiled hat fit for a Black Widow.

  “You’ve changed your ensemble,” I told her.

  “Of course.” Her blithe voice lilted with good humor. “Snow just purchased all the rights to my image’s extensive wardrobe as well as me.” She did a fashion model twirl. “Otherwise bar duty would get boring, for me and for the clientele.”

  “But why wear a hat obscuring your sophisticated-lady face?”

  “Can you keep a secret?” Nora turned her back, expecting me to come around for a girlfriend conference.

  When I faced Nora and her several-layered veil again, she lifted it for a sneak peek.

  Gasping, I saw Nora’s elegant pencil-thin eyebrows had blossomed into furry Brook-Shield caterpillars. Her mascara had run, giving her eyes the spiked, drawn-on look of a circus clown.

  “It’s a surprise new look,” she said with a winsome smile.

  “Are you two done primping?” Nick peered over Nora’s shoulder while she hastened to lower her veil. “I have a phenomenon to report, dear ladies. My keen suspicions have been raised. Would you care to look where I direct, Miss Street?”

  I turned again to face the bustling casino and the jumbo HDTV screen. The Seven Deadly Sins were now rocking out with Black CinSim Snow in place as lead singer.

  “Just look there.” The contents of Nicky’s martini glass almost overran one rim as he pointed.

  I looked. “The camera’s on the mosh pit where all the milling groupies are going nuts. So?”

  “Exactly my opinion of ‘groupies,’” Nick declared. “We didn’t have them in my day. They sound like a variety of aquarium fish,” he said carefully, “fish” being a difficult word to enunciate in his perpetual but charming sloshed condition.

  The ace detective babbled on. “I saw our mutual friend, Mr. Snow.”

  “Friend? Speak for yourself.�
�

  “I am trying to, Miss Street, if you will deign to listen. At the end of the earlier show, I saw Mr. Snow bend down to present the groping groupies with handsome white-silk neck scarves of the type that go so well with my tux.”

  I didn’t need more CinSim wardrobe notes or to know about Snow’s throwaways to his fans now that he no longer bestowed the notorious Brimstone Kiss for some mysterious reason.

  “I saw,” Nick Charles went on, “less than an hour ago, the entire mosh pit and our mutual sponsor, dressed all in white like a bride, as usual. I saw the whole k-k-kit and ka-Boodles disappear in a f-f-flash of fire.”

  Dubious, I held up a hand to take custody of Nicky’s martini glass.

  “I swear,” he said, holding his now-bare right palm upright like a witness in court.

  How weird to see the clear glass and the liquid inside take on subtle colors as the object left CinSim possession for mine. I sipped.

  Still just water. Flat dull water. Nick Charles’ vision of mosh-pit hell had not been the Boodles talking.

  But if the “real” Snow and his closest fans had been kidnapped, where were they? And how would I get there? The truly topsy-turvy scene at the Inferno that gave me a bold new idea.

  “Nora, will you watch Quicksilver while I take ‘Asta’ for a walk?” I held my hand out for the silver leather dog leash.

  She seemed startled by the idea, but the writhing tiger cub actually rubbed its furry sides back and forth on my calves as I took custody of its lead.

  Luckily, my full body suit prevented any touchie-feelie contact between me and Snow’s shape-shifting security chief now stuck in baby white-tiger form. Grizelle and I would only touch each other if it was hand-to-claw combat, and once recently it had been.

  “Asta is chipped to stay here at the bar,” Nick warned me.

  Grizelle sure wasn’t. From the loud purr that ended in a squall like a human infant’s I knew she badly wanted out of here too.

  I nodded at Quicksilver to tell him he was the Asta substitute for now. Since he and Grizelle had tangled too, I knew he’d enjoy supplanting her. He adored CinSims.