Virtual Virgin dspi-5

by Carole Nelson Douglas

  Grizelle inclined her elaborately decorated braids. “May I offer you earplugs for the elevator journey?” she asked Tallgrass.

  He snorted.

  Ric had thought Delilah tweaked Grizelle’s tail. Tallgrass jerked her braids.

  “Most impressive,” Tallgrass muttered in the short elevator spurt to the top.

  Ric wasn’t sure whether he referred to the Inferno Hotel, or Grizelle.

  Christophe was waiting as the elevator doors opened like a stainless-steel stage curtain on his dramatically bizarre figure of white skin and hair. He wore a white linen Cuban guayabera shirt with its subtle four pockets and pleats, but the long sleeves were rolled up in a display of casual cool.

  Ric was annoyed to see the Inferno bigwig sporting a classic item of Hispanic menswear with such aplomb. His own tropical suit the color of a cappuccino latte seemed formal and stuffy by comparison despite the open neck of his silk shirt.

  And Tallgrass. He looked fresh off the ranch. Not that it bothered Tallgrass one whit.

  The Native American had not doffed his pale straw Western hat in Christophe’s quarters, as Christophe recently had kept on his riverboat-gambler white hat at the Emerald City hotel-casino he’d bought in Wichita.

  So it would be a battle of white hats.

  “I understand,” the ex-FBI man opened the parlay, “no one knows what brand of supernatural you are.”

  “That disturb you, Mr. Tallgrass?”

  Christophe led them into the expansive living area and gestured to an arrangement of leather sofas so supernaturally white they must have come from ghost cattle.

  Ric wandered to the window wall to survey the Strip from this spectacular viewpoint.

  In daylight the framework of the neon icons looked as drab and shabby as the half-constructed hulks of glamorous towers-to-be, including one so close Ric could count the rivets on the I beams. He wondered how the rock-star mogul liked having his hotel crowded by another new Vegas venue going up.

  Probably as little as Ric wanted to be crowded by him.

  “Not much disturbs me, except labels,” Tallgrass had responded, stretching out his untidy middle-aged frame dead center on a curve of the endless sectional sofa. “No one can figure out what tribe I’m from. Most of my kind has vanished from my home state.”

  “Which is Kansas,” Christophe stated, sprawling on another long sofa dead center, but opposite Tallgrass.

  “Maybe.” Tallgrass’s smile was short and not very sweet at all. “Our people were moved all over the map by the US government, usually with some excuse that it was for our own good.”

  “I see Mr. Montoya has brought a private contractor to eye his possible future property.” Christophe turned to quirk a white eyebrow at Ric over the rim of his black sunglasses. “I’m glad you brought your agent into our discussion.”

  “FBI agent,” Ric said. He had to smile to himself at how each man had spread his arms and legs to occupy the most territory on his chosen seat.

  “Formerly,” Christophe noted, “the way I like all my agents. Those who’ve fled overcontrolling entities best suit my purposes.”

  “And you’re not overcontrolling?” Ric asked, pacing behind Christophe’s sofa.

  The rock-star mogul kept his face focused on Tallgrass. “That’s why it’d benefit your friend’s interests to deal with me. The devil you know, and all that.”

  “Are you a devil?” Ric had stopped behind Christophe, bracketing his hands on the sofa back on either side of him. Now Ric leaned close enough to knife him between the shoulder blades, claiming his own negotiating territory.

  “Depends who you ask.” Snow’s sunglasses lifted and aimed to the side of the room. “It seems you have a groupie of your own.”

  Ric jerked his gaze in that direction to spot the Silver Zombie moving smoothly across the white plush carpeting toward their conversational gathering. Toward Ric.

  “Still silent,” Tallgrass observed.

  Ric stood, partly because he would when any lady entered a room, partly in the nervous awe she always stirred in him.

  The other men also stood, as if he’d cued them. Tallgrass turned to Ric, nodding and brushing his palms lightly together. “She moves with a whisper like soft sandpaper, a slight snare drum brush.”

  Trust a veteran tracker to notice. Ric realized he heard that too.

  Tallgrass had seen the Metropolis robot in the guest penthouse atop the Emerald City hotel-casino in his home city of Wichita. In this more sophisticated yet austere environment, all laboratory white, she shone like a polished suit of armor walking through a snowstorm.

  She stopped in front of Ric. “Master.”

  “No one’s your master now,” he said.

  Her streamlined metal features turned to regard Christophe and Tallgrass before returning to face him. “I must answer to my maker, my caretaker. If not you, who else?”

  It was her first sentence.

  Ric found Christophe’s head and sunglasses bowed, looking down, staying neutral. Tallgrass’s dark eyes, often so noncommittal, had gone blank with shock.

  There it was. The quandary.

  If Ric didn’t use his natural power over this complex homemade CinSim, this brave new creature who was as diverse as mogul Christophe/rock star Cocaine/acquaintance Snow, who or what would fill that vacuum? She could be Good Maria/Bad Maria/robot/actress.

  “Thank you . . . Brigitte,” he said, using the actress’s name to establish himself as . . . director. “You may go.”

  She turned and strode away to the ajar double doors Ric knew led to the home theater. Could she even sit down in that wooden bodysuit? Did CinSims need to?

  Tallgrass released a windy sigh. “Certainly not one of the spirit-walkers of my forefathers.”

  Snow looked up at Ric, smiling. “In this case, looking out for my own interests dovetails with your needs, Montoya. Who can argue that this entity doesn’t harbor a demon, as the drug lord Torbellino maintained. He’ll want her and his cartel has limitless reach. You need powerful allies too.”

  He directed his gaze at Tallgrass. “You might have need of a dragon again,” Christophe added, referring to a recent battle with El Demonio’s forces in Wichita.

  “And you, Mr. Christophe, of a Wendigo.” Tallgrass smiled.

  “HE’S A SUPERNATURAL something,” Tallgrass told Ric once they’d reached the Inferno’s main floor again. “That’s my opinion. We know Christophe’s powers are impressive. You’ll never know their extent unless you watch him as closely as he seems to want to watch you.”

  “‘Watch over me,’” Ric said. “That’s his claim.”

  Tallgrass grinned. “You already have Miss Delilah doing a much more personal job of that. It’s hard to tell these days, Ricardo, who or what has anyone’s best interests at heart. If you can strike a mutually advantageous deal with this smooth operator, you’re doing well. I worry about you too. Meanwhile you and me have to keep the government working for us as we work for it. That’s our priority now.”

  “Before we leave, want to meet Godfrey’s ‘cousin’ at the Inferno Bar?” Ric asked.

  “Home of Miss Delilah’s Albino Vampire martini?” Tallgrass’s laugh boomed out, attracting amused stares. “She nailed Mr. Christophe but good by inventing that at his own bar. Sure, if they serve plain spring water. We’ll need our sharpest wits soon.”

  “That’s all right. We can let Nick Charles do all our drinking for us.”

  Chapter Twenty-seven

  THERE WERE A lot of reasons a venture to the Karnak Hotel made me edgy, and a few hundred of them had fangs. Just because the Karnak was a relatively new kid on the block in Vegas didn’t mean it wasn’t chock-full of the evil dead.

  In “middle-kingdom” Las Vegas, when the hotel-casinos first aspired to be modern architectural marvels instead of hyped-up motels with attached casinos and nightclub acts, the main hotel-casino buildings were set far back from the Las Vegas Strip.

  More people drove than flew
to Vegas then. Land was plentiful and cheap. Like aristocratic proprietors of country estates, the owners of major properties wanted long driveways leading to the magnificence of their main buildings, something impressive on the scale of the Roman Empire, say, of which Caesars Palace was the first and best example.

  And even Caesars had installed a moving sidewalk from one corner of the Strip to the front facade early on.

  So tourists had hoofed blocks along the Las Vegas Boulevard sidewalks and more blocks along driveways to reach the first hint of air-conditioning, the fabled zing, zing, zing of slot machine coins, and leggy cocktail waitresses bearing free drinks.

  Call it sweat equity. Tourists consider the sweltering heat part of the experience.

  Then some accountants realized the time the customers spent hoofing could be more profitably used having them cool and relaxed indoors, betting and spending money. Newer properties had entrances that cozied right up to the Strip, more like the long established Riviera and Flamingo hotels.

  That explains why the Egyptian-themed hotels like the Luxor, Oasis, and Karnak planted their main entrances right out front, where a pyramid, an obelisk, or a temple would be only a short stroll away. No grandiose avenue of the sphinxes like in the ancient days.

  At the Karnak Hotel you were immediately deposited by cab or walking in from the Strip among the massively thick and high crowded pillars duplicating a mammoth hall in the ancient temples of Karnak. And, incidentally, you were instantly immersed in cool, blessed shade, even outside.

  Since I’d dressed for my undercover outing in heat-absorbing black I took to the shade like a mallard to marsh. I wove from one clot of tourists to another through the lobby and registration area, not pausing to gawk at animal-headed gods twenty feet high.

  I was looking for a much lowlier deity.

  And having zilch luck.

  The crowds came and went, too thick and furious for a pipsqueak figure like Bez to stand out. I needed to avoid catching the eye of any hotel staff in linen kilt and braided wig who weren’t just local color, but whose kohl-outlined eyes would be scanning for suspicious characters like me.

  I was more familiar than anyone besides Ric with the Karnak’s hidden vampire court and underworld, from which Shez was an escapee, thanks to me.

  A cold wet nudge in the palm of my hand made me pause my weary tourist shuffle and step out of the traffic flow to snuggle up to the base of a towering statue of Anubis.

  “Quick! No dogs allowed,” I said, grabbing his collar and kneeling so I wasn’t a target. At least his wet nose told me he wasn’t dehydrated after following me from the parking garage.

  I felt a tug on the silver bangle on my left wrist. It melted down through my fingers to make a shoulder-circling semiprecious stone-studded collar on Quicksilver. Darned if he didn’t resemble the ancient god Osiris wearing his ceremonial doghead on his handsome broad human shoulders, of course.

  Before I could lecture the both of them, Fido and familiar, the crowd around us milled with murmurs of annoyance. They parted, unhappily, to provide a path.

  In moments, a short stocky figure about the height of Quick’s head was facing me.

  The deity know as Bes to the ancient Egyptians and—less reverently to me as the second headliner in the act of Shez and Bez—tucked the cell phone in his hand into the decorative horizontal band of his wrapped linen kilt. I’d glimpsed a screenful of Egyptians hieroglyphics before he’d hidden the screen.

  “Hail, Mighty Delilah and Quicksilver the Clever. My heart-brother, Shezmou, alerted me to your advent,” he noted in the formal way of ancient Egyptian gods.

  If I resembled Snow White, Bez was one of my seven dwarves, short, stout, and cocky. Too cocky. Since Bez was an ancient fertility god, one attribute was outsize and often a bit too obvious. He was not the lean-hipped he-man tomb paintings used to portray Shez and most male Egyptians. Bez was muscular, but stubby and hairy, even his face surrounded by a curly mane and beard. He was more reminiscent of your neighbor’s cute pot-bellied pig that had grown larger and noisier than advertised.

  “I came to escort you to the peak of the Karnak,” Bez said, ogling my outfit. “I see that I will not be able to look up your skirt as easily as you could look up mine, if desired, as I am sure that is. You are a strange woman from this strange land and wear twin snakeskins on your legs. Which I, however, find most interesting.”

  “You kilt is safe from any sneak peeks,” I told him. “I need to reach Shez’s top-level workshop from inside the Karnak.”

  I had no idea if Bez knew who or what Howard Hughes was, but I did know the undead mogul was backing Shezmou’s less lethal efforts both in his private quarters and on the Strip. He was quite the inventor and medical research sponsor, our Howard, in his twentieth-century heyday, and even moreso now that he’d become eternal.

  Bez beckoned me to bend down deeply to receive a private word. While doing so, I caught him trying to peer down my top. Where is it written that fertility gods have to be four-thousand-year-old dirty old men? Probably in all the ancient books.

  “Our high and mighty rooftop deity has installed a secret path to his throne rooms,” Bez whispered in my ear. “Follow me.”

  Quick and I did, getting sour stares from women tourists as Bez tweaked any passing hems, be they on skirts, skorts, or short-shorts. I hoped they took the little lion god for an unmanageable kid, because they sure glared at me like I was the world’s worst mother.

  “The souvenir shop?” I questioned when I realized that was where we were heading. “The only souvenirs I want to take out of here on this visit are Quicksilver and me.”

  “Tut,” Bez said, mischievously grinning up. “This place holds the cleverest innovation to the Karnak yet.”

  Like the Luxor’s main floor attractions, the Karnak souvenir shop was designed to put the visitor inside a pyramid, with faux stone and scene-painted walls and shelves crammed with reproductions of Nefertiti heads and King Tut’s golden death mask.

  Bez seized my hand, Quicksilver acting as a guide dog on my other side, and led me through the crowds and small mazelike shops. The culture-vulture tourists in the shop area were too busy ogling glitzy reproductions of the glory that was ancient Egypt to donate a glance to any passing dog-and-pony show like my party.

  We came to the deserted restroom area and passed it.

  Quicksilver whimpered in confusion and I was starting to wonder if the randy little clown was just trying to get me alone with him.

  Bez abruptly got on his knees and then mane-butted the lowest fake-stone block. Just as Quick and I exchanged mutually mute and puzzled looks, the stone swung inward into the dark, into which Bez was disappearing except for his unhappily exposed rear end.

  I looked back for witnesses, but realized this spot was beyond any viewing angle from the shop area.

  What a disgusting sight. All fours, Irma noted. Not dignifying.

  At least Bez isn’t behind us, I told her. Close your eyes and think of England.

  My “snakeskin” leggings proved useful as I knelt to wriggle through the opening, Quick panting on my heels. The other side was as black as, well, a tomb.

  I stood cautiously. No head or body bumps. There was room.

  A moment later glowing amber light revealed everything. I saw Bez standing, arms akimbo, dead ahead. I looked back to see the entry stone had shut behind us. More of the gigantic sandstone block walls and a paved path angled upward to our left.

  The most amazing object was an exquisite wooden bench with arms and legs carved into the likeness of lion cubs. It seemed suspended against the far wall, like an abandoned amusement park ride seat.

  “Hop on,” Bez urged, jumping up to install himself next to the wall.

  I looked up the grade and spotted parallel dark lines painted along the bottom of the wall opposite where we’d entered. Then I looked harder. The lines weren’t painted. They were fastened to the wall.

  “This is an inclined elevator, like in the E
iffel Tower in Paris,” I exclaimed, mystified and charmed at the same time.

  Not another step, Irma warned, this looks like the way to a fertility god’s bachelor pad. That imp Bez is always on the make.

  I ignored her and sat next to “that imp.”

  “I know only,” Bez said with a wicked leer, “to touch the magic button.”

  His stubby thumb depressed a gold circle atop the seat’s inner arm. A buzz of bees, almost as soft as silence, accompanied us as the seat glided upward.

  Howard Hughes invents again, Irma noted with a sigh, and shut up.

  Quick huffed out his doggie disgust at the mechanical route and trotted up the incline well ahead of our conveyance.

  Riding up the inside of a reconstructed ancient Egyptian pyramid passage was an experience I didn’t want to hurry. Bez grinned like the grown-up child he was beside me. I recalled that Karnak Hotel’s exterior concealed the top of an interior pyramid. Howard Hughes must have secretly constructed this inclined elevator so employees could sneak in and out of his top floor quarters without the resident vampire court far below the hotel’s bustling main floor suspecting anything.

  When the elevator mechanism hushed and stopped, Quicksilver lifted his forepaws and leaned on the fake stone wall. Again, it swung inward, revealing the elevator door and foyer outside Howard Hughes’s most upscale lair.

  Hesitating, I saw Bez gazing back down the illuminated slanted pathway. “If only they’d known about this when constructing the Great Pyramid at Giza.” A sigh ended his wish.

  Once I moved into the foyer, I immediately faced the familiar double doors to Howard’s suite.

  I knocked.

  Theda Bara, the silent screen vamp CinSim, flourished open the doors still wearing her notorious Cleopatra costume, or lack thereof. It was actually more concealing than the similar outfit Bad Maria wore in her Whore of Babylon production number with the Seven Deadly Sins doing backup at the Metropolis nightclub.

  Theda shrugged her disappointment at seeing me again, her A-cup metal bra shimmying at the gesture. How sad to think that female competition never died. Also metal bikini bras.