Avenging Fury

by John Farris

  “Ah-nohd,” a couple of the girls chorused.

  Harlee soothed Nic, who needed a lot of handling, by stroking the back of her head and long-stemmed neck. “Love your new crop, Nicole. Who did it, Sergio at Caesars?”

  “Supa-dupa,” Reese said, another peace offering.

  Nic smiled snarky at Flicka, who accepted it with a slight glower.

  Devon unlimbered and put her chin on the laced fingers of her hands. So to business.

  “Do you think the Avatar is still in Vegas?” she said to Harlee.

  Harlee nodded. “Darn tootin’.”

  “Isn’t that kind of a forties expression, Harlee?”

  “I don’t know. But I like it. Loved the forties. ‘What’s knittin’, kitten? Let’s cut a rug.’ Bobby sox. Hubba-hubba.”

  “No, that’s Barney Rubble,” Honeydew corrected.

  “The Flintstones!” Reese said.

  “You’re thinking ‘Yabba Dabba Do!’ ” Flicka corrected Honeydew’s correction. “And it’s Fred, not Barney.”

  Devon looked serenely from one face to another, loving them all. Gentle Devon always used a thin-bladed knife for her stealthy assassinations, because there was little external blood and almost never a distressing outcry. Nic, on the other hand, excelled at Ninja hand strikes or with the occasional blunt instrument. Flicka was a poisoner. Discreet. Untraceable stuff. And Harlee—

  “No more dork-outs,” Harlee said. “Yes, I’m sure Eden Waring is still around town. Because we know the supermodel won’t be leaving the hospital anytime soon, if ever.”

  “She’s at Concordia?” Honeydew asked.

  “Uh-huh. Whizzed by there this morning,” Nicole said. “They got strict traffic control on the grounds; everybody gets stopped and questioned. And there must have been six of those, you know, satellite-uplink trucks sittin’ around. Security inside, forget it.”

  “Are you still with that pimped-out low-ridah hardtail?” Honeydew said with an indulgent smile. “Really ought to give it up, Nic, before your spine gets so bad you can’t wear stilettos.”

  “Pimped-out? Girl, you don’t know biker edge when you see it. And it sure beat all hell out of drivin’ a cage, even if it is a sixty-five ’Vette.”

  Reese said, “I heard that Virgie Lovechild can’t get a camera on the floor where the Supa’s probably veging with the other postop brain farts. And how much d’you suppose it’s worth to Virgie, a shot of the Supa comatose in CCU? Fifty dimes from one of the tabs?”

  “ ‘Next on Entertainment Tonight,’ ” Honeydew drawled, doing her knockoff of a showroom-spiffy talking head. “ ‘Teen Supermodel’s Brave Fight for Life.’ ”

  “I think she’s older,” Reese said. “Like, she’s been doing Vogue covers practically forever.”

  “Speaking of security, the Avatar probably has plenty of her own,” Flicka said.

  “She’s awesome at taking care of herself,” Reese observed with a grimace, hugging her knees as she looked up at Harlee. “Those surveillance tapes, what a come that was. Like, omigod.”

  “Scared?” Nic said, with a mean torque to her shapely lips.

  “Chill,” Harlee reminded her again, looking at Reese, then answering the question in the girl’s eyes. “So one thing we know, the Avatar for sure will be spending a lot of time with her best bud.” Harlee had another thought. “She might be staying there too, like in a VIP suite, with the Supa. Critical care, that just means somebody’s watching the patient all the time, what else can they do for her? She’ll make it or she won’t.”

  Other heads nodded. Flicka made slow circles in the pool with her hand. There was a good smell of ribs cooking on an adjoining patio, visible through an archway in an adobe wall. Mellow western sunlight tinted all of their faces and flawless figures.

  “Okay,” Harlee said after a silent minute. “We know Virgie is the best at scoping out celebs. Half of the hotel employees on the Strip bird-dog for Virgie Lovechild and her pack-a-razzies.” She pronounced it “rotsies,” for “paparazzi.”

  “Virgie may already have a glimmer where the Av is hanging. Devon and I have been, like, cultivating Virgie. She’ll play ball.”

  Harlee paused, and smiled.

  “As for security at the hospital—all of you guys will look just darling in paisley. Questions?” Another pause. “Fine. Let’s chow down.”

  5:40 P.M.

  Even when he played poker all night, which wasn’t that often—a couple of times a week if he was in Vegas for an extended stay on business—Cody Olds was still young enough to snap back fully refreshed and in physical trim after a three-hour nap in the cool darkness of his modest condo in a high-rise building a few blocks east of the Strip.

  But on this late afternoon, with a date for a basketball game in less than an hour, Cody felt as if he had a weird kind of nonalcoholic hangover.

  He was almost a nondrinker; wine or brandy sometimes, a glass of celebratory champagne on three yearly occasions: his mother’s birthday, his own birthday, and the anniversary of the wedding of his two dearest friends.

  He’d been awake for about five minutes and in the bathroom, naked and brushing his teeth, still with a dream in his mind sticky as cobwebs and, unlike most dreams hazily recalled upon waking, vivid in detail, imagined with an artist’s eye. This dream had been about the attractive, athletic girl on the basketball court outside Bahìa’s spa. But they weren’t playing ball. And the name she’d slyly given to him was not her true name.

  So there he was with her on a windy mountain beneath lightning that laced a rolling dark sky in far northern New Mexico: the mountain called Dzilth-Na-Dith-Hle (“Dee-zee” in modern vernacular), a place profoundly sacred to the Navajo nation—Cody’s mother’s people—known to themselves as Diné. And in his dreams “Eve Bell” was really Changing Woman, soon to give birth to twin warrior sons, who, according to this crucial Navajo legend, were to rule the destiny not only of the historic tribal land of the Four Corners but of the universe itself.

  Face-to-face with Estsan Natlehi—Changing Woman—Cody saw only the parlous lightning in her eyes. He was trembling in his dream, chastened by her stern beauty, terrified of her lodestar power. But it was the unique masculine power in him that Changing Woman had sought and needed: without Cody Olds, only half Navajo, the mythic twins couldn’t be born.

  Not a part of the legend as he remembered hearing it.

  But he wasn’t about to challenge the will of Changing Woman. The fate of the Wolf Spider clan, all of the Diné, the entire human race, depended on him.

  Cody stopped brushing and rinsed. Stepped away from the basin. Five minutes after abandoning bed and dreamtime he had retained a straight-up erection, rigid as a railroad spike. He entered the thirty-six-nozzle Swiss shower, like a roomier version of the Iron Maiden. Turned it up full blast. No use. Changing Woman—or was it “Eve Bell”?—had him by the heart, and he couldn’t refuse the lightning that needed discharging within his own hard grip.

  So down the drain washed the human race. Cody couldn’t laugh. He felt a little depressed about masturbating. And apprehensive about something he couldn’t name.

  Legends? Perhaps.

  Or the truth implicit within the germinal legends.

  He was dressed to go out when his cell phone rang.

  Cody didn’t have much use for cell phones and he loathed e-mail. But his legal-eagle mother and his brother Ben were gadabouts in their various quests, and there was no better way to keep in touch with them.

  “Did you have the damned thing turned off last night?” his mother demanded.

  “I played poker until five this morning.”

  “How much did that cost you?”

  “I won, Ma.”

  “I know of a good legal offense fund that could use a whacking big donation.”

  “Wrote the check already. And one to Diné Citizens against Ruining Our Environment.”

  “That’s my boy.”

  “Where are you, Albuquerq?”

&nbs
p; “Benjamin and I are both mired in the depths of that open sewer that flows into the once-majestic and pristine Potomac River.”

  “Oh, Washington. Class-action again?”

  “Betcha bottom dollar, Cody.”

  “I thought you said suing any branch of the United States government was an exercise in monomania, like tryin’ to stack BBs on a greased plate.”

  “Before I join our ancestors, Cody, I plan to see to it there’s not a strip of hide left on any ass that has the bad judgment to still be hanging around the Bureau of Indian Affairs.” A late bloomer in career matters, Marie Olds had finished at the New Mexico School of Law when she was forty-six. She had since made up for lost time through sheer velocity.

  “Ben there? Let me talk to him.”

  “No, he’s out wolfin’. You would not believe how many single women there are in this burg. Some of them not half bad. And how their eyes do light up when they get a load of my Benny. They positively drool. It’s almost disgusting.”

  “Ben knows how to handle the D.C. scene. Did you get the leasing and drilling stopped up around Nageezi?”

  “We did. Indefinitely. The gas companies are in an uproar. Well, Jesus, how my heart bleeds. The greedy bastards. Eighteen thousand wells already in the San Juan Basin. But the Diné are supposed to give up sacred lands because BLM studies say that’s where the biggest deposits are. So much for cultural sensitivity. They’re already blaming us for the next energy crisis, which as we know are self-fulfilling prophecies.”

  “Are you takin’ your beta-blocker, Ma?”

  “So we’re supposed to forgo our heritage to keep the rest of the country warm and cozy? While the Diné get gypped in pipeline and royalty deals and most still heat their own homes with firewood? What little they can afford. On what I hope is a more positive note, what are you up to in Vegas?”

  “We’re opening a show of Carrie Ballantyne’s work at the gallery. You know Carrie. Ma, gotta run. Date tonight.”

  “Cody? Listen to your mother for once. Those show-girls either have a couple of kids tucked away in a double-wide, or else they’re riddled to the gizzards with STDs that don’t even have names yet.”

  “She’s not a showgirl. College graduate. Played basketball.”

  “What does she do now? Deal blackjack?”

  “No. I think she’s private stock, old family money, probably a few of ’em way up there on the Forbes big-rich list.”

  Cody had no idea from where that assessment had come. But he had been around his share of scions. Some good and thoughtful kids indifferent to privilege. And a good many snotcases, wastrels, or stone losers. “Eve Bell” had, if not inherited money, an aura of special breeding.

  “Really? Well, you might talk to her about the plight of—”

  “No, I won’t. Love you, Ma.”

  7:12 P.M.

  When night began to fall on the high desert and the El Dorado of glitz took on added brilliance against an indigo sky, activity quickened in the tarnished old Airstream caravan wedged into the walled backyard of Virgie Lovechild’s digs, off Koval and behind the parking garages of several mammoth Strip hotels.

  Hers was the only remaining private residence in a four-block area of apartment complexes with optimistic names like Paradise Valley and Blue Heaven Gardens: for the most part they were cheaply constructed two-story oblong buildings like those that overshadowed Virgie’s half acre for most of the day. All of the area was destined to be gobbled up by the oncoming sprawl of ever-more gigantic megaresorts like Wynn’s and the Venetian, but thus far she had resisted all offers for her property. Virgie liked it there for, among other reasons, the fact that she was within walkie-talkie range of the major Midway attractions.

  Virgie spent ten hours a day, seven days a week, minimum, in her cluttered office, usually a sweatbox in spite of two air-conditioning units taking up most of the available window space. She employed two assistants during busy nighttime hours. They worked the phones and computers, keeping tabs on nearly every social, political, and entertainment personality who set foot in town, plus a horde of the once fashionable, the newly notorious, the glamorously criminal, and the genuinely odd ducks who slipped into the population for a few hours or days to work their purposes. Virgie had both a phenomenal memory of and voracious appetite for faces—thousands of them. Recent plastic surgeries never deceived her. She was on good terms with the Las Vegas Metro police, who sometimes requested her services to deliver an elusive thief or homicide suspect. She traded tips with casino security honchos who kept track of the movements of known cardsharps and wired-up chiselers.

  To maintain the pace Virgie also employed, nearly around the clock, highly mobile photographers with whom she was in constant touch. She made their livings and hers off what her Pack of Rotsies (as Harlee Nations had dubbed them) digitally forwarded to her: candid celeb shots that were then peddled by her syndicates to the worldwide gossip press. She filled special requests, but Virgie, in spite of being tempted at times by the prospect of large fees, was loath to shovel dirt, even if the purpose was to bury someone hugely deserving, like a particularly venal politician or scumbag wife-abuser. Virgie cherished her near anonymity and stayed out of the social whirl. Nobody in her adopted hometown knew much about her, including her cop friends. She left her digs only on rare occasions, for a dental appointment or to have her hair done before her bowling night. There was a NO SHIT/BAD DOG sign on the partly open gate in front of Virgie’s mid-fifties stucco bungalow with its dilapidated palm trees and an old Chevy with a flaking vinyl top and hardening of the rubber hoses in the carport. But Virgie’s only dog was a nonthreatening pedigreed bichon frise named Snowjob. Virgie herself was just an old dame of uncertain origins, like a good many other loners who had migrated to the high desert during the last couple of decades of hectic expansion. If pressed by one of the regulars during her bowling night at a hundred-lane complex out on the Boulder Highway, Virgie would say—cribbing from the immortal Gypsy Rose Lee—that she was descended from a long line her mother had listened to.

  Virgie had a cigarette cough like a goose’s honk, smart neon-blue eyes, and bright yellow hair; on sagging freckled skin her collection of aging tattoos looked like epidermal roadkill.

  Truth to tell, Virgie was as socially undesirable as her manner was coarse. She had never met a Hollywood legend or wunderkind songbird or other postulants of fame afire in the lamps of their celebrity, in all her years of pursuing them from her cramped Airstream redoubt. But, seeing familiar faces even in her sleep, intimate as she had become with their luminous lives (the godlike auras Virgie herself helped to maintain), she considered them all family.

  Virgie had made it through sixty-odd years without a husband, therefore no chick and no child. No ties existed or were possible with those few blood relatives still living in Blackpool.

  No, the closest thing to children of her own were the somewhat bland but stylish and very lovely up-to-the-moment teenage girls who had started coming around a few weeks ago and by now had more or less adopted Virgie—for Christ’s sweet sake—as if she were some sort of school project. But, no, that wasn’t being fair. Virgie was the one who had been unable to resist striking up a conversation with Irish-tongued Devon at the hairdresser’s. They were just a couple of innocents in a place where innocence was tops on the menu for the two-legged carnivores who abounded in Dazzle City. They were awed by her deep wellspring knowledge of **celebrities,** starstruck and idolatrous like so many girls their age. Wanting to be in the know. Virgie had accepted, now welcomed them. They were on her mind a fair amount of time lately. When they didn’t show up outside the Airstream, timidly tapping, for several days, bringing little treats for her and Snowjob—fresh baked fudge, gourmet dog cookies—Virgie became concerned. All those carnivores on the prowl. She had no idea where her girls lived or went to school, who their parents or guardians might be. Seemed much too young to be emancipated juveniles. But on that score Devon and her best friend, Harlee, were supermum, a
s reticent as Virgie herself.

  Fair enough. One thing she was sure of, inasmuch as she was a shrewd judge of character: the girls who had captured her fancy (Virgie having come to that tempered age where beauty in the female pleasantly diverted her heart without risk of a romantic seizure) were not high-priced specialty hookers, wearing little-girl frocks, large hair ribbons, and Snow White–style buckle shoes to assignations. Virgie shuddered at the thought of rich, fatty, cologne-stinking carnivores fingering, oh God, those delectable bosoms and bottoms.

  Virgie was on one of her six phonecams when the girls appeared around seven fifteen, Devon carrying a beautifully wrapped box of the white chocolate, cherry-stuffed fudge that Virgie adored, in spite of how bad the sweetsies were for her precious remaining teeth. She already had more gold crowns than all the royal heads of Europe.

  “No, Satch,” Virgie said, blowing a two-foot stream of cigarette smoke from her nostrils, “p’raps she—or more likely it’s a drag queen—looks like Divinity.” Satch, a new hire, was on the other end of the connection and had just sent a candid for Virgie to vet. “Walks like Divinity. Even smells like her, God forbid. But she/he is pure wannabe; Divinity herself is front and center at Beyoncé’s show right now with her ex—no, the middle one, the Brazilian jujitsu champion—and with Enchante, her side dish of the moment, steppin’ out tonight with Slyrap Sho’Doggie. Do trust me on this, ducks, I always know whereof I speak.”

  Virgie swiveled around and said to one of her assistants, a black kid with a dagger goatee and a head that looked like a burnt cornfield, “Bluesie, where’s my ID on George’s new squeeze? I’m guessing she’s one of the Italian imports he enjoys with his Verdicchio di Villa Bucci.”

  Bluesie danced fingers over his computer keyboard, eyes a few inches from the flat-screen monitor. “Not in our files.”

  “ ‘Not in our files’ is never a satisfactory answer, Bluesie. Now, dig.”

  Deborah, a Goth girl with fat ankles and a habitually pursed little mouth who hated the sight of Harlee and Devon, clicked off on another cell and said, “Sean and Justin and three unidentified flying bimbos just got off the Warner jet at McCarran.”