by Jenn Stark
It was where the carnie-level Connected of the Strip flourished too, I knew. The hole-in-the-wall psychics who weren’t quite up to the main stage at Caesar’s Palace, the dime-store palm readers and sidewalk channelers who could stare at you for thirty seconds and bring back your Great-Aunt Betty.
But Nikki didn’t stop at any of those places. In fact, she didn’t stop at all until she cut into a wide parking lot bracketed by a mini strip mall and a free-standing building, a giant white monstrosity fronted by a glittering billboard that proclaimed it as the Chapel of Everlasting Love in the Stars.
I stared. I couldn’t help myself. “What the hell is this?”
“This,” Nikki said triumphantly as she jammed the car into the parking lot, “is Dixie Quinn.”
Chapter Seventeen
Apparently, my expression was enough to convince Nikki to take it down a notch. Or six. She used story time to check her lipstick as she spoke, her mouth going a mile a minute the way it always did when she did debriefs.
“Okay, what you need to know about Dixie Quinn isn’t that she’s an astrologer for a wedding chapel, though she is, and she’s not half-bad. More importantly, she’s sort of like a cross between a Welcome Wagon and Homeland Security for Vegas—she knows everyone and everything, what their skills are and where they live. She goes all out, even keeps records of this stuff, in the quintessential office black book. She’s a too little Goody Two-shoes for my taste, just between us girls, but we’ve come to an understanding because I also like keeping up on who’s coming into the city.” She winked at me. “Only newcomer she hasn’t drawn a bead on was you. But you didn’t actually stay long enough to lay down a shadow, let alone a root.”
I frowned up at the enormous chapel sign. “And you think she’ll have information on these girls?”
“Oh, I know she will. She’s the one who introduced them to me. You ready?”
“I want to get back to Binion’s.”
“Smart trumps fast in this case, dollface. Trust me on this.”
She hauled herself out of the limo, and I followed suit, blinking around in the harsh sunlight.
The chapel reared up in front of us, a beacon of eternal love sandwiched between a liquor store and a tattoo parlor, its parking lot surmounted by a second neon sign announcing “Drive-Thru Weddings.” An incongruously dainty traditional church-style entrance beckoned the love-struck from beneath a bedazzled white stucco star-topped steeple, looking impossibly tacky at noon. I suspected it got most of its business at two in the morning, though.
The chapel’s landscaping consisted of a series of topiaries cut to resemble bow-wielding cherubs nestled in cutoff roman columns that now doubled as flowerpots. A gaggle of stone geese bedecked in wedding attire waddled up the red-carpeted front walk. Based on the spotlights mounted every three feet or so, at night the entire place would be lit up with the kind of wattage usually reserved for used-car lots and crime scenes.
Both the liquor store and tattoo parlor were open, of course, and I made out the form of a thin, ball-cap-wearing man leaning in the doorway of the tattoo shop, the trail of his cigarette smoke floating up to dissipate in the arid heat. He nodded to me as we passed. I glanced up to the battered sign atop the shop: DarkWorks Ink. Artwork lined the windows, along with a single, flickering neon TATTOOS sign. One of the prints caught my eye: a faded poster of an armored warrior on a white horse, carrying a black flag with a white rose in its center.
I frowned. “Um, Nikki?”
Nikki’s sharp curse covered my words as she squinted ahead toward the chapel. “Son of a biscuit, not Henry again. He will not give up.”
I swung my gaze forward then jerked to a halt beside Nikki, gaping at a tiny Barbie doll of a woman dressed almost all in white, crouching in the alcove of the chapel. Despite that fact that it was barely noon, she was rocking four-inch platform white leather boots that nudged up against a shimmering white miniskirt, which bared enough skin to show off an impressive swath of white fishnet stockings. And she was trying to rouse an older, pudgy but remarkably well-dressed man curled up at the base of a large cupid-themed topiary vase.
“Henry, honey, don’t make me Tase you.” The woman’s voice was as soothing as a long pour of sweet liquor. She leaned over the man, revealing a white sequined leotard beneath her equally white leather bolero jacket, and sending a tumble of blonde curls free from beneath her snow-white cowboy hat. Yes. Cowboy hat.
“Please tell me that’s not Dixie,” I murmured.
“Henry, I’m telling you, you have to quit doing this to yourself,” the bombshell cooed. “You have to stick to Libras and Pisces, if you’re going to have any shot at all. Why do you do this to me, honey? You tryin’ to kill me?”
“Owwuarggummafluevian!” the man on the ground protested, and the woman clucked in gentle rebuke.
“You won’t say that to Bobby-Frank when he takes you home, promise? He’s got feelings, you know. He’s fragile.” She poked poor the guy with a rapier-like nail. “Promise me, Henry.”
“Iwufffliann.”
“That’s better. You’ll be yourself in no time. I’ll have those nice people at the Bellagio arrange a massage for you.” She leaned forward and kissed him on the forehead. “And stay away from Scorpios, okay? You know they make you crazier than a bedbug.”
The old fellow assented with a long, baritone mumble, and the woman rocked back from him, waving as if to the sky. Within fifteen seconds, a kind-eyed man who had to be Bobby-Frank ambled up, built like a fire hydrant and wearing a rumpled brown suit. He hunkered there with a sigh, eyeing poor Henry as the woman uncoiled herself and stood.
Or sort of stood. She couldn’t have been more than five feet high, even in the boots.
“A Scorpio?” Bobby-Frank asked.
“They get him every time.”
Bobby-Frank leaned over and lifted Henry off the ground, settling the man on his feet with barely a twitch of muscle. A cab had magically appeared at the entryway to the chapel’s drive, and Bobby-Frank folded Henry inside with a gentleness that belied his bulk. I glanced back at the tattoo parlor, but the thin man was gone, and a CLOSED sign now hung in the door.
“Well, Nikki, as I live and breathe—what are you doing here?” Dixie gushed, all sweet tea and Southern Comfort, whipping my attention back to her. “And who is this?”
“Sara, allow me to introduce Dixie Quinn. And Dixie, this,” Nikki said with a flourish, indicating me, “is Sara Wilde, aka how we’re going to get back Marta, Mary, and whoever else has gone missing you haven’t told me about.” Nikki popped a hip and settled her mitts on her sleek chauffeur’s uniform. “I know, I’m impressive. It’s okay to stare.”
“Oh!” Dixie blinked perfectly mascaraed eyes at Nikki, then at me. “Well, gracious, come on in, the both of you. It’s hot enough to fry cactus out here.”
I didn’t argue as Dixie led us inside to a cute little sitting room done up in bubblegum-pink walls, gold-framed wedding photos, and yards of white carpet. Dixie settled us into white overstuffed couches that looked like they’d been sold alongside their matching brass-and-glass side tables at a blowout sale at Big Lots. Several brass keepsake boxes were stacked artfully on the tables, with a small price card tented beside them. “So.” Dixie smiled at me with a perfect cupid bow’s mouth. “You’re new in the city?”
“New enough,” Nikki answered for me. “She’s been working for the Magician. But we’re on the clock here. We need to know about the girls. Languages, skill sets. Last known whereabouts. How many we might run into at Binion’s.”
“They’re at Binion’s?” Dixie frowned, then swiveled her gaze to me. “Not a good place. You go there to get your questions answered, for a price, when you don’t like the answers you get on the Strip. Nasty place to do business, but the rumors of their accuracy are steady and sure.” She nodded. “Come right back to the office. I have everything you need there.”
The office was little more than a closet, the walls lined by low fil
e cabinets and literally dozens of hand-drawn cartoons of couples in various states of wedded bliss, apparently a “caricature with purchase” promotion the chapel must be running. But it was the file cabinets that intrigued me. I frowned, looking around. “You don’t believe in the cloud?”
“I believe too much in the cloud.” Dixie’s manner was pure Southern charm, but there was no mistaking the steel underneath. “I wouldn’t store anything there, not when it’s so easy to hack. These cases are lined with lead, hematite, and more than a few charms to keep out prying eyes. It’s the only way I’ve kept the information safe.” She smiled ruefully. “And we’re pulling in more information all the time.” Somehow, I didn’t think she was talking about wedding information.
She went to her desk, where a ledger sat, closed. She touched the front, and locks audibly clicked, rendering the notebook a grown up secret diary. As she paged through its contents, she kept talking. “I’m sure Nikki has already filled you in, but I’m sort of the first stop, you could say, for the city’s Connected—astrologers, palm readers, fortune tellers, hypnotists—the works. We make sure everyone is settled in, finds work, learns their way around the city. Ah.” She reached an entry, then glanced up at both of us. “And when they go missing, we notice. Because someone needs to.”
Her last sentence was loaded with a bitterness that seemed years in the making. “You have people go missing a lot?”
“Even a handful is too many, and it’s happening more and more.” She refocused on Nikki. “Which girls do you think he has”
“Marta—that’s the one missing her ear, right?” Nikki waved a hand past her own shiny mane. “I think her sister was named Mary. No clue what their skills were, but there was a knot of them, all came in together?”
“Oh, yes. Psychic attunement. They weren’t sisters but close friends. Are close friends.” Dixie pursed her perfect lips, reading in her book. “One moved, they all moved. One had a thought, they all had a thought. You could whisper something in the ear of one of them at the back of the audience, and the sister on stage would speak it purely, plainly, and without prompting. You could touch one of the girls, and the others would know that too. More faintly, an echo, but she’d know it.” She looked up, her eyes fierce. “I do not want to imagine what’s being done with them at Binion’s. The girls arrived in the city two months ago, and they’ve been gone for three weeks now. Three weeks. I thought—I’d assumed they’d been taken out of the city. To think they’ve been here this whole—”
“Focus, Dix. You said they could speak anything spoken to them. So they know English? They can communicate?”
She shook her head. “They didn’t have to know English to perform. They’re mimics. Their own language was nothing I could figure out, some sort of pidgin Slavic that didn’t match up to anything we understood. But we’d begun teaching them. They’d barely escaped detection getting here, and we lost them in less than two months.” She looked at Dixie. “They won’t respond to reason, only orders. You bark at them loud enough, they’ll move. Their leader is tall, with long hair, so blonde it’s almost white. I don’t know if they’ll have cut her hair, but I doubt it’s shaved off. It’s too beautiful.”
Nikki considered that, nodded. “I can work with that.’
“There are two other girls there too, we think,” I said, drawing Dixie’s attention back. “Psychics from eastern Europe. Kavala. You have any record of them? When they might have come into the city, how long they’ve been locked up at the club?”
She frowned, shooting a glance at Nikki, who shrugged. “Her information is solid. I trust her.”
Beautiful brown eyes swung back to me. “Who are you seeking, exactly?”
“The two girls from Kavala,” I said, my nerves ratcheted up. “You got information on them, then give it to me. Otherwise, we’re out of here.”
Dixie bristled, and even that looked good on her, but she didn’t glance down at her book. “Those girls weren’t free when they got here. I don’t keep such records in the main directory. That doesn’t help them.”
“Then what do you—”
Dixie cut off my words with a wave of her hand, gesturing to the drawings on the wall. They were carnie-level art—caricature artist renderings almost, but instead of being cartoonish, they looked almost poignant, beautiful young girls and dashing young men in their wedding finery, bridesmaids posing in front of a silhouetted kissing couple, best men mugging for the artist. Then I looked closer. “You’ve got to be kidding me.”
“It’s the easiest way to get their pictures around the city. I hear about men, women, kids being taken, I get their descriptions, and these images go up on artists’ walls and in cafés and coffee shops up and down the Strip. I get a whisper of someone seeing a back-alley act where the players aren’t all looking so healthy, same deal. Someone sees a girl who looks like his sister, his daughter… Someone sees a guy who might be the stripper she saw the night before… It all helps.” She shrugged daintily. “The cops don’t always listen, but when they do—”
I schooled my features to be even, my breathing to stay steady. “Cops?”
“Won’t be any cops at Binion’s today,” Nikki said firmly, more to me than Dixie. She was scanning the pictures as well. “You think you have the girls up here? The ones from Kavala?”
“I’m afraid so.” Dixie moved out from around her desk and strode over to the far wall. Her cowgirl getup should have looked ridiculous, but I was already getting used to it. Welcome to Fabulous Las Vegas.
She reached up and pulled one of the crisp drawings down from its clip on the wall, then turned and handed it to me. “These your girls?”
I scowled at the image. It was clearly a reprint, but the likeness of the girls was unmistakable, though I’d only seen one picture of them. Two beautiful young women, their skin almost a ghostly white, their long hair lustrous as it dropped in a thick, gleaming braid to their waists. They were holding hands and gazing out at the viewer with wide, shining eyes, their perfect Cupid’s bow mouths smiling with bridesmaidenly bliss. Only, their bridesmaid’s gowns were decidedly unique. “Togas.”
“I remember that description when it came in. Someone had seen them at a private party—no connection to Binion’s, I can tell you that. But they thought they were on drugs of some sort. They were almost in a trance, lying on each other, stroking each other’s hair, murmuring nonsense. ‘Beautiful and tragic,’ my informant said.”
“There’s a lot of beautiful and tragic going on in the city,” Nikki pointed out, her keen eyes on the drawing as well. “Why’d they stand out?”
Dixie tapped the picture with a long pink fingernail. “Something he saw them do. They were pulled up to meet someone and immediately started crying, pulling at their clothes, their hair. They got hustled right out, but the guy they had done the demonstration for was all outraged. Big spender, apparently, who was looking for some sugar, not some kind of fit.”
I handed the drawing back to her. “Let me guess. He’s dead.”
“Found floating in Lake Mead not twelve hours later. Spooked my contact good, but that’s the first and last I heard of the girls, and that was a month ago and more.”
I nodded. I’d seen the date inscribed at the bottom of the drawing. They’d been in Vegas five weeks and were now out of public view. They’d only been missing for about eight. There was very little chance they were still alive.
Nikki placed a large hand on my shoulder. “We’ll get them.” She glanced at Dixie. “There may be others.”
“Well, darlin’, I didn’t think you came all the way over here for my apple pie.” She reached languorously over her desk and scooped up her petal-pink cell phone. “You just run along. We’ll be there whenever you need us.”
We turned to go, and I stopped, looking back.
“Question for you. That guy by the tattoo parlor. What’s he about?”
“Jimmy?” Dixie grinned. “Honey, he’s been here longer than I have. Master with a needle
and ink, not so much with his love life. Keeps to himself mostly, ’less you’re his client. His shop may not look like much, but he draws in some pretty high rollers.”
“Right.” I frowned, thinking about the image I’d seen in his window. I would have sworn it was… “He’s not part of the council, right?”
“Oh Lord, no.” She looked at me, startled. “He’s not even a… I mean…” She frowned. “Bless my soul, I’ve never really spoken with the man. He could be a Connected, but if so, he’s got to be a minor one. All his magic’s done with his needle, nothing more.”
“Thanks.” We walked out into the bright sunshine again, and I stared over at the shop. Now the sign read CLOSED, but that wasn’t the only thing that had changed.
The large print of the horseman and flag were gone.
Death had left the building.
Chapter Eighteen
I mulled over the image the entire way to Binion’s. Seeing images from the cards in places I didn’t expect them was kind of a thing for me. An ad for Red Devil pizza, a statue of Justice and her scales in the middle of nowhere. The image of a Hanged Man painted on the wall of an Italian bistro. For Death to show up in a tattoo parlor wasn’t completely unusual, but given the givens, I couldn’t help thinking there was a hidden message in its appearance.
What could it mean, though? Most of the time, Death meant extraordinary transformation.
And sometimes, it just meant a whole lot of Death.
We parked a quarter mile from Binion’s. The “Fremont Street experience” included many things, but quick access to your vehicle generally wasn’t one of them. Nikki changed out of her chauffeur getup into her usual street wear and lounged in a rare stretch of shade as I pulled a few cards. Seven of Swords, Pope, High Priestess. Since the Seven cautioned of trickery and the High Priestess could reference the girls’ oracular powers, those made sense. The pope, not so much. But I had a bad feeling about it.