Chapter Thirty-One
Deja-Vous outfitted me again and Dolly got me to the rambling wreck that was left of the 1001 Arabian Knights Hotel and Casino. Or so the mostly shot-out neon sign said. The name made me think of a cultural blend of Sinbad the Sailor and King Arthur's Round Table, but people were a lot less politically correct in the mid-twentieth century. The place sat on the bitter south end of the Strip below all the new high-flying hotels, where even the Johnny-come-lately hotels had not yet hung out their neon shingles.
It was true vampire time now, the dark of night lit by street lamps. Blowing sand beat a tattoo on the deserted hotel's shabby fifties-Moderne sign out front, still advertising Steve Lawrence and Edie Gorme.
Right. Steve and Edie who?
This property was clearly condemned. The windows were boarded over and the entrance was marked: DANGER. ACCESS FORBIDDEN. Not to mention the forbidding razor-wire-topped cyclone fence surrounding everything.
I parked Dolly across the Strip at our old home away from home, the Araby Motel. Having lived briefly at the Araby Motel, I'd soon found a low-profile parking space for Dolly behind a Dumpster under a broken parking lot light. No reason she needed to associate with that broken-down dump. The Arabian Knights, not the Araby Motel. Maybe that was how the motel had been named, after its big brother.
I felt conspicuous as I crossed the wide street, but nothing much was happening down here. The sun had taken a dive behind the Western mountains. One of those faint twinkles in the foothills was Los Lobos. In an earthy flashback, Ric was sensuously edging my skirt waistband down past my belly button in some instant rewind in the sky and from the scrapbook of my memory.
Meanwhile, I was edging my laced-up oxfords, virginal white, over the glass-strewn sand that surrounded the Arabian Knights. The outfit from Deja-Vous was as authentic as it was ridiculous. The clerk, a pimply-faced punk, had winked, clicked his tongue, and noted that this getup was hot stuff among the geriatric set.
Right. White hose, white garter belt, and white cotton, waist-high, full-coverage panties-ick! I'd read that Elvis had gotten off on those but he was soooo over. My get-up was fifties kitsch, not to mention the dead-white uniform and the kinky little black bag.
But a reporter on the trail will suffer anything for a prime interview and Vilma had promised that I'd meet a mondo-big player from the vampire side of the WW-V wars if I played it right.
A mini-tape recorder was stashed under one the ridiculous steel garters... those things left welts on my thighs! Water-weight again. I had tucked a tiny notepad and pencil up my tight, short white sleeve. The whole outfit was undersized, with the blouse buttons straining to display my cleavage, but I'd been assured this was the exact right costume from the exact right film of the period.
The lobby was empty, dusty, and moth-eaten.
A shred of desert wind shuffled all the litter around. Gaming tables tilted on three-legged stands. Playing cards with their numbers sand-tattooed off laid false trails through the endless rooms.
I found a bank of elevators. Even back in the forties, Las Vegas hotels aimed at height. This one was only ten stories, but it had been a Tower of Babel in its time.
Litter snaked across the marble floors. I jumped, imagining rat claws.
What I saw was even worse: a trio of shambling figures in the long black coats of always-cold junkies. They slunk along the outer walls like mongrel dogs, cowed but ready to attack in a pack at any sign of weakness.
Their eye whites and fangs glittered in slivers of light from the streetlamps. One limped. Another gnawed compulsively on his own filthy knuckles. The third edged nearer.
I retreated to the elevator bank and paced along the closed doors, pushing dead buttons and wishing for a nail file. Let me in, let me in! My disguise would earn me a pass from the chief resident vamp, Vilma had assured me, but she hadn't mentioned the homeless, hungry vamps on the chief's perimeter.
They were coming closer, forming into a gang of three. One brushed its long, filthy nails at my arm. Undead Ted looked like the prince of vampires compared to these vagrants.
Above one set of elevator doors the floor number ten lit up.
I can't explain how spooky that was. One floor on one elevator. I'd been told something was here. Apparently, something had noticed that I was here and that I wasn't going away.
The light descended slowly on the dusty gilt monitor. I pressed my back to those elevator doors and reached into the black bag, which made my circling vamps pause. Did I carry a wooden stake in my little black bag? Didn't I wish! Above me the numbers lit up in turn: Eight. Five. Three. Two. One.
A ting like a microwave finished cooking hit my ears. Any sound but wind here was shocking. The doors did what elevator doors are supposed to. Open.
My heart beat me half senseless. This was what I wanted, but it was totally spooky.
I backed inside and pressed the top button. Ten. The penthouse. That's where the story was. The vampire trio had decided to get bold just as the elevator doors snapped shut. One pinned a narrow finger in the closing crack, leaving a shriek behind as the car shot upward. A convex mirror in a corner of the elevator ceiling made me look like Jessica Rabbit, all mammary glands, all the time, in the distorted reflection.
The car zoomed upward with surprising, twenty-first century speed.
When the elevator door opened at the top, a weary man in a gray flannel suit was waiting for me.
He eyed me up and down with contempt and resignation.
"He's waiting for you. You'll have to pass through security. Let me see that bag."
I handed it over, feeling like any cowed modern airport traveler.
Wow. Inside was a stethoscope. A packet of hypodermic needles. A bottle of alcohol and lots of cotton balls. Latex gloves. And an instant camera. Weird.
"This way, Miss." He returned the bag to me unrifled.
The guy showed me through a plain brown door. The moment it shut I regretted being here in the worst way. The room was a giant shower stall, all white tiles and fluorescent lights. No windows, no obvious doors. I was totally trapped.
The lights went nova. A deep male robotic voice instructed me to turn with my arms extended. I quavered about the presence of my blouse-sleeve notebook, but didn't set off any alarms.
A section of tiled wall opened and I was in another chamber where a moving spray misted me from stem to stern. The odor was evergreen and eucalyptus and I had a sense of being scanned, as if by X-rays.
The next room was steam-filled and almost wilted my starched uniform.
I passed into yet another chamber, dim-lit after the glaring inspection room, and managed to rub my thighs together to activate the tape recorder.
"Nurse Wretched," a voice declared from an overhead PA system. I'd given my name as "Ratched."
"This is your patient."
The dim lights came up.
I was not alone. Really not alone. A half dozen clones of me-busty young women in tight white uniforms- flocked around a hospital bed accessorized with trees of IVs and other high-intensity medical paraphernalia.
The object of their attention lay sprawled on the sheets before me, Las Vegas's oldest living vampire, a scrawny, filth-brown man with nails the length of an abused pony's hooves and hair long and unkempt enough to make a supermodel's career.
My heart, and gut, sank.
I'd fought my way into this?
The rasp of heavy breathing magnified by machines surrounded me. My sister nurses grinned to show their sharp canine teeth. The breath sounds? Mine. I was the only breathing being in this place and I was being monitored as if I were the sick person.
"You're here to h-h-help me?" the skeletal figure on the bed wheezed.
I grabbed the stethoscope, finally understanding what a forgotten nest of undead this place was, my knees shaking.
"Breathe," I said, placing the silver circle on that hollow, filthy chest.
"You must be kidding."
"No. I can... read your state of health through this instrument."
The wild-animal glittering eyes focused on me. "And... my state is -?"
"Vigorous." I snapped the bag shut, determined to bluff my way through this. I actually believed it and he so needed to hear it.
The balloon-bosomed nurses arrayed themselves around him like chorus girls. He was used to flunkies, but was essentially a never-satisfied man.
I played doctor, rather than nurse, because only an authority figure could get anything out of this lecherous geezer. "I believe that unresolved issues from your past are hurting your recovery now. Why did the vampires lose the war?"
Even I sensed the instant suspension of all sensory devices: the security, the girls' phony solicitousness.
"Not lost," he huffed, clutching his bony chest.
I immediately applied the silver stethoscope head to it again. My medium. Silver. Even when it was chrome.
"Cold," he complained, writhing with the satisfaction of feeling something, anything. The surrounding nurses showed their fangs and backed off. Those shrunken gums grinned up at me, the teeth brown and sharp, like rusty razors.
"I can make you a star," he promised.
If there's one thing some men like better than gratuitous sex, it's telling war stories.
I lounged alone on the hospital bed with my host while his rakelike fingernails unthinkingly caressed the tape recorder lump on my thigh, taking it for some sort of vibrator, no doubt.
The creepy girl vamps hugged the room's walls, waiting for the old guy to fall asleep. Then they'd storm me for a group bite. I wasn't as worried about them as the lean and hungry vamps on the street level. Besides, I bet it was hard to catch the old guy asleep. As long as I kept him talking about his glory days of yesteryear, I was okay.
"So you're the sole survivor," I encouraged him, forcing my nurse-white false fingernails (thank God I could ditch them afterwards) through his kinky, gray, snarled locks. Snow's hair was sable-soft but right now his metal familiar had shrunk to a cheesy ankle bracelet with a dangling (two guesses what parts were dangling) Playboy Bunny charm. I was not here to think about Snow, but the old guy might give away something about him before I left.
"Sole survivor." He relished the words the way Nightwine savored mobile olive slices. "The sole survivor to stay on, despite all the mob action, even if I had to play dead to do it. See, my empire was going south. My lieutenants were using the fact that I like my privacy to take over. The Big Boys from the East Coast and Chicago outfits had brought me in to clean up the Alakhazam Hotel operation, but my own staff was conspiring to take over my Las Vegas interests. The only option was to let someone they couldn't buy or bully take over for me."
I got it. "You made an alliance with the vampires."
"Yeah. Good businessmen. Went for the jugular, like I did. Immortality would allow me to pursue my first loves, flight and females. I loved engineering things that people believed couldn't be done. Nice undergarment you're wearing, by the way. I invented that fashion-forward look."
I stared at him the way he was staring at my conical brassiere.
"What?" he demanded defensively. "I read Victoria 's Secret catalogues. Better class of model in them than in Playboy these days. That Hugh Hefner was just a wannabe me."
Actually. Howard Hughes, or what was left of him, had a point.
And then he stuck that point, a curling, yellowed fingernail, down my open blouse front while I pretended to wriggle away in delight rather than disgust.
"You're quite the aerodynamic genius, in the air and in the sack," I cooed. "So who did the deed? Who bit you over to the Dark Side?"
"I'd only let a woman. No guy was sucking on anything of mine. She was a beauty. Dark-haired like you. Built. Lips red as roses. I was going to make her a star."
Wow, was that a tired line! I glanced at the hovering nurses, who were clearly slavering over my virgin neck, wrists, and femoral arteries. All brunet. Crimson-lipped, white-toothed. All right out of a Hammer film from the sixties. Vampire High. Rocky Transylvanian Horror Show Mountain High. I'd fit right in if I didn't figure out an escape ploy.
I'd read up on Howard Hughes during my research. He wasn't in on the founding of Las Vegas, but came along shortly after. And he had indeed been asked by the mob to clean up the situation at the hotel. His playboy days were fading then, and he probably was tending toward the obsessive-compulsive disorders and paranoia that ended with him holing up in a string of hotels he owned, possessed of a germ mania but in a skeletal, filthy, unkempt state himself, with long tangled locks and mandarin fingernails like claws.
His reported death and burial in the seventies and the location and state of his huge assets and will remained lucrative tabloid paper mysteries for years. He could darn well be exactly what he seemed to be: a madman who had made a deal with the undead. The ramifications were mind-boggling.
Meanwhile, I needed to know more.
"Oh, Vampy Boy." I let a false fingernail coil in his iron-gray chest hair. Singular, as in one hair. "Tell me who bit you into eternity? I need a role model."
The cunning eyes in their corroded setting squinted at me. "Looked a lot like you. A Black Dahlia. Dark devilish hair, heavenly blue eyes, wanton red lips. Vida was her name."
Vida. Spanish for "life." She couldn't possibly be-? No. But she could still be... alive, so to speak.
He went on reminiscing. "She worked for the werewolves, but her heart had turned vampire. Liked the kick of giving blood along with her body. I suggested they turn her all the way just for me, so I could pick who'd suck me into immortality."
The selfish bastard!
"Where is she now?" Poor undead woman!
He shrugged. "She had issues. Left for California with some master vamp. Some Podunk town in Orange County, when I could have made her a star here. So. Now I am vampire. Now you will stop asking questions and become my bride. I need another one."
"I don't date older men." But I was wearing all white... even my undies.
A scrawny but powerful arm captured the back of my neck and drew me toward those neglected-knife-drawer teeth.
Around me I felt the busty nurse vampires closing in. Once he got the first bite, they would get seconds. Pickings were lean around here. Sharp nails dug into my nape, Nosferatu on the march.
The nurses were swarming my limbs, pinning down my arms and legs for their master.
I was immobile, helpless, out of options.
Then I felt that familiar, loathed cold shiver streaking up my ankle to my garter belt past my industrial-strength push-up, push-out bra to my neck.
Vampire Empire-builder chomped down hard on the wide silver dog collar suddenly circling my neck. Several rotting teeth shattered to the gum line as he screamed with pain and frustration.
I started kicking and flailing in all directions. The shocked nurses froze, and then zeroed in on the blood pooling at their master's bleeding gums. Periodontal disease is such a golden opportunity for the blood-based set, and there is no loyalty among bloodsuckers.
I rolled off the bed, scrambled to my feet, and dashed back the way I had come, the heel of my hand knocking Gray-suited Man against the white tile walls. In the hall I skipped the elevators and ran clattering down the fire stairs.
Down the last turn I ran into a free-range vampire coming up, unable to wait anymore.
I grabbed the iron railing and kicked hard at his chest, sending him tumbling down like a die cube on a table.
I clattered after him. These sturdy lace-up oxfords were the next best thing to butt-kicking boots. Maybe nurses needed that edge.
He fell into his two buddies, who kicked him aside to come for me. By then I had gravity on my side again, and momentum. I barreled into them, using my elbows, the strongest joint in the human body, ramming into ribs, collarbones, noses. Ordinarily vampires could take all I had to give and break me like a shoetree.
But these guys were so hungry they ignored my defenses and came snapping at my carotid arteries, one on each side. They hadn't seen my silver dog collar in the dark. Between the mythic power of silver and the stubborn nature of Snow's familiar to bend or break to any power, they gashed their mouths into bleeding rivers. I kicked them aside, onto their fallen comrade. Last I glimpsed they were snapping reflexively at each other.
I kept running.
The night was dark and the traffic was nil, but Dolly was waiting in the Araby Motel lot across the street, her headlights on and her engine racing like a Stephen King car.
I made for her and then eyed the dude waiting in the passenger seat. Dude? Dog. Quicksilver sat there panting, his tongue almost touching his gray chest hairs.
I never wanted to think about a gray chest hair again.
But the poor dog had run his pads off to find Dolly, and me, just in time. Now that we were reunited, he went pushing out the passenger door to down some poor wino who had happened along.
Wait! Another wino was grinning vacantly at my window. Thank God I'd left the top up.
Not a wino. A half-were. I opened the heavy door hard into its torso and came out, wishing for a silver bullet. I guess I had one. Quicksilver leapt the broad Caddy hood in one bound and landed claws down on the flattened half-were, tearing out its throat with one shake of his mighty head and jaws.
I fell back into the driver's seat, while Quicksilver snarled and ran down two of three more escaping shadows. All half-weres.
I knew he'd taken out the half-were motorcycle gang at the pet store parking lot, but I hadn't seen the carnage up close, in living color. A rich river of blood was oozing toward Dolly's left front tire.
Quick was plenty busy doing things I didn't want to see, although I couldn't help hearing them. I turned on the ignition and eased Dolly back out of the blood flow. The dog was part wolfhound. What part of that didn't I get? He was born to hunt and kill wolves. To protect flocks. And to him, I was flock. I was lucky to have him. Half-weres were predator scum, not even "unhuman," as Ric put it. I just didn't like to see where those teeth had been.
I had a chance to think while Quicksilver finished doing his business. Expecting a quick exit tonight, I'd left Dolly unlocked with the keys in the glove compartment. Now they were dangling from the ignition. Quicksilver and his clever paws and teeth? Dolly herself? Snow's pretty damn good remote manipulation of silver skills? My life-saving dog collar was now a charm bracelet loaded with tiny vintage Cadillacs.
So, I wondered, was this little mobile accessory of mine the Mark of the Devil, or a protective talisman? And was Snow evil incarnate, or maybe something more interesting? Hair, after all, is a literal "lock" and is associated with my namesake.
Who knew, who cared? Maybe Snow knew and I cared, but right now all I wanted was to get the hell out of here.
Quicksilver hopped into the passenger seat and I leaned far over to pull the wide door shut. I revved that Caddy engine and we blasted out onto the Strip, heading for the bright lights of Las Vegas Central due north.
Chapter Thirty-Two
Ric called me as soon as he got back the next day. "Man, what a mess."
"Where were you?"
"I could use a night at Los Lobos. You ready to rock 'n' roll?"
Hearing the soul-deep weariness in his voice, I decided that mentioning my petty personal problems was minor. I could have pointed out that the exertion of dancing wasn't the best medicine for a burned-out traveler, but I was too selfish.
"Salsa," I corrected, "but it's not the full moon quite yet."
"We'll make it so."
"Yes, sir, Captain Picard."
"Where are the hot-mama low-rider jeans?" Ric asked when he picked me up outside Hector's estate. I respected his decision not to confront Quicksilver on his own turf yet.
I fluffed my turquoise silk skirt in the car. "I felt festive."
My fluffing gesture had made my silver bracelet jingle jangle like spurs.
"Nice bracelet. Navaho work, isn't it?"
"Um-" I glanced down to find that the bauble had gone Native American and added turquoise stones to match my dancing skirt. "Yeah, I guess."
"You didn't know when you bought it?"
"I found lots of old silver jewelry at estate sales in Kansas."
I told myself that I hadn't-actually lied to Ric; I just hadn't hit him in the face with Snow's nasty little permanent present. Still, I felt queasy about dodging the truth with him, and changed the subject pronto.
"The turquoise doesn't quite match the rhinestones on my shoes."
He eyed and recognized the vintage plastic heels from our last, and first, date. "Those your lucky dancing shoes, chica? Or mine?"
That was another subject I didn't want to delve into, what could happen between us tonight. Haskell's ugly innuendos had tainted the growing ease of my relationship with Ric.
"So what happened where you were?" I asked. "Or can't I know?"
" Juarez."
I eyed his taut-jawed profile against the passing headlights, wondering if Captain Malloy had ever had this view.
"Oh. The thousands of factory girl murders that have been going on for decades. It must have been awful." I could say that with feeling, having been haunted recently by my own youthful innocent, Jeanie with the light brown hair.
His lips tightened, if that was possible. "I've been on it since I joined the FBI, fresh out of Quantico a few years ago. That's when they started calling me the Cadaver Kid. Sometimes I find the fresh dead. You would swear life had just kissed their cheeks goodbye. There's something... sweet about that. It's good to settle their families' anxieties and get police evidence, but many of them don't make it from the coroner's facility to a funeral home."
"Why not?"
"Hijacked," he said tersely. "Their bodies have hardly deteriorated. If they're raised as zombies, they have most of their faculties and such fresh, young corpses are in high demand as CinSim material."
"Ghastly! Can't anyone stop it?"
"Nobody's stopped Juarez," he said. "It often suits the powerful to use tragedies to enrich themselves."
After a moment he spoke again. "Sometimes I find the long-dead. They are only dry bones, fragile as precious parchment. I feel like an archeologist, privileged to reveal them. Then there are the savagely murdered ones. They still fester in the earth like plague victims. Bruised, bleeding. All those young, helpless girls. It was like being clawed at by... "
Groupies? I almost said. "Why were you there? Isn't it dangerous?"
"Damn right. The drug lords and traffickers in human and unhuman labor run the city with huge gangs. Police chiefs don't last twenty-four hours before being gunned down, and U.S. border forces and drug and immigration agents are often assassinated or caught, tortured, and killed within a day of entering the city."
"Ric!"
"That's why they want me there. I can blend in better than an Anglo agent and there's always my sterling track record at finding corpses. This time I found a DEA agent they'd done a torture voodoo act on. The body had to be brought up in pieces. At least the CinSim runners won't get him."
"Oh, my God! I'm glad I didn't know where you were and what you were doing. It's a wonder you don't have post-traumatic shock syndrome."
Ric shook his head as if dislodging memories of carnage.
"I need to be there. A lot of bodies have needed finding over the years. Some serial killers are working there, and the usual gangs of smugglers, thieves, and rapists. Nobody really cares about the deaths of these young women except their families. The Anglos who run the border factories like the cheap labor and provide buses that are about as secure as a sieve. The workers often have to stay overtime and miss the bus schedule. Their long hours send them home on foot after dark and Mexican culture doesn't give much respect to women out after dark. They're picked off by the border predators so fast that a girl can be seen leaving the factory one night and sleep in a shallow grave by the next morning."
"All human predators?"
"No." He was silent for a while. "Vampires and werewolves too. And then there's the regional boogeyman, the chupacabra."
"Chupacabra?"
"A blood-sucking goat-killer. It's been described as everything from a small half-alien, half-dinosaur tailless vampire with quills running down its back to a pantherlike creature with a long snaky tongue to a hopping animal that leaves a trail of sulfuric stench. Some claim they're alien 'pets' or cloning experiments gone wrong. The UFO nuts call such creatures Anomalous Biological Entities, aka ABEs."
I had a shuddersome memory of the trio of dead cows near Wichita. That half-dinosaur tail reminded me of the huge reptilian track I'd found there.
"Have you ever seen such a thing out on the desert?" I asked.
He paused for a minute or more. "Maybe. I've seen a lot of bizarre things out in the desert. Chupacabras? Rogue humans and unhumans are scarier, and human predators are worst of all, because they have no need to kill to live."
"You found more victims this trip?" Personally, I meant. These weren't numbers, statistics; these were lost bodies and souls he dowsed for.