Dancing with Werewolves

 

Chapter Thirteen

The dog leaped through the open window into Dolly's red-leather passenger seat as if claiming a cushy vintage doggie bed.

I'd planned to lower the pop-top for after-dark Las Vegas cruising, which it soon would be, so I unlatched the manual locks and hit the chrome control knob that had been futuristic in the fifties and Dolly was gettin' down.

The sense of freedom and safety the car gave me reminded me of my ignominious introduction to driving at fifteen-and-a-half. It also recalled Father Black. I tried not to think of him. Not that Father Black was a problem; no, the opposite. He was the priest who ministered at Our Lady of the Lake Convent, a slightly shy man in his late thirties with a kind, sometimes worried face. He'd been the only one to notice that I was nearing driving license age and had no one to teach me. So I learned to drive the aging stick shift Volvo the parish had bought him years before. We practiced in the school parking lot on weekends, and moved onto nearby country roads.

I never liked driving stick, but it was all I had and I got good enough to pass muster with it. The lessons ended on a humiliatingly sour note, though.

My dear bitchy classmates, all equipped with fathers and older brothers to teach them to drive their new Miatas and Beamers, started gossiping about Father Black and me. Sarah Anderson's mother, a hair-sprayed harridan in Prada pumps, stomped into the Mother Superior's office one day and said the lessons must stop because of the "scandal."

I was called in soon after, and all the swearing in the world that his instructions were purely fatherly weren't enough. I'm not sure Mother Superior bought Mrs. Anderson's line. Although she stopped the lessons, she said Mrs. Anderson had to chauffeur me to my driver's test and provide a car for me to take it in.

So I was delivered there in a (thank goodness) sporty six-speed manual Lexus that I then put through the paces. I'd vowed to pass the first time, come hell or high water. And I did. Father Black and I never communicated again, except for nods in the hall. He looked shy, worried, and now sad when I saw him. The woman's false charges had humiliated him as well as me, turning something rare and nice in my life, something fatherly, into something to be disowned.

Mother Superior told me later that the other girls had been jealous of me, but I couldn't see why they would be, when they had everything and I had nothing.

Anyway, as soon as I was on my own and could buy a car, I switched to automatic.

Dolly was such an extravagant find that she made me forget about my unhappy introduction to driving. She was bigger than a Lexus and way better looking than Mrs. Anderson. Her high horse-power chutzpah always lifted my spirits and that's what she did now.

Dog howled along with my chosen radio station, so I had to move it to NPR. Downer. Gas prices per gallon were rivaling the cost of Jimmy Choo shoes and the Supreme Court was all-boy again.

We stopped at a Peter Piper Pickle-Eater drive-through to load up on fast food. The shtick here was that everything came with pickles. Dog gobbled three Gargantua Burgers faster than I could order three more. He spit out the pickles even faster.

I sat and contemplated where the heck I could run and walk him so near the Strip. I'd have to buy a gimme cap and sneak him into my motel room as a guest. Hey, the rotating lady tenants brought in some real dogs of "clients." Why couldn't I have a genuine one? I'd paid for the week, after all.

The sun was long gone by the time we hit the Pet Palace, a pseudo-Taj Mahal affair in a strip mall with the fa?ade outlined in flamingo-pink neon that made Dog howl even louder.

"Shut up," I told him. "Rescues can't be choosers. You need a non-wussy leash. Don't worry. I'll make sure it's heavy metal."

I riffled through the papers I'd signed in Sunset Park in the parking lot's hot-pink glow. Rabies shot. Right. I'd take care of that in the next day or two. Swear to fix. Neuter. Important. I eyed my boy's silver-blue eyes. A quick nip and tuck. It would hurt me more than it would hurt him. What do dogs know?

I entered the Pet Palace's hyper-fluorescent lit interior and spent seventy-some dollars getting Dog-boy a stainless steel bowl set, several chew-bones the size of an Easter Island head, and a short leash with a chain big enough to serve as a watch-fob for King Kong. No dog bed was large enough for his big-boned frame. Why was there a rule that dogs had to sleep on tartan plaid? They weren't all Scottish. He'd just have to make do with the ratty rug at the Araby Motel. I had to deal with the scratchy sheets.

When I came out the parking lot was deserted for dinnertime down time. I'd put up the top and locked Godzilla of the North in the Caddy with the windows inched down all around.

He was staring soulfully at me, then perked his pointed ears, flaunted his grizzly-size teeth, and started leaping at the window.

Whoa! That's modern safety glass, Toto! Built to resist impact.

Maybe it was the sight of the Alcatraz-style chain in my hands.

Or maybe it was the jerk behind me who pulled me around to face him and three other guys. They were all so pasty-faced I took them for vamps. Then I noticed their sloping shoulders in plaid shirts and the plastic pocket protectors.

"It is her!" cried the one who'd laid hands on me. He had nails-chewed-to-the-quick hands. Nothing to worry about unless I was a manicurist.

I dropped my bags to the pavement with a steel rattle, gave Geek-boy an elbow in the stomach that cracked a couple of ribs, stomped his pal's foot in its shabby tennies, spun away from the third guy's grabbing hands and high-kicked his chin. I picked up Dog's chain leash and looped it around Bachelor Number Four's scrawny Adam's apple. Obviously this guy had not fallen far from the Tree and had been left for fertilizer by the snake.

It was a pleasure to see that my college martial arts training still gave me an instinctual edge.

Meanwhile Dog was howling up a storm.

No one came out to look or help, but the four guys were backing off, whimpering. I bent to retrieve my bags when I heard a nearing growl. I whirled on my attackers, who were crawling away even faster, pushing their plastic-framed glasses onto the bridges of their noses.

They weren't the problem, so then...

The growl grew multiple, mechanical, and closer.

Motorcycles churned into the parking lot, bumping up onto the sidewalks and converging on my disappointed suitors.

And on me, who happened to be still standing there.

"It's her!" I heard an adenoidal voice whine behind me. "Not us. Get her! She's Maggie! She's worth a bundle, dead or alive."

Motorcycle boots scraped asphalt as the dozen assembled Harleys paused to grumble like a minor volcano contemplating a major eruption.

These biker guys were way more threatening than the Geek Quartet. No helmets. Heads of unkempt hair as big as Afros melding into long sideburns into mustaches into mountain-man beards into industrial strength chest and arm hair under their leather vests into hairy knuckles on handlebars.

Their eyes gleamed yellow from out of the Sleeping Beauty's castle thicket of snarled hair, and their teeth gleamed yellow too. More like fangs. Parking lot lights glinted off the steel buckles and zippers and chains slathered stylishly over their leather pants and boots and, yeah, those muscle vests. They couldn't serve any purpose but bluff and glitter. At least these guys weren't tattooed from here to Kingdom Not-Come; not enough skin for the job, just those hairy ape acres... except they were from another animal family entirely.

Werewolves!

We didn't have those in Kansas. We didn't have much that was up-to-date in Kansas City. Or even Wichita.

Wait! The moon wasn't full. I looked up to make sure. While I was doing that three of them bounded off the leather seats of the Harleys and went to make Geek salad of the poor fools behind me. Their pathetic pig squeals propelled me onto the parking lot asphalt. I raced toward my car where Dog was going berserk hurling his handsome howling head at the windows.

Oh, my kingdom for a remote control for a' 56 Cadillac! But I was It. My twelve-yard dash for the car made the motorcycles rev, swoop, and circle me. Not that I'd want Dog free to be jumped by these lethal cousins.

The leader was mounted again, his beard a wet tangle gouted with black blood and white spittle.

"You ride with me," he ordered, patting the long leather seat behind him.

Right. I didn't much like my chances with the Dirty Dozen, lupine division. I knew that once a woman is in an attacker's vehicle, her survival chances plummet to less than zero. I figured I'd be better off eaten or offed than driven away.

"I h-h-heard about h-h-her," one underling muttered through his fangs. All those overgrown teeth didn't do much for stage diction.

"She worth something? To who?"

"Aw, those porn movie and snuff film guys. Even some amateur freakos. Big-money collectors. Whole bunch of, you know, people with money."

I waited. Maybe rabbits had the best idea. Freeze, then run like hell. 'Course, they didn't survive too long and had to reproduce very soon and fast, at which I was lamentably behind.

The leader of the pack twisted his clawed, hairy hands... paws... on the Harley handlebars, revving his bike until it bucked to be off and running down something.

Like me.

I eyed my feet. I was wearing my meeting-Ric-in-the-park spike-heeled slides. Not great for rabbiting in. I wondered if my maybe-prince would eventually dowse my body up from some desert wasteland.

Meanwhile, Dog was trouncing the inside of my Caddy, to no avail.

"What's that racket?" Leader demanded of his minions.

"A domestic slave."

"Worthless. Balls of a wombat."

It seemed to me that Dog was getting really, really riled, but I'd locked him in and unless he could develop an opposable thumb, we were both sucked. Maybe the shelter would notice the nice stainless steel bowls and leash that came with him when they were called in to take charge of the dog at the murder scene in the morning. At least we'd had a good, greasy last meal together...

Leader was swaggering off his cycle to control or kill me, mincing a bit, because the two-footed strut just didn't go with his circus-dog-on-hind-legs act.

I waited until he was within three feet.

"You worth delaying my dinner for?" he was snarling when I kicked one rear foot out from under him, looped Dog's chain around his hairy neck and crossed my fists at his greasy, long-haired nape. Then I stomped his spine with my spike heel.

He howled his pain and anger, impressively, and the pack was circling for the kill-me!-roaring closer and closer.

I heard a crash of broken glass and glimpsed a huge shadow racing straight for the nearest Harley, which went down in a spark shower of chrome scratching pavement.

Dog took them out, Mohammed Ali at his prime on four feet, snapping jaws good for snapping necks, spinning out motorcycles like ducks getting dunked in a carnival game. One by one.

This supernatural quasi-human dogwatch crew was no match for a magnificent canine using all of his animal instincts unclouded by any other agenda than saving the human who'd saved his ass. Which was decidedly not wombat-balled. I resolved then and there to break the first rule of responsible animal ownership and not to "fix" him. Call it an emotional decision.

I figured that by now he kind of owned me.

Chapter Fourteen

The cops came, when it was all over, in cars. Dog had taken off. The scarifying biker gang had shriveled into a dazed clot of scraped, bleeding werewolves. Apparently they'd managed to eat the Geeks, for the only victim still left standing on the site was me.

I babbled a little about visiting the pet store and being accosted when I came out. A woman officer took me into the back of a cop car and got my very confused statement, giving me a card for a place where I could get counseling for victims.

I'd gotten enough counseling during my orphaned childhood to give it myself, so smiled and stashed the card, collected my goods, and accepted Officer Smith as a ride-along while her partner brought up the rear.

"Kinda rough welcome to Las Vegas," she said as we headed out, the wind whistling through Dolly's broken window. Where was I going to get a '56 Caddy Eldorado Biarritz window replaced in Las Vegas? Not even Irma had an answer to that one. "Why're you staying at the Araby?'

"I can't afford much until I get a job."

"Get outa there as soon as you can. And collect that dog you mentioned adopting from the shelter. If you'd had one with you tonight, he might have scared off those cheap punks. Maybe."

"Tomorrow," I said, glancing into the rearview mirror. A gray lupine shadow was pacing Dolly and the squad car. At thirty-five miles an hour. That's my boy!

"You're lucky, Miss. The Lunatics are a nasty gang. We've been trying to put them out of circulation for a long time. Apparently they got to fighting among themselves over you."

"Lucky," I repeated with a shudder. At least my new dog was off the hook.

The officer dropped me off at the Araby Motel and returned to the following squad car with extreme regret, but I swore that I'd have new quarters soon. Tomorrow. And I would. Dog was waiting at the door to my unit, eerily enough, part of the shadow cast by the one parking lot light that still worked in the entire complex.

As he stepped forward, I saw that his ruff was matted by werewolf saliva. I hoped his coat was thick enough to serve as insulation.

"It's a head-to-toe bite inspection for you, mister, in the morning, and a curry-combing with your brand-new brush. Then we're off to see the wizard again. I could use some serious backup for storming Castle Nightwine. Again."

He interrupted a frenzied licking of his messed up flank to growl amiably.

"I need a name for you." I ran my hand over his skull, down his neck, past the wide leather collar that was now dimpled with fang-marks.

His eyes shone in the one parking lot light, pale and luminous, like the moon. Not just blue, like mine, but with an overriding silver-sheen. Like moonshine.

"Quicksilver," I said.

He sat down, boxed at his nose with his paws and grinned up at me, his tongue hanging amiably through his very white fangs.

Quicksilver it was.

Chapter Fifteen

I was surprised the next morning when the outer gates at Castle Nightwine opened instantly for us and the squawk box recognized us. Apparently everybody knew our names at Hector's place. Kinda like on Cheers.

" Miss Street and Mr. Dog," came the cultivated voice over the microphone.

"Mr. Quicksilver, Godfrey. He has a name now."

"Very good. Proceed to the main door and do scrape your shoes and paws on the welcome mat."

Quicksilver had surprised me this morning with a natty coat under which not one half-were puncture or scratch lurked. Of course he'd kept me awake almost half the night with the sound of his relentless licking and grooming. Still, the results were worth it. He looked downright awesome now that his leather and silver collar had a Manhattan-tugboat-size chain for a leash.

We trotted up to the entry doors, which resembled the approach to a cathedral. Godfrey was his same dapper self, including the curled upper lip we knew and loved.

"Is the master in?" I asked, handing Quicksilver's heavy-duty leash into Godfrey's white-gloved hand.

"Mr. Nightwine is in," Godfrey said carefully. He eyed Quicksilver with a certain camaraderie. "As to who is the master-?"

Words I loved to hear. I'd thought I knew enough now to squeeze Nightwine by his carnivorous balls, and I would find out just how much shortly.

The study was the same scarlet lamp-lit retreat, a place of cigar smoke, aged brandy, and leather-bound books. Daylight never penetrated here. Maybe Nightwine was a vampire. The surname was highly suggestive and anyone could be undead these days. Nowadays, playing pin the fang on the vampire was a better-and scarier-social game than guessing gender preferences used to be.

"I thought you'd be back." Nightwine informed me in rotund syllables, like a judge. Or a parole officer.

"I thought you'd want that."

" Miss Street, is it? Really and truly?"

"Yes. It is." As much as a made-up name invented by a social agency could be real or true.

"You must understand that yesterday I thought you were using a pseudonym. I thought you might be a Lilith imposter playing some sort of con game."

"That's what Adam told Eve and look where it got him. Confining clothes and original sin. No fun fast."

Nightwine was silent. So I spoke again.

"So her name was Lilith. Wasn't Lilith the uppity woman Adam banished from Eden so Eve could get down with the snake and queer the whole deal? And then they both blamed Lilith?"

"That's ancient legend. I deal in the present and the future. The fact is, as I now see, you are a stranger to Vegas and to my production company. You must understand. We're talking copyrights here. I bought all rights to Lilith's likeness and its reproduction. I have the same deal with all my corpses, living or dead. Lilith was unexpectedly... unique. Superb. A horror director's dream. Alas, I've been given to understand she requested a genuine dissection."

"Genuine? You mean you actually kill people onscreen?"

"Certainly not, that would be murder! But some are freshly dead, yes. If they wish. We don't kill them, we don't assist them in any way, they do it themselves. In order for our agreement to be valid, they must use some means that doesn't leave disfiguring marks on the body."

"Suicides still have to be investigated, just like murders. And autopsies performed and... "

" Miss Street, as we have established, you are new to Las Vegas. You are also ignorant of its laws. Let us just say that certain statutes have been passed that allow for our use of such "talent," as we call performers in the entertainment industry, and that all investigatory and legal procedures are followed. The order of those procedures may simply differ from the order elsewhere. Las Vegas has always accommodated the entertainment industry, Miss Street. It is one reason Nightwine Productions are located here rather than Los Angeles."

Had I mentioned I wasn't in Kansas anymore? I wasn't even in Southern California's LaLa Land �C and I thought that was as weird as a place could get.

"I think I understand, Mr. Nightwine. If your corpse is a real corpse, it is... ah... fresh and free of the... um... imperfections of death?"

"We prefer to 'dress' our own corpses."

"So the maggot in the nose was a director's touch?"

"Lilith made such a beautiful corpse that the director went light on the maggots, bloating, and rot. Etcetera. Do sit down. I realize our modus operandi is a shock. I'm sorry. Some people are dying for a taste of fame, even if it's posthumous."

I sat. "But... she wore my blue-topaz nose stud."

"And a dainty, poignant touch it was. Er, is, in your case. Like a tiny bejeweled tear. Exquisite." His beady black eyes actually weltered in some fluid as he eyed my nose and its little glint of bling.

"Well, Hector, I'm not dainty and bejeweled or crying, not to mention dead. I'm from Kansas and I'm somebody else than this Lilith entirely. I am not a posthumous person. Get it? I live, breathe, want answers."

"It just can't be. Not two of you in the world. So... telegenic. If you're not a sham, reneging on our deal, maybe you're Lilith herself. Maybe she made arrangements with a cheap reanimator."

"Cheap! I'm getting the impression that cheap is your style."

"You can't be real."

I'd felt that notion often enough in my dreams to feel my legs quiver a little. The reporter's credo: When in doubt, ask a hard question.

"Why not?"

"Well, we don't make mistakes. We offer untold opportunities to our non-extra performers. We are in high demand as a corpse factory. Our players are either alive mimicking death, or truly dead, and we keep scrupulous books on that, as the deceased often bequeath their royalties to loved ones. Lilith had no one to leave anything to."

"Right. Your corpses. Tell me about them-us, Hector."

"Ah, merely that we've found that the hyper-reality of modern media often requires real people for corpses. It saves dough and camera time to dissect them... dead. It's a last, spectacular way to make an impact as you, er, go."

"Nope. Dream on, Hector. I'm not reanimated."

"Ah. So. Then I would guess that you're an obsessed fan of the show. Perhaps you've undergone massive plastic surgery to become my Maggie."

"No scalpel has ever touched my lily-white skin."

Bad choice of image. I watched a soupcon of drool decorate his plump red lips.

"What can I say?" Hector tried next. "The corpse in question said her name was Lilith Quince and she swore she had no family."

"I don't either," I said. "That's why I want to find her."

"If she's really still alive, I do as well."

He'd knocked me speechless at last. What a coldblooded-

"Her... and your Black Dahlia beauty," he went on, "has made Lilith the most beloved corpse on the series. The popularity spike is already awesome after only a couple weeks. DVDs are selling like crazy. I'm even licensing 'Maggie' dolls and other tie-in merchandise via China."

"Maggie wasn't her name," I said, confused.

Oh. I got it with a sinking stomach. The name memorialized the maggot emerging from poor Lilith's topaz-studded nostril. Hector Nightwine was one money-sucking ghoul! Oops. He might actually be one.

"I am so sorry, my dear. None of us anticipated her popularity. Please. You look even paler than usual. Have some wine, a bit of food, perhaps during an unreeling of a vintage film? I am quite the cin��aste, you know."

Maybe I know. Maybe I don't want to know. The plate of scones he passed over his desk looked... half-baked.

"No, thanks." Who knew where that stuff had been? "Cin��aste? That's a perversion I haven't heard of."

Hector sighed, a gesture that shook his brocade vest like a bowlful of eels.

"It's not a perversion. It means I am a gourmet of cinema. A devoted aficionado. One who appreciates the art of film on a deep and knowledgeable level."

I appreciated the art of film; my vintage mania meant spending way too much on classic film DVDs. His "appreciation" meant he produced a global television series that gloried in women's corpses literally littering the cutting room floor? I contemplated Lilith's likely fate-though Nightwine's initial suspicions about me being a reanimated version of a deal-breaker hinted she might not necessarily be dead-and mine. Funny, if I was so damn beautiful, why didn't anybody ever offer me a home? I picture me at age ten: pale, skinny, and mop-haired. You don't feel beautiful if nobody ever wants you. And then, all of a sudden, it looks like everybody wants you... dead. Vamps. TV producers. Nutso fans with a necrophiliac streak as wide as the Styx, the river that runs through Hell.

Nightwine still frowned into his scones, which made crunching sounds like bones as he nibbled away on them.

"Twin is out?" he asked.

"Possible but unlikely."

"I know! Clone?"

"In Kansas? We still use rainmakers. Besides, it would need to have been done in the twentieth century."

"Not too far back. Lilith wasn't a day over twenty-five." He blotted crumbs from his over-colored lips with a crochet-bordered linen handkerchief. His currant-black eyes twinkled with a sudden thought.

"I do, of course, have samples of Lilith's DNA. We don't want any hanky-panky as to the identity of our corpses," Hector conceded. "If yours matches hers, I suppose you'd be entitled to a small royalty."

"I don't want money."

"But you admit you're an orphan. She could have been lost kin."

"I don't want money from her... death."

He licked his tongue against his teeth. It was over-colored too, and moved like a sea slug.

"Don't be foolish, my pearl. You wouldn't believe the crazies in this town who would snatch you and dissect you on camera and then sell a tape of it, Maggie is that popular. I must protect my investment. And you might be of some use. You were an investigative reporter, I believe."

"You've been checking up on me."

"Yeth," he admitted with a lisp as he bit into a dark purple plum from his desktop bowl. Nightwine was always eating or drinking something. Ewww.

"And then"-His glance was as encompassing and lewd as when he mentioned his beloved black-and-white movies-"I've had a chance since your last visit to scan all of my security tapes from Sunset Park the first day you visited. And the day after."

He paused as though to allow me time to tremble in my boots. Never gonna happen. It was too hot here for boots. I was wearing my forties purple platform sandals that made me six feet tall, for courage.

He reached out a plump forefinger and pushed the horns on the bronze sculpture of a bull on his desk.

I heard a mechanical whirring sound and turned as one section of paneled library shelves slid away to reveal a wall of television monitors. The central flat-screen one was huge, seven feet or so.

Nightwine lifted a remote control sporting about a hundred luminous buttons and pressed one. What was he doing, showing me a soap opera in progress?

Oh. It was Ric's face maybe two feet high and it was fine. He was making love to... my hair, and I was writhing into his body like a mink in heat as the image drew back at the clicking command of Nightwine's remote control.

The camera panned down to document our totally compromising positions and lingered suggestively on the operative prong of the dowsing rod shaking and dragging my hands as it plunged toward the ground. Who did this guy think he was? Alfred Hitchcock?

This wasn't just a security tape made by an automatic camera. Nightwine fancied himself a director. He'd taken control, captured every moment of the lost time when Ric and I had found the dead bodies and I'd channeled their last, lascivious, live moments.

I felt a flush sweep up from my chest over my cheekbones. God, we looked hot. Nightwine thought so too, or he'd have never stepped in to "direct" this routine surveillance moment personally. The original must have been an uninspiring long shot.

"This is when I realized that my Lilith," he said, "is worth far more alive. I could sell this... outtake... for hundreds of thousands."

"You're telling me that I'm a live dead sex symbol? You don't understand. That footage is not what it looks like."

"I do understand, Miss Street."

The remote chattered like a chicken. I was treated to a rapid run-through of the police scene the next day, the bodies in their excavated tomb, even me wandering over to the dog area to adopt Quicksilver.

"Perhaps you may be disinclined to believe it," Nightwine droned on in his prissy, pseudo-Brit diction, "but I actually am agoraphobic. I dread crowds and open spaces. I could use a... leg woman."

He leaned over his desk to eye my gams. I thought they were fairly okay too, hence my vintage shoe collection. Now I wished I'd worn leg warmers.

"You see, Miss Street, I am a victim of extreme success. I have so many spin-off franchised CSI shows that even an army of writers can't come up with sufficiently provocative scripts. So I mine the murders of yesteryear. Obscure ones, of course. Unsolved, as a matter of fact. You show more than a seasoned reporter's skills on my tapes. You have... something extra. And so does the most interesting Mr. Montoya. I agree that this cozy footage of you two is more than an idle turn-on for any passing voyeurs."

Ugh! Was he talking about himself? Yes!!

"I suspect that you are gifted as your equally attractive but lamentably absent 'sister' was not. You're a medium, my dear."

"Me? Ridiculous. I'm a reporter. I live and die by cold hard facts."

"I live and die by cold hard bodies. If you do indeed have a direct line to the dead, I want you to develop these skills. I want to know who those entwined corpses were. I want to know who killed them, and why. I want them to be the centerpiece of a Las Vegas CSI episode. I'll pay you well for any results you can... dig up. How you pay Mr. Montoya is your own business, but he is clearly an accessory before the fact."

I took a deep breath. So deep I felt a sharp pain in my side. Okay. I was alive. Unlike Lilith. Or unlike Lilith was presumed to be. I was also alive enough to really covet that footage of Ric and me, those close-ups of Ric's face while he held me. No one in memory had ever held me like that. No one had ever looked like that while holding me.

"I'll work for you," I said. Briskly. "I'll solve this case. And then I want those tapes. All the tapes of me and Ric, everything. No copies left."

"Not even one weensy one for my personal collection?"

"Not even one, Nightwine."

"You'll live on site?"

"Right."

How bad could it be? Besides, I could see that Lilith/me needed heavy security. And I didn't want Quicksilver exposed to any more werewolf gangs. He looked at me in a way no living thing ever had either. Except Achilles. I wasn't going to lose Quicksilver too, by God.

"All right." Hector punched another button on the remote. The wall of living images vanished again behind a gilded fa?ade of book spines.

"'There's more you need to know, Miss Street, more of the facts about underground life, and death, in Las Vegas that bear upon your investigatory efforts," he told me. "There's a thriving illegal traffic in the dead. Ask your Mr. Montoya if you can keep your mouths off each other long enough. Ah, I once was young myself, but it was so long and thin ago. The dead and the undead are being revived and employed: ghosts, zombies, vampires, and who-knows-what other supernatural creatures. They are being leased to the Vegas hospitality, entertainment, and sex industries by a mysterious consortium that makes the fictional and demonic Wolfram & Hart look angelic.

"I'm especially concerned about a related issue: some of the resurrected dead have even been peeled off the silver screen, the black-and-white movies whose images were filmed on silver nitrate. Do you know what travesties like this mean, Miss Street? They're taking Bogey out of Casablanca , Bette Davis out of Whatever Happened to Baby Jane, and selling their soul-less selves as cheap tourist attractions. Some are even being prostituted."

I leaned back in my chair. "Godfrey?"

"Wonderful actor. Classic portrayal. Surely you recognized him from My Man Godfrey? William Powell in the title role. Nineteen thirty-six. Perhaps the greatest screwball comedy ever made. A socialite played by Carole Lombard picks up a Depression-era hobo during a scavenger hunt. He becomes her family's servant, also their therapist. He's really a wealthy man and, of course, there's a romance. Powell was Dapper Personified in that part. I am honored to have him running my household. You would not believe what nasty, demeaning use such a fine vintage performance could be put to in the local brothels had I not snapped up Godfrey for my major domo."

I gasped. Godfrey was already a pal and my inside man at Castle Nightwine. He did not deserve servitude as maitre d' in a brothel!

"I see you feel a bit of my pain, Miss Street."

"How can someone rip off vintage film characters?"

"Ah. By exploiting a long-misused population among the dead. Can you guess?"

I couldn't and shook my head. This was a lot of reel life to absorb, especially when I still didn't fully trust the source.

"You see... " Nightwine said, leaning back almost half-horizontal in his reclining leather chair.

The extreme position made my nerve endings jump. I didn't like seeing even Nightwine in such a vulnerable position, although I understood it was calculated to earn my trust: harmless old grandfather leaning back to tell grandbaby a story.

"Zombies, my dear," he announced.

"Not my favorites."

"No one's favorites, or they wouldn't have been abused as slave labor for so many centuries in so many corners of the earth. They are the secret behind the construction of the pyramids, you know."

"The pharaohs used zombie labor?"

Hector nodded somberly. "That was in primitive times. Today the technique of overlaying a cinematic character on a zombie began forty years ago as part of an experimental 'black' project backed by a beloved kiddie animation movie company. Now it's a common, if concealed, reanimation project taken over by the immortality mob gone rogue. No one, nothing, is sacred or safe. Supernatural thugs of all descriptions harry anyone, including those who ask questions, as you have been doing."

"The immortality mobs?"

"That's what I call them. They came up in the usual mob businesses. Murder, Incorporated. Racketeering. Running supposedly-victimless crime kingdoms."

"You mean drugs, gambling, and sex for sale?"

"Exactly. But once the Millennium Revelation occurred, it literally opened up a whole new field for the mobsters: grave-robbing on a massive scale. Then they hijacked the film reanimation technology, cornered the market, and put their new slaves to all sorts of low uses for entertaining gullible tourists. Philistines!"

"Who are these mobs?"

"Their kingpins are hidden, naturally, but there are three major corporate forces in Las Vegas today. They're called the Triad. The Magus, Gehenna, and Megalith hotel-casino consortium, offensively adding up to a classic Las Vegas brand name, M-G-M. Then there's the Babel, Bedlam, and Brighton group known as the "killer Bs. And the Thebes, Delphi, and Byzantium, the tri-cities. A new wild-card player is the Inferno, currently the hottest single hotel-casino on the Strip."

I was blinking by then because I was new in town. It was an international playground, and none of these names meant much to me. All we had in Kansas were a few Indian casinos and the occasional reanimated medicine man.

"Don't you worry, my dear. You need have nothing to do with these yobbos. All I have in mind for you is some genteel Nancy Drew, Brenda Starr level sleuthing and reporting."

Nancy Drew? Brenda Starr? Hector was from the Stone Age.

The Ice Age, my friend Irma's interior voice kicked in, but humor the lascivious old slug. You'll be working again and maybe you'll learn more about Lovely Lost Lilith.

Maybe? I damn well would.