Dancing With Werewolves (10 page)

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 façade 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 mâitre 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,
re
animation 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
B
s. 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.

Chapter Sixteen

“Well?” Godfrey asked, sounding way too anxious for such a cool character in such formal clothes.

Quicksilver, on his chain, and I stood in the driveway, gazing on our new digs.

The place had a separate entry gate. Hector’s joint loomed like Manderley behind it, grand but totally separate, a mountain behind a molehill. This was indeed a “cottage”: one story, with a storybook roof of thick-piled green shingles that mimicked the thatch roofs of, say, the Shire. Or Forever England. Or Disneyland.

Rose bushes, climbing ivies, and tall spears of larkspur and hollyhock surrounded the stone walls, wafting an earthy, sweet scent a supermodel would have killed to call her own and bottle.

But it was all mine for a reasonable monthly rent. A half-circle of brick steps led up to the iron-hinged wood door. Mullioned windows peeked out from the riotous foliage.

“Well?” Godfrey asked again.

“I’ll sure whistle while I work here,” I said. This was my little lost Wichita house, only six times better. My throat swelled almost shut with emotion.

“Here is the key.” Godfrey planted a credit-card-size oblong of plastic in my palm.

He chuckled at my expression. Nobody had ever much chuckled at me in my life, and I liked it.

“Master Nightwine is thoroughly high-tech,” Godfrey went on. “He simply adores the illusion of low-tech. Hence my humble employment.”

“There’s nothing humble about you, Godfrey, but the manners.”

“Precisely so, Miss.”

He handed me a plain white card with seven numbers written on it, and then leaned close to whisper in my ear. That pencil-thin mustache tickled. Scratch getting one for Ric.

“This is the code that disables and reinstates Master Nightwine’s surveillance cameras at this location. In case . . . Master Quicksilver is entertaining the ladies some night.”

Quick whimpered and licked me anxiously on the wrist. I couldn’t always read dog language, but apparently he didn’t like being used as an excuse.

We all three knew who wanted to control whose privacy.

“Very good, Godfrey. You are the perfect man’s man, and the even more perfect woman’s man.”

He bowed. “I should warn you that Master Nightwine’s fascinations with all things vintage and filmic extends to the inanimate as well.”

Darn it! Godfrey talked too much like a college professor sometimes. I tried to translate his message.

“You mean, he collects film
things
as well as people?”

“Exactly, Miss.”

“You mean . . .
things
like my new residence?”

“Exactly, Miss. You are indeed quick-witted. I would refer you to a mid-nineteen-forties film featuring a fine actor-friend of mine named Robert Young. It was called
The Enchanted Cottage.
”

“And just what was enchanted about it, Godfrey?”

“Oh, my. I may become . . . unmanned. It is an old-style romantic fantasy. Unabashedly sentimental.”

“I’ve read a few romantic fantasies.” And had never believed a one.

“Not of your era, Miss. A facially scared World War Two veteran, Robert, meets a young but plain woman played by Dorothy Maguire. Only inside the enchanted cottage can the beauty of the inner selves they see in each other shine through.”

“A fantasy indeed.”

“But most affecting.”

“I’m no longer affected by fantasies, Godfrey.”

“Very good, Miss. Master Quicksilver. I’ll leave you two to get acquainted with your new residence.”

After he’d gone, Quick and I eased on down the fieldstone walk to the door. The card slipped easily into the old-fashioned Alice-in-Wonderland keyhole. The round-topped door squeaked open on reassuringly old hinges.

We moved into a slate-floored entry hall. Cozy rooms opened off it to either side: a kitchen and dining room, a little laundry room with a big dog bed, a back stoop and a clothesline in the garden!

Also . . . I found an office off the kitchen and a media room off the parlor. A circular staircase led to a loftlike bedroom with a huge four-poster bed topped by a mountainous embroidered feather quilt and . . . a master bath with a triple mirror, double sinks, a huge walk-in closet, and a Jacuzzi.

Quick leaped atop the four-poster, deflating the quilt about three feet. Methought the dog bed in the laundry room would make a good footrest in the parlor.

After a half-hour of exploring, Quick and I retreated to the front parlor, where I’d installed the dragon urn of Achilles’ ashes on the mantel. The place was thronged with window seats, so Quick stretched out full-length on one. I’d poured a glass of sherry from the quaint, mid-nineteenth century bottle on the silver salver. Say that three times fast: quaffing sherry from the silver salver.

I had one thing in common with Hector Nightwine, odious as it was to contemplate. I too liked to combine high and low tech. From this Stratfordian retreat of an Old World cottage I would penetrate New World perfidies of expendable media personalities, crime new and old under the sun, the fate of lost body doubles, and the world wide web of crime and extortion and immortality that made modern Las Vegas all things extravagant and evil.

Quick barked, short and sharp.

I just nodded in reply.

Chapter Seventeen

I reached Ric on his cell phone, his face tattooed into my memory from Nightwine’s videos like my own personal R-rated image.

“Delilah,” he said when he recognized my voice, as if he just liked saying my name.

I like hearing it, from him. Damn it, but Nightwine and his prying cameras had been right on: Ric and I had that certain something going.

“I need to see you,” I said. Literal truth.

“Sunset Park? Hot dog stand.”

“No. Someplace else.” I didn’t want us on camera anymore.

“New York, New York food court? Lunch?”

“Yeah. How will I recognize you?” My voice had taken on an alien, flirtatious tone. Ever since I’d tapped into the dead woman’s pheromones I hadn’t been myself. I liked some things about that, and hated some things. Ric was among the things I liked.

“I’ll be the guy who wants to try dowsing indoors,” he said.

                                                                                          * * * *

We shared a cozy corner at a plastic table in the urban New York City-themed food court with plastic chairs and food and knives and forks. Surrounded by faux brick walls with acres of iron fire-escape ladders, I told Ric about my strip mall attack the night before. I needed answers.

“So who were those matted men who tried to make hamburger patties of me?” I asked him. Maybe not so surprisingly, he knew.

“Nasty customers, a rogue gang of rabid half-werewolves. They’d been vampire-bitten in their human forms. It makes their own bites poisonous, even lethal, if you get enough, and they remain half-changed all the time. Not all the half-weres go rogue, but when they do you don’t want to mess with them.”

“Why aren’t there billboards warning against them, like they used to do with AIDS?”

A few years after the Millennium Revelation, an inoculation had made AIDS and all sexual diseases history, at least in the Western world. It drove religious fundamentalists crazy to lose such a sure-fire deterrent to sex, and it made AIDS as legendary as the Black Plague.

“They’re an animal form of AIDS, all right,” Ric said, “but this is all top secret. It would kill the tourist business if it got out. The big hotels have security teams to take them out if they come too close, but the half-weres are cagey. They make lightning raids, usually at lower-end businesses, sometimes to steal. Sometimes to enlarge the pack.”

“What do you mean ‘enlarge the pack’?”

He leaned over the plastic table to brush my hair off my shoulders, just for the heck of it.

“Brides,” he intoned like Bela Lugosi, following up by leaning way too close and kissing my neck. I laughed, but I didn’t mind “necking” with a man who didn’t need to tap my jugular like a keg at a frat party.

“Listen, Del.” Ric’s voice did a hot blowjob on my neck. “Werewolves run this town.”

“You’re kidding! These are the only ones I’ve ever seen.”

“Because they’re stuck in mid-change. Frustrates the

hell out of them. Most of our regular werewolves are no

worse than the mob bosses who founded Las Vegas in the

forties.”

I stared at him.

“Sure, those old mob guys were pretty bad, but they mostly killed each other. With bullets. Now that whole mob thing has gone corporate. With the Millennium Revelation it became obvious to some of us in law enforcement that werewolves had worked their way up the management ladder in Vegas. Figures. Unlike most supers, they only go feral three nights of the full moon a month, give or take a little waxing or waning. They pass as human and deal as humans most of the time, no more ruthless or crooked than the real thing.”

“Amazing. In Kansas we only had the occasional were-cow.”

This time
he
laughed. “I think that I shall never see, a were as weird as . . .
Elsie
?”

“So I’m from a farm state. I guess I’m just a hick.”

He brushed his lips over my neck again, paused to suck a little. A little bit more. A lot.

“No hickeys,” I told him. “I’ve had it with a lifetime of passes at my jugular vein. You swear you’re not a vamp in disguise?”

“I’m not a vamp, in disguise or out. Look. You’re an investigative reporter. You have a professional need to know these things. The moon will be full tomorrow night. You should see a cross-section of our werewolf population, not just the Wild Bunch.”

“Yeah?”

“I’ll take you there.”

“I’m not sure I want to tangle with those things again.”

“No, it’s perfectly safe. Los Lobos. A salsa club. We’ll go dancing. Werewolves love to dance.”

“Dancing?”

“Yeah. Clubbing.”

“Sorry, I’m Black Irish.”

“Whatever that is, I’m more than okay with it.”

“We Irish don’t dance.”

“You ever see any of the eighty-one touring companies of
River Dance
?”

“Yes.”

“That’s not dancing?” he asked.

“Only with our feet.” I pushed my arms stiff against my sides, made a poker face, did one tiny jig step at the ankles under the table. God forbid anyone should see me cutting loose. “It’s inbred. Sorry.”

He didn’t discourage easily but leaned closer, nibbling on my earlobe. All lips, no teeth. What a relief.

“That strait-laced Irish jig of yours is a cousin to the flamenco, one of the sexiest dances on earth. We Spanish can speak with our feet, as well.”

“Salsa’s like flamenco?”

“Nope. It’s a lot easier . . . and looser.”

“I can’t see werewolves without going to a dance club?”

“It’s the only place you can eyeball the full range of werewolves, the wonder of the change. Come on, it’s a hot underground club and even a few gutsy tourists get there. Aren’t you up to confronting what the Polyester Set is?”

That last dig did it.

He was still in sell mode. “The moon is just about to pop into full. I’ll pick you up tomorrow night at nine.”

“So late?”

“We want to be there at midnight, when the wolves run.”

“Three hours to kill?”

“Los Lobos has knock-out margaritas, a mariachi band to die for, and killer appetizers.”

I wasn’t crazy about all those lethal figures of speech, but Ric was inviting me into an element of his culture, if not his world (I hoped). His equally inviting voice and eyes made it hard to say no. Someday soon maybe I wouldn’t be able to say no to him about something way more serious.

                                                                                          * * * *

The next day I hied to the Fashion Show Mall on the Strip and hinted to saleswomen older and bonier than I was where exactly I was bound. They winked and sold me a three-tiered indigo silk skirt with flounces at the bottom and a mesh camisole to match, plus a black lace mantilla for a shawl.

At home, I pulled my Wicked Witch of the West fifties plastic-and-rhinestone heels out of their box. Weird how everything vintage had survived the weather witch’s insty tornado. Maybe old, pre-Millennium Revelation things didn’t do post-Revelation hexes. The clear plastic heels twinkled with aqua rhinestones and the vamp (excuse the expression, it’s a shoe thing) outlined my toes and instep with flamboyant rhinestone coronets.

Overdressed? Maybe. But then, could I really compete with Ric, who was a dandy sartorial blend of a young Tom Wolfe (ouch, wrong family name) and early Prince?

Before I left, I checked myself out in the full-length mirror at the end of the hall. The lighting here was dim, but the rhinestones on my shoes sparkled. I squinted. Wait! The rhinestones looked red, not blue. In fact, my whole figure looked angular and black and I had a green face and damned if I wasn’t seeing the real Wicked Witch of the West from
The Wizard of Oz
wearing Dorothy’s ruby slippers. Nightwine’s “enchanted cottage” was getting to my imagination.

I stamped my foot in spunky Dorothy fashion. “Get out of my mirror, you mean old witch!”

The figure wavered as if under water and I saw it had been myself, the way you can look at something very familiar and see it completely differently. A red nightlight from down the hall must have reflected in the rhinestones on my shoes. The light was so low that my clothes had lost their color, that’s why the nightlight. I shook off my sense of seeing someone else look back at me. I didn’t want to start the evening spooked.

Plenty of time for that later, my pretty,
Irma warned me with a sinister giggle borrowed pitch-perfect from the Wicked Witch of the West.

                                                                                          * * * *

Quicksilver, in the background, was bewailing my abandonment at the quaint cottage that was Hector’s guesthouse and my new digs. I stood on Sunset Road, waiting for Ric. I didn’t want to introduce Ric and Quicksilver at the front door, which the dog guarded like the drawbridge to the Tower of London crown jewel collection. Not that I minded that after glimpsing Las Vegas after dark. The older Corvette that cozied up to the curb was low, sleek, and colored bronze. As in “bronze god,” no doubt. Ric leaned over to open the passenger door.

I lowered myself into the leather seat and pulled the safety belt over my shoulder to snap it into the latch. We zoomed into the dark, up Highway 15 that paced the neon-lit Strip for a few miles. Then the car charged onto a rough-and-ready ribbon of unpaved road into the empty desert dark where the stars gathered into a mascara-thick layer of glitter. We were on an endless zigzag toward the Spring and Sheep Mountains. In the blue-tinted glass roof above me stars whizzed past like comets.

“Werewolves are ultra discreet,” Ric told me, the dashboard lights playing laser tag with his clear-cut features. “They can afford to be, since, unlike vampires, they can pass as perfectly human most days of the month . . . if they’re not raising obvious hell like your biker gang. Everyone overlooks it. Cops. Media. Tourists.”

He went on, as if lecturing at some alternate world Quantico. “Some werewolves are almost like us, except for a little moon-madness once a month. Not too different from the female of our species.”

He glanced at me sitting a little stiffly in a seat that was semi-reclined by design. “Nice shoes, by the way.”

“Thanks. What am I going to see at Los Lobos?”

“Mostly traditional Hispanic werewolves. Not many gray timber wolves or white Arctic ones. Yellows and reds, in daily life everything from gang-bangers and taquiera owners to music idols. A mix. Werewolves come in all styles and flavors. Some are enforcers for the casino owners. Some
are
the owners. Some are wait staff. Some are your friendly neighborhood janitors and maids.”

“And you?”

“I’m your friendly Latino ex-FBI guide. I don’t belong anywhere, but I go everywhere. Okay?”

“Yeah. Lone wolf. I get it.”