I explored the roof on foot, vertical and a slave of gravity again, thank God.
The surface tar was overlaid with gravel. Occasional air-conditioning units poked up in knee-high hummocks just the right height to trip me in the dark. They were humming away, so the building was in use and occupied.
I circled until I found a larger hummock, the sort of inset entry you find to a storm cellar in Kansas. What it was in post-Millennium Revelation Las Vegas, I hadn't a clue. It could have been the low road to a crypt.
Okay. What does the alert investigator do? She walks down into the dark and finds out.
Mules, do your duty! Irma offered a small cry of encouragement to my footwear. Iam so glad we are not wearing your Wicked Witch of the West spike heels for this outing.
Listen to the born spike freak, I sassed her back. You'd wear heels to a golf course.
The steps were steep and I hadn't thought to bring along a high-beam flashlight. What woman would expect Dracula to dump her off in the dark like undelivered mail, without even one courtly swipe at her circulatory system?
But once on level flooring, my humble mules were able to shuffle me into a vaguely lit area. The metal door to the service stairs was chained shut with a sign reading Building Condemned: Do Not Use affixed with rusted screws. A search revealed no other access but an air conditioning shaft grille. Spotlighted by a distant neon sign, I could see it was enameled white, but now grimed a dusky gray. I was able to shake it free after further loosening the screws with my fingernails. What shoddy maintenance work! Probably hadn't been inspected in decades.
I set the grille aside and crawled in headfirst. The shaft ran straight, turned, then dropped what felt like four feet and ran straight again.
There was no use cursing the darkness. The only way to enter or leave this building was via down.
I gulped, cheered by the absence of cobwebs pushing over my features like an unwanted, unseen veil. Then I stopped. And wondered why there were no cobwebs. Oh. Maybe I wasn't the only intruder to use this route.
Investigation work was already losing its glamour.
Then I heard voices.
No, I am not Joan of Arc. I am a simple Kansas girl turned loose in the big bad city. And I am a PI. So, onward toward the voices. Another ten feet and I could hear giggles echoing off the hollow aluminum shafts. Giggles?
Definitely female voices, those cloying, phony tones I hated from the girls at Our Lady of the Lake Convent School. Girls who had power and tried to pretend they didn't. Voices I'd heard, once out of high school, directed almost exclusively at men. At powerful men they aimed to seduce.
Seduction had been against my religion...until I'd met Ric here in Vegas. And he'd been the seducer. No, we'd both been seduced, by love and death and lust and dust six feet under in the desert.
I paused, wishing I had my dowsing partner with me, only Ric dowsed for the dead. I was afraid he'd rind some where I was headed now. Those voices echoed as if in a vault. A burial chamber. Great. I wished Quicksilver was with me. I almost wished Dracula was with me, but he, wisely, had split.
When in doubt, advance.
At last, some light leaked into my square metal tunnel. I crawled right into another grille, my nose flat against the metal.
I could look down. A little. I saw a lot of white and began to recognize the location.
Oh, no! The 1001 Knights Hotel. Not here! Not him again! What had I done to deserve this?
At that moment a tremor ran through the shaft, like a boiler deep below going postal. Probably the periodic hiccough of the condemned building. The grille gyrated off its loose screws. I was shaken into it, past it and down the rabbit hole into the white light.
Luckily, unlike Alice, I landed on a bed. Unluckily, there was someone repellent in it. Several someones.
Scarlet-painted worm-lipped women in white scattered at my descent.
The desiccated scrawny figure of an old man in cerise satin pajamas stayed put to aim his lecherous death's head grin at me.
"Howard Hughes," I said, scrambling off the high hospital bed and its stiff white linens. "What an unexpected...meeting."
"Hmm," he said, "I liked you better in white."
His "nurses" regrouped around the hospital bed, licking their lips at me.
I had nowhere to go. Howard's mandarin-long fingernails scratched his sparsely haired chest, drawing blood. The vampire nurses sighed in unison and, with fangs descended, came uncomfortably closer.
He waved a cadaverous hand. "Back! You had your share during the turning. Now if Miss Street cares for a friendly lick from me-"
Ick. The sanitary issues alone were stomach-turning. Historically, he'd been famously vermin phobic. You'd think he'd still have serious inner conflicts about germs in his new state.
"I'm here on your business this time," I said.
We'd first met a couple of weeks ago, when I'd finagled myself in disguised as a nurse-the sexy fantasy sort found in Playboy magazine. Howard Hughes and Hugh Hefner had more in common than initials. Hughes was supposedly the most powerful vampire still left in town, which doesn't say much for Vegas vamps.
"Too bad." Howard's watery dark eyes studied my face. "I could have made you a star."