Chapter Twenty-Eight
I woke up in the middle of the night, a teasing trickle of ice water cascading over my breasts. The invading cold made me sit upright, clutching for the ebbing neckline of the old-fashioned brushed-cotton nightgown that I'd found in the closet, now far enough off my shoulders to suit a Gothic heroine.
Then I understood what was happening. A couple dozen alien, icy metal snakes were writhing over my collarbones, nipping at my breasts with needle-sharp fangs! I switched on the bedside lamp and jumped out of bed, hopping to escape the nasty feeling. I only agitated the metal-scaled serpents into a faster, colder dance over my flesh.
The mirror above the dresser flashed back a chorus-girl sparkle. I was wearing a glittering rhinestone Egyptian-type collar from the base of my throat and down my cleavage, writhing serpent-chains that ended with arrowhead-shaped heads with vampire-sharp fangs.
Snow! Sending his costume jewelry flunkies to belly dance on my bod when I was out cold. What a bastard! He made Haskell seem like a small-time gnat. He made Hector Nightwine look like a slightly kinked teenager by comparison.
I lifted the cold, dead writhing lengths off of my living flesh. Necklaces this flashy were for sale in every Las Vegas hotel glitz shop, but none so carefully wrought. What was happening here?
The answer hit me with a sharp new chill: Snow was thinking about me. The shape-changing jewelry echoed his thoughts, desires. He was reminding me of the leash he had put on me, the soft loop of his albino hair that had become metal... had now become chains of rhinestones. Except... I lifted the stones to the mirror to study their electric sparkle. These were diamonds. Holy Hell!
I sat up in bed, my arms clasped around my knees. I was wearing a gently used granny gown and probably a hundred-some carats of supernaturally lustful diamonds.
As I breathed in and out, trying for calm, the necklace shrank into a modest silver circlet. Maybe Snow hadn't expected me to sense his midnight invasion. Maybe he hadn't expected calm. Maybe he hadn't expected me to come calling on him the first thing the next morning.
I sure hoped so, because I would, and then there'd be Hell to pay.
When I hit the Inferno I went straight for my inside man, Nicky.
It was only 10:00 am. I expected a headliner like Snow to be zonked out somewhere decadent with a bevy of groupies until late afternoon. I even expected Nick Charles to be off someplace where CinSims kick back when off-screen.
No. Nick was at the bar, as debonair as ever, still dressed in a formal black-and-white tux.
"My dear girl," he said, rising like a robot to the occasion of my striding in on a rush of fury. "You're looking quite... flushed. Did you win at the slots?"
The blackboard above Nicky's amiable, sloshed face snared my attention. In pink neon chalk, it announced: House specialty: Albino Vampires.
"That's highway robbery!" I said.
"Noooo." Nicky focused carefully on where I was looking. "It's not a Highway Robbery; that's made with rum. That is the hot new house drink. The boss ordered me to forsake my martinis for it. Didn't you already order one the other night?"
"Order it? I invented it!" While I tapped my fingernails on the heavily varnished bar I noticed that I was wearing a half-handcuff bracelet again.
Bastard! Lech by remote fondling! Thief!
I felt a presence behind me and turned. Snow, of course, long white hair, night-black sunglasses, white silk tee, slacks, and jacket. The man must bathe in bleach!
"That's my drink," I opened.
"If you order it."
"I made it to order, right here. Just the other night. I named it."
"Catchy title. You used my ingredients, my bartender."
"It's still mine."
"My version is slightly different. That's all it takes for legal ownership. Try one."
He snapped his fingers. I again noticed bloodless, manicured nails as slick and opaque as white gloss-enamel paint.
A martini glass as albino as my concoction of the other night was soon wafted down in front of me, exact to the topping-off drizzle of raspberry liqueur. Also wafted down was the bill: twelve-fifty.
"Highway robbery," I repeated, for the record.
"You need to taste it to be sure."
I did, recognizing my own yummy ingredients. Nothing added, nothing subtracted.
"My recipe."
"You haven't finished it."
What? He wanted to get me drunk? I tilted the wide glass lip to mine and chug-a-lugged a lot of heavy-proof liquor. I was so mad I knew my system would burn it up and spit out very sober nails.
Something soft and sweet bobbed against my teeth. Something from the bottom of the glass. I slurped stinging vodka and sweet liqueurs until I saw bottom. Oh. A drunken maraschino cherry, skewered by an arrow of white chocolate. Sweet, plump, succulent. Nice touch. I left it.
"The cherry," Snow said, "is a tribute to your bartender expertise and your undercover skills. Otherwise, nothing personal."
I knew an insult when I heard it. Also, a reference to my quasi-state of virtue, that even I didn't know for sure. "I want to talk to you. In private."
"My office?"
"No tigers."
"No invisible allies."
I stood and let him precede me through the crowded casino to the place we'd last negotiated.
When we were alone in the office, I looked around, tapping my toes. No tigers.
As he went around the desk, I held out my half-handcuffed right wrist. "I don't appreciate this."
"Why not?"
"I took it to a jewelry shop before I came here. Nothing will take it off. Not a jeweler's diamond-toothed saw, not a pinpoint acetylene torch. I want out of it."
"Why do you think I can help you with that?"
"It's your sick toy!"
"How so?"
"Your hair?"
"And how did my hair become your hair shirt?"
"I-" Time to own up. "I touched it."
"Why? Because it was mine and you couldn't resist?"
What ego! Pride incarnate of course.
"Because it was white and long like the coat of my dead dog."
"Which you loved."
"A dog that had earned my love. Brave. Protective. True."
"Hardly like me, of course. So you claimed the lock of my hair because it reminded you of a dead dog. I can't say I'm flattered."
"You should be! Achilles was worth six of you. He got blood poisoning from biting a vampire ten times his size. You tackle anything like that lately? No, you pick on passing strangers. Achilles didn't need to harass hapless women with bewitched hairs."
"Yet the echo of his hair bewitched you. Just that. Nothing to do with me."
"Nothing to do with you. Look. I'm the last woman in the world who'd ever be in your fan club. I think you're despicable, the way you encourage your worshipping fans, poor, deluded creatures. It's immoral to kiss them into insensibility so they become mindless zombies. It'd be normal if you'd screw them, but, no, you keep them lost in permanent unfulfilled infatuation. I've seen them wandering around the Inferno, drinking, gambling mindlessly. Maybe doing drugs. That's a shitty way of drumming up loyal customers, Snow. I've even been suspected of killing one of them because she fixated on me after you mauled me in the Inferno Bar."
He leaned back in his white leather executive chair, balancing a black Mont Blanc pen on his pallid fingertips. "You weren't exactly stopping me."
"I took you for an amusing freak," I said, very deliberately.
I couldn't see any expression behind the dark glasses but his fingertips pressed so hard on the pen that I actually saw them grow whiter, or maybe they looked that way because a blush of pale pink blood showed through his skin above the pressure points.
Interesting. He had a circulatory system. That was a big argument in academic circles: did vampires have circulatory systems? Sure they drank blood, but since they were dead, they didn't have a heartbeat or a pulse. Given their rep as hot-blooded lovers as well as big drinkers, how the hell did they get it up without a pulse or heart beat? Assumption was only available to a few select saints, and they all skedaddled for heaven, not vampire games. Vamp tramps, totally hooked on the blood-sucker-as-Don-Juan mythology, would never tell. They were mesmerized by the vamp powers, and any tales they lived to tell were big on ecstasy and vague on details.
"I took you," he said finally, "for an amusing fool."
I'd been called worse. "I want this off!"
"Can't do it. It has a mind of its own, in case you hadn't noticed."
"It's your familiar."
"Now I'm a witch as well as a freak?"
"Or a warlock."
"You don't know what I am."
He had me there.
"But you'd love to find out." He leaned forward as I leaned away. "You can't resist finding out, can you, Delilah? Your whole life has been about finding out... about other people, not yourself. You don't have a life."
I understood that calling him a freak had brought this challenge and I was momentarily ashamed. A reporter gets used to feeling like an advocate of the downtrodden. Snow? Downtrodden? What about my manacled wrist?
Even as I thought that, Snow said, sympathetically, "It could be worse."
In demonstration, my solo handcuff linked to one that appeared on my left wrist.
Snow grinned and picked up the pen again with unbound hands. "Is your cuff half-empty, or half full?"
This kind of confinement ramped up my horizontal binding phobia, which Haskell had done nothing to help. I was stuffing panic down as fast as it raced up my esophagus to my throat, keeping cool.
One cuff immediately snapped open and my left wrist dropped free.
Snow spoke seriously. "The police didn't need to cuff you merely to bring you in for questioning."
I hated that he guessed, or knew, about my humiliating arrest. "This police detective named Haskell did," I said. "He's a bully and bigot."
"What's to be bigoted about you? Unless someone discriminates against annoying snoops."
"It was about the company I keep."
He digested that for a few seconds. "I still haven't made my point." He nodded at the half-handcuff. "It could be worse."
The cuff thinned and wrapped itself around my wrist like a serpent, spilling chains over the top of my hands and ringing one finger.
I'd seen some heavy metal bands. I knew this arrangement of chain-linked wrist bangle and ring was called a "slave bracelet."
"I'm a mammal person," I said, "I don't agree."
"Or even worse," Snow said.
I felt the icy swift shiver of the silver snake move up my arm and down my torso under my clothes, settling in a broad cold swath around my pelvis and streaking between my legs to harden into shape with a metal snick like a lock turning.
It felt like a chain-mail bikini bottom, not that I'd ever had a personal acquaintance with one. Haskell and his rough handcuffing were forgotten in the face of a medieval device turned bondage accessory: a freaking chastity belt. It recalled my recent nightmare. Fear became fury, then fear again.
"Obviously, it's not my familiar," Snow said, yawning.
Liar! He loved hiding behind his sunglasses and manipulating me into cheesy bondage gear that made me feel naked in front of him, physically and mentally. Stooping to calling him a freak hadn't helped.
"Still," he added, "it's a good thing that coveting is a commandment and not a Deadly Sin."
Before I could react or speak, the silver snake slid away again, ice water on the move, back to my wrist. Oh. It had morphed into a bracelet dripping charms: a circle of adorable Achilles faces, long-haired, hidden-eyed, sagacious.
"An admirable breed." Snow dropped the pen to the desktop like a small bomb. "I've always been partial to Lhasas myself."
I was still fighting not to blush at the unexpectedly warm sensations the adventurous example of "could be worse" had caused. Snow was interested in me, in teasing me? Sexually? Didn't he have enough groupies? I eyed the lovely Achilles bracelet and melted a little. Why did I suddenly feel in the wrong for descending to name-calling? That didn't stop a retort.
"I've got more to worry about than your migrating familiar or my hijacked drink recipe. My freedom is on the line."
He nodded. "Mine as well. Do your job, Delilah. That's the fastest route to the freedom you crave. And maybe mine."
I didn't know what he meant, didn't want to know. I did know it was a good exit line, so I took it.
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Nowadays a whole encyclopedia could occupy a disk the size of my little fingernail, and here I sat again in the Clark County Library looking at late twentieth-century microfilm of mid-twentieth century personalities and events.
But that's when Las Vegas was founded, in the post-World War II world of exploding prosperity and post-Prohibition mob expansion. I found it sad that banning liquor had spurred a drunken binge of organized crime in all areas of vice: gambling, prostitution, and racketeering. And the baby-booming Las Vegas founded by visionary psychopath Bugsy Siegel was at the heart of it all, where mobster and middle class met, each legitimizing the other.
Of course, like all visionaries, Bugsy had been punished for it: he had been found dead in 1947 of several bullets to the head at the age of forty-one. The thirties and forties and fifties were the era of drive-by shootings on an epic scale, like the St. Valentine's Day massacre. So they'd shot up Bugsy's pretty-boy face through his living room window.
I unreeled the early history of Las Vegas. First came the El Rancho Grande and the Last Frontier. The 1948 founding of Bugsy's beloved Flamingo Hotel was the turning point. The first hotel-casinos were small, upgraded motels three hundred miles from Los Angeles and an endless drive from the rest of the country, but they were an adventure destination for those lost souls in search of glamour. Only a few years later a successful animator named Walt Disney would create an adventure destination for the whole family called Disneyland.
Bugsyland had always been an adult playground, saturated with sex, booze, and gambling. And it had been worth fighting over.
I vaguely knew that the East Coast Italian Mob of Mobs, the Jewish mob (from whence Benjamin aka Bugsy Siegel), and other mobs, chiefly Chicago, which was Irish, met, maneuvered, kissed Judas cheeks and rubbed out each other in Las Vegas.
But I'd never heard of the French mobs until now. The Italian-Irish-Jewish mob triad made sense. All resulted from the massive influx of European immigrants through the Golden Door mentioned in the poem beneath the Statue of Liberty. The French had given the U.S. that Amazonian artwork and its defining image-not masses of refugees. Why would a French mob, small and superior, figure in the founding of Las Vegas?
So little was said of it that I had to literarily read between the lines of microfilm. The word "Inferno" in one article riveted my attention, though. "Monsieur Reynard, chevalier of France, has announced his plans to build a lavish hotel-casino called the Inferno, complete with Folies Bergere-style bare-breasted chorines, along the highway already occupied by El Rancho Vegas, the Last Frontier, and the late Bugsy Siegel's Flamingo hotel-casinos. French investment would indeed add luster to the thriving desert strip of nightclubs. Some have compared the future Inferno to Montmartre's Moulin Rouge in Paris."