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Chapter Twenty-Eight

I woke up in theoverfor 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 as happening A couple dozen alien, icyat s! I switched on the bedside la I only agitated the metal-scaled serpents into a faster, colder dance over my flesh

The irl sparkle I earing a glittering rhinestone Egyptian-type collar fro serpent-chains that ended with arrowhead-shaped heads with va his costume jewelry flunkies to belly dance on my bod when I was out cold What a bastard! He htwine look like a slightly kinked teenager by coths off offlesh Necklaces this flashy were for sale in every Las Vegas hotel glitz shop, but none so carefully wrought What was happening here?

The answer hitabout hts, desires He was re 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, ranny gown and probably a hundred-some carats of supernaturally lustful dia for calm, the necklace shrank into a modest silver circlet Maybe Snow hadn’t expected ht invasion Maybe he hadn’t expected cal on hi

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 soroupies 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 for like a robot to the occasion ofquite 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 Vahway 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 ernails on the heavily varnished bar I noticed that I earing a half-handcuff bracelet again

Bastard! Lech by re! Thief!

I felt a presence behind ht-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 ht I naredients, htly different That’s all it takes for legal ownership Try one"

He snapped his fingers I again noticed bloodless, loss-enalass as albino as ht was soon wafted down in front of -off drizzle of raspberry liqueur Also wafted doas the bill: twelve-fifty

"Highway robbery," I repeated, for the record

"You need to taste it to be sure"

I did, recognizingsubtracted

"My recipe"

"You haven’t finished it"

What? He wanted to get ed a lot of heavy-proof liquor I was so mad I knew my syste soft and sweet bobbed against lass I slurped stinging vodka and sweet liqueurs until I saw bottom Oh A drunken maraschino cherry, skewered by an arrohite 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 hih the crowded casino to the place we’d last negotiated

When ere alone in the office, I looked around, tapping ers

As he went around the desk, I held out ht wrist "I don’t appreciate this"

"Why not?"

"I took it to a jewelry shop before I ca 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 o! Pride incarnate of course

"Because it hite and long like the coat ofthat had earned my love Brave Protective True"

"Hardly like me, of course So you clai I can’t say I’m flattered"

"You should be! Achilles orth six of you He got blood poisoning fro 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 withto 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 per around the Inferno, drinking, gas That’s a shitty way of dru up loyal custo 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 stoppingfreak," 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 therohiter, 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 systeument 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 vaames Vamp tray, would never tell They were mesmerized by the va on ecstasy and vague on details

"I took you," he said finally, "for an a 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 knohat 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 hie and I waslike an advocate of the downtrodden Snontrodden? What about ht that, Snow said, sympathetically, "It could be worse"

In demonstration, my solo handcuff linked to one that appeared on ain with unbound hands "Is your cuff half-empty, or half full?"

This kind of confine phobia, which Haskell had done nothing to help I was stuffing panic down as fast as it raced upcool

One cuff immediately snapped open and my left wrist dropped free

Snow spoke seriously "The police didn’t need to cuff you uessed, or knew, aboutarrest "This police detective naot"

"What’s to be bigoted about you? Unless so snoops"

"It was about the coested 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 aroundchains over the top of er

I’d seen soe was called a "slave bracelet"

"I’ree"

"Or even worse," Snow said

I felt the icy swift shiver of the silver snakein a broad cold swath around s to harden into shape with a

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 achastity belt It recalled ain

"Obviously, it’s notbehind his sunglasses and ear that made me feel naked in front of hi 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 tochar-haired, hidden-eyed, sagacious

"An admirable breed" Snow dropped the pen to the desktop like a small bomb "I’ve always been partial to Lhasasnot to blush at the unexpectedly warm sensations the adventurous example of "could be worse" had caused Snoas interested in roupies? I eyed the lovely Achilles bracelet andfor descending to naotfamiliar 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 knohat he ood exit line, so I took it

Chapter Twenty-Nine

Nowadays a whole encyclopedia could occupy a disk the size of ain 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-Prohibitionliquor had spurred a drunken binge of organized cri, prostitution, and racketeering And the baby-booel was at the heart of it all, wherethe 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 sy’s pretty-boy face through his living rooas First came the El Rancho Grande and the Last Frontier The 1948 founding of Bugsy’s beloved Fla point The first hotel-casinos were seles 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 fasyland had always been an adult playground, saturated with sex, booze, and gauely knew that the East Coast Italian Mob of Mobs, the Jewish el), and other o, 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 froh the Golden Door mentioned in the poeiven the US that Aees Why would a French as?

So little was said of it that I had to literarily read between the lines of microfilm The word "Inferno" in one article riveted h "Monsieur Reynard, chevalier of France, has announced his plans to build a lavish hotel-casino called the Inferno, co the highway already occupied by El Rancho Vegas, the Last Frontier, and the late Bugsy Siegel’s Flao hotel-casinos French invest desert strip of nightclubs Some have coe in Paris"

I got it The naughty French had invented the can-can and the topless chorus girl at the Moulin Rouge in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century Why wouldn’t they exhibit an interest in such a wide-open site of Aas? Even today, Nevada was the only state in the Union to legalize houses of prostitution

But a French ination Weren’t the French far too refined to resort totheir own late-eighteenth century bloodbath of a Revolution Aun, the Thoun The French had couillotine, a hundred-and-fifty-years earlier French Christophe Could it be-? I finally found Reynard’s first name Christophe And Reynard, if I remembered my convent-school French, meant "fox"

So as there no further reference to the Inferno for seventy-some years?

A few more turns of the microfilm reel made all that clear