Chicks Kick Butt (26 page)

First, I checked his grip on the thick brass rail. His feet curved like talons around the metal, but wore soft leather shoes curled up at the toes and down at the heel, slippers Santa’s elves would wear. My gaze inventoried the odd bits of wardrobe clothing his squat distorted body, then studied a pale bony array of bulbous cheeks and forehead and forked chin, every feature somehow pulled off center like a melted plastic mask. One eye was entirely missing. Rather than a mouth, the creature had a broken-toothed maw. A bushy eyebrow over that bright malicious single eye finished off a face twisted into a grimace a gargoyle would flee, shrieking.

Even at this suicidal height, I’d have pushed off from my captor just to avoid an inescapable double jeopardy of death by asphyxiation: the mixed reek of garlic and onion breath. While I calculated how to tip us backward onto the safety of the balcony fronting the elevators, the powerful arms spun me sideways to lift me like a trophy above the misshapen head.

While my stomach made an imaginary drop of forty stories and the siren’s voice soared to higher melodic peaks up here, my captor’s terrifying maw shouted something over and over to the crowd below.

“Sank you, Harry!” or some such gibberish spewed from his harsh throat. He snarled down at the gaping crowd below, repeating the word or phrase as boast … or challenge. I clung to the sleeves of his long arms as my personal King Kong shook my helpless torso like a weapon.

Then he swept me down again, clasping me doll-like to his barrel chest. In a moment his apelike feet had pushed off the railing as he swung us out over the gaping crowd on the hard marble hundreds of feet below.

My stomach did another swan dive.

Death by implosion was not on my adventure-travel wish list. I clung to the wide lapels of his organ grinder’s monkey jacket. He seemed eerily at home swinging on a rope, and was still gabbling that guttural challenge to the gawkers below.

In times of unthinkable danger, the mind decides to sweat the small stuff. All I could focus on was that the crowd sure could see up my full skirts and crinolines to … my—good thing I’d been brought up to anticipate a sudden car accident and always wore underpants.

Only then did I see what we swung from … not a Cirque du Soleil bungee cord, but an … untethered … steel elevator cable. Oh, Lord. Were some innocent civilians also dangling from a broken steel thread in one of this row of a dozen elevator cars?

My position remained completely helpless, so, for motivation and an adrenaline surge, I ramped up the indignation of it all. I’d been swept off my feet before by far more attractive and supernaturally powerful forces than this scruffy tent-show acrobat.

I grabbed tight to the nearest long powerful forearm and twirled like a trapeze artist. That spun us into a tangled bundle. I hadn’t expected the creature’s response.

Instead of dropping us to the nearest balcony like any rational madman, he swung us back over the railing, past the exposed solid ground of the hallway … through a pair of open elevator doors … and into the naked elevator shaft. No enclosed car awaited inside … only empty space.

Screeching triumph, the creature swung from one rising or lowering elevator cable, ducking under or sailing over the stately sinking and rising cars, his rhythm sure and athletic. He Tarzan of the Apes, me Jane.

A distracting fantasy, but this still put me in mortal danger, and I was one of the few mortals still left around this town since the supernaturals had come out to play. Visions of imminent collision with the speeding elevator cars made me clutch the demented monster for dear, if questionable, life.…

At last we descended to the deserted equipment bays below the elevator shafts. Here, all was as dark and empty and cold as the hotel casino’s public spaces had been bright and well lighted. The icy artificial air-conditioning up top had been replaced by a subtle subterranean chill.

Solid ground was the ancient limestone that underlies the desert sand.

As I caught my breath, I still heard the unknown siren’s unearthly song, trilling madly. I now thought of it as a melodic scream for help. Soon I might be making such noises myself.

While rows of elevator cars clanked continually above us as they came and went, I spied some pine-scented Gehenna bed linens nudged into a nest on the hard ground, and room-service plates and food stockpiled by the same limestone wall.

“Safe. You. Here,” the creature grunted. “Thank-you-very.”

Thank-you-very.
Was that the gibberish he’d bellowed from the peak of the atrium?

Somehow, I suspected that his mumbled signature phrase was a clue. This mind-boggling, impulsive creature must be a key to the mystery I’d been hired to solve.

So it was only a hunch. That’s what I’m paid to follow.

Right now, he was shoving the trays of room-service leavings at me. I realized this was what he subsisted on, poor inarticulate thing. I eyed the fag ends of cocktail shrimps and the abandoned crescents of gnawed cheeseburgers and pizza crusts. I supposed other handicapped persons on the fringes of the Las Vegas Strip survived on such leavings of the rich and famous.

His huge hands thrust a tray of the “choicest” pieces at me.

I’d only just been kidnapped. I’d had no time to develop the hunger of the truly needy.

But I always had time to understand the generosity of the easily ignored.

“Thank you very,” I said, smiling and nodding, as I plucked a couple brown-edged celery sticks from the array and nibbled politely.

The satisfied grin on that lantern jaw helped me gum down the rubbery stalks. Was I supposed to be his dependent? To share this marginal existence? Because I was what? Convenient? Or female?

My sympathies aside, this guy had to learn that I was not the swoop-up-able female of fiction and fable. And then I realized that my kidnapper was just that, a creature of fiction and film. He’d been so grimy and things had happened so fast that I hadn’t realized I was dealing with a CinSim, a character from a movie given an extended life attached to the “canvas” of a zombie.

His … uh, one eye and skin tones and clothing were not just gray, but shades of cinematic black and white. My earlier “hunch” had been vague, but on the track.

Even as I realized this, I felt a cold snakelike uncoiling at my ankles. My snazzy silver shoelaces were undoing themselves.

The silver familiar, my version of a sidekick-cum-unshakable personal demon, made like twin garter snakes and twined free of my shoes’ lacing holes. The familiar relished the drama of being spectacularly present as much as it enjoyed being overlooked. Kinda like any private eye since Sherlock Holmes.

Its twofold form coiled up between my rustling skirt folds and into my curled palms, gaining warmth and a supple strength from the blood pounding in my veins.

I watched a descending elevator glide to touch rock bottom just forty feet from the creature’s makeshift camp.

My hands swung out in a sowing gesture, releasing and casting the silver familiar into a fifty-foot lariat lashing out to mate with a momentarily still elevator cable.

Within the coiled tension of my fisted hands, the links of silver shortened and pulled me atop the elevator car like a giant slingshot. I’d become used to its sudden shape-shifting, but the only witness to the operation remained below.

I gazed down ten feet at a jumping Rumpelstiltskin chattering away like Cheetah, Tarzan’s clever movie chimp costar. Only from above could I see that my kidnapper hadn’t been an ape or a monkey but a man. A hunchback.
The
Hunchback, I realized.

Now I could translate the sounds he had chortled from high in the hotel atrium while I’d been hefted like a trophy over his ungainly head. I had a silent movie script to go by, where the word had been shown onscreen. Not “Thank you very” but
“Sanc-tu-ary!”

That’s the word the Hunchback of Notre Dame had shouted as he swung the kindhearted Gypsy girl, Esmeralda, away from the stake where she was to be burned as a witch and up to the gargoyle-guarded stone heights of the famed Paris cathedral, where a hunchback was the humble bell ringer and where an innocent scapegoat like Esmeralda could find a triumphant “sanctuary” from the ignorant mob storming the church grounds.

This guy had mistaken the crowd of pushy tourists for a rioting mob and me for Esmeralda.

I could think of only two black-and-white-era CinSim hunchbacks, both consummate actors, both despising the Hollywood looks sweepstakes. One was Charles Laughton. The earlier, silent-film version had been Lon Chaney, “the Man of a Thousand Faces.”

Something about this bizarre situation was ringing a bell in my head besides the endless vocalizations above, now segueing from the soaring hymn of “Ave Maria” to “Ah, Sweet Mystery of Life,” which reminded me of my mission.

Thrilled as I was to have actually relived one of the most iconic moments in the early history of film, I had to lose this scenario and figure out why and how a woman with the voice of an angel would want to haunt a murderous old sinner like Cesar Cicereau.

I’d begun my escape swinging on a silver cord instead of a bell rope, and now was clinging atop a rapidly rising elevator car. Looking up, I saw enough cables to string a harp and a big dark flat nothing—the elevator shaft top—waiting to brain me.

I wound the familiar’s shrinking silver cord around my palms. When I had just a garrote-length left, I looped it around the handle on the car’s rooftop emergency escape hatch and pulled … only I wanted in, not out.

Moments later, just as the elevator shaft top loomed above like an iron hat, I jerked open the hatch to drop down into the brightly lit car, taking my weight on my bent knees. I straightened as the hatch overhead banged shut, smiling at the startled tourists into whose midst I’d so abruptly appeared.

“
Whew
. What a wild private party on the penthouse level,” I complained. “Do
not
accept any of those slot machine invitations. It was ballistic.” They eyed me with mixed suspicion and envy.

Meanwhile, I noticed the Muzak filling the now-plummeting car. More of that sweet and impossibly sugary soprano voice. What was she singing now? “Send in the Clowns”? No need to get personal!

“Oh, that voice is unearthly,” a woman said as the elevator doors finally opened on the main floor.

Yeah! Probably a ghost.

At least I was back where I’d begun, even though my newly laceless shoes were useless after my catapult atop the elevator car. At least I was now wearing a silver charm bracelet dangling place-appropriate wolf heads.

I decided to restart my investigation on the main floor. First, a limping detour down the shopping wing brought me to a store called Two Cool Tootsie’s. My dressy spike heels were buckling sideways, so I charged a pair of Steve Madden leopard-print flats with a rose on the toes to Cicereau’s account.

Unfortunately, the gushing saleswoman took me for Cicereau’s latest moll, not an employee whose wardrobe had suffered in his service.

“Shame about your mangled Jimmy Choos,” she consoled me.

I’d explained I’d caught one high heel in an elevator door and broken the second while wrenching the first loose.

“Are you sure the boss will like you as well in flats?” she asked. “I hear he runs hot and cold.”

“Oh, Cesar is quite a runner, but he dotes on anything that reminds him of dead Big Cats,” I said. “That old Starlight Lodge hunting urge, you know.”

She shuddered as she rang up the new shoes. “I’ve heard what gets chased down at that place. Just stay on his safe side, honey. Cringing is good.”

Shod again, I cruised the main entertainment area with a fresh eye. The building’s gigantic wooden tree architecture mimicked soaring Gothic cathedral columns. No wonder the Hunchback had replayed his best scene here with me as a stand-in.

Tourists strolled leaf-patterned parquet paths around forest scenes of ferns and flowering plants and thick clustered trees. The scale made you feel as small and helpless as a chipmunk skittering near the trickle of hidden streams, hearing the rustle of bird life in the leaves above. Sensing silently stalking wolves in the shadows. At least I did.

I was glad to break into the brightness of a skylight-illuminated mountain village square with a half-timbered inn called the Huntsman’s Haven that broadcast scents of fresh-baked bread, beer, and bratwurst.

A Gypsy wagon and camp drew children to the tricolored wagon, ponies, and the music and color of juggling, knife-throwing, and fortune-telling attractions. I am not an outdoorsy girl. One enforced summer at a mosquito-ridden Minnesota camp during my group home days had been enough for me.

I really needed to check out the hotel’s theater stage. The Gehenna’s big contracted show starred Madrigal, the strongman magician, and his creepy pair of female fey assistants. Picture two-foot-high Barbie dolls with glitzy wardrobes, webs, and venom.

My captor had been an escapee from an old silent movie. Had the Gehenna been adding new attractions?

Sure enough. The slick marquee advertising Madrigal and his fey accomplices had a smaller satellite now, a film theater showing
London After Midnight.

This was definitely a black-and-white silent film. As a vintage film junkie, I was drawn toward the marquee like a mesmerized bride-to-be of Dracula. This 1927 silent classic had been lost, burned in a fire in the sixties. How could
London After Midnight
be shown here?

Before I could get close enough to the booth to barter my shoes or my soul for a ticket … so much for refusing to carry a purse … a sinister figure, all in black, stepped into my path.

He wore a top hat over a clownish, frizzled, chin-length hairdo that framed a vintage gray face with popping eyes and an ebony-lipped mouth grinning to show every tooth filed into a point. I didn’t know whether to scream with laughter or fear, and aren’t those the yummiest theatrical moments of all?

Spotting me, he spun with a demonic grimace and lifted the arms of his calf-length cape … to display the bat-winged spines visible underneath.

Sinister or comic? Early films walked that very thin line.