Dancing With Werewolves (16 page)

Haskell slammed me into the back seat of his unmarked car, not bothering to push my head down so it didn’t bang the doorframe. I managed to duck, having seen enough crime shows on TV and enough live arrests in Wichita to know the drill.

I fell sideways on a seat that smelled of sweat, vomit, and strawberry car freshener. I almost added to the vomit and was half-sorry I didn’t, although I wouldn’t want Haskell to know what he’d done to my nervous system.

I managed to work myself upright, despite the bruising handcuffs. I had excellent lower body strength from self-defense workouts. Too bad it hadn’t paid to use them.

He drove me down the Strip, a slow, public route that allowed people to gawk at me when the car paused at the interminable stoplights. I’d known cops. I’d worked with them. Most of them were good, dedicated people. But when one went bad, he went very bad indeed.

At the cross street of Paradise, I spotted Quicksilver weaving in and out of the colorful trail of tourists on the sidewalks like a shaggy, ghostly greyhound.

The pantry door would have to be completely replaced by the resident brownies, but I didn’t mind. It was good to know he was nearby and keeping it as discreet as an animal his size could.

Good dog.

Chapter Twenty-Six

“Downtown” was more than a figure of speech in Las Vegas. The main police department offices were there, near the Fremont Hotel, but homicide, aka crimes against persons, had long since gotten its own building in the Sin City That Never Sleeps.

Haskell left me handcuffed to a small, scarred table in a miserable cubicle of a room with soundproof tile on the ceiling. (I wasn’t about to yell to
that
eye-in-the sky ceiling for help, anyway.) In front of me was a table bearing nothing but one empty ashtray stinking of tar and nicotine. I was sitting in a chair so plastic and imbued with sweat, fear, and other less mentionable bodily fluids that it made my skin crawl.

I really needed to go to the bathroom but knew that if I asked anyone he’d make sure I didn’t. I’d covered crime stories. I knew how cops made suspects squirm by any means. So I was guilty of . . . what? Back exposure with intent to seduce? It actually crossed my mind to wonder if Snow would bail me out. It was probably his set-up anyway. His note had implied that I had power of a sort. Too bad nobody had clued me in on exactly what it was.

“Miss . . . Street?” The woman who poked her head in the door was blonde but hard-edged. Maybe five years older than I was. Carried her shoulders like she worked out and had mojo authority. Was a pretty cool chick, really. Ric’s captain friend. Oh, shit.

I nodded.

“I’m going to have to testify to your phone call proving prior interest in the Inferno, from witnessing the Sunset Park crime scene.”

“Be my guest.”

“Being a hard-ass won’t help you.”

“Funny. I thought telling the truth might.”

“Haskell says before this came up you impersonated an officer on that crime scene.”

“I implied, he inferred. He was being sexist.”

Blondie’s poker face didn’t move. She faced sexist every day.

“And racist,” I added.

A little of the ice broke. She really did like Ric.

“Haskell has issues,” she conceded. Malloy started to leave, then hesitated. “You might want to reconsider saying anything.”

I nodded. Message received. My truth could be my fall. I felt a shiver of silver moving along my arm to my hand. A white flash settled around my neck on a chain.
Won’t you wear my ring.
No!

Haskell poked his red, hypertensive face into the room. “Guess what. Guess you do have a man upstairs. Your ‘lawyer’ is here.”

All right! My lawyer. Pretty fast service from someone.
Hmm.

“I hope you haven’t cuffed her,” I heard an authoritative voice say in the hall.
A boldly black-and-white CinSim rolled into the room, maybe 270 pounds of designer suit. He had a baritone deep enough to take out the Three Tenors. Cool enough to chill dry ice.

“My name is Mason,” he said. “Perry Mason.”

Not Johnnie Cochran, but not bad.

Nightwine must have caught up with the tape pretty damn quick after we left. Who else would send Perry Mason, for God’s sake?

I sat up straight in my scuzzy jailhouse chair. I couldn’t wait for my next line. “My name is Street. Delilah Street.”

He took the chair across from me like a pope deigning to sit on a toadstool. “What a coincidence. My personal assistant’s name is Street. Della Street. May I call you—?”

“Delilah.”

He looked uneasy for the first time “Delilah. I like it. Now, Delilah Street, how do we get you out of this mess?”

“I thought that was your job.”

“Here, yes. The convincing explanations later are up to you, young lady.”

Chapter Twenty-Seven

The Snow groupie had been found dead in a Dumpster at the hotel’s rear the morning after my jaunt to the Inferno. She’d been strangled. Her image flashed into my mind’s eye, a harmless-looking middle-aged woman, really, except for the fanatic’s mania in her eyes and voice.

The hotel security cameras had recorded everything, including shots of this very woman looking green when Snow had come on to me. Cameras had also recorded our fight over the hairpins later and my obvious rebuff. The police theory was she’d come after a lock of my hair later and I’d killed her. Groupies could be annoying, but the police scenario did presume a certain element of self-defense on my part.

Perry had picked up on that immediately, ace attorney that he was in book and on film. When he drove me home in his black fifties Caddy convertible that felt like Dolly’s love match, I told him I’d finished my evening at the Inferno breaking and entering the executive offices. He frowned impressively.

“Pleading innocence by virtue of being occupied in another crime is not a viable defense. Miss, er,
Delilah
Street. Also, from your own testimony, you left the office in plenty of time to commit mayhem elsewhere.”

“Didn’t the hotel cameras capture the body being Dumpstered?”

“A good question. No. A black batlike shape covered the lens for several minutes that early morning.”

“Should they be looking for a vampire?”

“Perhaps. The neck was not marked by a ligature, or tooth marks, it was mauled. It would be impossible to tell if a vampire bite was involved. You, of course, are not a vampire?”

I showed my pearly whites, blunt and even. “Not to my knowledge. In fact, I have a deep aversion to vampires.”

“Doesn’t everyone?”

“Not vamp tramps and Snow groupies.”

“You think this woman could have had an opportunity to approach this ‘Snow’ person after you left his office, and he killed her?”

Was Snow a killer? I didn’t know. What did I know . . . ?

“The woman was demented,” I said. “All those Snow fans are. You should see them claw each other in the mosh pit to be one of the so-called lucky few he bends down to kiss.”

“On the mouth?”

“Yeah!”

I recalled how Snow rose after each extended smooch and placed his palm on the latest conquest’s forehead like a televangelist to push her back into the crowd. How the woman fell, senseless, into a buoying mass of her sister fanatics. And then disappeared beneath the swell of clamoring wannabe recipients of what they called the Brimstone Kiss.

“Those mosh-pit women clot like those spawning fish called grunion,” I said. “Someone could disappear in their midst and never been seen again until—”

“The Dumpster.”

“Exactly.”

“I’ve seen the security film the police confiscated,” Perry said. “You don’t look dressed to kill.”

“What?”

“The woman was strangled. It took force. The killer would have been marked, or disarranged. The police haven’t gotten a warrant for your rented clothes, but Della tells me that Déjà-Vous says that you have them.”

“You want them?”

“I have access to private labs. Better we know any damaging evidence first.”

“Be my guest.” I brought him inside and gave him the big white box when we got to my cottage. A silver bracelet slid down my wrist with the gesture of surrender, a bangle of pink cubic zirconias. Snow was so predictably partial to pink. Until now, I’d had no idea he could add jewels to my silver gewgaws. Hmm.

“Meanwhile,” Perry said before leaving, “don’t speak to the press. Call me if the police approach you for any reason. And let my office do the investigating.”

I nodded twice, but sat the fence on the third condition.

“Don’t worry about a thing, Delilah. From what you’ve told me that detective is the one in trouble.”

There was one thing I wasn’t going to tell Perry Mason or anyone else, because it might make me very unconvincing: that I’d glimpsed an apparition of a woman in my hallway mirror the night before the little green delivery elf and Detective Haskell had barged into my cottage this morning. But the more I thought about it, the more I recalled about that apparition of a woman. Woman? She had been a girl and she’d worn blue velvet with a sweetheart neckline. At least the bodice was blue velvet. The long skirt and short petal-shaped sleeves were blue taffeta. Definitely a late-forties get-up.

Her hair had been light brown, pulled up and puffed out at the sides to resemble the the sixteenth century heart-shaped headdress seen in portraits of Mary Queen of Scots. She’d been as doomed as that beheaded queen of Scotland, but she was a child of the 1940s, every detail screamed that. She was the dead body from Sunset Park, sure as God made little green cacti, and she was dressed exactly as I’d known she had been clothed.

How did I know this? I’d sensed some of it the day when Ric and I had met and melded dowsing for the dead . . . with mental medium tricks . . . with passion by proxy.

Yet it shook me all over again, to see her standing in my hall mirror. Details I’d sensed when Ric and I found her—wrist corsage, sterling silver heart locket at her throat, beseeching baby eyes, everything—had reassembled whole in my own hallway. Had even
replaced
my own reflection. She couldn’t have been more than seventeen and was about to be mowed down like Bambi’s mother.

Somehow, I understood she came here because her spirit knew I was trying to identify her, but the vivid memory of an apparition wasn’t evidence I could use with others, except Ric. I felt angry and helpless. And I knew from her lost, plaintive eyes that she had just felt helpless, which made me even angrier.

So. What solid facts did I have? I had the information I’d copied off the microfilm reader, and I had the testimony of the ghost in my mirror, mute for the moment, but plenty eloquent anyway. I was free to keep investigating for now. My lawyer (I did kinda like that term) had said the police evidence against me was only circumstantial, but a black hair had been found on one of the three Déjà-Vous hairpins and I knew DNA testing would prove it was mine, although it would take time.

Thank God.

Perry Mason took the dress box. I thanked him profusely for all his help and eyed Quicksilver, hanging back by the oleander bushes bordering the estate fence. He’d been keeping up with a lot of Detroit steel today.

I pushed the code to open the gate for Mr. Mason to drive out. As soon as his car’s shark-sharp tail fins had vanished, Quick was at my side, slurping my hands and growling in alternate rhythm.

“I know. Our hands and paws were tied, boy, but it’s over.”

I had a brain-splitting migraine, my wrists and shoulders were sore, and my soul was soiled.

Otherwise, I’d come out of the ordeal pretty well.

When we walked back into the cottage, Godfrey was waiting. He must have used the rear kitchen door.

“Welcome back, Miss. Mr. Nightwine has ordered dinner in for you. Not to worry, it’s from the Bellagio. Medallions of beef for you and a fine steak, very rare, for Master Quicksilver, as well as a soup bone from the Paris hotel. My master also left this written message and bade me not to keep you from your recuperation.”

Godfrey refused to stay for thanks, but bowed his way out immediately.

Quicksilver sat salivating over his napkin-covered silver tray, so I wafted off the linen and let him have at it in the kitchen.

Godfrey had left the other tray, bearing a single white rose in a sterling silver vase, on the breakfast table. The mellow Las Vegas dusk was tinting my window rose-gold. I pulled a damask napkin off a nouvelle cuisine feast of tender beef and garlic mashed potatoes to die for and chocolate mousse, but read the note before I ate.

My Dear Miss Street,

Godfrey has left, along with these culinary offerings, a tape of the recent events in the cottage I have allowed you to use. A copy of said scene rests in my private safe. Any trace of these events has been erased from the streaming tape in my central security system. No one will ever see or know of these distressing events save you or I. I am only keeping a record for prosecution purposes, should the need arise and should you wish to pursue such a course. I am most distressed that the authorities in any form should violate my property and your rights in this brutish fashion. All of my resources are at your command should you decide to proceed against this creature in any manner.

Your devoted servant,

Hector Nightwine

Okay. I sniffled a little with my dinner, which was superb and didn’t move unless I did it.

Chapter Twenty-Seven

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 Night-wine 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:
H
ouse s
p
e
c
ial
t
y:
A
lbino
V
am
p
ires.

“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.