Chapter Thirty-One

Deja-Vous outfitted me again and Dolly got me to the rambling wreck that was left of the 1001 Arabian Knights Hotel and Casino. Or so the mostly shot-out neon sign said. The name made me think of a cultural blend of Sinbad the Sailor and King Arthur's Round Table, but people were a lot less politically correct in the mid-twentieth century. The place sat on the bitter south end of the Strip below all the new high-flying hotels, where even the Johnny-come-lately hotels had not yet hung out their neon shingles.

It was true vampire time now, the dark of night lit by street lamps. Blowing sand beat a tattoo on the deserted hotel's shabby fifties-Moderne sign out front, still advertising Steve Lawrence and Edie Gorme.

Right. Steve and Edie who?

This property was clearly condemned. The windows were boarded over and the entrance was marked: DANGER. ACCESS FORBIDDEN. Not to mention the forbidding razor-wire-topped cyclone fence surrounding everything.

I parked Dolly across the Strip at our old home away from home, the Araby Motel. Having lived briefly at the Araby Motel, I'd soon found a low-profile parking space for Dolly behind a Dumpster under a broken parking lot light. No reason she needed to associate with that broken-down dump. The Arabian Knights, not the Araby Motel. Maybe that was how the motel had been named, after its big brother.

I felt conspicuous as I crossed the wide street, but nothing much was happening down here. The sun had taken a dive behind the Western mountains. One of those faint twinkles in the foothills was Los Lobos. In an earthy flashback, Ric was sensuously edging my skirt waistband down past my belly button in some instant rewind in the sky and from the scrapbook of my memory.

Meanwhile, I was edging my laced-up oxfords, virginal white, over the glass-strewn sand that surrounded the Arabian Knights. The outfit from Deja-Vous was as authentic as it was ridiculous. The clerk, a pimply-faced punk, had winked, clicked his tongue, and noted that this getup was hot stuff among the geriatric set.

Right. White hose, white garter belt, and white cotton, waist-high, full-coverage panties-ick! I'd read that Elvis had gotten off on those but he was soooo over. My get-up was fifties kitsch, not to mention the dead-white uniform and the kinky little black bag.

But a reporter on the trail will suffer anything for a prime interview and Vilma had promised that I'd meet a mondo-big player from the vampire side of the WW-V wars if I played it right.

A mini-tape recorder was stashed under one the ridiculous steel garters... those things left welts on my thighs! Water-weight again. I had tucked a tiny notepad and pencil up my tight, short white sleeve. The whole outfit was undersized, with the blouse buttons straining to display my cleavage, but I'd been assured this was the exact right costume from the exact right film of the period.

The lobby was empty, dusty, and moth-eaten.

A shred of desert wind shuffled all the litter around. Gaming tables tilted on three-legged stands. Playing cards with their numbers sand-tattooed off laid false trails through the endless rooms.

I found a bank of elevators. Even back in the forties, Las Vegas hotels aimed at height. This one was only ten stories, but it had been a Tower of Babel in its time.

Litter snaked across the marble floors. I jumped, imagining rat claws.

What I saw was even worse: a trio of shambling figures in the long black coats of always-cold junkies. They slunk along the outer walls like mongrel dogs, cowed but ready to attack in a pack at any sign of weakness.

Their eye whites and fangs glittered in slivers of light from the streetlamps. One limped. Another gnawed compulsively on his own filthy knuckles. The third edged nearer.

I retreated to the elevator bank and paced along the closed doors, pushing dead buttons and wishing for a nail file. Let me in, let me in! My disguise would earn me a pass from the chief resident vamp, Vilma had assured me, but she hadn't mentioned the homeless, hungry vamps on the chief's perimeter.

They were coming closer, forming into a gang of three. One brushed its long, filthy nails at my arm. Undead Ted looked like the prince of vampires compared to these vagrants.

Above one set of elevator doors the floor number ten lit up.

I can't explain how spooky that was. One floor on one elevator. I'd been told something was here. Apparently, something had noticed that I was here and that I wasn't going away.

The light descended slowly on the dusty gilt monitor. I pressed my back to those elevator doors and reached into the black bag, which made my circling vamps pause. Did I carry a wooden stake in my little black bag? Didn't I wish! Above me the numbers lit up in turn: Eight. Five. Three. Two. One.

A ting like a microwave finished cooking hit my ears. Any sound but wind here was shocking. The doors did what elevator doors are supposed to. Open.

My heart beat me half senseless. This was what I wanted, but it was totally spooky.

I backed inside and pressed the top button. Ten. The penthouse. That's where the story was. The vampire trio had decided to get bold just as the elevator doors snapped shut. One pinned a narrow finger in the closing crack, leaving a shriek behind as the car shot upward. A convex mirror in a corner of the elevator ceiling made me look like Jessica Rabbit, all mammary glands, all the time, in the distorted reflection.

The car zoomed upward with surprising, twenty-first century speed.

When the elevator door opened at the top, a weary man in a gray flannel suit was waiting for me.

He eyed me up and down with contempt and resignation.

"He's waiting for you. You'll have to pass through security. Let me see that bag."

I handed it over, feeling like any cowed modern airport traveler.

Wow. Inside was a stethoscope. A packet of hypodermic needles. A bottle of alcohol and lots of cotton balls. Latex gloves. And an instant camera. Weird.

"This way, Miss." He returned the bag to me unrifled.

The guy showed me through a plain brown door. The moment it shut I regretted being here in the worst way. The room was a giant shower stall, all white tiles and fluorescent lights. No windows, no obvious doors. I was totally trapped.

The lights went nova. A deep male robotic voice instructed me to turn with my arms extended. I quavered about the presence of my blouse-sleeve notebook, but didn't set off any alarms.

A section of tiled wall opened and I was in another chamber where a moving spray misted me from stem to stern. The odor was evergreen and eucalyptus and I had a sense of being scanned, as if by X-rays.

The next room was steam-filled and almost wilted my starched uniform.

I passed into yet another chamber, dim-lit after the glaring inspection room, and managed to rub my thighs together to activate the tape recorder.

"Nurse Wretched," a voice declared from an overhead PA system. I'd given my name as "Ratched."

"This is your patient."

The dim lights came up.

I was not alone. Really not alone. A half dozen clones of me-busty young women in tight white uniforms- flocked around a hospital bed accessorized with trees of IVs and other high-intensity medical paraphernalia.

The object of their attention lay sprawled on the sheets before me, Las Vegas's oldest living vampire, a scrawny, filth-brown man with nails the length of an abused pony's hooves and hair long and unkempt enough to make a supermodel's career.

My heart, and gut, sank.

I'd fought my way into this?

The rasp of heavy breathing magnified by machines surrounded me. My sister nurses grinned to show their sharp canine teeth. The breath sounds? Mine. I was the only breathing being in this place and I was being monitored as if I were the sick person.

"You're here to h-h-help me?" the skeletal figure on the bed wheezed.

I grabbed the stethoscope, finally understanding what a forgotten nest of undead this place was, my knees shaking.

"Breathe," I said, placing the silver circle on that hollow, filthy chest.

"You must be kidding."

"No. I can... read your state of health through this instrument."

The wild-animal glittering eyes focused on me. "And... my state is -?"

"Vigorous." I snapped the bag shut, determined to bluff my way through this. I actually believed it and he so needed to hear it.

The balloon-bosomed nurses arrayed themselves around him like chorus girls. He was used to flunkies, but was essentially a never-satisfied man.

I played doctor, rather than nurse, because only an authority figure could get anything out of this lecherous geezer. "I believe that unresolved issues from your past are hurting your recovery now. Why did the vampires lose the war?"

Even I sensed the instant suspension of all sensory devices: the security, the girls' phony solicitousness.

"Not lost," he huffed, clutching his bony chest.

I immediately applied the silver stethoscope head to it again. My medium. Silver. Even when it was chrome.

"Cold," he complained, writhing with the satisfaction of feeling something, anything. The surrounding nurses showed their fangs and backed off. Those shrunken gums grinned up at me, the teeth brown and sharp, like rusty razors.

"I can make you a star," he promised.

If there's one thing some men like better than gratuitous sex, it's telling war stories.

I lounged alone on the hospital bed with my host while his rakelike fingernails unthinkingly caressed the tape recorder lump on my thigh, taking it for some sort of vibrator, no doubt.

The creepy girl vamps hugged the room's walls, waiting for the old guy to fall asleep. Then they'd storm me for a group bite. I wasn't as worried about them as the lean and hungry vamps on the street level. Besides, I bet it was hard to catch the old guy asleep. As long as I kept him talking about his glory days of yesteryear, I was okay.

"So you're the sole survivor," I encouraged him, forcing my nurse-white false fingernails (thank God I could ditch them afterwards) through his kinky, gray, snarled locks. Snow's hair was sable-soft but right now his metal familiar had shrunk to a cheesy ankle bracelet with a dangling (two guesses what parts were dangling) Playboy Bunny charm. I was not here to think about Snow, but the old guy might give away something about him before I left.

"Sole survivor." He relished the words the way Nightwine savored mobile olive slices. "The sole survivor to stay on, despite all the mob action, even if I had to play dead to do it. See, my empire was going south. My lieutenants were using the fact that I like my privacy to take over. The Big Boys from the East Coast and Chicago outfits had brought me in to clean up the Alakhazam Hotel operation, but my own staff was conspiring to take over my Las Vegas interests. The only option was to let someone they couldn't buy or bully take over for me."

I got it. "You made an alliance with the vampires."

"Yeah. Good businessmen. Went for the jugular, like I did. Immortality would allow me to pursue my first loves, flight and females. I loved engineering things that people believed couldn't be done. Nice undergarment you're wearing, by the way. I invented that fashion-forward look."

I stared at him the way he was staring at my conical brassiere.

"What?" he demanded defensively. "I read Victoria 's Secret catalogues. Better class of model in them than in Playboy these days. That Hugh Hefner was just a wannabe me."

Actually. Howard Hughes, or what was left of him, had a point.

And then he stuck that point, a curling, yellowed fingernail, down my open blouse front while I pretended to wriggle away in delight rather than disgust.

"You're quite the aerodynamic genius, in the air and in the sack," I cooed. "So who did the deed? Who bit you over to the Dark Side?"

"I'd only let a woman. No guy was sucking on anything of mine. She was a beauty. Dark-haired like you. Built. Lips red as roses. I was going to make her a star."

Wow, was that a tired line! I glanced at the hovering nurses, who were clearly slavering over my virgin neck, wrists, and femoral arteries. All brunet. Crimson-lipped, white-toothed. All right out of a Hammer film from the sixties. Vampire High. Rocky Transylvanian Horror Show Mountain High. I'd fit right in if I didn't figure out an escape ploy.

I'd read up on Howard Hughes during my research. He wasn't in on the founding of Las Vegas, but came along shortly after. And he had indeed been asked by the mob to clean up the situation at the hotel. His playboy days were fading then, and he probably was tending toward the obsessive-compulsive disorders and paranoia that ended with him holing up in a string of hotels he owned, possessed of a germ mania but in a skeletal, filthy, unkempt state himself, with long tangled locks and mandarin fingernails like claws.

His reported death and burial in the seventies and the location and state of his huge assets and will remained lucrative tabloid paper mysteries for years. He could darn well be exactly what he seemed to be: a madman who had made a deal with the undead. The ramifications were mind-boggling.

Meanwhile, I needed to know more.

"Oh, Vampy Boy." I let a false fingernail coil in his iron-gray chest hair. Singular, as in one hair. "Tell me who bit you into eternity? I need a role model."

The cunning eyes in their corroded setting squinted at me. "Looked a lot like you. A Black Dahlia. Dark devilish hair, heavenly blue eyes, wanton red lips. Vida was her name."

Vida. Spanish for "life." She couldn't possibly be-? No. But she could still be... alive, so to speak.

He went on reminiscing. "She worked for the werewolves, but her heart had turned vampire. Liked the kick of giving blood along with her body. I suggested they turn her all the way just for me, so I could pick who'd suck me into immortality."

The selfish bastard!

"Where is she now?" Poor undead woman!

He shrugged. "She had issues. Left for California with some master vamp. Some Podunk town in Orange County, when I could have made her a star here. So. Now I am vampire. Now you will stop asking questions and become my bride. I need another one."

"I don't date older men." But I was wearing all white... even my undies.

A scrawny but powerful arm captured the back of my neck and drew me toward those neglected-knife-drawer teeth.

Around me I felt the busty nurse vampires closing in. Once he got the first bite, they would get seconds. Pickings were lean around here. Sharp nails dug into my nape, Nosferatu on the march.

The nurses were swarming my limbs, pinning down my arms and legs for their master.

I was immobile, helpless, out of options.

Then I felt that familiar, loathed cold shiver streaking up my ankle to my garter belt past my industrial-strength push-up, push-out bra to my neck.

Vampire Empire-builder chomped down hard on the wide silver dog collar suddenly circling my neck. Several rotting teeth shattered to the gum line as he screamed with pain and frustration.

I started kicking and flailing in all directions. The shocked nurses froze, and then zeroed in on the blood pooling at their master's bleeding gums. Periodontal disease is such a golden opportunity for the blood-based set, and there is no loyalty among bloodsuckers.

I rolled off the bed, scrambled to my feet, and dashed back the way I had come, the heel of my hand knocking Gray-suited Man against the white tile walls. In the hall I skipped the elevators and ran clattering down the fire stairs.

Down the last turn I ran into a free-range vampire coming up, unable to wait anymore.

I grabbed the iron railing and kicked hard at his chest, sending him tumbling down like a die cube on a table.

I clattered after him. These sturdy lace-up oxfords were the next best thing to butt-kicking boots. Maybe nurses needed that edge.

He fell into his two buddies, who kicked him aside to come for me. By then I had gravity on my side again, and momentum. I barreled into them, using my elbows, the strongest joint in the human body, ramming into ribs, collarbones, noses. Ordinarily vampires could take all I had to give and break me like a shoetree.

But these guys were so hungry they ignored my defenses and came snapping at my carotid arteries, one on each side. They hadn't seen my silver dog collar in the dark. Between the mythic power of silver and the stubborn nature of Snow's familiar to bend or break to any power, they gashed their mouths into bleeding rivers. I kicked them aside, onto their fallen comrade. Last I glimpsed they were snapping reflexively at each other.

I kept running.

The night was dark and the traffic was nil, but Dolly was waiting in the Araby Motel lot across the street, her headlights on and her engine racing like a Stephen King car.

I made for her and then eyed the dude waiting in the passenger seat. Dude? Dog. Quicksilver sat there panting, his tongue almost touching his gray chest hairs.

I never wanted to think about a gray chest hair again.

But the poor dog had run his pads off to find Dolly, and me, just in time. Now that we were reunited, he went pushing out the passenger door to down some poor wino who had happened along.

Wait! Another wino was grinning vacantly at my window. Thank God I'd left the top up.

Not a wino. A half-were. I opened the heavy door hard into its torso and came out, wishing for a silver bullet. I guess I had one. Quicksilver leapt the broad Caddy hood in one bound and landed claws down on the flattened half-were, tearing out its throat with one shake of his mighty head and jaws.

I fell back into the driver's seat, while Quicksilver snarled and ran down two of three more escaping shadows. All half-weres.

I knew he'd taken out the half-were motorcycle gang at the pet store parking lot, but I hadn't seen the carnage up close, in living color. A rich river of blood was oozing toward Dolly's left front tire.

Quick was plenty busy doing things I didn't want to see, although I couldn't help hearing them. I turned on the ignition and eased Dolly back out of the blood flow. The dog was part wolfhound. What part of that didn't I get? He was born to hunt and kill wolves. To protect flocks. And to him, I was flock. I was lucky to have him. Half-weres were predator scum, not even "unhuman," as Ric put it. I just didn't like to see where those teeth had been.

I had a chance to think while Quicksilver finished doing his business. Expecting a quick exit tonight, I'd left Dolly unlocked with the keys in the glove compartment. Now they were dangling from the ignition. Quicksilver and his clever paws and teeth? Dolly herself? Snow's pretty damn good remote manipulation of silver skills? My life-saving dog collar was now a charm bracelet loaded with tiny vintage Cadillacs.

So, I wondered, was this little mobile accessory of mine the Mark of the Devil, or a protective talisman? And was Snow evil incarnate, or maybe something more interesting? Hair, after all, is a literal "lock" and is associated with my namesake.

Who knew, who cared? Maybe Snow knew and I cared, but right now all I wanted was to get the hell out of here.

Quicksilver hopped into the passenger seat and I leaned far over to pull the wide door shut. I revved that Caddy engine and we blasted out onto the Strip, heading for the bright lights of Las Vegas Central due north.

Chapter Thirty-Two

Ric called me as soon as he got back the next day. "Man, what a mess."

"Where were you?"

"I could use a night at Los Lobos. You ready to rock 'n' roll?"

Hearing the soul-deep weariness in his voice, I decided that mentioning my petty personal problems was minor. I could have pointed out that the exertion of dancing wasn't the best medicine for a burned-out traveler, but I was too selfish.

"Salsa," I corrected, "but it's not the full moon quite yet."

"We'll make it so."

"Yes, sir, Captain Picard."

"Where are the hot-mama low-rider jeans?" Ric asked when he picked me up outside Hector's estate. I respected his decision not to confront Quicksilver on his own turf yet.

I fluffed my turquoise silk skirt in the car. "I felt festive."

My fluffing gesture had made my silver bracelet jingle jangle like spurs.

"Nice bracelet. Navaho work, isn't it?"

"Um-" I glanced down to find that the bauble had gone Native American and added turquoise stones to match my dancing skirt. "Yeah, I guess."

"You didn't know when you bought it?"

"I found lots of old silver jewelry at estate sales in Kansas."

I told myself that I hadn't-actually lied to Ric; I just hadn't hit him in the face with Snow's nasty little permanent present. Still, I felt queasy about dodging the truth with him, and changed the subject pronto.

"The turquoise doesn't quite match the rhinestones on my shoes."

He eyed and recognized the vintage plastic heels from our last, and first, date. "Those your lucky dancing shoes, chica? Or mine?"

That was another subject I didn't want to delve into, what could happen between us tonight. Haskell's ugly innuendos had tainted the growing ease of my relationship with Ric.

"So what happened where you were?" I asked. "Or can't I know?"

" Juarez."

I eyed his taut-jawed profile against the passing headlights, wondering if Captain Malloy had ever had this view.

"Oh. The thousands of factory girl murders that have been going on for decades. It must have been awful." I could say that with feeling, having been haunted recently by my own youthful innocent, Jeanie with the light brown hair.

His lips tightened, if that was possible. "I've been on it since I joined the FBI, fresh out of Quantico a few years ago. That's when they started calling me the Cadaver Kid. Sometimes I find the fresh dead. You would swear life had just kissed their cheeks goodbye. There's something... sweet about that. It's good to settle their families' anxieties and get police evidence, but many of them don't make it from the coroner's facility to a funeral home."

"Why not?"

"Hijacked," he said tersely. "Their bodies have hardly deteriorated. If they're raised as zombies, they have most of their faculties and such fresh, young corpses are in high demand as CinSim material."

"Ghastly! Can't anyone stop it?"

"Nobody's stopped Juarez," he said. "It often suits the powerful to use tragedies to enrich themselves."

After a moment he spoke again. "Sometimes I find the long-dead. They are only dry bones, fragile as precious parchment. I feel like an archeologist, privileged to reveal them. Then there are the savagely murdered ones. They still fester in the earth like plague victims. Bruised, bleeding. All those young, helpless girls. It was like being clawed at by... "

Groupies? I almost said. "Why were you there? Isn't it dangerous?"

"Damn right. The drug lords and traffickers in human and unhuman labor run the city with huge gangs. Police chiefs don't last twenty-four hours before being gunned down, and U.S. border forces and drug and immigration agents are often assassinated or caught, tortured, and killed within a day of entering the city."

"Ric!"

"That's why they want me there. I can blend in better than an Anglo agent and there's always my sterling track record at finding corpses. This time I found a DEA agent they'd done a torture voodoo act on. The body had to be brought up in pieces. At least the CinSim runners won't get him."

"Oh, my God! I'm glad I didn't know where you were and what you were doing. It's a wonder you don't have post-traumatic shock syndrome."

Ric shook his head as if dislodging memories of carnage.

"I need to be there. A lot of bodies have needed finding over the years. Some serial killers are working there, and the usual gangs of smugglers, thieves, and rapists. Nobody really cares about the deaths of these young women except their families. The Anglos who run the border factories like the cheap labor and provide buses that are about as secure as a sieve. The workers often have to stay overtime and miss the bus schedule. Their long hours send them home on foot after dark and Mexican culture doesn't give much respect to women out after dark. They're picked off by the border predators so fast that a girl can be seen leaving the factory one night and sleep in a shallow grave by the next morning."

"All human predators?"

"No." He was silent for a while. "Vampires and werewolves too. And then there's the regional boogeyman, the chupacabra."

"Chupacabra?"

"A blood-sucking goat-killer. It's been described as everything from a small half-alien, half-dinosaur tailless vampire with quills running down its back to a pantherlike creature with a long snaky tongue to a hopping animal that leaves a trail of sulfuric stench. Some claim they're alien 'pets' or cloning experiments gone wrong. The UFO nuts call such creatures Anomalous Biological Entities, aka ABEs."

I had a shuddersome memory of the trio of dead cows near Wichita. That half-dinosaur tail reminded me of the huge reptilian track I'd found there.

"Have you ever seen such a thing out on the desert?" I asked.

He paused for a minute or more. "Maybe. I've seen a lot of bizarre things out in the desert. Chupacabras? Rogue humans and unhumans are scarier, and human predators are worst of all, because they have no need to kill to live."

"You found more victims this trip?" Personally, I meant. These weren't numbers, statistics; these were lost bodies and souls he dowsed for.

"Twelve, some as young as fourteen. The oldest was twenty-two. They'll be identified and catalogued and buried again in the desert, with only a crude headstone. It's beginning to feel sadistic to dig them up, but the authorities keep hoping each new death will nail some single maniac killer who can die for the sins of all the opportunistic rapists who fill the border cities."

We were out of the city now and driving on the dark, almost deserted highway toward the distant faint twinkles of mountain habitations. We were silent for a while, lulled by the empty dark and the roar of the Vette's engine.

"It must... take something out of you to find all these bodies," I said finally.

"It always has." His glance slid toward me and darted back to the empty highway.

He was trying to decide whether to tell me something. Usually I wanted to know everything. Relentless reporter, that's me. Nothing I can't take. No knowledge too devastating. Now I didn't know about taking on whatever Ric was holding back. I sensed still-raw wounds underneath that smooth, defensive exterior. I didn't know if I was one of them. Or could be.

He decided to let me in a little more. "I've always maintained a certain control, a certain distance, when I work. Ric Montoya, human cadaver dog. Ever since... Sunset Park, I don't have that distance. I don't just find them and deal with the dead. I feel them now. They expect something of me I've never had to give, like they're reaching out of the earth to grab me with their living-dead hands, their living-dead minds, their living-dead emotions and needs. It's... exhausting."

"And my fault?"

He wouldn't look at me. "I'm a dowser. You're something else. A conduit. A medium. I don't know what you are and I doubt you do either. It's not your fault, but I can't just dowse any more. Thanks to you, I'm a tuning fork. I vibrate to their presence as if they were alive and I were dead, a mere medium to be activated. I feel their pain, their undone deeds, and their broken hearts. It's too much."

What could I answer? He was right that I didn't know anything when it came to these matters. So I asked.

"When you dowse for the dead now, do you feel the same electricity we generated in Sunset Park together?"

"No. That's ours. And theirs, the dead couple's. Oh, I've sensed lust and greed in these sex killings, but nothing as positive as that."

"It was positive, for us, then, wasn't it? I've never felt anything like that, over a grave or anywhere, with anyone." I put my hand on his on the steering wheel. "Ric. I missed you."

He turned to see me, really see me, and his mouth melted.

"Oh, Del. Delilah. Take me away. Take me away tonight."

I saw the despair in his dark eyes and nodded. I knew a prime assignment when I heard it, and I wanted this one very, very much. The tension between us had changed from our own professional problems into an unspoken need to shake ourselves loose of them.

Ric was shimmering and glinting in his soft, expensive clothes, which I now recognized as a defensive barrier against the death he wrested daily from the brutal earth.

I felt quite the glamour girl, all soft and silken folds and uncertain emotions. He read me like a book, dowsed me, and understood what I offered, wanted what I was willing to give. Only I didn't really know what that really was. So I also felt nervous, as usual.

The Los Lobos parking lot looked mundane, filled with cars not quite old enough to be interesting. Ric's was low, sleek, sexy, a quick getaway. Another barrier against death.

This time the place looked under-patronized. I noticed the frayed edges of the country-music posters on the walls and saw the gouges in the wood plank floor.

I ordered an Albino Vampire to my specs, watching the waitress scribble down the directions. Ric ordered the same, cocking a dark eyebrow at me.

"That's a pretty potent cocktail. You trying to get me drunk, Querida?

"Not until we get home, hombre."

"Su casa or mi casa?"

"Do you have uno perro?"

"No. No dog. Do you have uno Spanish dictionary?"

"Si."

Trumpets and mariachis hailed us to the dance floor.

I was beginning to get the rhythm. One-two-three. Oomph. I didn't care this time what the onlookers would think. I was desperate to distract Ric from the awful job he'd had to do. Werewolves did the two-step, but so did my disordered emotions, wanting to soothe him, envelop him, ease him, please him, and end the angst.

When he jerked my elastic waistband down over my hips, below my navel, I put my hands on his shoulders. One-two-three, seduce. He buried his face in my neck and shoulder, pushed my torso into his. I so wanted this man to find salvation in me, or that elusive state that haunted Edgar Allan Poe kept searching for, surcease. Was this sex? Or something else?

Right now I was haunted by something that ate at my stomach and burned in my throat. I had to tell Ric, warn him. He needed to understand that I might be even more... touchy... now.

"Ric, this wasn't anything like what you experienced in Mexico, but while you were gone-"

"What happened?" His profile had grown sharp before his face turned to me. He'd interrogated hundreds of suspects. He knew when they were aching to conceal something.

"Haskell happened."

"That pig. How? Why?"

"When I was investigating the Inferno I ran into one of the Seven Deadly Sins' lead singer's groupies."

"Cocaine. Yeah, I've heard of him. A very bad player."

"His groupies are crazy. This one and I had a brief encounter."

"You into girls, chica?"

"Not that kind." I slapped his shoulder playfully.

Making a joke of my story was a calming technique. Ric could sense the tension in my back muscles. I could feel his hands smoothing them even as we danced.

"Short story: this Cocaine character was out pressing the groupie flesh in person and stopped to play with my hair in passing. The video cameras recorded this one woman trying to get a lock of my hair afterward as a souvenir. That creeped me out, so I told her back off. She turned up dead the next morning in the hotel Dumpster. Haskell came to my cottage and arrested me."

"For what?"

"For questioning."

"Arrested? Just for questioning? That's not procedure. Oh. You don't mean handcuffs?"

He had stopped dancing so we just stood there while other couples flashed their moves around us. We stood motionless, in each other's arms, so close our breaths fell into comforting sync. It was getting harder to pretend I'd shrugged off an ugly and traumatic moment.

I just nodded. "I knew a very personal pat-down wasn't procedure."

"How personal?"

"For the barrel of his gun, very."

Ric dropped my hands, a good thing because his had become very hard fists. He muttered some Spanish curses too low and too fast for me and my handy little Street Spanish book to translate.

"Hector's security system got the incident on tape," I told Ric, wanting to defuse him. "Haskell's screwed."

"Jesus! You were taped being manhandled?"

"Hector's destroyed every security tape but a copy he gave me, to use if I want to bring charges. Or destroy. I'm only mentioning that I might be a little... twitchy about being touched right now."

"Querida." Ric pulled me closer, put his forehead to mine. We began swaying to a slow dance, a slow-motion floating island amid a stream of frenetic salsa-dancing couples.

"Forget that. Forget Haskell. You're with me now. I'll make it better."

"It just might have triggered my old phobia. I might not be... what you expect or want. Too much trouble."

"You're trouble, all right. The kind that makes me very twitchy. Let's get out of here. I know just the place to soothe all your cares and woes."

"Really? Where?"

"My place."

We left before the werewolves had really begun to dance, but it wasn't a full-moon night anyway.

Ric opened the Corvette's passenger door. The car was a low-riding hammock with rocket power. The seat was already half-reclined by design, but at least he didn't bother snapping the seat belt for me. Not being belted in didn't worry me. Ric drove as if he was one with the car, fast and powerful, outrunning everything... Juarez, Haskell, my old nagging fears.

The low car thrummed along the asphalt as it wove its way out of the mountains, clinging to every curve with a dreamy sense of deja vu. Again the powerful engine vibrations massaged my spine. Again Ric's hand moved on the stick shift, up, down, across, and I felt my body sway with the motion. After a while, all my cares and woes had been outrun. I was only here, only now, only with him.

He seemed to sense my evolution from edgy fear to edgy interest.

No full moon flirted with us through the Vette's blue-tinted glass roof. No werewolves haunted the hills as they ran through the freedom of their change.

It was just us and the night, and this time he wasn't taking me to be dropped off primly at my cottage door.

This time he was taking me home with him.

Chapter Thirty-Three

Ric's car stopped, purring. The end of motion disoriented me. Ric opened the car door, pulling me up and out. My ankles wobbled as my hands returned to his shoulders, his to my hips. We had cruised past a gated entry and were in a newer housing development, nice but not palatial. He waltz-walked me inside, past a courtyard where wind chimes and a huge central fountain made aural love to each other.

Inside the house was dark, quiet. It wasn't that large, but everything about it felt chosen, sensual, perfect. A huge stainless steel refrigerator purred against one wall. Faint light glinted off dark granite countertops and other stainless steel appliances. Ric paused at a long kitchen island, where he caressed the granite, black with glittering silver and blue veins, like precious ores. "It's called blue pearl. You. Me. Here."

"Horizontal," I protested. Besides, it looked like a sacrificial altar.

We were in another room where I heard water flowing, clinking like tiny coins in fountains. It was cool there, humming with an air-conditioned serenity. Ric sat me down on the hard edge of an interior fountain. He slipped off my Cinderella slippers, set my feet in cool water. I hadn't known my dancing-princess soles were burning until then. My soul, burning. His fingertips dribbled fountain water on my chest, which he licked off until his mouth had pushed my neckline down. My nipples blossomed in his mouth and exploded at the touch of his teeth.

He pulled me up and onward, pushing me down on a velvet sofa to put my shoes back on. Why? He was taking me apart and putting me back together, and all the while the dark, soft sound of his unseen rooms ate away at my composure.

Bedroom. Music. It was a smart house. Sound had followed us through, tinkling, glittering, humming. Celtic? Spanish? New Age? All of the above.

I noticed a low bed on a pedestal, satin sheets. Mirrors.

"Is this a vampire's lair?" I joked, afraid of the way everything about him was pushing into me. Claustrophobic again, in my own body and not remembering why.

He danced me into another room, pushed a light switch, flooding us as if we were in a photo studio.

The master bathroom. I saw a blue pearl granite hot tub sunken in a rim of unlit candles. Mirrored doors, windows, a big mirror over the double sinks.

"See my reflection?" he asked. "Do I look like vampire to you?"

He looked like dark hands moving over my pale skin, a lowered angled face making love to this woman in the mirror, my double with her clothes half off and still hidden, still private.

He finger-walked my skirt up to my hips. In the mirror. His feet pushed my shoes apart, spread my legs like a cop doing a very personal arrest. A shattering memory of Haskell drowned in a sudden liquid shot of desire. Ric wasn't, never would be, Haskell, and I was finally able to make distinctions between my fears and my desires.

"Glad you wore those hot mama shoes again," Ric said. "Make you just the right height for me."

I was pretty non compos mentis by then, but I liked being just right for him and I knew what he meant. We'd been brushing against each other all night, hip to hip, so I just purred a little.

"This is the way we stood in the park. You remember? In daylight. This is what you ambushed me into wanting, into feeling, into wanting to do with you. It was just the usual water-witching demonstration, except you were so soft, so moist, so cool, an oasis of flesh. I owe you an orgasm."

So I'd felt more than a hard-on back then. I leaned my head back on his left shoulder, watching his hands on me, playing at the extremities of our mirror image, not quite revealing myself to me, or to him. I saw faint auras, mine ice-blue, his hot and yellow. They melded to make green and purple where they touched.

"Nice cologne." I inhaled deeply. I'd first scented it in the park when all my senses had sharpened. "What's it called?"

"Night," he murmured into my hair.

"Is that with a K?"

"No. I'm definitely not that noble."

Below the line of the mirror, his fingers slipped into me, toying with my inner silk, a movement so easy, so natural. An action only in the mirror, where neither of us could see while his fingers delved where we both could only feel. His left forefinger reached up to tease the spaghetti straps off each of my shoulders in turn, using just his nail. That roving fingernail edged my camisole neckline down in eighth inches until only the swollen precipices of my nipples held up the soft fabric.

"You like to tease yourself," I managed to say.

"You too."

"I teased you?"

"You didn't know it but what do you think it was like, this strange lush woman in my arms in a public park, writhing against me in broad daylight?"

"It was night to me. All dark, all dancing in the dark."

Even as my insides heated to the boiling point, a small cold voice I'd always had in my head, along with Irma, uncoiled. You're ruined. You can't escape the past you don't know. And I remembered every nerve-wracking, uncertain, humiliating failure of my so-called life. The Reporter stirred, came forward, said objectively...

"Forty percent of women are non-orgasmic."

And, as far as I could remember, which wasn't much, I was personally batting zero percent in my personal life when corpses and ex-FBI guys who could dowse for the dead weren't involved. There were no dead bodies here now.

Ric looked so good in the mirror as he made love to me, his dark lashes sexy shadows on high cheekbones. His fingers pulled out of me. Warned maybe. They lifted before me in the mirror, slick and shiny. He brought them up to my face and painted my lips with their transitory glisten. I inhaled his fingertips, pulled them into the hot cavern of my mouth.

"I live in Las Vegas," he breathed in my ear. "I don't believe in odds. My whole life has been bucking the odds."

He pushed my skirt up in back, pushed me over until my hands under his grasped the smooth gilded faucets. We were dowsing for the depths within ourselves. I heard the hiss of a zipper, the notched touch of metal teeth, felt the brush of silken linen, then pure soft silk, and velvet flesh stretched taut to push home into me.

"In the park," he was saying, "the wand had never driven so hard and strong and deep for the ground, but it was driving somewhere else, too. Not just down and back, as we passed over it, and as the rod will do. It ached to enter you. I couldn't blame it. I felt that urge too, but I couldn't let that raw wood violate you. It took all my strength to control it. To keep it away. To keep you untouched. To keep you to myself."

I felt an irresistible object pushing into the most wounded part of me, a no man's land of mystery and perhaps even hysteria, on the soft friction of velvet against silk. Velvet had nap. Silk would give first, as scissors cut paper.

"I hurt," I said. But it wasn't his impending presence; it was as if a rubber band had shrunk between my legs.

"That's good, Delilah," he murmured, "and I can make it hurt more and less and better."

I glanced up at Ric in the mirror. His face was cast down to watch my body, his hands moving on me but not further invading me until I said so. Somehow that reflected face seemed a truer window than any I'd ever looked through or into for a long, long time. I believed what he said, that the tightening lovely ache inside me, at my innermost gateway, would evaporate with his entry.

"Yes," I said, loving how he waited until my last ssss had faded into a sigh before he did more.

He was murmuring musical, sexy Latin words now. Their sibilant alien sound pierced me to the bone. The swollen ache became an eruption as he rocked into me. Suddenly my interior was a vast tense, spreading plain. The outer limits of my senses stretched, screamed their joy at being explored. Something was gathering, on the high plain fringes, something cataclysmic, storm-laden.

"Let it go," Ric urged in English. "Let yourself go."

I was running with the wolves. Werewolves. Whole-weres. Running like quicksilver or my Quicksilver, under the moonlight, my body a bright full moon aching for observation of its wonders.

I threw back my head, let the earth's silver dowsing rod delve me like a dream lover, and howled my freedom to the star-sprinkled skies.

My face was turned into Ric's shoulder again. We were upright, I pressed against him, he against me, still joined.

What if you didn't know anything about yourself? Not really.

Like most people, I'd grown a protective shell, only mine was thicker than most. Hard as nails. The phrase meant the metal nails that won't bend under the hardest hammering, but I always thought of women's fingernails when I heard it: that odd growing part of us that is such slight protection, brittle enough to break at one wrong glancing word or gesture; tough enough, if we're driven enough or desperate enough, to wound.

Oh, some of us flaunt our fingernails, paint thin clear enamel carapaces over them, sometimes tinted as pink as rare meat, sometimes bold and red as a stoplight, sometimes glittery like jewelry. But they are still a fragile element of our bodies, no matter how thick the shell over the exposed nerves and thin-skinned flesh beneath, and pulling them out was an ancient form of torture.

My nail polish was neutral and effacing, but as impervious as shellac.

The Wichita, Kansas, TV studio had the usual food room: sink, microwave, dishes, silverware, vending machines. Although the on-camera women were supposed to be uniformly slender, the support staff brought homemade pastries and desserts. We gathered around the treats to nibble or gorge, depending on our metabolisms and moods of the moment. One time a woman had exclaimed that some hit of whipped-cream, chocolate-laden sugar was "better than sex." A quick poll named the top better-than-sex dessert: carrot cake. A lone vote for banana cream pie won a lusty group laugh, and the woman who craved those huge trans-fatty glazed donuts was told with giggles and knowing titters that she could combine the two. I'd laughed knowingly too, although I only got the reference now. My own fave had been lost in the hullabaloo: gourmet coffee and chocolate.

Now I knew that little office coffee klatch conversation for an exchange so shallow that even Irma at her ditziest was light years away from explaining the enormous risk and reward of having sex.

The wellsprings of trust involved dazzled me. The emotional liberation of feeling trust on such an intimate level left me with a peace and gratitude for being alive I'd never imagined. All the happy TV commercial couples, the hyper-passionate romance-novel couples, had seemed part of some elaborate play everybody else liked to pretend they were now starring in. What I felt here and now was real. Was it love? That fast and easily? I didn't know. I'd just have to trust that, whatever it was, it was right for us both. That, beyond the first-time mechanics and even though he whispered-warning, apologizing �C that I'd be... tender, delicado... the next day, as long as I felt this inner conviction, I'd never be sorry. Trust. It meant that Rick would not hurt me, and if he ever did, I knew the pain would be mortal.

That's how I felt as I beached myself on Ric, feeling his body as a solid breathing wall behind me. His fingers were caressing my inner outer edges. A wall. A wave.

His shirt collar was still open. In the mirror I glimpsed a shadow, blue-black, the only dark place on him besides his hair and eyelashes. My open mouth swiveled to that sole entry to him.

He was still inside me, against me, behind and in front, fingers and one long, hard thick finger, so I felt deliriously surrounded. I let myself sag against him, held up by his invasive prongs like a paper doll on pushpins.

The shadow at his throat, his collarbone, teased my eyes.

My head lolled on his shoulder. "What's this?"

His face was close, focused down on me, eyes slit. I touched his skin under the slightly open collar.

"What do you think you feel, what do you see?" he asked.

I brushed his collar aside. Frowned. "You're... wounded."

He made a humming sound like a purring cat. My fingers pressed against the shadow. Puffy flesh, darkening as I touched it.

"Ric! Did... I do that?"

"Yeah. When you zoned out over the dead zone in the park. You... spasmed. All over. I felt every tremor. Then you turned your head into my neck and shoulder. And bit. You did that."

I stared at his bruised skin just peeking beyond the white starched corner of his shirt.

"I bit you?"

"Yeah."

"No! I'm not a vampire! I hate those bloodsuckers. I'd never do that."

He touched my lips, pushed his forefinger onto the ticklish top of my mouth until I panted with a strange sort of lassitude.

"Maybe you're a werewolf. I don't care. It's okay. It's a totally human thing, called a love bite, a passion mark, a hickey."

What was I?

"A deliciously passionate woman," he told me in the kitchen, where he applied an ice pack and antibiotic ointment to his neck on my insistence.

What I regarded as a scary untreated wound he seemed to consider a sensual trophy. Weird. But what did I know about any of this?

"But I need a little R &R until our next round. Waiting makes all the difference," he added, his eyes hot-fudge warm.

Not me! I resisted, not insisted. I feared, not dared. I was a... nice person.

Not hot.

Ric came close again, pulled me hip to hip. "We could... share a shower. A bed. Sleep. Or we could do what I really, really want to do."

"And that is?"

"I want to drive... you... home again."

Oh. The very thought of that low, leather-lined car with major vibrating road feel undid me. Ric's hands on the stick shift. Right. Drive me home. The reins were back in his hands. Drive me.

By now the semi-reclining passenger seat, sans seatbelt, would have been tolerable, but Ric didn't lower it. Instead, he pulled me down sideways once we were on the road, across the central compartment, my head pillowed on his iron-muscled thigh that any woman would have killed to have.

I was strangely out of it, dreamy. His fingers teased my skirt up over my bare hip, and then caressed my uppermost breast under the camisole. Again I was lulled by that easy, fringes sort of lovemaking, what pleased him as he steered the car and trifled with my body swaying to the drone of the engine, the motion, the fondling.

We made the same dreamy approach to my cottage door; only Ric stopped us at the bottom of the shallow steps to the front door.

"I hate to say this, believe me, but I've got to leave town again."

I didn't will it, but my fingers curled hard into his jacket lapels.

"Just a quick trip to D.C. to report on the Juarez situation. I'll be back in a couple of days."

"What'll I do for a couple of days?"

"Keep checking out the Sunset Park killings. That ought to keep you in the libraries and out of trouble. Besides, you'll be tender."

"So you want me on the shelf while you're gone?"

"I want you somewhere safe, Del, and thinking about when I come back."

"You got it," I said. Promised. I ran my hands along the smooth, silken edges of his lapels.

I was so besotted at that instant that I wanted to make love to his clothes, but I stopped myself from asking that he leave me the jacket. Now I understood why the public high school girls had coveted and worn their boyfriends' letter jackets. Or leather jackets, depending on what crowd they ran with. I had been so retarded! But Ric was catching me up fast. Hickeys. Letter jackets. Lust.