"I hope you're planning on taking your hellhound to the Sinkhole with you," Hector Nightwine, my boss, said, sounding a teensy bit guilty, when I told him of my expedition in his manorial office that afternoon.
"Quicksilver is not a 'hellhound,' he's just a poor rescue dog."
Hector snorted. He does an awesome snort, being a bearded man of size and a connoisseur of blood-red wine, bizarre food forms and vintage films.
"And I'm Orson Welles," he sniffed.
Actually, he could be in Vegas nowadays, where the line between life and death is thinner than a honed straight razor's edge.
Quicksilver, who combined the huge size of a wolfhound with the disconcerting conformation and features of a blue-eyed 150-pound wolf, lifted his grandma-eating-size muzzle from his paws to whine like an abandoned puppy.
Hector snorted again. Majestically. "That dog could have outdone the heroic Rin Tin Tin in the early movies. He knows just when to second your extravagant lies."
"I can use loyal backup," I said, "especially since your damned show has made me the world's most wanted woman."
"Isn't that what all women want?"
"Not this one. Not this way." I ticked off my many pursuers on my fingers. "Cesar Cicereau of the Gehenna Hotel thought he could use me and then tried to kill me. Any creep who mistakes me for your highest rated CSI corpse, Lilith, wants to sell my hide to the black and blue division of the blue movie trade. The Las Vegas Metro Police Department's Detective Haskell has been bitten unhuman, into an even more loathsome variety of bully, and wants me either convicted of the murder of a Snow groupie or just plain dead out of revenge. For all I know, this mysterious 'client' wants to lure me into a meeting for some fate worse than death."
A sliver of smile peeked like a maggot from the corner of Nightwine's small, pursed candy-apple-red mouth.
"There are a lot of fates like that nowadays, my dear. Surely you're taking the Cadaver Kid along?"
I shrugged. If I was going to be a serious investigator, I needed to prove to him and myself that I didn't need a white knight behind my every move around Vegas.
Nightwine took my reticence for the affirmative, as I'd hoped.
"Very wise. A good dog and a good man are what a girl needs most in these perilous times."
"I thought you didn't like Ric."
Now he shrugged, a lot more impressively than I had. The shoulders in his burgundy brocade smoking jacket were mountainous. "Montoya's FBI, but at least he didn't stay in long. The Feds keep trying to close down my City of Dreams."
"City of Nightmares."
"As I said, my City of Dreams."
"I don't know why you're going all soft on me now that you're my landlord. You've always wanted me to find out who the guy in that Sunset Park double grave was. I've got a stake in your new vintage murder concept TV series. You were gonna make me a living-dead star, keep Lilith's mystique as a CSI's hottest corpse yet going. Remember? I couldn't do anything more dangerous in this town than get mistaken for Lilith."
"That's all true," he admitted. "I only fret because you're still new to Vegas. Good luck, Delilah. Do check in when you get back. Godfrey will be anxious."
"Right."
I left Nightwine's sumptuous office, Quicksilver at my heels, to find his man Godfrey lurking and listening in the hall. Godfrey's amiable, middle-aged starch went splendidly with his formal butler's garb. He escorted us down the back stairs to the kitchen exit with a monologue of warnings underscored by the castanet click of Quick's nails on the wooden stairs.
"The master means well, but underestimates the sturdiness of his employees, Miss. He is used to dealing with staff less, er, physically fragile than a mortal such as yourself. The Sinkhole is not fit for woman or beast. Mr. Montoya is not so accustomed to Las Vegas and its quirks yet that he would make a reliable guide. I knew a poor chap from Bangalore -"
"Godfrey," I said, "that sounds like the start of a naughty limerick." When we hit bottom at the large kitchen floored in big black and white marble squares like a chessboard, I turned to face him. "Besides, I know what I'm doing."
Godfrey's CinSim face and garb were all black and white and shades of gray. He was a blend of actor William Powell and the disguised rich-man-posing-as-butler from My Man Godfrey, a classic nineteen-thirties screwball comedy.
I knew that beneath the slick film image the heart of a zombie didn't beat, but Godfrey felt solid when touched and his fully human concern touched me.
"Godfrey, I have to learn to live in this pretty nasty world I've found myself in, just as you have. I'm not tied to any particular place, as most of you CinSims are. A girl's gotta do what a girl's gotta do."
I nodded at Quick to follow me. We skedaddled out the back door, but not before Godfrey called after me, "Remember you're from Kansas. There might be some ruby red slippers somewhere to whisk you home in a pinch."
Poor Godfrey. He believed in movies almost as much as Nightwine did. It was only thirty yards across the cobblestone driveway to my digs. The sharp, reassuring sound of Quicksilver's nails still shadowed me. That dog was my fanged guardian metronome.
The place I rented from Hector was as cute as dimpled and spit-curled Betty Boop, the cartoon flapper. I fell in love again with my literal Enchanted Cottage every time I saw it. I considered it a real-life version of a vintage Disney cartoon cottage made for bluebells and bluebirds circling the front door, and sometimes they actually did.
Hector had added a lot of modern comforts, including a Jacuzzi and convection oven, but the cottage remained an unfolding origami magic show of kitchen witches, yard trolls and other usually invisible manifestations that came and went on their own quirky schedule.
Once home again, I caught up on the newspaper and current events and domestic chores that didn't get magically done by the shy household help before preparing an early evening snack.
"Better eat, drink up and be merry," I told Quicksilver. "We're going where you definitely don't want to consume anything you don't have to in self-defense."
I could soon hear him lapping up a tsunami at the kitchen water bowl while I changed into my impromptu Sinkhole outfit. As a TV reporter in Wichita, I wore business casual for the job. Here in Vegas I was going places where I needed clothes that would protect me from fang bites and claw burns.
I'd learned at an early age that bluff was the best disguise.
The use-softened black biker leathers I'd found at vintage clothes emporiums along Charleston would have looked Hell's Angels Goth with my black hair. Especially if I slapped on some vampire-red lip-gloss.
But after I struggled into the leather low-rise jeans, the knee-high boots, the spandex knit top and funky suede-fringed seventies vest, I pinned up my Black Beauty mane and pulled on my new short blond wig in the classic twenties/seventies Sassoon/so Neurotic Now bob that curves under your chin like twin scimitars.