The perfect disguise. Blonds were so plentiful in this town three hundred miles from Hollywood people literally couldn't see their faces for the façade. And the town sprouts wig shops like a transvestite creates female celebrity impersonations. Then I popped in gray contact lenses with no correction that obscured my morning-glory-blue eyes. Delilah, meet anti-Lilith.
The mirror accomplished the introduction. When the tall mirror ending the hall to the attic bedroom suite wasn't playing tricks and I wasn't in disguise, it reflected me in all my Snow White coloring and Lilith glory.
It was odd that the world thought Lilith, and therefore me, her double, beautiful. I'd always hated my dead-white skin and dead-black hair that reminded every vamp and half-vamp in the New Millennium universe that I came corpse-pale, just what they were looking for in a woman and a fast-food combo. I'd been fighting off vamp-boy bullies since puberty. It got so I'd rather fight than fornicate, even when I'd finally had a chance to do the latter.
I was making friends with my own image since I'd met Ric, though. His savvy, warm and winning personality and hot Latin blood were melting my Black Irish heart and hormones. I'd never had a boyfriend, only bad dates. I'd never had a lover or an orgasm. All that was past tense now and I'd wanted in the worst way to ask him to escort me to the Sinkhole.
Which is why I wouldn't. I don't like being dependent on other people. It only gets you hurt in the short run and makes you weak in the long run. Orphan's axiom. Dogs, on the other hand, offered unconditional love and unflagging doggy breath.
I slapped on some Lip Venom. I always carried the tingling, lip-plumping gloss because it made me feel lethal and viperish. Then I finished pinning on the wig with twenty copper-blond hairpins and was ready to go, except for donning the used cop utility belt I'd found in a pawn shop behind the Harley-Davidson souvenir shop and café.
It made me look hippy, but in a big baaad don't-mess-with-moi way. I kept the baton and heavy flashlight and added a couple kitchen knife hilts for show.
No cell phone. You could be identified by them. Las Vegas was full of dead zones, anyway. Nor did I have lots of relatives and friends to send pics of the infamous Sinkhole.
So where would I find the elusive Sinkhole, a notorious place where human and unhuman lowlifes did sex, drugs, armed robbery and grievous bodily harm to each other and any suicidal straights who wandered in?
I drove Dolly downtown near the crime district for starters. I wasn't worried about my flashy vintage ride even though it was hot enough to melt. It had its own special security system.
Soon after hitting town, Quicksilver had broken out a side window to escape the locked car and defend me from a half-werewolf biker gang called the Lunatics. The window was a one-off, long since vanished from even junkyards and online auto-part dealers. I mourned loudly about the impossibility of replacing the window when I got home and parked Dolly in the driveway of the Enchanted Cottage.
The next morning, I found the window-glass in place and intact. Ever since, when I parked Dolly in iffy areas, a nasty poison-green aura haloed the car. I figured it was pixie halitosis.
If I could bottle that arsenic glow, I'd have a really innovative method of car security. Nobody in Vegas messes with pixies, I'd learned fast. They're the equivalent of supernatural fleas: tiny, hungry, able to leap from one host to another in a single bound and bite. They cursed as much as your average American teenager, but real curses, not just bad words. Curses corrosive enough to move all the hair on your head to your toes.
So I left Dolly in the parking lot of a new high-rise time-share. Quick and I trotted through the Downtown "Experience"-a blocks-long barrel vault canopy, ninety feet high at its peak, that combined a pedestrian mall with a not-at-all-pedestrian sound and light show.
The venerable Four Queens Hotel and Casino had been reinvented as an exotic Temple to Ishtar, Medusa, Isis and the original sexpot Lilith. No Delilah. I guess overeager hair stylists aren't sexy-scary goddesses, even though it's sooo hard to stop them from snipping too much off.
Overhead holographic images evoked great world tragedies of fire and flood, featuring thousands of screaming, falling bodies hurtling right at you. There were no sappy Celine Dion renditions of "My Heart Must Go On." A rock band howled to back up their death agonies.
Tourists in Capri pants and Bermuda shorts were gaping open-mouthed at the kaleidoscope of destruction playing out above, tiny camcorders attached to their cell phone earjacks, so they could look and shoot instead of point and shoot. They resembled Borg wannabes. Creepy! Quick and I passed them like dust on the wind.
I headed for the area's outskirts. I figured that the Sinkhole would find you if you wanted it to. Or if you looked like you belonged there.
Amazing how even the biggest tourist attraction in the world makes room for sleaze. I was soon walking along unkempt strings of one-story shopping centers. Half of the shops were deserted. The other half sold fortunes, cut-price show tickets, lottery tickets, exotic lingerie and massages.
Beside me, Quick growled. I put my hand on his shoulder. It reached my hip. He was three times the size of most wolves. Good dog! The thin silver chain with a cross around my neck coiled like a snake and slithered down my black-knit sleeve to my wrist. It became the mace-like spikes on a leather wristband.
If my unwanted bodyguard was showing its fangs, we must be nearing the Sinkhole.
Quicksilver's hackles rose under my fingers along with his prolonged, low growl.
Good. We were there. Now all we needed was not to "get into" anything. I was hoping to tap the same eerie psychic energy that had helped me find the Sunset Park bodies when co-dowsing for the dead with Ric.
First I felt the heavy metal beat from the Downtown Experience quicken under my feet, through the thick leather soles of my motorcycle boots. It rumbled on and on, like Quicksilver's growl.
The sidewalk broke into smaller blocks, then heaved, then shattered.
The ground was giving way underneath us! I curled my fingers into Quick's thick black leather collar studded with silver-dollar-size moons in phase from crescent to full. If he hadn't been born half wolfhound, he would have been all wolf. As it was, he hated werewolves, even half-werewolves.
My punk leather wristband tightened hard enough to take my pulse.
Pounding. My pulse pounding.
Spinning. My head was spinning, the low-rise buildings around me were falling down, together. Ashes, ashes, all fall down.
We fell. Together. My fingernails digging into my own palms, Quicksilver's sharp wolfish muzzle tilted up at the moon.
And then the carnival music rose up to snap at our senses. We rode a merry-go-round of sound and fury screwing deep into the earth. I held on to the dog collar for dear life, Quick's and mine. No wonder it was called the Sinkhole.