I set the grille aside and crawled in headfirst. The shaft ran straight, turned, then dropped what felt like four feet and ran straight again.
There was no use cursing the darkness. The only way to enter or leave this building was via down.
I gulped, cheered by the absence of cobwebs pushing over my features like an unwanted, unseen veil. Then I stopped. And wondered why there were no cobwebs. Oh. Maybe I wasn't the only intruder to use this route.
Investigation work was already losing its glamour.
Then I heard voices.
No, I am not Joan of Arc. I am a simple Kansas girl turned loose in the big bad city. And I am a PI. So, onward toward the voices. Another ten feet and I could hear giggles echoing off the hollow aluminum shafts. Giggles?
Definitely female voices, those cloying, phony tones I hated from the girls at Our Lady of the Lake Convent School. Girls who had power and tried to pretend they didn't. Voices I'd heard, once out of high school, directed almost exclusively at men. At powerful men they aimed to seduce.
Seduction had been against my religion…until I'd met Ric here in Vegas. And he'd been the seducer. No, we'd both been seduced, by love and death and lust and dust six feet under in the desert.
I paused, wishing I had my dowsing partner with me, only Ric dowsed for the dead. I was afraid he'd rind some where I was headed now. Those voices echoed as if in a vault. A burial chamber. Great. I wished Quicksilver was with me. I almost wished Dracula was with me, but he, wisely, had split.
When in doubt, advance.
At last, some light leaked into my square metal tunnel. I crawled right into another grille, my nose flat against the metal.
I could look down. A little. I saw a lot of white and began to recognize the location.
Oh, no! The 1001 Knights Hotel. Not here! Not him again! What had I done to deserve this?
At that moment a tremor ran through the shaft, like a boiler deep below going postal. Probably the periodic hiccough of the condemned building. The grille gyrated off its loose screws. I was shaken into it, past it and down the rabbit hole into the white light.
Luckily, unlike Alice, I landed on a bed. Unluckily, there was someone repellent in it. Several someones.
Scarlet-painted worm-lipped women in white scattered at my descent.
The desiccated scrawny figure of an old man in cerise satin pajamas stayed put to aim his lecherous death's head grin at me.
"Howard Hughes," I said, scrambling off the high hospital bed and its stiff white linens. "What an unexpected…meeting."
"Hmm," he said, "I liked you better in white."
His "nurses" regrouped around the hospital bed, licking their lips at me.
I had nowhere to go. Howard's mandarin-long fingernails scratched his sparsely haired chest, drawing blood. The vampire nurses sighed in unison and, with fangs descended, came uncomfortably closer.
He waved a cadaverous hand. "Back! You had your share during the turning. Now if Miss Street cares for a friendly lick from me-"
Ick. The sanitary issues alone were stomach-turning. Historically, he'd been famously vermin phobic. You'd think he'd still have serious inner conflicts about germs in his new state.
"I'm here on your business this time," I said.
We'd first met a couple of weeks ago, when I'd finagled myself in disguised as a nurse-the sexy fantasy sort found in Playboy magazine. Howard Hughes and Hugh Hefner had more in common than initials. Hughes was supposedly the most powerful vampire still left in town, which doesn't say much for Vegas vamps.
"Too bad." Howard's watery dark eyes studied my face. "I could have made you a star."
When he'd been a playboy movie mogul, star-making had been the name of his game. His single success was busty Jane Russell, for whom the engineer-aviator had designed the world's first pushup bra. Come to think, maybe the old coot had earned a crack at immortality. He certainly was a Renaissance man. Pilot, inventor, unreal real estate tycoon, lech…
"A star?" I hooted. "Hector Nightwine's already taking a shot at it. I'll be doing featured cameos on his next TV series."
"Nightwine!" he snorted. "A minor, a very minor player. Still, my condition has certain limitations and I require agents to act on my behalf. I would like you to become one of them, Delilah Street."
"How do you know my name?" The last time I had been here, I had ducked out without any introductions.
His smile revealed teeth so ancient they all looked like fangs. "You are already gaining a reputation in this town. I assume anyone the Cicereau mob wants to assassinate is someone worth knowing. Or at least using."
"Ever the straight-talking billionaire," I said. "How do you know about my near-death experience at Cicereau's mountain lodge?"
"Cesar Cicereau thinks he's a rival, but I'm merely giving him the space to screw up. I have sources inside his organization. You look lovely in that python unitard with a Rome Beauty apple in your mouth. Delicious! Cicereau was a fool to let you escape him."
Holy Hugh Hefner, Catwoman! Irma whispered, this undead lech knows about your secret birthday-suit command performance at the Gehenna. He must have better intelligence and organization than you'd think.
"If you have Cicereau's operation wired then why do you need me on your payroll?"
His scraggly-haired head nodded regally. "This may take more legwork than my in-place operatives can handle. I want to know who shared that Sunset Park unmarked grave with Cicereau's daughter."
"You know who the dead woman was?"
"Yes, my tasty little runaway winesap. In today's Vegas, even the spider webs have ears. The creatures of the night's hearing can outdo the most advanced electronic bugs. Better, they can return to me with information."
Bats and wolves were associated with Old World vampires, but spiders? Wolves. Did Quicksilver have a gene susceptible to vamps? He was at least as much wolf as wolfhound. That might explain why he'd slept while I was being airlifted up, up and away by Dracula.
Then there was that spider-fey familiar of Madrigal, the house magician at Cicereau's Gehenna Hotel and Casino, Sylphia…
Thinking of creepy-crawlies made my pale Irish skin break out in gooseflesh.
"Nice." Howard ran a yellowed nail down my arm. I was undecided: did spooked women most titillate his inner mogul, playboy, or vampire?
Time to stop being terrified and deal.
"Okay, Hughes. You know that Cicereau's own daughter was in that grave, but you don't know who the guy was. We're assuming he was a vampire. Is that why you're so interested?"