Of course everybody eyed me when I walked Quicksilver from the parking lot to the dog area. They always looked at me when I walked Quicksilver, so I couldn't tell if my new outfit had any pulling power of its own. I left him with a shelter lady, who was only too pleased to entertain him for a while, and worked my way up the Trail of Dead People's Trees to the picnic table area where I'd first met Ric.
He was sitting on it, feet on the bench seat, white-shirted, facing Sunset, expecting me to be coming from Nightwine's estate. Maybe he was contemplating the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse sculpture eternally charging out of the bland stucco wall.
"Hi."
He turned at my voice. Ric had that law enforcement professional face down cold: blank, noncommittal, and unflappable. The moment he saw me it melted, did a 180-turn, although I couldn't quite name his new expression, other than stunned.
He jumped down to the ground, met me coming toward him, still stunned. Now I knew how those night-time soap opera queens felt. He walked into me, or me into him, I don't know which. He hooked his fingers through my belt loops, brushed a kiss over my lips, cheek, neck, just under my ear.
I'd heard of skipping stones, not kisses.
"Delilah," he whispered. "Muy tempestado. A pity I have to go away soon."
"Away?"
"South of the border."
"Down Mexico way?"
"Yes, where exactly I can't say."
"For a long time?"
"It'll seem long now. Two or three weeks."
"But I wanted to find out about the dead couple. Nightwine will pay me for a solved case he can fictionalize on CSI. You have police access-"
"Not with Haskell on the case. Can't you use your reporter's wiles to check into it?"
"Librarians rarely need wiles and that's where I'd find information on missing persons from decades ago- newspaper archives."
"Good, a library is a fairly safe place." He grinned. "Then there's the angle of the Inferno gaming chip. And, if needed, I do have one police contact you might try: Captain Kennedy Malloy. See? Lots to keep you busy while I'm away. When I'm back, we'll go salsa dancing. The werewolves won't leave if they see you in this."
"It's not supposed to mean anything to the wolves."
"And that, Querida, means everything to me."
We'd billed and cooed as much as I felt comfortable doing in public. My Irish genes still had to be dragged kicking and screaming into the arena of open emotion.
I pushed off enough to capture Ric's eyes again. Seriously. "One thing. Does it bother you that our being so…simpatico…started over a couple of dead bodies?"
"In Mexico, we celebrate the dead, we don't fear them."
"I know, 'Day of the Dead' and all that. But-" I lowered my eyes, not because I went for that flirtatious crap, but because I couldn't quite face some things. Like my own history. "I don't mean the impact of death. I mean the…sensuality that came with it. It's almost like it took us…me…over. I mean, I've never-"
"I know. But I've never either."
"You've never?"
"Not that intensely. I agree. We were borrowing from the dead. It was like their last bequest."
"Isn't that…creepy? Doesn’t it bother you?"
He ran his hands down my midriff to my hips. "You bother me. That's the way it should be, Querida."
Okay, I liked it. I'd been asking for it, in the shy honest truth of that phrase, not as an accusation. I'd trusted Ric to know and appreciate the difference, and he did. It was always so touchy for women to be sexual without being misinterpreted. Maybe that's why I'd never wanted to do it before. Or maybe Ric was why I'd never been able to do it before.
Or maybe the dead bones, the skeletal lovers buried in the limestone crypt, had been waiting for a couple of fools with our particular weird talents and my dicey personal history to be infected with their own lethal passions.
Maybe we were doomed to the same fate.
If so, I could only hope we'd enjoy getting there half as much as they apparently had.
The man-dog introduction was not as successful as the live-dead introduction in Sunset Park two days earlier.
When I escorted Ric to the dog area, Quicksilver's usual embarrassing crotch-sniff turned into a sudden snap. Ric's pelvis did an evasive maneuver as fast, skilled, and sexy as a matador's, but the fact remained that my dog had serious territorial issues.
"Bad boy!" the shelter lady and I shouted in unison.
“No!”
Quicksilver sat down and commenced to lick his privates while casting resentful glances at all concerned.
The shelter lady and I giggled. Ric was not amused.
"At least," he said, when he kissed me goodbye under Quicksilver's watchful ice-blue gaze, "I don't have to worry about your personal safety while I'm gone."
I was going to miss him. I forced myself not to look back as I led Quick back to Dolly at a trot, trying not to worry about Ric's personal safety on his vague quest south of the border. I didn't need to ask if it was risky; his tight-lipped dismissal of my questions said everything.
I latched Quick into his safety harness in the front passenger seat. We both knew that it would break away in a second if he wanted it to, but it was easier to look like I was following responsible pet ownership rules than to explain to traffic cops that he was more like a hyper-bright twelve-year-old than a dog. After he'd broken major automotive glass to roar to my rescue in the pet store parking lot I wasn’t keen to tie him up.
"I'm going to be hitting the research trail," I told him as we pulled out of the park's lot.
"This town boasts two daily newspapers and a major university library. Somewhere in their records our dead folks must have left a trail."
Quick regarded me with such intelligent eyes that I wanted to put a pair of sunglasses over them so as not to give away his awesome IQ. While he was looking so Rhodes Scholarish, I added, "Ric is a great guy and I really, really like him, so you will not treat him like an appetizer tray, got it?"
Quicksilver growled softly and stared out the open side window, letting his tongue flap through his fangs so he looked like the usual idiot canine easy rider.
When your dog is better at undercover work than you are, you have a problem.
Chapter Twenty-One
With Ric gone, I decided to devote myself to chaste, boring research.
Before I tried to dig up any news stories from the forties, I used the laptop (high/low tech again, my quaint cottage had a flawless and fast wireless connection) for online searches to background the Inferno Hotel and Casino. It was the hellcat's pajamas, all right.
After a brief flirtation with becoming a family entertainment destination in the early nineteen-nineties, Las Vegas embraced its old reputation as the Millennium arrived and did an about-face back to being the best that it could be, or in its case, the worst: Sin City.
The Inferno, only three years old but born to be a wild child, was the latest in knock-down, drag-out adult entertainment, cultivating a wicked reputation in an already wicked town. The Hades theme was wrapped around the house rock attraction, a group called the Seven Deadly Sins. I'd never heard of them, but we don't hear about a lot of things in Kansas, and feel the better for it.
I decided to check with Nightwine. He'd been digging up Las Vegas murders a lot longer than Ric and I had.
"You're looking delightful," Godfrey observed as he greeted me at the mansion's back door.
"How do you manage to cover every entrance to this maze of a place?"
"We CinSims are light on our feet," he said with a wink.
"Sin-sims?
"Ah. You're new in town. That's what I am. ‘CinSim’ is short for Cinema Simulacrum."
"Godfrey, that's makes about as much sense as Pig Latin. Cinema I know. What's a simulacrum!"