I sure hoped so, because I would, and then there'd be Hell to pay.
When I hit the Inferno I went straight for my inside man, Nicky.
It was only 10:00 am. I expected a headliner like Snow to be zonked out somewhere decadent with a bevy of groupies until late afternoon. I even expected Nick Charles to be off someplace where CinSims kick back when off-screen.
No. Nick was at the bar, as debonair as ever, still dressed in a formal black-and-white tux.
"My dear girl," he said, rising like a robot to the occasion of my striding in on a rush of fury. "You're looking quite…flushed. Did you win at the slots?"
The blackboard above Nicky's amiable, sloshed face snared my attention. In pink neon chalk, it announced: House specialty: Albino Vampires.
"That's highway robbery!" I said.
"Noooo." Nicky focused carefully on where I was looking. "It's not a Highway Robbery; that's made with rum. That is the hot new house drink. The boss ordered me to forsake my martinis for it. Didn't you already order one the other night?"
"Order it? I invented it!" While I tapped my fingernails on the heavily varnished bar I noticed that I was wearing a half-handcuff bracelet again.
Bastard! Lech by remote fondling! Thief!
I felt a presence behind me and turned. Snow, of course, long white hair, night-black sunglasses, white silk tee, slacks, and jacket. The man must bathe in bleach!
"That's my drink," I opened.
"If you order it."
"I made it to order, right here. Just the other night. I named it."
"Catchy title. You used my ingredients, my bartender."
"It's still mine."
"My version is slightly different. That's all it takes for legal ownership. Try one."
He snapped his fingers. I again noticed bloodless, manicured nails as slick and opaque as white gloss-enamel paint.
A martini glass as albino as my concoction of the other night was soon wafted down in front of me, exact to the topping-off drizzle of raspberry liqueur. Also wafted down was the bilclass="underline" twelve-fifty.
"Highway robbery," I repeated, for the record.
"You need to taste it to be sure."
I did, recognizing my own yummy ingredients. Nothing added, nothing subtracted.
"My recipe."
"You haven't finished it."
What? He wanted to get me drunk? I tilted the wide glass lip to mine and chug-a-lugged a lot of heavy-proof liquor. I was so mad I knew my system would burn it up and spit out very sober nails.
Something soft and sweet bobbed against my teeth. Something from the bottom of the glass. I slurped stinging vodka and sweet liqueurs until I saw bottom. Oh. A drunken maraschino cherry, skewered by an arrow of white chocolate. Sweet, plump, succulent. Nice touch. I left it.
"The cherry," Snow said, "is a tribute to your bartender expertise and your undercover skills. Otherwise, nothing personal."
I knew an insult when I heard it. Also, a reference to my quasi-state of virtue, that even I didn't know for sure. "I want to talk to you. In private."
"My office?"
"No tigers."
"No invisible allies."
I stood and let him precede me through the crowded casino to the place we'd last negotiated.
When we were alone in the office, I looked around, tapping my toes. No tigers.
As he went around the desk, I held out my half-handcuffed right wrist. "I don't appreciate this."
"Why not?"
"I took it to a jewelry shop before I came here. Nothing will take it off. Not a jeweler's diamond-toothed saw, not a pinpoint acetylene torch. I want out of it."
"Why do you think I can help you with that?"
"It's your sick toy!"
"How so?"
“Your hair?"
"And how did my hair become your hair shirt?”
"I-" Time to own up. "I touched it."
"Why? Because it was mine and you couldn't resist?"
What ego! Pride incarnate of course.
"Because it was white and long like the coat of my dead dog."
"Which you loved."
"A dog that had earned my love. Brave. Protective. True."
"Hardly like me, of course. So you claimed the lock of my hair because it reminded you of a dead dog. I can't say I'm flattered."
"You should be! Achilles was worth six of you. He got blood poisoning from biting a vampire ten times his size. You tackle anything like that lately? No, you pick on passing strangers. Achilles didn't need to harass hapless women with bewitched hairs."
"Yet the echo of his hair bewitched you. Just that. Nothing to do with me."
"Nothing to do with you. Look. I'm the last woman in the world who'd ever be in your fan club. I think you're despicable, the way you encourage your worshipping fans, poor, deluded creatures. It's immoral to kiss them into insensibility so they become mindless zombies. It'd be normal if you'd screw them, but, no, you keep them lost in permanent unfulfilled infatuation. I've seen them wandering around the Inferno, drinking, gambling mindlessly. Maybe doing drugs. That's a shitty way of drumming up loyal customers, Snow. I've even been suspected of killing one of them because she fixated on me after you mauled me in the Inferno Bar."
He leaned back in his white leather executive chair, balancing a black Mont Blanc pen on his pallid fingertips. "You weren't exactly stopping me."
"I took you for an amusing freak," I said, very deliberately.
I couldn't see any expression behind the dark glasses but his fingertips pressed so hard on the pen that I actually saw them grow whiter, or maybe they looked that way because a blush of pale pink blood showed through his skin above the pressure points.
Interesting. He had a circulatory system. That was a big argument in academic circles: did vampires have circulatory systems? Sure they drank blood, but since they were dead, they didn't have a heartbeat or a pulse. Given their rep as hot-blooded lovers as well as big drinkers, how the hell did they get it up without a pulse or heart beat? Assumption was only available to a few select saints, and they all skedaddled for heaven, not vampire games. Vamp tramps, totally hooked on the blood-sucker-as-Don-Juan mythology, would never tell. They were mesmerized by the vamp powers, and any tales they lived to tell were big on ecstasy and vague on details.
"I took you," he said finally, "for an amusing fool."
I'd been called worse. "I want this off!”
"Can't do it. It has a mind of its own, in case you hadn't noticed."
"It's your familiar."
"Now I'm a witch as well as a freak?"
"Or a warlock."
"You don't know what I am."
He had me there.
"But you'd love to find out." He leaned forward as I leaned away. "You can't resist finding out, can you, Delilah? Your whole life has been about finding out…about other people, not yourself. You don't have a life."
I understood that calling him a freak had brought this challenge and I was momentarily ashamed. A reporter gets used to feeling like an advocate of the downtrodden. Snow? Downtrodden? What about my manacled wrist?
Even as I thought that, Snow said, sympathetically, "It could be worse."
In demonstration, my solo handcuff linked to one that appeared on my left wrist.
Snow grinned and picked up the pen again with unbound hands. "Is your cuff half-empty, or half full?"
This kind of confinement ramped up my horizontal binding phobia, which Haskell had done nothing to help. I was stuffing panic down as fast as it raced up my esophagus to my throat, keeping cool.
One cuff immediately snapped open and my left wrist dropped free.
Snow spoke seriously. "The police didn't need to cuff you merely to bring you in for questioning."
I hated that he guessed, or knew, about my humiliating arrest. "This police detective named Haskell did," I said. "He's a bully and bigot."
"What's to be bigoted about you? Unless someone discriminates against annoying snoops."