“FAR BE IT from me,” said my landlord, Hector Nightwine, the next morning while I squirmed on the carved wooden chair opposite his office desk, “to insert myself into the course of true love, but you and the Cadaver Kid have been absent from the Strip for too long.”
He sat in an even more massive chair that cupped him like King Kong’s palm would surround a giant prune Danish. For once, I didn’t know what to say.
The mental picture of Hector Nightwine inserting himself between Ric and me was physically impossible and emotionally repulsive.
Hector was a mini-me of Star Wars’ Jabba the Hutt in an Orson Welles smoking jacket. If he knew I had a metal bikini top from the first film of Cleopatra in my cottage quarters on his Sunset Road estate, I’d be kept in chains on the set of his CSI V TV series forever.
The “Cadaver Kid” nickname was from Ric’s few years in the FBI, where his “gift” for finding buried dead bodies was considered gee-whiz great profiling, not an inborn paranormal ability.
As for true love, I doubted Nightwine would ever know it unless it came wearing a bottom line, and I was even more superstitious now about calling what Ric and I had anything that resembled a clichéd happy ending.
So I addressed the only possible part of his comment I could.
“The Strip, Hector? Some new mega-billion behemoth going up there? Where on dry Nevada earth is there room?”
Hector’s chubby, hairy hand stroked the black beard that concealed his multiple chin collection.
“No, this is a modest … shop, I’d call it. It’s sprung up on one of the odd bits of untaken Strip land housing one-story enterprises.”
I made a face and crossed my legs to distract his attention to my Betty Grable pin-up shoes: forties platform-sole spikes in VE-Day red. Better to have him leering at my ankles than my bustline. At least I thought so.
“You mean,” I asked, just to be clear, “among the cheapie tourist shops, scalped show-ticket booths, palm readers, and naughty lingerie hucksters?”
Something had to occupy and pay rent on the odd Las Vegas Strip corners not commandeered by hotel-casino frontage. What I couldn’t figure out was why international media mogul Hector Nightwine cared about a dinky new shop.
He couldn’t wait to tell me.
“Some of your old friends,” he said, waggling his coarse eyebrows, “are busy vying for this spanking new enterprise. I’d think you’d want to visit, since a new friend of yours is the merchant in question.”
“Merchant? I don’t know any ‘merchants’ except for a certain ghoulish TV mayhem huckster in my twenty-twenty sights at this moment.”
Nightwine’s plump hand dipped into a wooden salad bowl filled with crunchy little nothings from the lower orders of planet life. Dead now, I hoped.
“Flattery will get you everywhere, dear Delilah. I confess. You are such a modest little thing.” He wagged a forefinger that dangled something black and slimy and boneless. “Does Mr. Montoya know you’ve set up a bare-chested hunk in a commercial hot spot?”
I straightened my spine, imagining myself standing at my immodest full five-eight, though seated, and glowered to encourage him to go on. Which he did.
“Two major Strip forces you know, Delilah, are fighting wolf-fang and tiger-claw to acquire the business for their hotels, and no doubt franchise it.”
Now I got it. “Cesar Cicereau’s Gehenna Hotel werewolf mob versus Christophe’s rock-star Inferno Hotel?” I asked.
“Mais oui, ma petite. I’m considering entering the fray. The concept is genius, my dear Delilah. You did sign Mr. Shezmou to a personal contract, did you not?”