Chapter Seven
Dolly and I were stopped at a gas pump somewhere off of Interstate 70 in Colorado, where the whole world was trees and sun-sparkled creeks that shadowed the highway curves. The state also offered long, lonesome stretches with towns so sparse that a girl had to pee by a backcountry gravel roadside if she missed a freeway rest stop.
In the cities, you could get by driving all-electric or electric-gas hybrids, plug in at home and refuel at sleek, almost odorless ranks of compressed-gas dispensing stations. Vintage car enthusiasts operated all-gasoline throwbacks like Dolly for an extra fee or for free if you were poor enough. But out here in the boonies all you could get was pungent, pricey gasoline in old-fashioned pumps. You still couldn't beat fossil fuel for distance driving. And no farmer would run a hybrid tractor.
This shabby retro gas station (Deliverance West) had rest rooms, but I didn't like the look of the grinning yokels in the Ford 350 across the concrete island from me. Since I'd been on the road two days from Wichita I'd learned that guys with super-charged pickups were aggressive on the highway. On solid ground they were as untrustworthy as vamps with artificially extended fangs.
"Hey! We can help you with that great big hose, little lady."
That taunting, pseudo-friendly threat gave me the same cold internal paralysis I felt at the orphanage when the older boys cornered me in a deserted hallway, against the wall, on my own, needing to bluff and bully my way out of the trap. Sweat prickled my scalp and sopped my palms. Despite all the time I'd spent on a workout mat in college, learning self-defense, the instant purgative spasms of visceral fear never retreated one step.
And I couldn't either. Surprise was my shadow partner. So was bluff. I eyed them, then cocked the nozzle on the gas pump over my shoulder, like an Uzi.
"You've got it all wrong, boys. I'm not little. I'm not a lady. And the help you need with your hoses is something you should consult a plastic surgeon about."
They took about ninety seconds to decipher my comment. By then I was topping off the tank and not concerned about milking every drop from the nozzle, despite the highway robbery price of gas. Just get me outa here, Exxon, with no untidy oil spills. Particularly mine.
The mountain men's bearded faces were finally falling as their grins grew feral.
"We seen ya on TV. Looked mighty good nekkid. Come on, Maggie doll, let us show you a real good time."
Nekkid? What lame dialogue! And who the heck was Maggie? Not me!
They were right about one thing. This little lady needed to hop into her driver's seat and hit all the door locks. But one man had vaulted around the pumps and was blocking the driver's side door. The other had penned me in at the car's rear.
One thing about growing up vamp bait in an orphanage where bullying is the house rule: you learn how to think on your feet if you don't want to be someone else's steak tartare.
I glanced at the combo pay-and-junk-food shack. Anybody remotely human inside had ducked out the back.
So I pulled the pump trigger and wasted ten bucks of Premium Unleaded dousing my helpful dudes from their shirtless overalls to their matching roadmaps of prison tattoos. My heart was pumping harder than the gas and my palms grew suddenly damp on the cool steel.
Bravado was one thing. These guys were brawny and stupid, a fatal combination.
"See this metal nozzle, fellas? I'm gonna turn it into a matchstick by striking it on the concrete in two seconds flat. You'll both look good as holiday sparklers. Give my regards to George M. Cohan."
They were so busy frowning at my mysterious vintage reference I thought their eyebrows would break their own noses. But their narrow eyes, light-colored and totally human, were still blinking with the dim primal urge to rape and pillage.
I sent the gas hose hissing at the guy by my left front fender, and when he naturally backed up, I leaped forward and swung the heavy Detroit-steel door hard into his torso.
His screaming oooof got me into the driver's seat. I hit the locks, turned the key, and reversed hard. The dangling hose I'd abandoned swung like a pendulum, its metal head striking sparks on the concrete island.
I backed the other guy off my rear bumper and gunned out of the station onto the access road, then onto the entry ramp, and floored it. It was oddly fitting that I aced an oncoming gasoline tanker into the right-hand freeway lane.
If Achilles had been with me in physical form, he would have taken those yahoos off at the knees. Now his ashes rode shotgun in the back seat, my ghostly talisman.
What was the matter with those warped bad ole boys? Calling me Maggie! Must have been serious Rod Stewart fans. Right. Of course the rocker was still at it, though, delivering greatest hits on stage. It wasn't clear if he was part clone, part hologram, all plastic surgery, or some entirely new hybrid of the Immortality Mob's busy marketing schemes.
My hands trembled on the pizza-size steering wheel but Dolly's alignment was rock steady. You could find these frozen-in-time steel cream puffs that'd been bought but lightly driven and stored in barns or garages for forty or fifty years at estate sales if you got lucky. Gas guzzlers, yeah, but horsepower enough to tow a Titan missile.
We sped at a sedate six miles over the speed limit toward Las Vegas. No motorcycle cop stops this ole girl. Who can you trust in this wicked world? No one.
Whenever I spotted a white Ford 350 in my rear-view mirror for the next one hundred miles, my hands went white-knuckled on the steering wheel. That attack had felt weirdly personal, and I didn't know those bozos from Adam or his firstborn.
Chapter Eight
My remaining possessions were in storage in Wichita, so I drove into Las Vegas with what was on my back and in the back of my car: laptop computer, my sterling silver collection courtesy of Frigidaire, Achilles' ashes. The trunk was large enough to hold a living room suite or about six dead bodies, so both my regular and vintage clothes had made the drive with me.
Luckily, the southern Las Vegas Strip fringes still support some low-end lodging. The Araby Motel decor was mock-1001 Nights and obviously functioned more as an oasis for quickies both paid and unpaid and had hourly rates as well as nightly, weekly and monthly. I took a room for a week. I'm usually an optimist. This was just a landing spot while I got the lay of the land.
Within forty-eight hours I discovered this glitzy adult entertainment theme park was seriously bipolar. Days were sun-baked and sweaty, but nights were dark and balmy under a blitz of dazzling light shows.
This was not Kansas anymore. Gone was the green and gold landscape surmounted by blazing blue sky. Instead, Las Vegas was the world's biggest velvet painting, all dark of night lit up by neon pinks, blues, yellows, greens, reds, and purples. Its daytime sunlit face seemed dull, a little sleazy, and oddly lifeless despite the crowds gushing like tides in and out of Strip hotel-casinos.
What had been Vegas landmarks at the turn of the Millennium-The New York, New York faux skyscraper silhouette, the half-size Eiffel Tower -were barely visible today. Even the concrete-needle condo towers that began sprouting in 2006 were mere dull gray exclamation points in a cityscape that sizzled, literally. The roar of the MGM Grand's golden gate-keeping lion and the Mirage's volcano were lost in the flame-throwing torrents that washed down and spouted up from the new generation hotel-casinos like the Gehenna and the Inferno, whose swooping architecture looked chillingly organic.
My target was not the Strip's new hellfire glory. The street map I'd bought at Sam's Town on the way in almost covered the chintzy bedspread of my Araby Motel room. Yes, a fold-out paper map. It provided the detailed overview I needed. The Araby still had rotary phones, a wireless connection was out of the realm of the possible.
Nightwine Productions took up a whole block of Sunset Road, opposite Sunset Park. Sunset Park... Sunset City. Maybe the word "sunset" was a good omen.
At least I was out of the Araby Motel's damp and tepid air-conditioning by four that afternoon, just when the afternoon sun was at its most blistering. The 60 SPF sunscreen lay on my skin like heavy cold cream. I'd tried calling Nightwine productions but had given up on explaining my mission after encountering an endless menu of options all inappropriate to talking to a human being. It was high time I was off to see the wizard in person.
Sunset Park boasted a lot of what Las Vegas has little of: trees shading a walkway meandering around a small, central lake. Plaques near the trees dedicated them to deceased loved ones. So Sunset Park was a memorial garden, if not an outright graveyard.
Farther back around the lake my shoes oozed into marshy ground sprouting grasses tall enough to mask hidden lurkers, or dead bodies. Walt Whitman had called grass the "green hair of graves" and back here I could believe it. This swamp-grass jungle you couldn't see past, or be seen in, recalled the creepy reeds where black-clad Victorian ghosts as solid as ebony tombstones appeared in an old movie that had scared the heck out of me. When I was a kid, those distant, formal, thoroughly solid phantoms had terrified me more than all the gouts of blood 'n' guts in teen slasher pics.
Now that chilling memory drove me back to the trees dedicated to the dead, which seemed more normal. From there I had a Realtor's eye-view of the Nightwine headquarters on Sunset Road, a nice, noirish address for a TV production company specializing in criminal forensics. All it needed to be a Sunset Boulevard was a nice, classic filmland murder.
More than a house or an office, it was a sprawling walled estate occupying a full city block, not far from Wayne Newton's spread, Shenandoah, on the same street. Newton 's place was unforgettable for the life-size 3-D bronze sculpture of horses galloping out of the wall onto a grassy corner area. (Newton was a noted horse rancher as well as a headlining Vegas vocalist and had looked preserved in something even before the Millennium Revelation.)
I wondered what Hector Nightwine was as I studied the fa?ade of his encompassing, stay-out wall. Obviously a man with a sense of humor, or hubris. The larger-than-life-size sculpture galloping out of his wall was... were... the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse. You could almost hear those armored, crushing steel steeds snorting. The ghoulish berserker warriors on their backs representing War, Famine, Pestilence, and Death bristled with enough broad-axes, swords, and pikes to quell a riot.
I crossed the boulevard, darting between traffic, to eye the scrolled-iron gate blocking the driveway. That's all there was. No foot approach. I retreated back to the park to sit on a shaded bench and plan my attack on Nightwine's castle, obviously his home as well as his office.
I'd made sure to dress in my respectable investigative reporter gear: conservative blazer, blouse, and skirt. No checks or prints to give the camera's eye double vision. Everyone else around me was casually dressed in shorts and sandals and tees.
Except one.
I caught the gold glint of cufflinks on French cuffs. Custom-made silk-blend white shirt. Cream summer-weight wool-silk pants, knife-edge pressed, also expensive. A silk tie as smoothly blue as the cloudless sky, barely loosened at the collar. A suit jacket draped over the corner of a picnic table. Everything fit for a Fortune 500 executive in a boardroom, except the slim gold herringbone belt that curled around his narrow hips like a luxurious snake.
I took all this in within two seconds. Instant observation is a reporter's first line of offense. The expensive clothes played off a dark olive complexion too smooth to be a tan. His long-fingered hands incongruously held a small dead branch from one of the nearby trees, which he was showing to three young black children dressed in rainbow colors.
Their mother, thirtyish black velvet in Queen Latifah duds, relaxed at the concrete picnic table's other end, watching the man, and I could sure see why. His strong narrow Hispanic features had an aristocratic grace, as did the relaxed length of him.
It was easy to ogle him. All his attention was on the youngsters, who were jumping up and down around him, yelling "me first." That phrase had been so common at the orphanage it still put me off. I'd never crowded forward to beg for anything, even attention. They said I was distant, a loner, but it got me through better than vying for beta spots against the alpha toughs who ran the secret gangs institutional life spawns.
A pig-tailed six-year-old girl in pink and lime-green won the prize first: strutting over the grass, the Y-shaped twig in her hands like bicycle handlebars, or as if she were pushing an invisible lawn mower. Mr. White-collar Coolio walked right behind, smiling and encouraging her, the two older boys trailing them. Curiouser and curiouser. I wished I had a videographer with me. They made a pretty, contrasting picture: corporate Pied Piper leads urban kids. Something resonated with me that made my throat tighten. Prince Charming was focusing on the kids with genuine interest and obvious enjoyment. When the girl stopped to bound up and down in frustration, he bent over her, put his fingertips just ahead of her beautiful dark little hands on the sticks and they walked on together.
The girl squealed with joy and triumph as the bottom of the Y-shaped twig jerked down at the grass. Oh. Dowsing for water.
In Las Vegas? Except for cultivated water, like man-made Lake Mead behind Hoover Dam, and this picture-book lake, or sprinkler systems, it must all be desert under the well-watered grass.
I watched the man waltz the two young boys around the same territory, where each one "dowsed" successfully in the same spot once he added his own touch to the process. They were too young to realize they were all "discovering" the same "well." Probably a buried sprinkler head.
The Millennium Revelation had indeed proved Hamlet right that "there are more things in heaven and on earth than are dreamed of"-including a large dose of Hell that would have really bummed out the Melancholy Dane. But some superstitious water dowsing wasn't among them. We had weather witches in Kansas who could play a lot of tricks with rain, wind, and fire, so why bother dowsing for water? It was a pre-Millennium Revelation cheat and outmoded anyway.
The guy, another under-thirty, surely, returned his gullible little friends to a very grateful mama, plucked his jacket off the picnic table, slung it over one shoulder, then looked right at me.
The tables had turned so fast that I couldn't pretend to be glancing away. And he was coming straight for me over the grass on those braided leather Italian shoes anyway.
Chapter Nine
"You're a skeptic," he said.
"Um, yes. It's a fun game for the kids, but water dowsing is small stuff nowadays."
"Giving children attention and a sense of accomplishment isn't small stuff." His look was corrective and cool.
What an arrogant twit! Although I'd just been touched by his ease with the kids, it obviously didn't translate to adults.
"No," I answered, "but making them think they can find underground water with Witch-Hazel's twig is deceiving them to make yourself look good." I'd been deceived a lot in my childhood, and still resented it.
He lifted the twig, which I hadn't seen him holding at his side. It was slender and rough-barked.
" Mesquite?" I scoffed. "Doesn't it have to be willow?"
" Willow is traditional but not essential. I can dowse with anything that has three legs. A wood twig. A reformed wire hanger. A midget with a hard-on."
My shock couldn't help coming out as a laugh. His mouth was unsmiling but his dark eyes glinted with humor and challenge. "Why don't you try it? You might have the gift."
"I doubt it. I don't have a gift for anything but my work."
He shrugged and held out the stupid stick.
I stood and took it. It'd been... oh, fifteen years since I'd touched a dead stick, probably to prod an icky bug out of my path.
"All right. What do I do? Walk around with the two branches in my hands and the third one pointed dead-ahead like-" Well, I wasn't going to say what it was pointed straight out like.
"Right."
Only then did I realize that he had no accent to go with the sleek Latin looks.
"Watch my purse," I ordered, and began circling aimlessly over the grass, "driving" a featherweight twig ahead of me. I went to where each child had jumped for joy, and then paused. "This is the place, isn't it? The sure-thing spot?"
He had perched on the picnic table to watch me. "That's the spot. You're an ace detective."
"I'm an investigator, but not that kind."
"Don't tell me: you investigate fraudulent phenomena."
"Sometimes. See? Nothing's here. Nothing's happened."
"That's because I'm not there."
I was thinking that might be a shame but it didn't prove anything.