Summer 2007 (14 page)

“—footsteps?” The Russian flattened himself
against the wall, one hand raised unnecessarily for silence. The American held
his breath.

Always better to get trapped in a stairway than an
elevator, if you have to get trapped.
Of course, it could be a hotel
guest, climbing for exercise. Two hotel guests. Climbing quickly. In complete
silence, the American skipped four steps backward and crouched with his gun in
his hands, covering his partner and the landing below them.

The footsteps came closer, hesitated before the turn.
The American heard a noisily indrawn breath. “Gentlemen. If we promise not to
draw our guns, will you put yours away?” A familiar voice, pitched in a light,
ironical range.

“You tennis-playing son of a bitch,” the American called
back, delightedly. The Russian had already stepped away from the cinderblock
wall and holstered his piece, and was moving forward as two tall, muscular
men—one Caucasian, one black—gained the landing, shoulder to
shoulder, and paused. The American looked from one to the other, at their polo
shirts and skin-tight white jeans, a contrast to his own and his partner’s
sober suitjackets and monochrome ties. He burst out laughing, and was rewarded
by a sideways, fleeting smile from the Russian. “What brings you two to Las
Vegas?” He extended his hand to the tennis player, who clasped it heartily.

The black man leaned against the wall and crossed his
arms, biceps bulging under the tight sleeves of his shirt. “The same thing as
you two, I presume,” he said, middle Atlantic accent and a light bass range.
“Only a little more officially, if the rumors are true.”

“We’re here to see a man about a horse,” the American
answered, still grinning. The rational corner of his mind recognized the giddy
relief as honorably discharged adrenaline, and his partner’s second sideways
glance told him the Russian knew it too.
I’m more worried about the assassin
than I thought.

“We’re on vacation,” the Russian elaborated, extending
his right hand to the scholar. They clasped briefly, the scholar muttering
something in a language the American didn’t recognize, but which his partner
apparently knew well enough to answer in. “We were just about to get something
to eat. Would you care to join us?”

“Delighted,” the athlete said, reversing course lithely.
He grinned over his shoulder, and the American spread his hands in bemused
acquiescence. Obviously the Russian thought it would serve some purpose for the
four of them to be seen in public together, and the other agents were willing
to play along.

“Do you, ah, need to head back to your hotel and get
ties?”

The athlete shrugged, as if letting the suggestion slide
off his back. “At seven o’clock in the morning, in Las Vegas? You don’t suppose
the Brown Derby’s still open this late? Or open again this early?”

“There’s a Brown Derby in Las Vegas now? I only knew
about the one in Hollywood.”

“Age of globalization, man,” the scholar said, falling
into step beside them. “Age of globalization.”

#

One-Eyed Jack and the King of Rock & Roll. Las
Vegas. Summer, 2002.

I paused on the east side of Las Vegas Boulevard, near
the flat rubble-graveled lot where the old El Rancho had stood vacant for so
many years, and watched the ghost of Bugsy Siegel smoke a cigar while brains
dripped down the back of his collar. Bugsy didn’t seem to notice me, or my
entourage, but I had the weirdest prickle as if he’d just been staring at me.
Anyway, he wasn’t the sort of thing I was used to seeing in broad daylight; I
preferred the John Henrys, frankly, who followed along single file, barely
wincing when the tourists walked through them.

Little ghosts don’t interact much, but they can be a
damned pain in the ass if they’re mad enough, and powerful enough.

Doc Holliday cleared his throat twice before I realized
he wasn’t coughing. He just wanted my attention. “Speaking of ghosts and
shadows, Jack—” He jerked a thumb over his shoulder, and I followed the
gesture.

I’ve seen a lot of strange things. The ghost of an
imploded hotel sitting healed and shimmering like a mirage in the evening
sunshine wouldn’t take a prize by any means, but it was enough to make me blink
and rub my eye. That was what Bugsy’d been looking at; a parking lot filled
with tailfinned Cadillacs and Buicks with five-body trunks, with Nash Ramblers
and a ‘63 Corvette, candy-apple red, a pedestrian in a close-tailored gray
gabardine suitcoat and a skinny black tie slowing down to take a lingering
look. I could see the rubble through his shoes.

“That’s unusual,” I said. John Henry grunted on my left
side, and I chuckled a little nervously. “I hope I didn’t call up every ghost
in the city.”

“If you did, you don’t know your own power, Jack.”
Holliday ducked his head to light a cigarillo, shielding the flame of his
Lucifer match with his hands. “That looks to my practiced eye like some sort of
a natural supernatural manifestation, if you know what I mean. Where did you
want to drink?”

“The Brown Derby,” I said, checking the angle of the
sun. It would be dark soon enough, and if we hurried we could hit the lull
between the dinner rush and the post-show crowd.

If we hurried.

I beckoned the John Henrys along. We had a while to walk
still, and I’d need better clothes for the Derby. Lucky for me there are
shopping malls the length of the Strip these days. I hung on to my Doc Martens;
they’d be fine if a little selfconsciously trendy under a suitpant, and the
damned things take a year and a half to break in right. I changed in a washroom
and stuffed my old clothes in a wastepaper basket. I never liked that t-shirt
anyway, and the cargo pants were torn.

We walked into the Brown Derby at eight fifteen p.m. and
were seated right away. Or, I should say, I was seated. The John Henrys
followed, drifting through the table to take their chairs. It wasn’t a bad
table, in the smoking section with a view of the bar. I had just ordered a
vodka martini and was hiding my small talk with the ghosts behind the menu when
an Elvis walked past. Which is not unusual in Vegas, by any means.

Except he looked like Elvis Presley.

Nobody
looks like Elvis. I don’t mean,
nobody dresses like Elvis, or apes his hairstyle, or tries to move like Elvis.
Because sure, people do.

I
knew
Elvis Presley.
Nobody
looks like
Elvis—except his daughter, that is—and nobody moves like him,
either.

And
this
guy wasn’t dressed like professional
Elvi dress. Soft sandy blond hair fell down in his dark blue eyes, not dyed
matte black, and not greased into a pompadour. He slunk across the gaudy casino
carpet like a panther, total confidence and strength, and the collar of his
black leather gothcoat was turned up to hide the hammer-edged line of his jaw.
He scanned the crowd as if he were looking for somebody but he didn’t quite
know who, and it hit me with the force of a kick in the belly who he was. What
he was. Who he had to be.

Elvis. Of course.
I blinked hard.
Which
means Stewart is really—

—gone.

Surreptitiously, I raised my hand to flip the patch off
my
otherwise
eye. And blinked harder, because the second I did it I
could smell the old blood and the midnight on him, clots of darkness wound
through his soul like so many slimy clumps of rotting leaves. Not what I
thought he was, then. Not my new partner, my opposite number, my ally.

Oh, Vegas has enough problems this summer without one of
those.
Muttering an excuse to the John Henrys, I came around the table
on a jagged line to intercept as he made for the casino. I trailed him
casually, sidestepping MegaBucks and scurrying around the blackjack tables,
trying not to move so aggressively that the eye-in-the-sky would spot me for a
threat. I didn’t mean to hurt him any; just warn him off. Tell him to head
north for Chicago: the windy city’s animae have always had a habit of taking in
strays.

But I saw him stop, intent on something that had drawn
his eye—a flash of golden hair alongside a strobing slot machine
light—and my eye followed his, and I saw—

“Stewart?”

Walking hunched forward slightly as he made some sort of
a point with his hands—
jab, jab, jab
—animated in
conversation with three companions, the hairstyle different, longer, but the
crooked nose unmistakably the same.

He didn’t hear me. I wasn’t close.

The vampire’s gaze fastened on the four men crossing the
casino floor, and he stepped back into the shadows behind a row of video poker
machines, obviously eager that Stewart and his three companions shouldn’t see
his face. I glanced after the vampire as he faded from view, but Stewart took
precedence. And if the bloodsucker chose to stay in my city, I’d run across him
again eventually.

I hurried toward Stewart, making a mental survey of his
companions as I came, trying to decide if an intercession was in order, or an
introduction. Introduction, I decided. By the tenor of the conversation, these
were Stewart’s friends. Especially the shorter of the two strong-chinned,
slender, black-haired men, who bore a superficial resemblance to one another.
The final man was African-American, muscular and athletic, handsome in a rugged
rather than a Tiger Woods sort of way. Familiar, too—but everybody looks
like somebody famous, in Vegas.

“Stewart,” I called, and held out my hand as the little
group drew abreast of me and started to pass me by.

Stewart blinked and turned to me, a thin vertical line
between his eyes. “I beg your pardon. Do I know you?” he asked, and my heart
thumped once in my chest and went still.

It wasn’t him. It could have been, from fifteen feet.
From close enough to shake his hand, however…no. Not quite. Not the face, and
not the faint European accent and subtle precision of pronunciation. But
another one was the coldness of the equal subtlety and precision in his eyes.

“No,” I said, and backed away. “I beg
your
pardon. But you look very much like someone I—”

I used to know.

I turned on the heel of my Doc and went back to the
restaurant, cursing myself for failing to follow the vampire instead. Cursing
myself for the hope I’d felt, however briefly, and for the fresh sharpness of
the broken ache in my chest.

I knew who they were now; the penny had dropped.

Not just not Stewart.

Ghosts. More ghosts, summoned up out of the collective
unconscious, called up out of the soup of story. I shook my head, sat down in
my still-warm chair, and looked up into the eyes of the memory of two dead men.

At least I’d thought of something the John Henrys could
do to help until I figured out how to manage Angel, immaterial or not. I bet
they could be pretty good at keeping track of a vampire, if they were careful,
and stayed out of sight.

Meanwhile, I could try to figure out what it was that
I’d summoned home to Vegas. A namesake rite wasn’t supposed to work that
way—and I shouldn’t have had the power to do it, even if it did. I was
starting to think I’d managed to call home every ghost—media, legendary,
and the ‘little’ ghosts, the ghosts of the unquiet dead, like Bugsy out
there—with even the vaguest of connections to my city.

That could get confusing.

Especially if two or three Howard Hugheses showed up.

#

Part II

Tribute and the Streetwalker With A Heart Of Gold. Las
Vegas, Summer, 2002.

It was full dark by the time I left the mint-green glow
of the MGM Grand behind me and walked north, counting the cracks in the
sidewalk. The desert itself was my enemy, but at least the mountains ringing
the valley gave me a long anticipation of sunrise and cut the sun’s descent
short when it slid down the sky in the West. Headed for California and points
out to sea.

The skinny kid with the eyepatch troubled me, but I
didn’t know why I ran. Hell, I didn’t quite know what I was doing in the MGM to
begin with, other than staying out of the sun: they’d be unlikely to hire an
Elvis impersonator. I needed a club, a cabaret. Someplace that wouldn’t expect
afternoon shows.

I could live by murder and theft. When I exhausted the
resources Sycorax had left me.

That doesn’t put you on a stage, does it?

But the kid. Thousand-dollar suitjacket bought off the
rack, and a cheap high-school dye job. Scarred urban combat zone boots peeking
out from under his pinstriped trousers. Hell, maybe he was a rock star. It
wasn’t like I’d been keeping track.

Except he’d been sitting at his table pretending not to
talk to a couple of mismatched ghosts, and he’d practically leaped over it to
give chase when he’d seen me. And then I’d run smack dab into the media ghosts
I’d seen earlier, and they’d been all buddy-buddy with
another
pair, who
also
didn’t belong in Las Vegas, all of them dressed as if it were forty
years ago and most of the country watching television in black and white.

And I could swear I’d seen that black-haired kid’s profile
somewhere, before.