Dead to Me

21

It was just after two in the afternoon when I woke, and despite my growing concern for Irene’s whereabouts and my sequestered cultist hottie’s safety, I had experienced an intensely restful and immediate slumber thanks to the power of sheer exhaustion. As a bonus, there had been only four new calls on my answering machine from Tamara telling me how worthless I was and I had slept through them all. I considered myself doubly blessed on that count.

Freshly rested, I walked back through the Village to the Lovecraft Café, slowly feeling the worry of the past few days snowball itself upon me as my mind began to focus on my caseload again. When I walked in, Mrs. Teasley was at the rear of the coffee shop divining the location of a lost dental crown for a young couple. Normally I would have listened for a quick laugh and gotten fuel for a whole day’s outrage as to why that old charlatan was still on staff. With everything else on my mind, however, I proceeded straight through the coffee shop and back into the darkened theater. The projector was showing 2001—HAL was explaining to Dave why he couldn’t open the pod bay doors. I worked my way down the aisle to the heavy wooden door leading into our office.

As I headed for my desk, my mood became even darker. Connor and I were making little progress with Irene’s case. Her disappearance from my apartment last night made it even harder.

If Irene were just another case, I might be coping better or thinking straighter. But Irene had been more than that. I had enjoyed her presence in my apartment more and more. Then there was the strange kiss I had shared with Sectarian-in-exile Jane.

Jane.

I was worried about that sitch also. Maybe I’d gain some insight by reading the little black book of hers I’d found, but I hadn’t dared look at it yet. I was pretty sure it was a diary. I was both afraid and unprepared to violate her private thoughts. Having spied on her was one thing, but oddly enough, reading her diary was a level I wasn’t ready for yet. Everything about Jane threw me. The darkness in her was juxtaposed with a pleasant, earnest personality and what seemed like a desire to please others, and I couldn’t help but admit that I found her damn attractive despite her alliances.

As I approached my desk, I spied Connor sitting across at his, flipping intently through some books.

“Hey,” I said in greeting. I looked at my desk in disgust. It looked like a filing cabinet had thrown up all over it.

Connor smiled. “How ya feeling, kid?”

He didn’t seem to mind me strolling in midafternoon so I assumed that the Inspectre must have talked to him.

“I’m better,” I said, not wanting to get into all the dark details of the past twenty-four hours. “Long night.”

“So I heard,” Connor said, closing the book before him. “Don’t worry. I won’t make you recount the whole thing to me. I’m sure you’ve gone over the good, the bad, and the ugly of it with the Inspectre. Unless you want talk about it…?”

I appreciated the buddy-buddy effort Connor was extending, but I hadn’t told the Inspectre everything that had happened last night, and I wasn’t going to share it with Connor either.

Acting all touchy-feely wasn’t something Connor did too often. Usually, he’d give a lecture on objectivity or professionalism, about staying detached from my coworkers and our clients. He took a while to warm up to people. He didn’t talk much about his previous partners in the Department, and he had given me enough of a cold shoulder on the subject that I was smart enough never to bring them up. But suddenly he was being a regular Chatty Cathy. I wondered what exactly the Inspectre had told Connor about last night.

“Thanks,” I said, “but nah, I don’t need to talk about it. I’d rather we got down to business.”

“Fine by me,” Connor said. He grabbed up another book and buried his nose in it. After a few minutes, he gestured for me to join him, so I scooted my chair around. He had been a busy little researcher during my slumber this morning, and his desk was cluttered with travel brochures for Las Vegas, printouts of topographic maps, gambling guides, and a plentiful array of playing cards. Anything that might give us a clue to make sense of what we had heard from Gaynor.

“Any progress?” I asked. “What was it Gaynor said on the train again?”

“‘Follow the Vegas trail and all will become clear,’” Connor repeated, trying to sound like the mystic, but failing completely. “As you can see, I ransacked the resource room to find out everything I could about Vegas. Even brought in several decks of playing cards my grandmother brought back from a trip there several years ago. I called down to Lesser Arcana, hoping for some help taroting up the cards. All they could spare was a lousy intern and she wasn’t very much use. She was able to tell me some secrets about where my grandmother hid our Christmas presents, but she didn’t give me anything useful about Irene.”

“Think the Department would spring for two plane tickets?” I asked hopefully. A little investigative work mixed with sun, spectacle, and the gaudy neon paradise of the Strip might be just what the doctor ordered to clear my head.

“Have you seen the revised budget the Mayor’s Office sent to us?” Connor said. “Davidson dropped off the newest cuts this morning.”

“Davidson was here?” I asked. “Today? You’ve got to be kidding. The man practically betrayed us at the Sectarian Defense League and now he has the unmitigated gall to show his face here?”

Connor shook his head. “Look, kid, I need you to keep an open mind…the verdict’s still out on Davidson. He’s been a good friend to the Department in the past. You weren’t here last October, but he cleared up this huge fiasco when the Chrysler Building was overrun by a legion of undead from a pet cemetery down by the East River. Things That Go Bump in the Night Division had us all working overtime on the cleanup, but it was Davidson who took the heat for us back at Town Hall. He did his politiciany magic and plausibly denied the whole thing when the media came sniffing around. He’s done well by us in the past.”

I rose and wheeled my chair back over to my desk.

“But he’s working with the Sectarians!” I shouted.

“Easy, kid, easy!” Connor said. “You’re gonna blow a gasket. Look, don’t be such a purist. Okay?”

“Meaning what exactly?”

“Meaning that obviously Davidson isn’t a saint,” Connor said. “You wanna know the first clue? He’s a cog in the political machine! That means he’s already tainted. Working as the Mayor’s liaison means working both sides of the fence. He’s probably seen things that would make a hard case like Wesker weak in the knees. Government work is a dirty game, Simon. If we want to stay in it, we gotta step up to the air-hockey table, you know?”

I nodded resolutely, acquiescing to Connor’s take on the bigger picture. What looked black-and-white to my eyes looked different through his. I had trusted him these past months with my life, and I supposed I would have to trust him on this, too. For now, at any rate.

Connor picked up one of the Las Vegas guidebooks and thumbed through it. “Care to get back to business?”

“Any leads popping up with any of the guides?” I asked, settling in at my desk. I opened the left-hand drawer and readied a roll of Life Savers.

Connor shook his head. “Let me give it a try,” I said.

I took off a glove, popped half a roll in my mouth, and then reached across the desk for a colorful-looking guide that sported a neon cowboy hitchhiking on its cover. Weller’s Guide to Losing Your Shirt in Las Vegas, the cover read.

Focusing my will on the book, I felt the electric spark of divination kick in.

My mind flashed through a series of disconnected images that I had trouble focusing on—book binderies, type-setting machines, paper mills—all images to do with making the book itself but nothing else. As those images threw themselves at me, I let them fall away. Finally one forced itself forward and I had no other choice except to embrace it.

The vision put me in a mom-and-pop bookstore. Several fixtures of well-thumbed paperbacks sat askew in a metal spinner rack along one of the aisles. Suddenly a figure carrying a tall stack of books blocked my view. I pulled my focus to the details of the figure and he came into resolution. The face was that of a young man, awkward looking with a bad spot of acne across his forehead. He was absolutely unfamiliar to me.

What else was noticeable? There had to be something useful.

I soaked in everything around the teen. The details. The clerk’s clothes, for instance. Parachute pants, skinny leather tie, and a FRANKIE SAYS RELAX button just above his nametag. The Weller book sat at the top of his pile and he slipped it off to shelve it. I double-checked his face, noticing the telltale mullet flaring out from behind his head, and I had all the information I needed to know I had hit a dead end.

I shook myself free from the vision. Connor had given up his book and was watching me instead.

“Anything?” he asked.

“Nothing linking to the case directly, no,” I said, “but maybe indirectly. I think I might have found an error in our approach.”

I felt the hypoglycemia kick in and helped myself to the other half of the Life Savers roll. I replaced my glove and picked my way gingerly through the rest of the pile of books, confirming my suspicions.

“All I got off the Weller book was some image from the mideighties of the book itself being shelved. Most of these books you pulled are seriously outdated. They’re useless to us.”

Connor flipped through several of them, checking their copyrights. “Hadn’t really thought of that, kid. Nice catch. A lot of what we end up with in the Resource Room is through donation or leftover from church sales. Not a lot of first-run material. Again, those goddamn budgetary concerns.”

“I don’t think these books are going to help us,” I said. “They only cover the old Strip of Vegas. There’s the whole new Strip that’s been building up over the past twenty years that isn’t even mentioned in these books.”

Connor stared at me. “And you know this how, New England boy?”

“Jesus. Don’t any of you bookworms have cable? I saw it on the Discovery Channel,” I said. “It was a special on building roller coasters. One of them runs right through one of the newer hotels in Vegas. New York, New York, I think.”

Connor rolled his eyes and reached for his mouse. “I’ll bring up a link to their tourist bureau.”

The Internet was rarely our first line of investigation, owing to protocol. Between the speculative fiction, blogs, and porn, we simply didn’t have the manpower to sift out legitimate sources from the bullshit ones. Plus a lot of the wisdom of the ancients that resided in the arcane tomes we used had yet to be scanned in. Digital investigation might be the tool of the future, but not until the funding kicked in.

Within a minute, we had an interactive map covering the modern Vegas Strip. Starting at the Stratosphere, Connor systematically passed the mouse over icons for each of the venues. A window full of stats popped up for each of the hotels, each with the intent of bringing fat-walleted tourists into their oasis in the desert. I started reading the names out loud as Connor scrolled.

“Stratosphere, Sahara, Slots-A-Fun, Stardust, Frontier, Treasure Island, The Venetian, Mirage, Royale, Harrahs, Paris, Aladdin, Excalibur…I never knew there were so many different places to lose money at.”

I continued scrolling until the screen revealed one final casino at the farthest end of the Strip, hiding just past the obsidian pyramid of the opalescent Luxor. One final hotel.

“Mandalay Bay,” I read out loud.

“Mandalay?” Connor asked, slowly narrowing his eyes.

“Mandalay,” I agreed. “You don’t think—?”

Connor interrupted me, finishing my developing thought. “—that Gaynor’s riddle about the wooden fish and ‘following the Vegas trail’ is about Cyrus Mandalay? How many Mandalays do you know?”

Possibly having solved the riddle felt satisfying, but the dawning realization that Cyrus might be involved in this whole stolen fish business gnawed at my stomach. If so, how? And had we given anything away when we’d walked right into his shop?

Connor was excited, though. “This is a great lead.”

“You see?” I said encouragingly. “We don’t have to invoke a power to do every little bit of investigation. Perhaps when a man has special knowledge and special powers like my own, it rather encourages him to seek a complex explanation when a simpler one is at hand.”

Connor looked impressed. “You come up with that on your own, kid?”

I shook my head. “Sherlock Holmes,” I said. “Never read it, but one of the books I accidentally triggered off in my past belonged to some guy who really liked the line. It stuck.”

“Oh,” Connor said, rolling his eyes. “Well, speaking of books, I think it’s time we head back to Tome, Sweet Tome and find out what Cyrus has to say for himself.” The reality of what it would mean if Cyrus was really involved was clearly sinking in. Connor’s face grew angrier by the second. Cyrus had been acting a little shady the last time we had been to the Black Stacks, but wasn’t he someone Connor relied on, after all?

Sure…for a price. Now it seemed as if all signs were pointing to his involvement in something far more sinister than simply overcharging his customers.

Connor stood up and headed toward the door without another word, full of purpose. I had never seen this type of silent anger building up inside him. He was going condition critical. As I stood to follow, he called out.

“Don’t forget your bat.”