After Snow left, it was as if an invisible bubble around us had burst. The crowd tightened around me, buzzing as lights bathed the stage. All the nearby women eyed me, their expressions drenched in envy.
Looks can’t kill . . . yet. So I held back and stood apart as the women surged forward to watch the Seven Deadly Sins strut onstage to screams, whistles, and applause.
The woman in shreds of glittering crimson costume that bared almost everything could only be Lust. Another woman in equally skimpy lurid poison-green was obviously Envy. The rest were guys in stock rock uniforms: tight black leather pants and tarted up jackets, vests, and shirts. Gluttony must be Mr. Patchwork Velvet Vest in vegetable shades of greens, orange, and yellow. Sloth sported drapey silver-gray jersey slathered with white rhinestones. Anger’s black leather biker jacket was inset with blood-red lightning bolts. Greed’s outfit was the color of money, a forest-like mélange of green, amber, and rust with an overall glitter of gold and silver.
The Sins began playing. Gluttony’s insistent initial percussive beat gave way to Anger’s rumbling bass guitar. Sloth’s rhythm guitar amplified the low vibration until a raw, repeating riff from Greed on lead guitar seized the stage. Then Lust and Envy joined in with a harmonic chorus of mock-orgasmic “oo-oos.”
The audience’s screams greeted a gorgeous life-size dragon (assuming dragons were the size of a killer whale) as it descended from the high above-stage flies, snorting clouds of smoke and fire from its two heads. I recalled from my Our Lady of the Lake religion classes that Revelations portrayed the Devil as a dragon.
The pale glittering figure on this dragon’s back slid down one formidable scowling, bestial head to bound to the stage. The crowd went wilder.
Snow was Pride, of course, the only missing Deadly Sin.
His costume, bejeweled white from shoulder to white patent-leather boot-top, evoked Elvis. The whipping mane of white hair recalled blues-man Edgar Winter, but the total effect was pure blazing fallen archangel, Lucifer in the Sky with Diamonds.
Whew. I found it all so obvious . . . yet completely fabulous erotic-rock theater. The memory of Snow’s far more understated dalliance with me only intrigued me more. Why hadn’t the rabid fans swarmed us? Was he somehow invisible to them? I bent to reclaim my fallen hairpins before they were trampled flat. A woman nearby bent to help. We rose together.
“Can I keep one?” the woman pled.
I summed up her pleasantly plump face and the embroidered velvet shawl that camouflaged middle-aged spread. She’d obviously stayed behind to assist me.
“Why?”
She leaned up to whisper hotly in my ear. “He touched it.” Her warm, worshiping gaze flicked to the curls I was twisting back into a chignon and pinning into place. He’d touched them too.
“Listen,” I told her. “My name’s Delilah. I cut people’s hair, not the other way around. So forget it. No locks for the lovelorn here.”
“I’d pay . . . five hundred.”
“He’s just a stage performer. It’s all glitter and illusion. Who is he anyway?”
“Cocaine’s been the Seven Deadly Sins’ lead singer for ten years, but he’s so much more. He owns this hotel-casino and hot properties like it all over the world. They’re the only places SDS performs anymore.”
She had leaned so close that her breath and words blended in my ear.
“The online chat groups say his mouth is hotter than brimstone and they call him Ice Prick, though no one knows from personal experience. The tabloids claim he’s an albino vamp. He denies it violently, but I saw him looking at your throat. Let him have it, honey. It’d be heaven.”
This was way more than I wanted to know. If I’d read this description in a personals ad, I’d react with a shudder rather than a frisson, given my personal history. What creeped me out most was the frigid prick part, not the vamp suspicions. Accused witches in medieval times had claimed the Devil had an icy penis. Now I knew the reason for the nickname, Snow. It was all sex, drugs, and rock and roll. With the supernatural follies mixed in until undone.
A vampire bite isn’t fatal, everybody knew that now, unless the parties wanted it to be. Some vamp tramps ached to become vamps themselves, despite the inconveniences, and that took an exchange of all bodily fluids. Some longed to be drained to death. Maybe it personalized the slitting-one’s-wrists in the bathtub form of suicide.
For me, I’d not yet found a way into workable ordinary human sex. Now that I’d connected with Ric, I didn’t need to take the obscenic route. But I’d sure enjoyed our little tango duel. Hell, I was only human, even if Snow wasn’t. I knew enough to know what I really wanted and needed: a little love and support. Hard to come by, but I’d glimpsed it now, in two forms, man and dog. I was one lucky girl since arriving in Las Vegas. All I had to do was stay alive to enjoy it.
I peeled the groupie’s avid hand off my wrist before the woman tried to skin my back for a trophy–Hector had been right that ghoulie groupies would tear apart the objects of their obsessions—and gave the mock-blind man in the bright lights a last glance. The music was raw, rhythmic, but I didn’t need to listen.
Nick Charles waited for me beside the Inferno Bar, his comforting, smartly sloshed, dapper self, a spare martini in hand just for me.
“Thanks, Nicky. I needed this.”
“Everyone does but they don’t know it yet.” He reeled only slightly as he picked up his own almost empty glass. His martini glasses were always almost empty.
I leaned against the bar to sip gin and vermouth like the lady Myrna Loy’s Nora Charles always was, wishing I had my own Asta on a leash at my feet. Poor little Achilles. Sudden tears stung my eyes like undiluted gin. The unconditional love of a dog is impossible to replace, even with another dog as awesome as Quicksilver.
“I’m glad—” Nicky leaned groupie close on a soft scent of vermouth. After all, we were married for the evening, “—we met up. Word around the watering hole here is that the Inferno is the hub of all the straight and kinked crime in Las Vegas. That chap onstage in the shiny pajamas is rumored to be the headman of the mob that runs this place. Hard to believe his act. What is his problem?”
I took his arm with a smile. Sexy now translated way different from when he’d been the sex kitten’s pajamas back in the day.
“Another one for the road?” Even as Nicky spoke he nodded at the bartender. “The traffic on the Strip could kill a sober pedestrian.”
I laughed and hitched my skirt and myself onto a bar stool to eye the bartender. “I’ll have an Albino Vampire.”
His congenial face went as white as mine was naturally. All along the bar, chitchat stopped. Glasses ceased clinking. Other bartenders froze in the act of pouring scotch, gin, vodka, wine, beer. Obviously, Christophe’s staff knew the boss hated that rumor.
“What’s . . . in it?” My bartender sounded like he was being invisibly throttled.
Behind me Cocaine—Snow must be a, hmm, pet name–was pouring out a great rock ballad about Lady Velvet. I could feel his sunglasses zeroing in on my bare, defenseless, and still so well pampered back, and proceeded to ad lib a recipe. “A jigger of white Crème de Cocoa, a jigger of vanilla Stoly, a jigger of Lady Godiva white chocolate liqueur topped with a swirl of Chambord raspberry liquor the color of blood, in a martini glass.”
Nick Charles regarded me with awed approval and a gentle palm clapping. The bartender shortly after presented me with a dazzling white dessert of a drink tricked out with a hint of hot pink. The boys and girls at the bar gasped as one.
Nick and I chimed rims, then I swiveled to face the stage.
Cocaine/Snow still had the spotlight but the sunglasses might be looking anywhere.
I lofted my glass in a farewell toast.
Snow lashed his spun-glass angel hair around like a white Persian cat-o’-nine-tails and ended the song with long, wailing banshee of a guitar chord.
I’d have liked to think the final flourish was just for me, but then so did every woman present, and most of them were storming the mosh pit, clawing each other for the honor of being one of the women Snow bent down to kiss.
Ridiculous. I turned to Nicky. “Time to rock ’n’ roll.”
“Could you say that in English, please?”
“Time to do a do-si-do around the executive offices here. Are you and your friend in Security game?”