by Donn Cortez
“Well, the teddy bear was all right, but the cherubs were overkill.”
“He had bad skin, too. I’d much prefer to work on something else.” His smile got a little wider. “I’m Barry, by the way. I own this shop. You have something in mind?”
“I do. Vory v zakone.”
Barry’s smile slid off his face. “That’s not really the kind of thing I do.”
“Sure it is, Barry. Oh, I’m sorry, I didn’t introduce myself. Sara Sidle, Vegas Crime Lab. Jim Brass told me to look you up.”
“You got some ID?”
She produced it. He took it and studied it intently, front and back, before giving it back. “If that’s a forgery, it’s a damn good one,” he said. “Okay, so you know Brass. I still don’t do those kinds of tattoos.”
“That’s okay—I’m here for information, not ink. You’ve done that kind of thing in the past, though, right?”
Barry sighed. “Just a second, all right?” He shuffled to the front of the store, locked the door and flipped over the “Open” sign. Then he made his way back, where he eased himself onto a wide stool. “Okay. Yeah, I’ve done some work for the Bratva na peeski. Not a lot—they prefer to do their own stuff, usually while behind bars.” He shook his head. “But some of the younger guys appreciate a more professional touch. In prison, they use a sharpened guitar string attached to an electric razor for the needle, and for ink they mix burned shoe rubber with their own piss. I can understand the attraction of a more modern approach, though there’s a certain blurriness to that kind of tattoo that’s very distinctive. I’ve managed to duplicate it with my own tools, but don’t ask how—it’s a trade secret.”
“I’m more interested in the canvas than the art. I’m looking into a fake-credit-card ring, and I’d like to know a little bit more about the players before I start digging. Brass gave me the heads-up on some of them, but he felt you might have a more up-to-date perspective.”
“He did, huh? Look, no offense, but talking about these guys is more than a little dangerous. I owe Brass, but—”
“Melinda.”
Barry stopped. His eyes got wider, then narrowed. “He wouldn’t . . .”
“Oh, he definitely would. He said to mention the name if you dragged your heels, so I did. Can we move on, or would you like to take a few minutes to grumble?”
“Yeah, yeah, fine. Where you want to start?”
“Grigori Dyalov.”
“Right at the top, huh? Major badass. Runs the local operation, totally ruthless. Used to be a colonel in the KGB, did a lot of really nasty stuff in Chechnya. There’s a story going around that his favorite way to execute political dissidents was to drag them behind a horse. To make sure the horse ran fast enough, he’d set the person on fire. To make sure the fire didn’t go out too soon, he’d use kerosene.”
“Scary stories are a dime a dozen. Every mob guy I’ve ever run into has at least one.”
“I’m just sayin’. The other thing I heard is that he used to be a real high-level spook—you know, the Cold War, espionage, real James Bond stuff. They say that’s why he’s never been busted—he’s got too many contacts, even here in the States.”
“So he’s Dr. No and the Godfather?”
Barry shrugged. “Hey, a lot of those KGB guys joined the mob when the Kremlin tanked. They got the skills, the contacts, the experience—where else they gonna go for a paycheck? Dyalov’s whole crew is either ex-KGB, Spetsnaz, or both. Those guys would stick a knife in your eye just to have a place to hang their hat.”
“Spetsnaz—that’s their elite commando unit, right? Like Navy SEALs or the Green Berets?”
“Yeah, minus the bragging and swagger. Spetsnaz don’t talk about how good they are—they just show up, kill everyone, then leave. Spetsnaz training focuses on toughening you up—they basically beat the crap out of you every day until you learn to ignore pain. I’m talking electric shocks, going for long swims in freezing water, all kinds of abuse. Not just physical, either—they’d send recruits to morgues or even car crashes, make them haul around dead or dismembered bodies. Get them so used to death that it didn’t shock them anymore—just another day at the office.”
“Guess I must be part Russian, then—you know you’re a CSI when you catch yourself yawning at an autopsy. So what’s Dyalov into?”
“The usual. Prostitution, money laundering, drugs, extortion. Identity theft is a big one these days. I hear they’ve been cranking out a lot of bad plastic.”
“Any specifics?”
He hesitated. “I had these two guys come in here last week; one of them wanted a pirate put on his chest. Told me if I made it look like Johnny Depp, he’d beat me to death with a crowbar . . . anyway, in this community, a pirate tattoo means you’ve committed armed robbery. This guy already had a church with two steeples, so he’d done at least two years in prison.”
“What’s the tattoo for credit-card fraud? An American Express logo?”
“That’s funny. I’ll suggest that the next time one of those psychos shoves a gun in my face and tells me to do a good job.”
“Sorry. Who was this guy?”
“His friend called him Ilya, didn’t catch the friend’s name. They talked in Russian while they were here—guess they thought I wouldn’t understand. I’m not real fluent, but I know a little.”
“What’d they say?”
“Something about a new shipment of plastic. Not a lot of specifics, but Ilya mentioned something about a souvenir shop on Fremont.”
Sara nodded. “Thanks, I appreciate that. It’ll give me something to go on, anyway.” She walked over to the wall and eyed one of the designs. “Think this would look good on me?”
“Depends where you want it,” said Barry. “Tattoos are like real estate. Location, location, location.”
“Yeah. Speaking of which, where were you last night, around midnight?”
“Me? Here, working late. Why?”
“Don’t suppose you own a wheelchair, do you?”
He frowned. “No. I use one of those electric scooters sometimes. What, somebody see a guy my size sprinting away from a crime scene?”
“Not exactly. Thanks for the help—I’ll tell Brass you say hi.”
“Melinda. He would bring that up . . .” she heard him mutter as the door swung closed behind her.
16
FAITH, LOYALTY, AND HOPE. Those were the three things King Oswald had asked for in return for granting the peace John Bannister and Theria Kostapolis were seeking, and Catherine wasn’t sure where to find any of those three particular virtues in Vegas.
Although she’d rejected the idea that Bannister and Theria might try to prove their faith in each other by getting married, Catherine realized that proving their loyalty was another matter. Marriage was a binding contract stating flat out that the two people involved would remain loyal to each other, and in Vegas it was about as difficult to obtain as a bus transfer—though sometimes the transfer was good for longer.
They would have had to get a marriage license first, a procedure carried out at City Hall. She hadn’t found a marriage license among Bannister’s personal effects, but it was possible Theria had kept it.
A few minutes online with a civil-records database confirmed it: John Bannister and Theria Kostapolis had obtained a license earlier that day, though they hadn’t exercised the option of an immediate civil ceremony. Which meant they must have visited one of the many wedding chapels Vegas had to offer—but which one?
She tried to put herself in their place. Trapped in hell, forced to undergo a ceremony that would seem bizarre and surreal no matter what the actual environment—would they choose the chapel carefully, or simply opt for the closest choice? She doubted Theria would choose anything connected to the Catholic church—not unless a twisted version appealed to her on some perverse level. Despite having apparently given up on life, Theria was obviously a strong-willed person; it had taken the death of her parents to finally stop her constant attempts to esca
pe. Then, even after surrendering to guilt, she’d proven strong enough to get Bannister to see the world the way she did.
It was hard to say which way she’d decide to go. Catherine decided the best approach was to tackle the chapels based on proximity to the license bureau, and keep her eyes open for anything that leaped out at her.
“Thank you. Thank you verra much,” said Elvis, waving as the bride and groom drove away. Catherine pulled up to the drive-in kiosk, her driver’s-side window already rolled down.
“Hey, little lady,” said Elvis. “Where’s the lucky man? Takes two to tango, y’know.”
“Sorry, I’m not quite ready to hang up my blue suede shoes.” She pulled out her CSI identification and showed it to him. “I was wondering if you’d married a couple named John Bannister and Theria Kostapolis earlier today.”
“I marry a lot of people. Kind of the point of a drive-through chapel, you know? Volume.”
“They might not have been in a car.”
Elvis frowned. “Hey, I don’t do walk-ups. I have my standards, you know?”
“Can you check your records, please?”
“All right, just hold on.”
He disappeared inside. Catherine knew this was a long shot, but she’d already canvassed every chapel in a ten-block radius with no luck.
A drive-through chapel presided over by Elvis wasn’t the strangest Vegas wedding option, but it was close. She wondered about the people who chose to join their lives via someone impersonating a dead pop star in a venue that aped a fast-food restaurant. It was quintessentially American, she supposed—the rock-and-roll lifestyle, movie stardom, car culture and cheeseburgers all in one convenient package. But marriage was supposed to be about commitment, wasn’t it? Not instant gratification?
She sighed and told herself to lighten up. Next thing she knew, she’d be telling those damn kids to get off her lawn.
Elvis came back, shaking his head. “Nope. Sorry, nobody by that name.”
She thanked him and pulled away. There was already another car with a grinning couple in it right behind her, the woman wearing a plastic tiara, the man in a bright green cardboard tophat. “Oh, a formal affair,” she muttered.
Damn kids. Get off my lawn. I have a gun.
The whole idea of marriage had been gnawing at her. Not marriage in general, but the idea of getting married in hell. It made no sense. What did you do, get a demon to preside over your ceremony? Elvis was bad enough as a symbol for commitment, but throw in a set of horns and a forked tail, and the whole thing went straight past mockery to out-and-out grotesque. Anything conventional would be warped and twisted by their symptoms—as would anything unconventional. They’d gone to the trouble of getting a license, no doubt as proof for King Lucifer Oswald, but how would they go about actually tying the knot in a way that would be meaningful to them?
She thought about it as she drove. An official marriage license was simply permission from authority. To actually marry, they’d have to seek confirmation from a higher authority—but not the authority of hell itself, because hell represented deceit and suffering. Catherine supposed she could make a case for marriage being the same thing, but she shouldn’t let her own history color her judgment.
Was there such a thing as a higher authority in hell, other than the Devil himself?
“Well, I’ll be damned,” Catherine muttered. “And so, apparently, were they.”
She was in a coffeeshop with free WiFi, her laptop open on the table in front of her. A little surfing through a few religious-studies sites had produced some surprising information; there was, in fact, an aspect of hell—according to some theologists, anyway—that remained untainted by the evil around it. It was referred to as “Abraham’s bosom,” the place where the righteous dead awaited Judgment Day. Exactly why they were waiting was a matter of some debate; some scholars believed it was a place for those who died before Christ’s time and therefore had no chance to be redeemed. It was also said that during the three days Christ was dead, he went down to hell to collect these souls and take them up to heaven.
If that scenario were true, none of the scholars seemed to have any idea what happened to the place after it was vacated. And Abraham’s bosom was very definitely a separate place, cordoned off from the rest of hell by either a wall or a chasm; maybe it was just sitting there empty, waiting for Satan to foreclose on the mortgage, or maybe it had already been turned into timeshares for the upwardly mobile demonic elite.
Or maybe it wasn’t empty after all. Some accounts seemed to depict the righteous dead as the patient sort, preferring to wait until Judgment Day before heading into the light. Abraham’s bosom was supposed to be a kind of paradise unto itself, which would explain why its occupants were reluctant to leave. Why join the general population when you already have a cozy little private estate of your own? True, the howling of the damned might take a little getting used to, but if paradise ever got boring, you could head into downtown Hades on a Saturday night.
“The righteous dead,” said Catherine aloud.
“’Scuse me?” her waitress said.
“Oh, nothing. Sorry.” Just trying to figure out where a couple of crazy kids would go to get hitched in the underworld. . . and I think I might have figured out what they were looking for.
Theria Kostapolis’s religious indoctrination had included lots of studying. She’d be aware of Abraham’s bosom and what it meant. If you were looking for a good man to pronounce you man and wife in hell, there was really only one place you could go.
All Catherine had to do now was find it.
There were numerous ravines in Vegas, many of them running through the golf courses that clustered around the edges of the city like green lily pads around the shores of a lake. Catherine thought one of them might qualify as the chasm that was said to separate Abraham’s bosom from the rest of hell, and she was studying maps on the large wall screen in the AV lab when Archie walked in. “Hey, Catherine. Looking for someplace in particular or just using the equipment to do some real estate shopping?”
“Hi, Archie. I’m trying to figure out where a hallucinating couple suffering a psychotic break with reality might go to get married.”
Archie raised an eyebrow. “Well, they’re in the right city. Looks like you’re checking out golf courses—they’re going with a big outdoor ceremony, then?”
“Maybe. I’m actually looking at ravines—the golf courses are incidental. A lot of people do get married on them, but I can’t see my pair going that route. I’m looking for something a little more enclosed.”
“An enclosed ravine? The only place I know of like that is out at the Desert Springs Reserve: they’ve got an interactive exhibit in the Mojave Room that re-creates a flash flood down an arroyo. It’s pretty cool.”
“No, what I’m looking for is an enclosed space beside a ravine. Someplace—I don’t know, the opposite of most of Vegas. Quiet, serene, peaceful.”
“A spa?”
“Not unless they offer an escaped-psychiatric-patient discount.”
“Oh, your crazies are on a budget? Well, the Nature Preserve at the Lincoln Hotel is free—”
“Wait. That’s it—Lincoln. Abraham Lincoln.” She grinned. “Archie, you’re the best!” She was already out the door and halfway down the hall.
“You’re welcome!” Archie called after her.
The Lincoln Hotel was shaped like a horseshoe, its U-shaped building wrapped around a glass-roofed, three-story-high structure filled with exotic plants, birds, and a series of interconnected ponds, streams, and waterfalls. It was open to the public and mercifully free of the upbeat music piped to almost every public space in and around the Strip. It was intended to be an oasis of calm in the midst of frenzy, and it did its job well.
Catherine stood on a wooden bridge that arched over a gently burbling stream, looking around and trying to see the landscape through the eyes of John Bannister and Theria Kostapolis. Would they still have seen horror, or would their min
ds have gone along with what Theria had learned as a child—what, in some cases, she’d had beaten into her?
The mind always looks for an escape. Especially in the harshest circumstances. The concept of a sanctuary within Hades itself. . . it must have been a powerful idea to a young child trapped in her own hell. And if Theria is the dominant one of the two, that belief would have communicated itself to Bannister, made him see it the way she did.
Yes. They’d come here, she was sure of it. All she had to do now was prove it—and hope that they’d left some clue to their next destination.
She crossed over the bridge and walked down a path at random. An exhausted-looking tourist couple were sprawled on a bench, dressed in shorts, sandals, and T-shirts; they both had their eyes closed, sunglasses held in lax hands, listening to the birdsong.
She glanced from side to side as she strolled, alert to anything out of the ordinary. The place was laid out in a very open way, with nowhere a traveler looking for a more permanent resting place could conceal herself. Theria might have been here, but she hadn’t stayed. Hotel security would have seen to that, though so far both patients had proven adept at avoiding the authorities.
The question now was, who would have performed the ceremony?
They wouldn’t have approached a random tourist. They would have wanted someone who belonged here, one of the righteous dead—which meant an employee. She was headed for the hotel to talk to human resources when she suddenly stopped.
Beside the path, a shaft of sunlight fell on a monk.
He was kneeling beneath a palm tree, working on the flowered border. The top of his head was smooth and brown, with a band of hair that encircled it just above the ears. His hooded robe, Catherine saw as she took a second look, was really just a brown blanket thrown around his shoulders, bunching up at the back of the neck.
“Excuse me,” she said.
The man looked up with eyes that were brown and mild. “Yes?” His face was wide and friendly, with a short, neatly trimmed mustache.
