Chicks Kick Butt - Rachel Caine, Kerrie Hughes (ed)

by Chicks Kick Butt (mobi)

  I knew the suite’s layout from my previous visit, especially the paired guest bathrooms bracketing the entry hall like guard wolves, so that welcome and not-so-welcome guests could clean off blood and gore, coming and going.

  Inside, I felt nervous. Outside, I acted like the Girl Who Had Offed Frankenstein’s Monster. Inside, I was just another mob hireling.

  Cicereau sat ensconced on a lavish spread of Swedish modern furniture, all woodsy and leather. He was wearing furry earmuffs and clutching an icepack to his head. The moon was recovering from being full, but Cicereau still looked like he had a hunting hangover.

  I’d considered the Hunchback of Notre Dame a grotesque figure at first, but Cicereau, although totally human in his nonwerewolf form, was a sort of human toad whose broad, rapacious face lacked half the intelligence I’d seen glimmering in the mostly mute Hunchback’s one eye.

  “Street. So you’re really here,” Cicereau crowed. “And so is the screeching siren I want you to eliminate. About now the sound of your scream after my men hurl you through the window would be worth the momentary overriding of the screaming Mimi in my hotel.”

  “Wronged women do seem to have it in for you,” I commented. “I need some information before I wrap up this case.”

  “Really? You plan to wrap up something besides your own life and career?”

  “You recently invested in some new CinSims, didn’t you?”

  “Yeah, but none who sang. My accountants say I need to up the main-floor attractions. I’m old-school. I think a couple thousand rooms, a big theatrical show, a shopping mall, a bunch of bare boobs here and there, and a casino crammed with gaming tables and machines should do for the stupid tourists.

  “And do you know what those CinSim things cost? They’re leased, like freaking vending machines. What a racket. Worse than that freaking supernatural soprano. You pay over and over for the product, like any sucker who visits Vegas. Not Cesar Cicereau. I figured out how to beat the Immortality Mob at its own game.”

  “Let me guess. You leased the Man of a Thousand Faces.”

  “Well, that’s exaggerating what the dead dude has to offer, but yeah, that particular deal was attractive. The CinSim people assured me that this Lon Chaney actor would be a freaking chameleon. At least ten for the price of one.”

  “I’ve never heard of a CinSim being leased to play multiple roles. It could turn the actor underneath the characters schizophrenic.”

  “Stop the schmancy-fancy words. ‘CinSim’ is hard enough for my electronic dictionary. I’m experimenting with the Gehenna’s tourist attractions, okay? I happen to think this CinSim craze isn’t here to stay, but I’ll try something now and then if it seems to fit my theme. I mean, this guy is the whole freak show put together: the Hunchback, the Phantom, Dracula, the Mummy, the Wolf Man, whatever. He’s got the monster chops down, and I like that.

  “What I don’t like,” Cicereau said—leaning forward and pointing at me with the kind of big, dark, stinky cigar familiarly called “a wolf turd”—“is that girly high-pitched yammering whining like a bitch in heat all through my hotel. Her you get rid of, and I don’t care how. Right?”

  * * *

  “Cicereau seems a bit confused about his CinSims,” I pointed out after I’d washed off the cigar stink in the entry-area powder room and joined Sansouci in the hall outside the kingpin’s suite.

  “Cicereau hires people to know about things that confuse him.”

  “Do you smoke?” I asked.

  “Only after sex,” he joked. “Listen. Just do the job and don’t overthink ole Cesar. He doesn’t.”

  “Listen,” I answered, leaning my hands on a brass railing related to the one I’d almost been tossed off earlier. “That woman has the purest, clearest vocal tone I’ve ever heard and is on perfect key. You can’t say it doesn’t move you. If I could sing like that—”

  “If you could sing like that you’d be on Cicereau’s death list.” Sansouci looked up. “Besides, your job is to send her back where she came from. She’ll still be singing somewhere.”

  I sighed. “I probably can do that, but something’s wrong about Cicereau’s SinCims purchases. Can you get me some info off Groggle?”

  “Me? Look up something for you on a computer? Do I look like a male secretary?”

  “I’ll write it down for you. If you can read.”

  “I can read you. You’re pretty desperate.” He handed me a pencil stub and a Gehenna matchbook from the Hell’s Kitschen Lounge.

  “Yeah,” I admitted. “I need a full report—pronto, puppy—from you on these two names, just like you were a private dick.”

  “I sort of am,” he said with a gigolo gleam.

  “I’ll warn you that they’re dead guys.”

  “Bros.” The undercover daylight vampire nodded sagely as he pocketed his makeshift notebook. “This’ll be an intriguing change of pace.”

  “And I’ll need to know all about who they were, on and off the silver screen.”

  “You want a freaking book?”

  “I think I’ve read part of it, but I need more. You know how to print out from online, don’t you? You just flex your fingers and hit PRINT.”

  “Five-finger exercises are second nature to me. Where’ll you be?”

  “In the deepest pit backstage of the hotel theater, entertaining the creep who set her”—I looked up to where the encompassing voice seemed to be ensconced—“haunting us.”

  * * *

  Was I aching for a reunion with the Hunchback of Notre Dame? Hell, no! I was hoping for a rendezvous with the Phantom of the Opera, though.

  That was who had drawn the mysterious voice down from CinSim heaven.

  I might welcome a bit of Internet intervention and detailed info from Sansouci … who would make an admirable private secretary, but I’d basically determined that the Gehenna’s troubles were due to the eternal triangle. Man, woman … man.

  You just had to picture the key elements as monsters, movie monsters.

  Meanwhile, I was developing as extreme an allergy to sopranos as Cesar Cicereau. That we should have something in common was disgusting.

  I had barely arrived back on the main floor, when Sansouci put the make on me again.

  “Your printout, madam.”

  “That’s an iTouchOften screen.”

  “Works for me.”

  I reached for it, but he held it behind his back, as if in a game.

  “This really means something to you,” he charged. “Not just the what and the how, the assignment and the pay, but the who and the why.”

  “Maybe. I doubt an ancient vampire like you could understand.”

  “Maybe if you knew my what and how and who and why, you would.”

  “Maybe that’s a too unhuman place for me to go.”

  He considered, then shrugged.

  “How do exploring the dark, deep crevices of the human heart, soul, and mind work for you?” I asked.

  “My ’hood.”

  “Forgive me if I don’t think that you have the depth.”

  “Try me.”

  I needed an assistant. I could use some muscle and I could provide the missing “soul.”

  “Is that main-floor maze through the woods populated by anything but naive tourists?” I asked.

  “Cicereau was aiming at a walkway of fairy-tale victims.”

  “Fairy-tale victims?”

  “You know. Toothsome females in supine positions, like Sleeping Beauty.”

  “And Snow White in her crystal coffin?” I wondered.

  Sansouci grimaced. It didn’t look anywhere near as bad on him as it did on the Hunchback. “She had that Lilith look he likes.”

  “My double. Right. That’s why he hires me: look, but no need to touch. Just use me to save his ass.”

  “It’s a job,” Sansouci consoled. “Like mine.”

  “There are jobs and there are jobs. Are you willing to walk Little Red Riding Hood through the woods?”

  �
�This hokey ‘attraction’? If it will stop that woman ghost upstairs from howling, sure.”

  “She gets to you too?”

  “Nothing gets to me.”

  “We’ll see.”

  The woodland walk was too new to attract many tourists. No gaming, no glitz. We were alone.

  “You realize,” Sansouci said after a while, “you’re Little Red, and I’m the Wolf.”

  “Not this time. And don’t let my devoted wolfhound know that.”

  “He’s not here.”

  “He could be in two seconds flat,” I said with a grin.

  Just then we heard a fierce canine growling in the woods. I shrugged complacently before rushing toward it. Sansouci held back a bit.

  The growling ended with a piercing wail of surprised pain that rose up in a weird chorus with the ghostly soprano.

  I crashed thorough the carefully planted underbrush to find a blunt-featured, perfectly respectable middle-aged man writhing on the forest floor.

  “It bit me!” he cried. Then he spotted me. “Oh, are you all right, miss? You haven’t been bitten too? I tried to divert the wolf from hurting you.” He glowered over my shoulder at Sansouci.

  I was no longer the accused witch Esmeralda outside of the great cathedral of Notre Dame, but the werewolf-threatened young woman Larry Talbot had saved from a werewolf bite in the forest, making himself the werewolf-to-be.

  I knelt beside him, another CinSim, yet still wounded in spirit and fact. “I’m fine,” I told him. “You saved me. What’s your name?”

  The distant trills above made him gaze up through the canopy of leaves. “What beautiful music I hear. It’s like a lullaby.”

  “You mustn’t fall asleep,” I said, shaking him. “Concentrate. What’s your name?”

  “Name? Creighton. No, Larry now. Not Creighton. I was walking in the wood to visit the Gypsy camp and saw you. An enormous wolf was threatening to bite you.”

  “You stopped it,” I reassured him.

  Meanwhile, my mind was on overdrive. Something was wrong here. His name was Creighton? There went my house of cards of a theory. The movie hero, Larry Talbot, had been played by the son of the Hunchback and the Man of a Thousand faces, Lon Chaney. I was now comforting Lon Chaney Jr., CinSim.

  I’d now met both father and son CinSims, both famed for playing multiple roles, multiple monster roles. I should be bringing these events to a conclusion, but the scenario and cast were just getting more confused.

  And who the hell was the ghastly, ghostly soprano still commanding the upper reaches of the Gehenna Hotel?

  * * *

  I had no trouble persuading Sansouci to leave the troubled man in the woods to his own devices.

  “What a wimp,” Sansouci declared when we neared the main concourse. “I got ‘bit’ for eternity too and you don’t see me moaning around about it.”

  “You’re not the angsty protagonist of a movie classic.”

  He snorted derision.

  “Scoff all you like, but Lon Chaney Jr. knew what his father knew, that a likable monster under the mask is much more intriguing than an evil being through and through. Cicereau would be more fully rounded if he’d actually regretted having his daughter killed.”

  “No sell,” Sansouci said of his boss. “You can handle these schizophrenic CinSim shape-shifters?”

  “I’ll have to. Give me the printouts you made for me. Lon Chaney Sr. mistook me for his movie leading lady. Most CinSims are leased in a single role, but this pair were known for metamorphosing. Maybe I can convince Larry Talbot I’m his love interest.”

  “You’d do all this for Cicereau?”

  “Heck, no.” I snatched the folding papers Sansouci produced from his inner jean jacket pocket. “I’ll do it for getting these helplessly entangled CinSims’ house in order. Whatever’s gone wrong has to do with the actors’ private lives. You’d better leave me to it.”

  I stood there and listened after Sansouci left. The voice was still singing, although familiarity bred dismissal. It was becoming just more casino background music. Yet, Larry Talbot had been right. She’d been singing a lullaby while we’d talked in the ersatz woods, Brahms’s famous one, in fact, and it had almost put Larry Talbot to sleep.

  Suddenly, I had a plan.

  I headed back to the theater area. It was “dark” now, even during daylight, since only two evening shows played there. I knew my way around theaters, and had almost been an indentured attraction here, so I raced down the empty aisles and up the steps at the side of the stage, then into the dark and curtained wings at stage right.

  Large light-board and special-effects layouts filled the area. Matching installments were set up at the back of the “house.” I wanted under, not up, so I scrabbled around in the dark until I found a set of narrow, steep steps down to the subbasement.

  Before I descended, I turned on the pinpoint light and punched the button on one of two dozen labeled sound and visual effects: lightning, thunder, parade … there! Just what I needed. Wedding processional.

  Sansouci was right. I was making the ultimate sacrifice to pursue this case.

  Glad for my flat-heeled shoes, I backed down the ladderlike steps into the dark. Above, I heard the house above fill with the thrilling notes of “Here Comes the Bride,” aka Wagner’s operatic Bridal Chorus from Lohengrin.

  The music was ponderous, slow, churchy organ music. I’d never expected to waltz down the aisle to this famous, formal organ music, but it was crazy appropriate for the past and the present I needed to meld into one big postmortem family reunion to end the haunting of the Gehenna and put restless human spirits and silver-screen stars to bed in Lullaby Land. I hoped it would conjure the most famous monster of all.

  And, with the vibrations of that thunderous march shaking the stone roots of the subbasement, I stopped and listened for the thin soprano trill that never stopped.

  Yes! Faint, but still discernible.

  I stepped forward to the march’s beat, clasped my hands at my demure Audrey Hepburn waist, and mouthed the words “Here comes the bride, all dressed and wide.” Well, those were the lyrics we had used at Our Lady of the Lake Convent School.

  “Beautiful,” a thrumming male voice added to the cacophony.

  A face from a nightmare leapt in front of me. “You? You, girl. You sing like a chorus of angels emerging from one throat. I’ll teach you, shape you, make you even more magnificent.”

  I simpered at the grotesque face with the eyes circled in black paint and the blackened and ragged teeth. I couldn’t sing, but I could hear, and I mouthed along with the distant siren, while the Phantom of the Opera closed his lids over those mad, blasted eyes and swayed to the song echoing above.… “Think of Me,” as it is sung at the Las Vegas Venetian Resort Hotel Casino performance of The Phantom of the Opera every night, by Christine, the beautiful soprano the Phantom loves and longs for.

  Finally, the female phantom of the Gehenna finished a long, sustained phrase, and … stopped.

  The automatic organ melody had died even earlier.

  I stood alone in the darkened silence with the Phantom of the Opera, 1927-style, Lon Chaney’s greatest transformation.

  “My love. My Christine,” the Phantom said, words Chaney had mouthed on the 1925 silent-film screen. He’d never uttered an audible word until his last film in 1930, and, dying, this son of deaf-mutes had not been able to speak at all. “Only you can sing my soul to rest.”

  Yes, that was true. To accomplish that, I had to lead him on a merry chase.

  Up the stairs I sprang on my brand-new leopard-skin rose-toed flats, feeling the CinSim clutch at my ragged taffeta hem.

  Onto the stage and up the aisles to the bright artificial light of the concourse I flew like Cinderella eluding her Prince. Tourists paused to observe and ooh and chuckle. Just part of the performing mimes Vegas hotels are famed for. Then I ducked into the carefully landscaped wooded area and hoped my high-pitched screams befitted a frightened girl fleeing a wer
ewolf.

  Larry Talbot, now fully furred and fanged, rose from the underbrush, growling, determined to stop my pursuer.

  I stepped aside like a bit player trying to save her acting wardrobe as monster met monster.

  * * *

  The Phantom ruled his understage world, but he was an emotional and intellectual monster.

  The Wolf Man bared his fangs and his wild, white-eyed look and pounced on the disfigured maniac opera buff.

  I couldn’t have the Immortality Mob’s property tearing each other gray limb from black limb, so I jumped between them.

  “You want to save me, noble suitors,” I cried in what for me was close to a swooning soprano, “do not destroy each other. I love you both.”

  Well, there. I’d introduced a logical impossibility into the plot of every film either “man” had ever acted in.

  In confusion, Lon Chaney Jr. morphed into his Mummy persona.

  “Oh, Karis,” I said, pressing a restraining hand on his blood-smudged chest wrappings. “He is but an old man, a figure of fun, not a rival.”

  At which, Lon Chaney Sr. obligingly changed into one of his demented clown personas.

  This is when I discovered that the female love interest is the queen of the board, the key to every plot of every originally cheesy melodramatic script these film legends had appeared in. She was lovely, she was engaged, she was a swooning wimp, and they ached to own her love, but always lost out to a fine, stalwart, handsome, ordinary human man.

  In some ways, the life and loves of Lon Chaney and his son Creighton, who would resurface as Lon Chaney Jr., much to his embarrassment and shame, were as much at stake here as any misunderstood film monster’s fate.

  I was getting a lot of melodrama whiplash keeping these legendary actors and their roles apart when a woman’s voice came to my rescue.