Carole Douglas - Brimstone Kiss

She dialed her boss and then nodded us in.

"I see why you wear suits, even in this heat," I told Ric, eyeing the plastic rectangle dangling from his own lapel. "You must get a lot of temporary ID tags in the consulting business."

He nodded, then smiled as Grisly Bahr came out in his lab coat to greet us. Even he wore an ID tag.

"Great to see you, amigo," he greeted Ric. "I should have known you'd have snagged Miss Street. She's a comer."

"I thought she'd snagged you," Ric said.

"Don't I wish. Well…you both will like this new mystery. I want to run it past you, C.K., before I lay it on Captain Malloy."

C.K.? Oh. Cadaver Kid.

"The captain likes her crime facts cut and dried and down to earth," Ric agreed.

"This is down to earth, all right, kiddies. Way down to earth."

By then we'd walked through a door or two, down a featureless hall and into a refrigerator-cold room littered with sheet-covered gurneys. Some sheets were alarmingly flat, others way too lumpy in all the wrong places. I knew the air would be icy, but that didn't completely eliminate the stench of death, so I'd treated my nostrils with Vicks VapoRub, a trick I'd learned as a reporter.

Bahr led us to one side of the room and pulled back two of the really shallow sheets to reveal the bare bones of our Sunset Park couple.

I winced to see what was left of the gently rounded flesh of the young woman I'd seen in my Enchanted Cottage mirror. Yet the brown bones were mostly whole and the facing skulls seemed to be smiling rather than grinning.

"You've placed the gurneys so they're still face-to-face," I noted, surprised.

Grisly Bahr actually stuttered a bit. "Yes, well, ahem, it duplicates the crime scene, doesn't it?"

"Don't let him fool you. He's a sentimental old dog," Ric told me.

Bahr gestured at the right side bones. "She was a healthy young woman in 1946. About seventeen years old."

I nodded, knowing and mourning all this.

Ric surreptitiously took my hand. He knew that too.

"But this guy," Bahr was saying. "This young buck of perhaps nineteen from the length and development of the bones, as we knew, we can now accurately date for age. He was a robust young fellow of six hundred or so." He eyed Ric under the shrubbery of his eyebrows and over the glint of his half-glasses. "You got any ideas on that, C.K.?"

Ric sighed. "It could only be… vampire."

"So you say. Still, you know our authorities are having a hard time dealing with supernatural showing up now in all ways, shapes and forms-including from the past. They still want to believe it's all the result of autoimmune disease or pollution or even global warming, God help us.

"I told Miss Street earlier that the male's cause of death was one used centuries ago to kill vampires. The head was cut off and a coin put in the mouth. But that's folklore. The age of the bones is scientific fact. I fear our friends in law enforcement are going to lay it on that disease that ages kids prematurely."

"Progeria," Ric said while I was still taking in the subtext of their comments. "That's ridiculous. These bones are full-size."

Did they mean that officialdom was a tad behind on recognizing the sweeping influence of supernaturals on the history of this planet? I'd noticed that the Wichita authorities were in a state of denial, but thought that was just small-city slowness in catching up with major national trends.

Now, I wondered if all the standard authorities- police, politicians, coroners, medical and health officials and religious leaders-were behind the curve on this. In that case, any investigations I could do for Hector or even Howard Hughes would add to the human knowledge pool.

While I'd been daydreaming, the two guys were still discussing those dry bones.

"Just as well, maybe," Ric told Bahr, "if your superiors are slow to see the supernatural cropping up here. The Cicereau mob is deeply involved in these kills. If the case can be solved to our satisfaction, privately, we might all be safer. I can always get Captain Malloy to sign off on it."

"Yes, you can, muchacho macabre."

So Bahr thought blond Captain Kennedy Malloy was utter putty in Ric's fingers too. Didn't like to hear that.

"No use agitating the public, or the police, on some of these dicier killings," Ric agreed.

"All part of the job," Grisly told me, winking. "Don't you worry, Delilah. This fellow's saving the attractively efficient Captain Malloy for me."

So much for the " Miss Street " act.

I asked my first question. "The man's manner of death. It was enough to keep him dead for eternity?"

Bahr nodded. "Decapitated, coin in mouth. Unless someone or something with some extra strong mojo we don't know about comes along." He glanced at Ric. "I'm keeping the corpses in separate stainless steel lockers. This guy's heaped with garlic. Just in case."

Ric nodded.

Grisly Bahr shook his head. "My wife is used to the orange after-odor of the formula that banishes the workplace air of decay around here, but this new garlic overtone is driving her crazy."

"SIX hundred years," Ric mused as we returned to the now-welcome heat outside and our sizzling cars. "Where do you want to go for lunch?"

"Someplace where they don't serve six-hundred-year-old food."

He suggested we stop at a deli en route to Sunset Road and picnic in the park; then Dolly and I would be the next thing to home.

By the time we settled under the concrete awning on the concrete picnic table, with our feet resting on the attached benches, it was well past high noon and the joggers were long gone. We'd laid our jackets aside, and probably looked like a couple of office workers on a lunch break.

If anyone had overheard us, they would have gotten over that assumption.

"A six-hundred-year-old male adolescent," I said between munching on low-fat turkey and rye. "Indubitably a vampire, Dr. Van Helsing."

Ric nodded. "We've seen a few recent converts to the clan in Vegas, but not any established vamps. What about Kansas?"

"Same thing. Half-blood vamps, usually punk kids and even some fake ones."

"Some humans like to mimic the vampire lifestyle. Artificial fangs and carotid artery cocktails."

"Icky."

Ric drank from the longneck Dos Equis at his side. He'd bought a six-pack, so I had my own and some to spare.

"If it's consensual all around, though," he said, "there's nothing traditional law enforcement can do." His pupils darkened. "And you seem to like keeping my vampire bat bite site active. Is that 'icky?'"

"Let me see." I slipped my fingers under his shirt collar on the left side of his neck. Stroked softly along the thin silk shirt fabric. Ric's eyes closed and his lips parted. I moved my hand down to feel his pounding heartbeat and strum his hard nipple with my fingernail.

"Delilah," he said. I think that was all he was capable of saying at the moment.

"I've got some buttons I can discreetly push wherever we are. You bet I like that, Señor Montoya."

He leaned close to kiss the taste of the beer from my mouth.

"I've got my weird buttons too," I pointed out. "But there's more than wannabe vamps going on. Look at the half-weres who stay in a semi-human wolf state permanently. It's like someone's been messing with the traditional mythology."

"Someone has been messing with all traditional mythologies."

"What Hector Nightwine calls the Immortality Mob," I suggested.

"Catchy name, but I doubt it's just one entity. A lot of big corporate money is invested in making Vegas the most hip and future-forward place on the planet. But it's hard to keep up nowadays, with new 'manifestations' turning up all over the globe."

"Keeping up with the Joneses could mean playing ring-around-the-world."