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in my mind. Like we’d ever had one. A home, not a mind.
I’d have to count on the familiar being able to extend or shrink so I hit the diamond’s rounded central plane dead on. When I launched into what I hoped was a trapeze-style swing into and through the dangling gemstone mirror above me, I felt the dang sling-back shoes slip off my heels, and then off entirely.
I had a second to hope they didn’t brain Madrigal as they fell, then everything around me exploded into an icy nova of light and cold. Hunched in an upright protective fetal position I felt the familiar release from the limb as it wrapped and coiled around my forearm again, its job done.
For an instant my body hung in space before my stomach tightened as I passed through a smooth cool barrier like plunging through a swirl of soft ice cream.
Yummy! Irma chortled. Home free with hot fudge on it.
Madrigal’s magic eased my way for only an instant. Then I was breaking through transparent layers of spun-sugar-thin ice, my breath sucked out of my body by a plunge into coldness beyond arctic. I landed with a sickeningly audible crack on one side and hip.
I had crashed into hard metal, stunned, and slid down a slick surface to an even harder floor. Looking around, I saw myself reflected in stainless steel. Was I up against the mirror backing of a giant rhinestone?
Loretta would love to trap me in a cage as I had immobilized her, a bug in a blender.
And I had done it to myself.
Ric was still on his own against the vengeful ghost at large, thanks to me.
Chapter Eight
IT COST RIC a hundred bucks just to take an elevator down to the Seven Deadly Sins Dream-theme Park on the Nine Circles of Hell Limbo level.
He was the only passenger at this late-morning hangover hour. The reflective stainless steel walls of the bullet-shaped car hosted silhouettes of writhing nude women, which made him feel he was starring in the opening credits to a James Bond movie. He even had the concealed weapon.
A sudden turn, and he thought he saw . . . Delilah, like a swimmer viewed through a giant aquarium window, floating, brushing against the smeary glass, her lips almost touching the cold steel sides of the elevator capsule . . . car.
Ric shook off the hallucinogenic vision. Who knew what delusions modern technology could hurl at suggestible tourists in Vegas these days . . . ?
His forefinger hovered over seven different destination buttons, one for every deadly sin. Ric was crazy-curious how anyone could make Sloth entertaining, much less sinful, but pressed “Lust.”
That was the most personal of sins. Employing chipped CinSims as exotic sex trade workers was as degrading as anything Ric could imagine, and he’d seen the worst results of human trafficking in women and children during his work in the Mexican-US Border Wars.
Here, he imagined the reality of involuntary prostitution would be prettied up.
Ironic that he was down here to settle a question of morality.
The doors sliced open without sound, framing a shapely woman with long brunet hair wearing a really short sarong. Flowers bedecked her neck, hair, and the print of the sarong. Everything was in shades of gray accented by black, with a luminous brightness putting the, uh, subtleties of her figure into sharp focus.
“Welcome, Ric” she crooned, lifting a lei over his head and picking up his left hand to lay her right-hand fingers on his. Her eyes closed. “The elevator scans reveal that I am your favored gender and physical type, but you need not choose me.”
“How do you know my name?” he demanded. A credit card would record it but . . . he’d paid cash, not wanting to leave a record.
She pressed his palm to her fulsome cleavage. “My heart tells me you find me comely.”
Her skin felt warm, soft, moisturized. He jerked his hand away. He’d never touched a CinSim before.
People tended not to, even in Las Vegas casinos, but he was in touchy-feely land now, a place of costly carnal knowledge, and it felt . . . creepy, not sexy. That probably was only because he knew a zombie underlay the Hollywood beauty queen’s likeness. She was the sarong film queen of the thirties and forties, Dorothy Lamour, who turned to lust object and comedy with Bob Hope and Bing Crosby on their popular “Road” pictures. Ric had seen enough old TV to glimpse those.
“Come with me,” she said,