Virtual Virgin

“What are you doing here?” I asked him.

“Ah. Research.”

“Does ‘research’ always make you look so sheepish, amor? And exactly where is ‘here’?”

Looking around, I glimpsed black-and-white film vistas of native girls in tropical lagoons cheek by, uh, lower cheek with slinky dames on nightclub floors. Whether nature or nurture, the scenes were populated by gorgeous, more ungowned than gowned, Hollywood stars of the pre-Technicolor days.

Uh-oh, Irma warned. Our main man has been window shopping on the naughty side of Vegas.

This time Ric grabbed my upper arm. “I don’t want to explain here, in front of the, um, populace. Let’s just hop back into the elevator and get to the main floor.”

“The main floor where?”

He looked startled. I usually knew where I was coming from, if not always where I was going.

“Delilah, are you . . . all right?”

“Pretty much, or so you whisper in my ear nights. Regularly.”

Ric closed his eyes as if hoping all this, even I, would go away.

“So, Ricardo, you have some ‘’splaning’ to do. Where are we?”

“At the Inferno.”

Now it was my turn to be speechless. I turned to examine the bullet elevator. I’d never seen one like it at the Inferno, not even on the way to Snow’s penthouse.

“Where did you think you were?” Ric asked.

“Maybe . . . in some fey-sprung time trap. Loretta Cicereau is loose and set me up for a big fall in mirror-land. You haven’t seen her? She’s out to destroy you and seemed in a big hurry.”

“Maybe she can’t find me.”

“I sure wouldn’t have been able to. What is this place and why was that CinSim siren pressing wrinkles into the left arm of your best suit?”

“Let’s just get into the elevator and out of here, Del.”

“I’m not anxious to hop back on the Claustrophobia Closet. Isn’t there another exit?”

Ric looked around. I noticed some of the dark-haired CinSim honeys abandoning their exotic settings and gathering like the three brides of Dracula around us. Ordinarily I’d have loved to interview each and every one, unemployed reporter and rabid film fan that I am, but something was wrong here and it involved a “honey” of my own.

“I’m not leaving, Ric, until you tell me what this weird place is. It can’t be anywhere at the Inferno I’ve seen. . . .” The light was dawning and it was colored lurid red.

“It’s the, ah, entertainment level of the Nine Circles,” he said.

“The Nine Circles of Hell? I know Snow has a key club at the Limbo level, where all the noir movie sets are stocked with the appropriate CinSims. So what are these babes in the woods doing here on their own?”

“You do punch L on the elevator floor layout to get here,” Ric said.

“Really? I’d thought it would be B for bimbo.” I was beginning to get a dark suspicion.

Ric looked over his handsome tropical suit shoulder at the encroaching lovelies.

“It’s the Lust level, Delilah, and these babes will eat a guy alive.” He grabbed my arm and pulled us both back into the elevator car.

“What should I hit?” I asked, ready to split now that he’d confessed to Mama. I had a lot more questions.

“M for Main, I guess.” Ric kept anxious watch as lily-pale hands with black fingernail polish reached out to stop the elevator doors from closing.

I pushed the button, and the doors shut out the longing, zombie faces of the Lust level attractions just in time. The elevator car didn’t move, and my stomach indulged in the classic sinking feeling. Now we were both trapped.

“What button did you hit?” Ric eyed the lit board.

I pointed at one.

“Delilah! That’s not an M for Main. That’s a V.”

I leaned close to study it in the dim light. “I thought it’d been used so much only the middle of the letter was still visible. So what’s on V?”

Ric put his palms to his temples to wash his face free of the sudden worry lines. “V as in . . . Violence. I didn’t get out of Jesuit high school without knowing my Dante’s Inferno.”

“Snow probably ghostwrote the whole thing. I don’t remember a major class of damned sinners in Dante’s map of Hell starting with V.”

“You’re right that; there’s an invisible M involved. M as in Murder. Murderers.”

The elevator decided it had tormented us enough by remaining shut but motionless. It whooshed down smoothly, then stopped with a jolt harsher than a condemned prisoner’s body reaching the end of its noose.

By then I was the siren hanging on to Ric’s right arm with my left. I was not letting him out of my custody until the Las Vegas Strip’s version of Hell was behind us both.

The elevator doors parted. My other hand hovered over the floor buttons. I’d hit the real Main the instant the elevator registered it had reached this floor and was ready to rise again. I punched the right steel circle and . . . nothing happened. All I felt was a depressing lack of depression under my forefinger. Maybe the buttons were jammed.

“What the freaking hell!” a mad-bull sort of voice demanded from beyond the locked-open elevator doors. I looked around Ric to see a stocky guy wearing a teal velour sweat suit. His wet ringlets surrounded a bald spot and he was blocking the elevator exit, hairy hands akimbo on his hips.

“You! Girly. Look at me. I’ve seen your sweet kisser before and the circumstances were not good.”

He glared at Ric next. “And you, punk, what are you doing on the spa level of my hotel dressed like a Cuban drug lord? I deal with your kind on less personal levels.”

Now I saw that sweat was dripping off the man’s nose, onto the large gold wolf’s head on a thick chain around his equally thick neck.

“You, punk,” Ric said, pushing a palm against the guy’s dry velour shoulder and intimidating him into a backward shuffle. “We took your kind down daily when I was in the FBI. Don’t like my suit? Yours stinks. Literally.”

“This is my hotel,” the guy snarled, showing fangs. “I could have you torn to pieces in five seconds flat.”

I’d moved forward with Ric to keep him from doing anything regrettable before we understood what was going down here, beside the elevator.

“And what hotel is this?” I asked, pretty sure all of us had been jerked into a non-Vegas venue, a fey purgatory, maybe.

The guy cast a quick, narrow glance around, then swiped one arm over his brow. He was starting to pant.

“Man, it is hot here. And I don’t recognize the . . . hallway.” He ignored Ric to fasten his confused brain on me. “You’re that naked TV autopsy babe with the huge Internet fan club, minus the maggot beauty mark on your upper lip. Maggie. That’s right. I had you in the palm of my hand. That Adam and Eve act with Madrigal would’ve gone mega-huge. The Gehenna Hotel would have been the number-one show spot in Vegas. But you wouldn’t cooperate.”

He tried to strut forward to grab me, to assert that unpleasant piece of my past when I’d been his prisoner. By now I’d recognized Loretta’s father, Cesar Cicereau, fresh from a Gehenna spa workout room, hijacked to Hell as I had been.

Ric pushed back the head of the werewolf mob like he was a pizza deliveryman trying to pass off a cold pie.

“I’ve heard about your plans to use this woman in your stage show against her will,” he said in full law-