Virtual Virgin

Ahmed switched on the solo driver’s consolation and wake-up pill, Poxx talk radio.

MY SURPRISE WAS sprung when I had to use the tiny remote I worked out of my pants pocket.

Ric looked up to see the rearing forefeet of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse bronze sculpture looming over our vehicle.

The cab stopped inside the now-open iron gate.

“First the time got away from us, and now the place isn’t right.” Ric’s frown barely dented his dusky Latino forehead, but it made him look intense and muy macho.

“This is one of the highest-security pads in Vegas,” I pointed out. “Ours free for the duration.”

“I don’t want to owe anything to our ambiguously supernatural host.”

“He can’t be worse than the morning movie date you ultimately stood up.”

Ric was teasing now too. “I suppose we have to do it sometime.”

“Umm, yes, we do.”

Ahmed’s eyes were popping in the rearview mirror.

“For two hours and fifty-one minutes, you say?” Ric asked.

“And fifty-two minutes.”

Ric groaned.

So did Ahmed.

“Twenty bucks will do it,” Ahmed said. “I gotta leave.” As Ric leaned forward to pay him, the cabbie rasped, “That woman is insatiable, buddy. Run for your life.”

The moment our feet touched pavement, the cab’s wheels squealed away like an abused Indy 500 stock car. The cab’s taillights disappeared down Sunset Road. Ahmed’s meter was now a tracking meteor.

“That’s the nicest thing anybody’s said about me since I left Kansas,” I told Ric. “Now,” I went on, “I need to quick-change into something more comfortable . . . and less wafting an odor of boiling blood. You can hang out in the courtyard for a sec. Look. Isn’t that cute? Quicksilver’s waiting for you on the stoop to play catch.”

“Cute” was my way of kidding. Quicksilver was all dog, and then some. The half-wolf part dominated his looks, and the half-wolfhound part accounted for his huge size and striking blue eyes to match mine, that being a rare wolfhound gene.

“You don’t need to doll up for me!” Ric yelled as I raced inside the Enchanted Cottage, leaving him to confront a very bored guard dog in search of a little home entertainment, just like us.

In four minutes flat, I was back outside. Quicksilver was waiting by the Enchanted Cottage’s hobbit-hole- shaped front door when I came through in one of my Hector-cajoling outfits.

The platform heels almost looked “today”—purple satin peep-toes with marabou feather trim over the instep. The knee-length forties frock of pale lilac print voile was short at the flutter sleeves and swing hemline. I had puffed my hair up at the sides into a heart-shape, thanks to two tortoiseshell combs, but it was down in back, falling like a curtain over the nape of my neck.

“Holy Hedy Lamarr!”

Ric had recently seen the real thing, so I was highly flattered. He was still under the influence of the Lust level; I could tell by how he eyed me.

My new yet discreet hairstyle, designed to hide any trace of his love bruises, was a private signal and a turn-on for him that would be wasted on our unsuspecting host. Hector Nightwine struck me as a leg man anyway, or perhaps, more accurately, a drumstick man.

“How do you manage these vintage transformations?” Ric asked. “I hate to say it, but you’d be the queen of the Inferno’s Lust level in that getup, especially the silly shoes.”

Apparently Ric’s stroll through the Inferno’s shady lady section had upped his appreciation of vintage rags, if not footwear.

“Frilly, not silly, shoes,” I corrected him. “My secret weapon is a long history of attending Wichita estate sales, added to an Enchanted Cottage wardrobe witch I never spot.”

“I love how you look, but I hate that you gussy yourself up for that CSI lech, Del.”

“He’s genuinely fond of CinSims and their vintage appeal, Ric. I doubt he ever leaves his estate, and rarely his office suite. He likes being cajoled, but he’d never touch me and risk destroying the illusion. There are worse power mongers in Vegas nowadays. And I’m betting you’ll get a chance tonight to research my favorite CinSim, Godfrey. Just don’t mention to Nightwine that Snow owns a totally complete new version of Metropolis. Hector would chew on more than the usual Survivor reality show vermin atop his desk if he knew that.

“Come on, Quick.” I turned to my patient dog, who’d been following our conversation like a spectator at a tennis match. “Time for us to get our due at the Big House.”

Quizzical, Ric jammed his hands in his pockets and held his tongue too, trailing Quicksilver and me while we trotted across the driveway into the servants’ entrance of Hector Nightwine’s Sunset Road mansion.

Cameras on stalks rotated silently across the courtyard to follow us, reminding me of mechanistic alien eyes in a fifties science-fiction movie.

“Now you’ll see what I have to put up with,” I told him as I opened the kitchen door, “to live in high-end security.”

“MASTER QUICKSILVER! MISS Street,” Godfrey exclaimed, meeting us inside the door, as he always did.

If I didn’t know that his master required him to dance twenty-four attendance on his apparently insomniac self, I’d think Godfrey lived by Nightwine’s back and front doors, the eternal butler.

“And Mister Montoya,” Godfrey acknowledged Ric with a nod of his head. “The master is most curious about the purpose of your visit. May I say, Miss Street, you look most like Miss Carole Lombard in that ensemble?”

“Thank you, Godfrey. That’s an enormous compliment. Carole Lombard,” I told Ric, “was Godfrey’s love interest in the film named after his butler character, My Man Godfrey.”

“Does Nightwine lease that Lombard CinSim?” Ric asked us.

“Alas, no,” Godfrey said in his emotionless butler voice. “It might distract from my duties, and, frankly, the girl was a bit of what you nowadays call ditzy, and a pushy dame on top of it.”

“She made Godfrey marry her at the end,” I explained.

“Oh,” Ric said.

“Mr. Nightwine is eager to see you, Miss Street,” Godfrey told me, “but not Master Quicksilver. He fears competition for his favorite snacks.”

“Quick prefers the prime cuts you feed him from the kitchen anyway,” I answered. “Ric, why don’t you and Quicksilver get acquainted with one of Godfrey’s filling snacks while I pave the way with Nightwine upstairs?”

Ric nodded far more agreeably than I’d expected, so I left the trio and took the narrow back stairs to the level of Nightwine’s office. There I knocked lightly on the huge coffered door.

“Enter,” a robust voice commanded.

I did.

“Such a pleasure to see you back after your recent getaway, Miss Street. Sit.”

I did, crossing my legs, which allowed display of the half-off frou-frou shoe dangling from my instep.

Nightwine sighed with visual, vintage satisfaction. He loved feeling like a detective in a noir movie receiving a femme fatale client. Nero Wolfe, perhaps, given he too was a housebound man of size.

“What can I do for you, Miss Street? Everything running smoothly at the Enchanted Cottage? No rogue gnomes or pixies showing up?”

“Peaceful as ever.” I’d never told Nightwine that the hall looking glass had always acted more like a door than a mirror for me, but he probably knew. Someone had bought the Wicked Queen’s prop from Disney’s Snow White film. Who, if not Hector?

I had a bone to pick with Nightwine, but now was not the time to bring up touchy matters.

“I see the Cadaver Kid has escorted you here,” he noted.

“Ric was called that in his very early days with the FBI. It’s a dated term now, Hector.”

“But so colorful, Delilah.” He also loved it when our conversations evolved into first names, though they