of thing I was used to seeing in broad daylight; I preferred the John Henrys, frankly, who followed along single file, barely wincing when the tourists walked through them.
Little ghosts don’t interact much, but they can be a damned pain in the ass if they’re mad enough, and powerful enough.
Doc Holliday cleared his throat twice before I realized he wasn’t coughing. He just wanted my attention. “Speaking of ghosts and shadows, Jack—” He jerked a thumb over his shoulder, and I followed the gesture.
I’ve seen a lot of strange things. The ghost of an imploded hotel sitting healed and shimmering like a mirage in the evening sunshine wouldn’t take a prize by any means, but it was enough to make me blink and rub my eye. That was what Bugsy’d been looking at; a parking lot filled with tailfinned Cadillacs and Buicks with five-body trunks, with Nash Ramblers and a ’63 Corvette, candy-apple red, a pedestrian in a close-tailored gray gabardine suit coat and a skinny black tie slowing down to take a lingering look. I could see the rubble through his shoes.
“That’s unusual,” I said. John Henry grunted on my left side, and I chuckled a little nervously. “I hope I didn’t call up every ghost in the city.”
“If you did, you don’t know your own power, Jack.” Holliday ducked his head to light a cigarillo, in a logical move for a consumptive, shielding the flame of his Lucifer match with his hands. “That looks to my practiced eye like some sort of a natural supernatural manifestation, if you know what I mean. Where did you want to go to go drinking?”
“The Brown Derby,” I said, checking the angle of the sun. It would be dark soon enough, and if we hurried we could hit the lull between the dinner rush and the post-show crowd.
If we hurried.
I beckoned the John Henrys along. We had a while to walk still, and I’d need better clothes for the Derby. Lucky for me there are shopping malls the length of the Strip these days. I hung on to my Doc Martens; they’d be fine if a little self-consciously trendy under a suit pant, but the damned things take a year and a half to break in right. I changed in a washroom and stuffed my old clothes in a wastepaper basket. I never liked that T-shirt anyway, and the cargo pants were torn.
We walked into the Brown Derby at 8:15 p.m. and were seated right away. Or, I should say, I was seated. The John Henrys followed, drifting through the table to take their chairs. It wasn’t a bad table, in the smoking section with a view of the bar. I had just ordered a vodka martini and was hiding my small talk with the ghosts behind the menu when an Elvis walked past. Which is not unusual in Vegas, by any means.
Except he looked like Elvis Presley. Nobody looks like Elvis. I don’t mean, nobody dresses like Elvis, or apes his hairstyle, or tries to move like Elvis. Because sure, people do.
I knew Elvis Presley. Nobody looks like Elvis—except his daughter, that is—and nobody moves like him, either.
And this guy wasn’t dressed like professional Elvi dress. Soft sandy blond hair fell down in his dark blue eyes. Hair not dyed matte black, and not greased into a pompadour. He slunk across the gaudy casino carpet like a panther, total confidence and strength, with the collar of his black leather gothcoat turned up to hide the hammer-edged line of his jaw. He scanned the crowd as if he were looking for somebody, but he didn’t quite know who, and it hit me with the force of a kick in the belly who he was. What he was. Who he had to be.
Elvis. Of course. I blinked hard. Which means Stewart is really—
—gone .
Surreptitiously, I raised my hand to flip the patch off my otherwise eye. And blinked harder, because the second I did it I could smell the old blood and the midnight on him, clots of darkness wound through his soul like so many slimy clumps of rotting leaves. Not what I thought he was, then. Not my new partner, my opposite number, my ally.
Oh, Vegas has enough
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