“Sank you, Harry!” or some such gibberish spewed from his harsh throat. He snarled down at the gaping crowd below, repeating the word or phrase as boast … or challenge. I clung to the sleeves of his long arms as my personal King Kong shook my helpless torso like a weapon.
Then he swept me down again, clasping me doll-like to his barrel chest. In a moment his apelike feet had pushed off the railing as he swung us out over the gaping crowd on the hard marble hundreds of feet below.
My stomach did another swan dive.
Death by implosion was not on my adventure-travel wish list. I clung to the wide lapels of his organ grinder’s monkey jacket. He seemed eerily at home swinging on a rope, and was still gabbling that guttural challenge to the gawkers below.
In times of unthinkable danger, the mind decides to sweat the small stuff. All I could focus on was that the crowd sure could see up my full skirts and crinolines to … my—good thing I’d been brought up to anticipate a sudden car accident and always wore underpants.
Only then did I see what we swung from … not a Cirque du Soleil bungee cord, but an … untethered … steel elevator cable. Oh, Lord. Were some innocent civilians also dangling from a broken steel thread in one of this row of a dozen elevator cars?
My position remained completely helpless, so, for motivation and an adrenaline surge, I ramped up the indignation of it all. I’d been swept off my feet before by far more attractive and supernaturally powerful forces than this scruffy tent-show acrobat.
I grabbed tight to the nearest long powerful forearm and twirled like a trapeze artist. That spun us into a tangled bundle. I hadn’t expected the creature’s response.
Instead of dropping us to the nearest balcony like any rational madman, he swung us back over the railing, past the exposed solid ground of the hallway … through a pair of open elevator doors … and into the naked elevator shaft. No enclosed car awaited inside … only empty space.
Screeching triumph, the creature swung from one rising or lowering elevator cable, ducking under or sailing over the stately sinking and rising cars, his rhythm sure and athletic. He Tarzan of the Apes, me Jane.
A distracting fantasy, but this still put me in mortal danger, and I was one of the few mortals still left around this town since the supernaturals had come out to play. Visions of imminent collision with the speeding elevator cars made me clutch the demented monster for dear, if questionable, life.…
At last we descended to the deserted equipment bays below the elevator shafts. Here, all was as dark and empty and cold as the hotel casino’s public spaces had been bright and well lighted. The icy artificial air-conditioning up top had been replaced by a subtle subterranean chill.
Solid ground was the ancient limestone that underlies the desert sand.
As I caught my breath, I still heard the unknown siren’s unearthly song, trilling madly. I now thought of it as a melodic scream for help. Soon I might be making such noises myself.
While rows of elevator cars clanked continually above us as they came and went, I spied some pine-scented Gehenna bed linens nudged into a nest on the hard ground, and room-service plates and food stockpiled by the same limestone wall.
“Safe. You. Here,” the creature grunted. “Thank-you-very.”
Thank-you-very. Was that the gibberish he’d bellowed from the peak of the atrium?
Somehow, I suspected that his mumbled signature phrase was a clue. This mind-boggling, impulsive creature must be a key to the mystery I’d been hired to solve.
So it was only a hunch. That’s what I’m paid to follow.
Right now, he was shoving the trays of room-service leavings at me. I realized this was what he subsisted on, poor inarticulate thing. I eyed the fag ends of cocktail shrimps and the abandoned crescents of gnawed cheeseburgers and pizza crusts. I supposed other handicapped persons on the fringes of the Las Vegas Strip survived on such leavings of the rich and famous.
His huge hands thrust a tray of the “choicest” pieces at me.
I’d only just been kidnapped. I’d had no time to develop the hunger of the truly needy.