“Don’t have to. I’ve already established a deep suggestive state in Ric.”

“You used hypnotism on him?”

“Long ago, yes. Now, I just have to draw on our common memory bank, as it were, and run the images through my mind. I’m rebooting his consciousness, you could say, overpowering the evil done to him with a speed-reading course in good nostalgia. He’ll awaken and act normally soon. He’ll slowly recall what happened to him only when his subconscious fully ramps up over the next several days. The shock will be muted, like a bad dream. The pain will be distant.”

She bent over to lay her cheek on his hand, then straightened with a happy sigh.

“Since you’ve bonded with him, you should be able to do something of the sort too. Just sit by him, remembering the happy times. You can even remember the hot times.” She laughed to see my latest blush. “Men respond very strongly to such stimuli. He could do worse than come to consciousness again with a wet dream. This is a bridal suite, after all.

“I’d suggest you reinstitute sex with him before he’s totally himself again. That immediate and pleasant sensory memory will do more to override the ugliness than anything I can do.”

Imagine. A guy’s “mother” prescribing sex to his girlfriend. Helena Troy Burnside was a cool lady, just like Irma said.

She stood and gazed down on him. “I’m so proud of him. He overcame so much to become the strong, confident, well-adjusted man you fell in love with. This won’t knock him down again now that he has you. Trust me.”

“You’re leaving? You told Snow you might not-”

“I could hardly tell a rock idol that I don’t have time to accept a personal invitation to his show. I’ll instruct the nurses not to disturb Ric until tomorrow.”

She eyed me oddly. “I have a feeling that you can heal Ric more than I can. Sit by him for the night. I’ve opened his mind and senses to pleasant things. Your love is what he needs now. Don’t be afraid to give it no matter what form it takes.”

“But-”

“Philip will be anxious for a firsthand report. I’ll catch a cab outside. This is Las Vegas. Getting in and out of town is a snap, particularly with a private plane waiting. Call me anytime to report or ask questions. I’ve left my card on the bedside table. Perhaps Ric will bring you home for Thanksgiving.”

She embraced me lightly at the door, her smooth, mineral-powdered cheek brushing mine. For an instant after she’d left, I felt a sickening replay of interviews at the group home with prospective adoptive parents who never returned after that first meeting with me. I felt abandoned and swallowed a lump of concrete in my throat.

Get a grip, Irma told me. Be glad she’s not the clingy mother type. She’s a smart one. You saved Ric’s life, now you get to have him to yourself and be the light of his eyes when he comes fully conscious. Enjoy, Street! You so do not get that part of things.

I walked to the wall of windows. The Strip was lighting up as the sun had set and blackness pooled over the valley. It was that magic twilight time just past sunset when Vegas’s garish self-advertisement felt easy and muted.

A deep breath cleared my mind and emotions but I was still tired. I put Quicksilver on guard in the main room, where his food and water dishes were kept, and walked back to the double doors and up the single step to Ric’s bed.

The nurses had settled down in their rooms and one would give Quicksilver his evening walk, she told me.

That must be a sight on the Strip!

I sat in the chair Helena Burnside had left, watching Ric. His mother was confident he’d be all right, why couldn’t I be? Maybe because I feared the Resurrection Kiss as much as I’d feared the Brimstone Kiss. Or more.

THE NEXT MORNING, after I awoke stiff and with tingling feet, I was booted out by the attending nurses.

With Ric in Helena ’s time-slowed state, I had a choice of occupations.

I could sit by his bedside day after day, waiting for something to happen, or I could do what I’d always done, push out into the bigger world and make something happen myself.

The heave-ho seemed a perfect opportunity to do some quick, minor investigating.

Most of the things that had happened to me and Ric in Las Vegas since we’d met a few weeks ago had changed our lives and almost caused our deaths.

I needed to understand what every dedicated reporter needs to know: who, what, when, where, and why.

And I knew just where to begin.

TO ANYONE REARED in the Midwest, calling upon someone at home without notice was incredibly rude.

I cringed to park Dolly’s huge shiny black presence, so like a stylish hearse, outside Caressa Teagarden’s Sunset City residence, all exterior shingles and peaked roof, a gingerbread cottage for the Millennium Revelation.

I neared the front door but still I hesitated to knock. When “Sun City” retirement communities cropped up in Sunbelt states more than half a century ago, they were viewed as enlightened communities that encouraged the aging population to unite in child-free environments. The oldsters would never have to worry about breaking a hip by tripping on abandoned roller skates and could travel anywhere to see their families.

The Millennium Revelation changed even that.

Nowadays “ Sunset City ” is the Shangri-la for older people. These post-Millennium Revelation communities for the aged thrive in the hammock-shaped “smile” that the warmer Lower Forty-eight states create, from North Carolina to northern California through all the temperate zones in between.

Instead of signing up for “adult living” that would morph into assisted living and then medical bed-care until death, aging people could have themselves sucked and tucked to a fare-thee-well, then sign up to live on indefinitely in a physical virtual reality state as long as their money lasted.

It wasn’t that different from the previous plan, except that weird science and possibly supernatural mojo were involved.

Of course, the Sunset City owners and operators never revealed exactly what they were doing. It was a “proprietary” program, rumored to rely on cellular and cloning experiments by the Koreans, later snapped up by the elusive Immortality Mob.

The artificially preserved oldies but goodies were happy. Their offspring may have resented not inheriting the family estate but could look forward to an extended self-care plan also. (I hate to call it an “extended life” plan. To me, it didn’t seem so much life as the illusion of it.) I guess a lot of people had settled for that even before the Millennium Revelation.

Still, my unannounced visit was Caressa’s fault. She wasn’t listed in any directory either by a phone number or an email address. She was also “at fault” for following me from the Wichita Sunset City to this one near Vegas. Unlikely coincidences like that were starting to make me highly suspicious.

When I’d “interviewed” her recently, pretending to follow up on our mysteriously canceled Kansas appointment earlier, I’d originally made the usual mistake of the arrogant young. I’d considered her the typical rambling old dear living in the past. She was also the only “old-looking” person I’d met in Sin City, with the exception of Howard Hughes.

Caressa Teagarden had managed to take the “mummified” look out of the museum and return it to the parlor. I admired her for ignoring the siren call of eternal youth and beauty so easily achieved today.

“Oh, it’s you again, my dear girl,” she greeted me after I finally knocked on her unlocked front door and she edged it open. Unlike the usual glamorous Sunset City residents, Caressa’s slight body curled over a supporting cane and her pale facial skin was crossed with tiny arroyos begging for a flash flood of daily moisturizer. I can’t say how pleased-pink and lovely she looked.