Ric had already moved to the garish wall of steel food dispensers, poised to feed dollars into drink slots. “Anybody want anything?”

I shook my head but the guys had Red Bulls. Of course. Having been shooed out of the autopsy room by a woman, they had to macho up again.

“Sounds like you annoyed the homicide captain,” Ric told Sansouci after we sat at his table. “What’s her issue? Any untimely expirations you might have had something to do with besides the current remains?”

Sansouci shrugged. “Malloy? Hell hath no fury-”

– like a woman scorned, Irma breathed. This Malloy broad has her eye on both Ric and Sansouci? Her taste is way too like ours.

“Yours,” I said aloud.

“Our what?” Ric asked.

“Ah, I meant Malloy’s dating druthers is your problem, guys. Come on, Ric, don’t so look innocent. You know she likes you. Apparently she liked Sansouci once too.”

But I couldn’t believe it even as I threw out the pretended distraction, though I’d rather have Ric and Sansouci getting territorial about Kennedy Malloy than about me.

Malloy had wanted to be one of Sansouci’s daily dinner dates? I couldn’t picture a high-ranking police officer willing to be some vamp’s midnight snack or lunchtime lay, even if she had nothing to lose but a few ounces of blood.

“You doing all right now, Montoya?” Sansouci asked Ric to change the subject.

“You were in on that Karnak action?” Ric asked in turn, surprised.

“Yeah. Cicereau volunteered some forces when Christophe rallied a rescue party, thanks to Miss Street here.”

“I need to hear all the details,” Ric said.

“Delilah didn’t tell you?”

Ric took in his use of my first name. “We had other things to discuss first, but now I’m all ears. Shoot.”

“It was pretty awesome, man,” Sansouci said. “Christophe has unsuspected resources.”

“Not unexpected by me.”

“You may have been Mr. Suspicious FBI Agent Man, but you were out, uh, cold at the time.”

Sansouci eyed me nervously. Ric had been more than “out cold.” Cicereau’s man didn’t know how much I’d told Ric.

“Look,” Sansouci said after a big ice-breaking chug of Red Bull. “I don’t know what anybody else thinks but I figure we’re all sitting on a fire-ant pile of ancient evil that makes a few Stripside touches of the Apocalypse look like a Punch and Judy puppet show in Sunset Park.

“To save your sorry ass, Montoya, your lady here helped expose the whole shebang. That got a bunch of powers along the Strip stirred up to go and kill a tombful of ancient Egyptian immortals, which is kind of ironic if you think about it.”

This was such a hokey recital I expected Sansouci to pull out a cheroot and strike a match on his spurs to create a smoke screen.

Ric seemed unconvinced but a good interrogator is always tricky to read. “So this body tonight-?”

“My turn,” I said quickly. “That’s what the Egyptian cartel at the Karnak wanted with you: raising poor dead Loretta Cicereau’s slain boyfriend from the bones. Meanwhile, Loretta’s ghost had been working on me in my mirror after the same thing. She wanted her beloved Prince Krzysztof brought back to life. The Karnak’s royal vampires wanted it more.”

“Why?” Sansouci asked.

“Think about it. He’s a six-hundred-year-old vamp. Apparently most European vamps of that ‘superstitious’ era are permanently staked and beheaded, and moldering immobilized in unknown graves. The Egyptians must have been working on some potion or rite over the centuries that raises vampires from even the bones.”

“My God,” Ric said. “When I got here Grisly showed me the empty gurneys where the Sunset Park bones had lain. You mean,” he challenged Sansouci, “that hunk of once-biological… material in the autopsy room was… grown from those bones by a nest of ancient Egyptian vampires?”

“Yeah, and they needed you to do it. You have some kind of resurrection mojo? That certainly explains-” Sansouci shut up as I kicked him hard in the shin under the table. “When your girlfriend figured out where you were and why,” he resumed, “she needed an armed expedition to pry you loose. Everyone in charge seems to think the excitement is over but the Bone Boy killed some tourists and a half dozen of Cicereau’s wolf-boys tonight. Unless someone stops those crazed mummies gone wild we’ll all be bloody gauze-bait.”

“The werewolf mob only looks out for its own,” Ric said. “Why’d you care?”

Another long silence, during which Sansouci smoldered and Ric matched him glare for glare.

“Ask your lady friend,” Sansouci snarled in a wolflike way that confused the real issue. He stood, practically pulsing with conflict and resentment.

Ric leaped up. “What does Delilah have to do with it?”

“Because it’s all about you.”

“Not here and now,” Ric said. “Why do you know more about it, and her, than I do?”

Sansouci, the coward, took that for an exit line. “Listen. I have to report back to the boss. Ask your lady.”

He finished the Red Bull as if swilling the last of a rare blood vintage. Of course only I thought of that image. “I’m sure she can fill you in on all the gory details.”

With a bloodthirsty grin, he swaggered out.

“Kennedy Malloy must have lost her mind,” Ric muttered. “That guy is Thug Central. She’d risk her career for a few nights’ stands with a werewolf? He must be some salsa dancer at Los Lobos.”

Poor Ric. He had so much to get caught up on.

“Do you think Malloy can dance?” I asked as we dumped our trash and headed into the empty halls of the truly dead.

“Not like you can now that I’ve taken you in hand,” he said.

“Speaking of which, we need to fox-trot back to Quicksilver and Dolly. You can follow us to my place. Poor Quick’s been feeling as left out as you lately.”

“So much has been happening,” Ric said, not aware of the half of it.

I’d have to fill him in fast. His powers of dowsing for the dead were the heart of everything horrible that had happened to and around him. It wasn’t right to keep him an ignorant accessory to the biggest and baddest news to hit Vegas since the Millennium Revelation.

I couldn’t afford to spare Ric anything at this point, not even the fact that I was now a stone-cold killer.

Of the Undead.

IT WAS LATE-MIDNIGHT-when I buzzed my gate open so Ric could park his car in the Enchanted Cottage driveway. I then stopped Dolly at the big house and told Godfrey I was home safe and thanks for sending Perry Mason to fetch me from the Gehenna earlier.

Hector Nightwine, of course, was glued to one of his surveillance screens as well as a classic film, so I was being polite and updating him at the same time.

Besides, it suited me to let Nightwine think Ric and I were settling down for a nocturnal reunion at the cottage. We were, but I had plans more radical than romantic.

Meanwhile, I deserved some R &R: Ric and Roll.

After I drove around to park Dolly, I found Ric sitting atop the semicircular steps leading to my front door. All the driveway lights were on.

At the bottom of the shallow stairs, Quicksilver sat in his alert “at ease” position, a furred statue in gray shading to silver and beige on his paws and face, blue eyes sky-clear. His upright ears and grave expression matched Ric’s posture of calm watchfulness.

The only thing supernatural about this scene was the obvious truce that had been declared between my two devoted but overpossessive defenders.

Gosh. A boy and his dog. Aww. Made me very suspicious.

Ric rose to open Dolly’s heavy door before I could gather my messenger bag from the red leather seat. Quicksilver was there just as fast.

“Really rough day earlier at the Gehenna, I take it?” Ric asked.

I leaned against Dolly’s side. “Rough enough.”