The mountain men's bearded faces were finally falling as their grins grew feral.

"We seen ya on TV. Looked mighty good nekkid. Come on, Maggie doll, let us show you a real good time."

Nekkid? What lame dialogue! And who the heck was Maggie? Not me!

They were right about one thing. This little lady needed to hop into her driver's seat and hit all the door locks. But one man had vaulted around the pumps and was blocking the driver's side door. The other had penned me in at the car's rear.

One thing about growing up vamp bait in an orphanage where bullying is the house rule: you learn how to think on your feet if you don't want to be someone else's steak tartare.

I glanced at the combo pay-and-junk-food shack. Anybody remotely human inside had ducked out the back.

So I pulled the pump trigger and wasted ten bucks of Premium Unleaded dousing my helpful dudes from their shirtless overalls to their matching roadmaps of prison tattoos. My heart was pumping harder than the gas and my palms grew suddenly damp on the cool steel.

Bravado was one thing. These guys were brawny and stupid, a fatal combination.

"See this metal nozzle, fellas? I'm gonna turn it into a matchstick by striking it on the concrete in two seconds flat. You'll both look good as holiday sparklers. Give my regards to George M. Cohan."

They were so busy frowning at my mysterious vintage reference I thought their eyebrows would break their own noses. But their narrow eyes, light-colored and totally human, were still blinking with the dim primal urge to rape and pillage.

I sent the gas hose hissing at the guy by my left front fender, and when he naturally backed up, I leaped forward and swung the heavy Detroit-steel door hard into his torso.

His screaming oooof got me into the driver's seat. I hit the locks, turned the key, and reversed hard. The dangling hose I'd abandoned swung like a pendulum, its metal head striking sparks on the concrete island.

I backed the other guy off my rear bumper and gunned out of the station onto the access road, then onto the entry ramp, and floored it. It was oddly fitting that I aced an oncoming gasoline tanker into the right-hand freeway lane.

If Achilles had been with me in physical form, he would have taken those yahoos off at the knees. Now his ashes rode shotgun in the back seat, my ghostly talisman.

What was the matter with those warped bad ole boys? Calling me Maggie! Must have been serious Rod Stewart fans. Right. Of course the rocker was still at it, though, delivering greatest hits on stage. It wasn’t clear if he was part clone, part hologram, all plastic surgery, or some entirely new hybrid of the Immortality Mob's busy marketing schemes.

My hands trembled on the pizza-size steering wheel but Dolly's alignment was rock steady. You could find these frozen-in-time steel cream puffs that'd been bought but lightly driven and stored in barns or garages for forty or fifty years at estate sales if you got lucky. Gas guzzlers, yeah, but horsepower enough to tow a Titan missile.

We sped at a sedate six miles over the speed limit toward Las Vegas. No motorcycle cop stops this ole girl. Who can you trust in this wicked world? No one.

Whenever I spotted a white Ford 350 in my rear-view mirror for the next one hundred miles, my hands went white-knuckled on the steering wheel. That attack had felt weirdly personal, and I didn't know those bozos from Adam or his firstborn.

My remaining possessions were in storage in Wichita, so I drove into Las Vegas with what was on my back and in the back of my car: laptop computer, my sterling silver collection courtesy of Frigidaire, Achilles' ashes. The trunk was large enough to hold a living room suite or about six dead bodies, so both my regular and vintage clothes had made the drive with me.

Luckily, the southern Las Vegas Strip fringes still support some low-end lodging. The Araby Motel decor was mock-1001 Nights and obviously functioned more as an oasis for quickies both paid and unpaid and had hourly rates as well as nightly, weekly and monthly. I took a room for a week. I'm usually an optimist. This was just a landing spot while I got the lay of the land.

Within forty-eight hours I discovered this glitzy adult entertainment theme park was seriously bipolar. Days were sun-baked and sweaty, but nights were dark and balmy under a blitz of dazzling light shows.

This was not Kansas anymore. Gone was the green and gold landscape surmounted by blazing blue sky. Instead, Las Vegas was the world's biggest velvet painting, all dark of night lit up by neon pinks, blues, yellows, greens, reds, and purples. Its daytime sunlit face seemed dull, a little sleazy, and oddly lifeless despite the crowds gushing like tides in and out of Strip hotel-casinos.

What had been Vegas landmarks at the turn of the Millennium-The New York, New York faux skyscraper silhouette, the half-size Eiffel Tower -were barely visible today. Even the concrete-needle condo towers that began sprouting in 2006 were mere dull gray exclamation points in a cityscape that sizzled, literally. The roar of the MGM Grand's golden gate-keeping lion and the Mirage's volcano were lost in the flame-throwing torrents that washed down and spouted up from the new generation hotel-casinos like the Gehenna and the Inferno, whose swooping architecture looked chillingly organic.

My target was not the Strip's new hellfire glory. The street map I'd bought at Sam's Town on the way in almost covered the chintzy bedspread of my Araby Motel room. Yes, a fold-out paper map. It provided the detailed overview I needed. The Araby still had rotary phones, a wireless connection was out of the realm of the possible.

Nightwine Productions took up a whole block of Sunset Road, opposite Sunset Park. Sunset Park… Sunset City. Maybe the word "sunset" was a good omen.

At least I was out of the Araby Motel's damp and tepid air-conditioning by four that afternoon, just when the afternoon sun was at its most blistering. The 60 SPF sunscreen lay on my skin like heavy cold cream. I'd tried calling Nightwine productions but had given up on explaining my mission after encountering an endless menu of options all inappropriate to talking to a human being. It was high time I was off to see the wizard in person.

Sunset Park boasted a lot of what Las Vegas has little of: trees shading a walkway meandering around a small, central lake. Plaques near the trees dedicated them to deceased loved ones. So Sunset Park was a memorial garden, if not an outright graveyard.

Farther back around the lake my shoes oozed into marshy ground sprouting grasses tall enough to mask hidden lurkers, or dead bodies. Walt Whitman had called grass the "green hair of graves" and back here I could believe it. This swamp-grass jungle you couldn't see past, or be seen in, recalled the creepy reeds where black-clad Victorian ghosts as solid as ebony tombstones appeared in an old movie that had scared the heck out of me. When I was a kid, those distant, formal, thoroughly solid phantoms had terrified me more than all the gouts of blood 'n' guts in teen slasher pics.

Now that chilling memory drove me back to the trees dedicated to the dead, which seemed more normal. From there I had a Realtor's eye-view of the Nightwine headquarters on Sunset Road, a nice, noirish address for a TV production company specializing in criminal forensics. All it needed to be a Sunset Boulevard was a nice, classic filmland murder.

More than a house or an office, it was a sprawling walled estate occupying a full city block, not far from Wayne Newton's spread, Shenandoah, on the same street. Newton 's place was unforgettable for the life-size 3-D bronze sculpture of horses galloping out of the wall onto a grassy corner area. (Newton was a noted horse rancher as well as a headlining Vegas vocalist and had looked preserved in something even before the Millennium Revelation.)