Dead To Me

Co

I rose and wheeled my chair back over to my desk.

“But he’s working with the Sectarians!” I shouted.

“Easy, kid, easy!” Co

“Meaning what exactly?”

“Meaning thatobviously Davidson isn’t a saint,” Co

I nodded resolutely, acquiescing to Co

Co

“Any leads popping up with any of the guides?” I asked, settling in at my desk. I opened the left-hand drawer and readied a roll of Life Savers.

Co

I took off a glove, popped half a roll in my mouth, and then reached across the desk for a colorful-looking guide that sported a neon cowboy hitchhiking on its cover.Weller’s Guide to Losing Your Shirt in Las Vegas, the cover read.

Focusing my will on the book, I felt the electric spark of divination kick in.

My mind flashed through a series of disco

The vision put me in a mom-and-pop bookstore. Several fixtures of well-thumbed paperbacks sat askew in a metal spi

What else was noticeable? There had to be something useful.

I soaked in everything around the teen. The details. The clerk’s clothes, for instance. Parachute pants, ski

I shook myself free from the vision. Co

“Anything?” he asked.

“Nothing linking to the case directly, no,” I said, “but maybe indirectly. I think I might have found an error in our approach.”

I felt the hypoglycemia kick in and helped myself to the other half of the Life Savers roll. I replaced my glove and picked my way gingerly through the rest of the pile of books, confirming my suspicions.

“All I got off the Weller book was some image from the mideighties of the book itself being shelved. Most of these books you pulled are seriously outdated. They’re useless to us.”

Co

“I don’t think these books are going to help us,” I said. “They only cover the old Strip of Vegas. There’s the whole new Strip that’s been building up over the past twenty years that isn’t even mentioned in these books.”

Co

“Jesus. Don’t any of you bookworms have cable? I saw it on the Discovery Cha

Co

The Internet was rarely our first line of investigation, owing to protocol. Between the speculative fiction, blogs, and porn, we simply didn’t have the manpower to sift out legitimate sources from the bullshit ones. Plus a lot of the wisdom of the ancients that resided in the arcane tomes we used had yet to be sca

Within a minute, we had an interactive map covering the modern Vegas Strip. Starting at the Stratosphere, Co

“Stratosphere, Sahara, Slots-A-Fun, Stardust, Frontier, Treasure Island, The Venetian, Mirage, Royale, Harrahs, Paris, Aladdin, Excalibur…I never knew there were so many different places to lose money at.”

I continued scrolling until the screen revealed one final casino at the farthest end of the Strip, hiding just past the obsidian pyramid of the opalescent Luxor. One final hotel.

“Mandalay Bay,” I read out loud.

“Mandalay?” Co

“Mandalay,” I agreed. “You don’t think-?”

Co

Possibly having solved the riddle felt satisfying, but the dawning realization that Cyrus might be involved in this whole stolen fish business gnawed at my stomach. If so, how? And had we given anything away when we’d walked right into his shop?

Co

“You see?” I said encouragingly. “We don’t have to invoke a power to do every little bit of investigation.Perhaps when a man has special knowledge and special powers like my own, it rather encourages him to seek a complex explanation when a simpler one is at hand.”

Co

I shook my head. “Sherlock Holmes,” I said. “Never read it, but one of the books I accidentally triggered off in my past belonged to some guy who really liked the line. It stuck.”

“Oh,” Co

Sure…for a price. Now it seemed as if all signs were pointing to his involvement in something far more sinister than simply overcharging his customers.