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the state, and perpetrator of crimes against humanity undreamed of.”

Ric leans against the front of the desk, the object in his hands now the focus of every eye. The rod reminds me of the chopped-off forked tongue of a giant snake. He’s holding a branch of the fork in each fist with the stem of the Y aimed at the audience like a gun barrel.

“I call on Miss Delilah Street to stand and testify. She knows I only needed to touch the backs of her hands on a dowsing rod to dredge up the dead.”

I stand.

A wolf whistle shrieks from somewhere and another anonymous guy calls, “The pretty shill in the audience, Montoya. Cheap trick.”

I can see Ric smolder from fifty feet away at someone inadvertently calling me a “cheap trick,” but I can speak for myself.

“Can you argue with his FBI record?” I ask. “I’m a former award-winning TV reporter, no shill and no patsy, and I don’t believe in water dowsing.”

That gets the group mumbling again, bewildered that I’m not supporting the speaker who’d introduced me.

“But I do believe in dead dowsing,” I go on, “because the Vegas police dug up the seventy-five-year-old bones of an embracing couple on the park site where”—How am I going to put this delicately for a mostly male crowd? Not possible—“where I saw and felt the dowsing rod act as if it had a twenty-mule team pulling it.”

The mental picture of the mules distracts attention from how I saw and felt the dowsing rod perform, which is just too, too phallic for bureaucrats. The audience quiets as I sit back down.

“Most authorities,” Ric reminds them, “most people don’t believe anyone can water dowse, or dowse for precious ores and stones, much less the dead. Traditionally dowsers favor certain tree woods, like willow, but most can also use bent metal rods, glass, or improvise with a coat hanger if necessary. I’ve even dowsed with barbed wire.”

A mass intake of breath makes the room seem to sigh. The audience has made the leap to realizing how painful that would be . . . barbed wire spinning in your palms so hard and fast the point of the Y aims down.

Ric nods. “Tore my hands up on that occasion, ladies and gentlemen, but the blood is necessary for stage two of my facility. When my blood drops to the ground where the dowsing rod has indicated it harbors a body, the dead will rise.”

Actual gasps fill the room.

Ric clicks a 3-D night scene into life on the screen behind him. At first glance, to me, it looks like a still from the first great zombie movie, the black-and-white Night of the Living Dead.

“This is a night shot of a desert ranch I call the Lazy Z,” he explains. “I’m not presenting a day scene because I don’t want any landmarks to betray its location. These are zombies I’ve reclaimed from the traffic in unhumans across the Mexican border.”

A horse ambles through the corral, led by a poky cowpoke.

“Is the horse a zombie?” a smart-ass voice calls from the audience.

“No. Horses calm feral zombies. Consider the ranch a rehab facility for the supernaturally abused. Here’s one reason I’ve come here today. I know how skeptical people who haven’t fought in the trenches of the border wars the US and Mexican governments are waging on drug cartels gone demonic can be. Still, you might have seen traces of a new and hidden force on the crime front, the Immortality Mob at work in your own cases.”

Now the murmurs are serious, questioning.

“Some of you might have borderline abilities of your own that will aid in your work. I’ve come before you, risking ridicule, to ask you to merely open your minds. It starts with inhuman traffickers smuggling zombies like those I showed you into the US from Mexico. Next comes a secret process to combine them with figures from black-and-white film. Only the silver nitrate in vintage film can animate zombies and that may be a scientific lead. Las Vegas is the nexus of this latest illegal trade.”

“Isn’t it always?” someone yelled. “Viva Las Vegas.”

Ric clicks again. The screen switches from still images to moving ones. “Here’s some of the Immortality Mob’s handiwork. You may recognize a few favorite movie sleuths.”

I sure do, and settle back in my seat with a nostalgic sigh as the luminous black-and-white scene plays onscreen.

Nick Charles, in his white tie and dark dinner jacket, is leaning on the Inferno Hotel bar, handing a