The Vampire and Me
an excerpt

Las Vegas is a perfect setting for vice. It’s also, sometimes rather surprisingly, a large community of ordinary people quite apart from the tourists who come to watch the Rat Pack sing at the Sands and the Dunes hotels or gamble their lives away at any of the flashy casinos. Ordinary homes and neighborhoods creep out into the desert from the central areas, Downtown and the Strip, tentacles of life pumping blood into the main attraction. They’re the people who make the beds, clean the rooms, guard the coatrooms, cook and serve the meals, and who offer... other entertainment.
Bonnie Michaels was born in Vegas. She’d grown up playing in the heat-soaked streets, watching her mother in her glamorous gowns and sultry makeup entertain a wide array of men, but there were always one or two special benefactors who took care of them. The house she’d grown up in had been provided by “Daddy Davis,” who had liked to come on the weekends and relax with them, taking Momma out to dinner and shows. He pulled Bonnie’s ponytails and teased. She’d liked him a great deal. When he left forever, “Daddy Alan” came. He hadn’t been quite as nice, preferring to believe Momma didn’t have any children at all. But he’d stayed longer, and Momma had been very happy while he’d provided for them.
Bonnie knew nothing of her real daddy, although she knew Momma kept a picture of a handsome soldier in uniform tucked between her mattress and box springs, along with a faded blue ribbon and a letter that read only,
“Belgium, 15 December, 1944.
Dear Molly,
I think this is very nearly the end of it all. I don’t despair, though, because I think about you and the wee Bonnie girl and it gives me more strength than you could possibly imagine. I can hear explosions and smell death but through it all, I know I have something so important to live for I can’t stop fighting for it. If all the world blows up tomorrow, at least I know I’m loved. I’m going to get some sleep tonight and I’ll write more tomorrow.”
Apparently, tomorrow never came. Bonnie didn’t know who the soldier was, but once she’d seen Momma crying over it. It was the one time she’d asked about it, and Momma’s reaction had made Bonnie put away the memory herself, and she never asked again.
Bonnie always knew, in a way, that Momma was different from the other mothers around. She heard the whispers and saw the sideways looks, but it never really affected her much until she turned fifteen and Momma started to train her. How to attract a man, how to interest him, how to be a proper mistress. How to gain a benefactor, a man who would take care of her but not for marriage. “Marrying a man is just handing him all your rights,” Momma would say with a sniff, whenever they passed one of Vegas’s many wedding chapels. “What you want is all the benefits of marriage without those foolish entanglements. Like I have with your Daddy Alan.”
“Yes, Momma,” Bonnie would reply. It wasn’t until she was sixteen that she really understood what it meant.
When she turned eighteen she found her first benefactor and moved permanently out of Momma’s house. He was an older man, who came to Vegas rather regularly, and liked the idea of a house and a mistress to care for it for the times when he’d visit. Robert was much older than Bonnie, full of fun and somewhat mischievous, and Bonnie liked him. He made few demands on her physically, although he enjoyed that part of their arrangement as well, and cared only that she accompanied him when he wanted her to, she kept his house nice for his visits, and she always made herself available to him when he needed or wanted her. In exchange he set her up with a place to live and an generous allowance and Bonnie found herself living the way her mother wanted her to. In many ways, she enjoyed it a great deal.
Then he died. She found herself staggered by his loss in many ways, the first of which was the discovery that her house was not her own. His relatives put her out on the street with nothing but her meager savings, which had given her fair warning not to rely on just the possibility of a benefactor always being there.
But Bonnie had several things going for her, and she had her fancy gowns, her wits, and her looks, all of which she knew how to use to her advantage. She knew her mother had lost more than one benefactor and had always bounced back. Bonnie could do the same.
The Sands hotel and casino was a grand place, filled to the brim with high-roller tourists and slack-jawed yokels who came to gawk at Las Vegas and all its glitz. Bonnie knew her way around a casino, of course, since Robert had been very fond of gambling, and she knew that men of his calibre tended to congregate around the high stakes areas, baccarat and poker. She had planned on trying the baccarat room first, just because it was generally higher stakes and she figured she might as well start at the top, but the poker room was filled with players and spectators, watching a fairly hot game in the center, and Bonnie found herself attracted to it as well.