DEAD TIRED, I headed "home" in the early evening Las Vegas Strip traffic. Instead of sugarplums -- or even three cherries in a slot machine window -- other, far less delightful, images danced in my head.

I was only two days of sleep deprivation past an endless night fighting Vegas's hidden ancient Egyptian underworld of bloodthirsty supernaturals. My cup of nightmares was sure to runneth over for weeks with visions of zombie mummies, hyena carcasses, and vampires in eyeliner.

Even worse would be visual reruns of Ric chained to a dungeon wall under the Karnak Hotel, victim of a vicious suck-fest. That was the ancient Egyptian vampire empire's version of waterboarding as they sought the secret of his ability to raise the dead.

Now my investigative partner was out of the Karnak's supernaturally infested bowels and alive, barely, in a highrise suite at the rival Inferno Hotel. In an hour, Ricardo Montoya had gone from the pit of Hell to the heavens, or the Vegas version of both.

Following Ric's and my separate life-threatening investigations at the Karnak, I was alive but iffy on the matter of my soul and sanity. Ric was in a coma -- possibly more dead than alive -- and possibly possessed of a more compromised soul than I was.

I'd been too frantic to do anything but hover over Ric for hours and was finally heading home under doctor's orders to "freshen up" before returning to his comatose side.

Good advice.

Getting myself together enough to drive my big black '56 Caddy, Dolly, through brassy Vegas Strip traffic forced me to focus. My heart felt a faint ping of security when the Nightwine estate's iron side gates opened automatically to admit us.

After parking Dolly near the carria