6. Ari
CHAPTER 6
ARI
“ H i.”
Three a.m., and I was back in the Library. Now there were three hookers at the table in the corner—earlier, there had only been two.
“Hey,” the elfin-faced brunette said. “Did you find your friend? How is she?”
“She’s okay, no lasting damage.”
“They let her out of the hospital?”
I nodded. “She’s gone to bed. Thanks again for helping earlier.”
The brunette nodded toward the blonde I hadn’t seen before. “Kina was the one who drove her and the hot guy to the hospital.”
I turned to Kina. “Thank you.”
“It was the least I could do after she stood up to the three book bitches.”
“This month, it’s books,” the brunette put in. “Last month, it was make-up, and before that, it was hockey. Next month, it’ll be something else. I’m Maddie, by the way.”
“They don’t even read the books,” the third woman at the table added. Her hair was a shade of dark red that definitely wasn’t natural, but most people would be too busy looking at her spectacular boobs to notice. “They just google the endings and then say nasty things about them.”
“If we say an author used a ghostwriter, we’ll get, like, three hundred comments,” Kina mimicked. “Controversy sells, apparently.”
“Oh, oh, remember when they were still doing the make-up?” Maddie asked. “That time they pretended they got an allergic reaction from a fancy foundation, and the manufacturer threatened to sue them for defamation?”
“They had to post an apology. That’s when they deleted their old account and switched to books,” Kina said.
“How do you know all this?” I asked.
“They’ve been coming here for ages. Their girlfriend used to work behind the bar and give them free drinks.”
“Why didn’t they leave when she did? She can’t give out freebies in her new job?”
“Nuh-uh.” The woman with the red hair offered a half-smile. “They don’t serve liquor in prison.”
“Texting and driving,” Maddie explained. “She crashed into a police cruiser.”
“Bad move.”
“Yup. The officer driving ended up with spinal injuries, so they threw the book at her.”
“Not one of the fancy hardcovers, I guess.” I glanced at the glasses of water the ladies were drinking. Did the bartender know what they were doing here? He must, surely? Why else would they be sitting here for most of the night nursing the cheapest thing on the menu? “Can I buy you a round of drinks?”
Maddie and the redhead glanced at Kina—the de facto leader of this little group—and Kina shrugged.
“Wouldn’t say no.”
I figured they’d go for fancy cocktails, but she asked for orange juice. Maddie wanted a coffee, and the redhead decided on Jack Daniel’s and Coke.
“It’s been a bad night,” she muttered, and Maddie squeezed her hand in sympathy.
“What happened?” I asked.
Another glance at Kina. “I was out with a guy, and he was a real asshole.”
“So that’s about fifty percent of the men on the planet, in my experience anyway.”
Always build rapport. Not every woman was lucky enough to find a Zach Torres. The three women nodded in agreement.
“Are you staying here at the Galaxy?” Kina asked, changing the subject.
I pulled a face. “Yes, I am.” I left the “unfortunately” at the end of the sentence unspoken, but they heard it loud and clear.
“Next time, try the Nile Palace. They offer a good discount if you book direct.”
“Thanks, I’ll try to remember that.”
Maddie checked a message on her phone, grimaced, and shoved it back into her purse. “The Galaxy isn’t that bad.”
“It didn’t used to be,” Kina said. “But now? The end stall in the ladies’ bathroom has been broken for the past three months. There are water stains on the ceiling in the hallway. Every time a member of staff leaves, they never get replaced.”
“The L in Galaxy fell off the front,” the redhead said.
I’d noticed that, but I figured it was a recent thing. “So you’ve been coming here for a while?”
“A couple of years.”
“At least they don’t water down the drinks,” Maddie put in.
A server brought our order, and the redhead chugged back half her Jack and Coke before I had time to pick up my glass. That guy must have been a real prick. Kina squeezed the redhead’s hand and then turned her attention to her drink. The orange juice came with a swizzle stick and three cherries. Other folks’ drinks only seemed to have two cherries, so I figured the bartender had a soft spot for Kina.
She’d relocated to Vegas from Milwaukee, I found out, in a last-ditch effort to escape a bad relationship. I offered appropriate condolences. Maddie had grown up in Naked City, which was probably why she didn’t think the Galaxy was so bad. The redhead didn’t mention her past, but her accent said she hailed from New Jersey, and the way she bit her lip when she ordered another drink said her reasons for leaving hadn’t been good.
Once she’d swallowed the last mouthful of OJ, Kina put down her glass and glanced at her watch, a not-so-subtle hint that my time here was done and they needed to get back to work.
“Well, it was nice meeting you. I hope your friend does okay.”
“Before I go, I need to talk to you about work.”
“Work?” Now Kina bristled. “Are you going for entrapment? Because the guy who used to own this place, Uncle Mike, he was okay with us being here. He basically said that as long as we’re discreet and we stay away from the family areas, he wouldn’t kick us out. We’re not hurting anyone.”
“It’s no trap. You have your wires crossed—I’m hoping to hire you.”
Maddie was already shaking her head. “No, no, no, we don’t do women.”
“This is more of a side project. You’re at this table most of the time, aren’t you?”
“So what if we are?” Kina had turned frosty. Defensive.
“Would you be willing to multitask? ”
“What do you mean, multitask?”
“Over the past several months, a number of personal items have gone missing from the executive suite here. Wallets, purses, phones, that kind of thing. We have a picture of a suspect, but as yet, nobody’s been able to track him down.”
At this stage, I decided to skate around the truth. Telling them about a possible Bitcoin loan and a bunch of armed home invaders would sound wilder than the lie anyway.
“Wait, do you work for hotel security?”
“No, I’m a private investigator, and I’ve been contracted for this job only. Nobody knows whether this guy is connected to the hotel in some way.”
“So what do you expect us to do about it?”
“Last night, my colleague was keeping watch in case he came back, but obviously things got a little dramatic. Anyhow, I thought you might be willing to help out with surveillance.”
“Are you serious?”
“Yes, I’m serious, and I’d also be paying for your time.”
The frostiness was replaced by a gleam. “How much?”
“Twenty-five bucks an hour, plus an allowance for food and drink.”
“Thirty plus food and drink.”
I suppressed a smile. “The budget would stretch to that.”
Jerry said the budget was generous, didn’t she? I had no idea how much she earned for jumping out of airplanes and shooting people, but I figured the money must be good.
“Okay, I’m listening,” Kina said.
“How much of the day and night do you think you’d be able to cover?”
“All we have to do is sit here and watch for the guy?”
“Ideally, we need a better photo of him, and if it’s safe, you could follow him to his car if he has one and make a note of the licence plate. Unless you can identify him from the photo we have—if you do that and it checks out, I’ll pay you five hundred bucks right now.”
Kina looked at the other two girls, and they both nodded.
“We could cover the full twenty-four hours. There’re usually four of us, but Billie’s working at the moment. We’ll make sure there’s always one of us here. You’re paying cash, right?”
I grinned at her. “Of course.”
“Then you have a deal. Where’s the picture?”
On my phone. I scrolled through to the fuzzy security image Jerry had sent me and handed it over. The three women gathered around to take a look.
Finally, Kina shook her head. “I don’t know him. This is the only photo you have?”
“Unfortunately.”
“You need to send it to me so I can show Billie.”
“Discretion is important here.”
“Hey, I can do discretion. I slept with three Hollywood actors and never told a soul.” She closed her eyes for a moment. “Man, that was a night.”
We exchanged contact details and agreed that I’d swing by with cash each day in payment for their services. If they saw Jimmy in the meantime, they’d call me immediately. Then I returned to my room to plan tomorrow’s schedule. Assuming the background check came back clean, I’d team Erin up with Rusty. Usually, she handled surveillance just fine—she’d tailed several cheating spouses with me, both male and female—but when things went unexpectedly wrong as they had today, she panicked and didn’t know how to handle the situation. She’d never been to high school. She’d never had to deal with mean girls before .
But I thought she was ready for this. Over the past few months, I’d watched her change not just physically—she’d begun growing her hair, toned down her make-up, and lost the nose stud—but mentally. She was stronger now. Happier.
Years in this job had made me a good judge of character. My experience with Haven’s sperm donor had been a wake-up call, and I’d learned a lot about people and their personalities since then. I had a feeling Rusty would be a steadying influence on Erin. And by working together, the two of them would avoid arousing Kelsey’s suspicions. A woman would always notice a lone man following her around, especially when he was wearing a dumb disguise like sunglasses and a ball cap and pretending he was doing anything but stalking her. But a couple was non-threatening. All Erin had to do was keep Rusty company and follow Kelsey into any spaces he couldn’t go. She thought she could have a private conversation with her sidepiece in the ladies’ bathroom? Think again. Erin would be there with her listening ears.
And I’d be free to chase down other leads. We had four so far—two good, two not so good. Jerry’s team had identified one of the men who visited Cole’s home as Shane Wallins, a Las Vegas resident who used to make deliveries for a local coke dealer. The Sad Hatter had gone to prison, I knew that much, but where had Shane been between then and—presumably—the morgue? Jerry hadn’t elaborated on his current whereabouts, but I figured if he was available for a conversation-slash-interrogation, we’d have more information than we did currently.
Alexa was still working on the possible-Russian-thug angle, but with no biometric data on file for either of those two men, it was possible they’d entered the country illegally. Plus one of the guns used had been reported stolen in Boise three years ago. The burglary case was cold, the file barely a page of jotted notes.
That left the MC connection for me to follow up…
Tomorrow, I’d pay a visit to a guy who rode with the Diamondback Devils.