2. Erin
CHAPTER 2
ERIN
S ome you win, some you lose.
Thursday lunchtime found us sitting in the Library on the second floor of the Galaxy Hotel. And when I said “the Library,” I meant a bar called the Library that had bookshelves lining the walls and a menu where everything came with fries. Two men were sitting next to us, talking way too loudly about cars, and Ari kept giving me looks whenever I picked up my cutlery because she knew I wanted to stab one or both of them in the eye with a fork.
At least the fries were crispy.
I’d gone from the perfectest villa on the West Coast to the shonkiest hotel in Vegas, and now I didn’t even have hot water.
“Does your shower work?” I asked Ari. “I turned mine on, and cold water came out, so I thought that maybe it was labelled wrong, but when I turned the knob the other way, the water was still cold.”
“Mine works okay. Did you try calling guest services?”
“You said we should keep a low profile. ”
“Yes, by acting like regular guests. A regular guest would call about the hot water.”
“Okay, I’ll call about the hot water.”
Great, one of the car dudes was playing a video on his phone, volume on full. Was it possible to ram a phone up a man’s ass? You always heard stories about doctors removing weird things from rectums in the ER, but you never found out how they got there. Now I knew.
Before we came to the Library, we’d met Jerry in a tiny apartment that she’d referred to as “my apartment” but it didn’t seem very homey, even if there was an art print of a cute kitten hanging on the wall and a variety of dirty mugs littering the counter.
“I don’t recognise him,” Ari had said when Jerry showed us a blurry photo of Jimmy on her laptop screen. “This is the only picture you have?”
“The Galaxy is suffering from a lack of security.”
“And hot water,” I’d muttered, but Jerry ignored me.
“Is that how he was able to get into Cole’s office?”
Jerry nodded and took a sip of her coffee. She’d picked up lunch for everyone—burgers and fries—but she’d only eaten one mouthful of her burger before she pushed it away. She was also wearing a cast on one leg, which had maybe contributed to her sour mood. If I were in pain, I’d be crotchety too.
“Apparently, Jimmy knocked on the door and then walked in without waiting for an answer,” she said. “Twice. At least, he called himself Jimmy. We have no idea whether that’s his real name.”
“Tell me everything you know about the situation. Try not to leave anything out—even the smallest clue can be important.”
Jerry glanced pointedly at me, and I wasn’t dumb. She didn’t think she could trust me with the details, and I wasn’t sure whether it was because Ari had told her about my past and she thought I was fragile, or because she just didn’t know me very well. “I’ll have to gloss over some parts.”
Ari sucked in a breath. “Okay, so I don’t think I want to hear the detail on those aspects anyway.”
“Detail on what aspects?” I asked, then let out a yelp when Ari kicked me underneath the table. “Never mind.”
Ari took notes as Jerry started from the beginning, detailing her initial meeting with Cole through to the latest incident—an attempted hit-and-run on Wednesday morning. She’d had a one-night stand? I’d never be brave enough to do that. She told us that Cole had inherited the Galaxy resort from his Uncle Mike, but Uncle Mike wasn’t such a great businessman, and now Cole was fighting to stop the company from going bankrupt.
“There’s an offer for the land on the table, but Cole doesn’t want to take it because the staff will lose their jobs.”
“Wouldn’t the purchaser build a new hotel?” Ari asked. “Couldn’t they apply to work there?”
“No, the owner of the Neptune wants to buy it and build a golf course on the site. His older son is a pro golfer, so it would be a family thing.”
The Neptune was the hotel next door; I knew that much. It was bigger, shinier, and classier, and it undoubtedly had hot water too.
“So he would stand to gain if the hotel went under?”
“He would.”
“Then he goes on the suspect list. What’s his name?”
“Stanley Fuller. He has two sons, Jace and Jackson, and Jackson is the golf pro. For what it’s worth, Cole doesn’t think Stanley is a bad businessman. Apparently, he helped Perry—the general manager—right after Mike died, but he’s also a serial adulterer and loves the sound of his own voice.”
“Mike’s death was sudden? ”
“He keeled over in his office.”
“Yikes,” I said, and Jerry glared at me. I wasn’t sure what to make of her. “Prickly” was the description that sprang to mind. Pretty and prickly. And also deadly, probably. Ari had met her working on a case in Portugal, and she said Jerry had been instructed not to kill anyone, an order she’d obeyed. But Ari also said Jerry seemed disappointed by that.
She moved on to yesterday’s incident, the one that had happened as I was tossing and turning and wondering what I’d forgotten to pack for the trip to Vegas. Perhaps I should have told Kai that Lucy McCall, one of Cole’s employees, had nearly been run over in the parking garage at the Galaxy, but then he would have convinced me not to go and I would’ve let Ari down. And I hated letting people down.
At least now we knew that the folks on Team Jimmy might be the violent type. After Lucy dove between two cars to get out of the way, the psycho behind the wheel reversed back to where she was lying with a broken arm and told her to tell her boss that this was his second warning, and he’d regret waiting for a third. That they’d get what was owed to them, no matter how many tricks he played.
The problem?
Nobody knew who “they” were, and just to make things even more complicated, Lucy had two bosses. She worked weekdays at the Galaxy and weekends at the Steel Horse Saloon. And the Steel Horse Saloon was owned by a biker gang who had their fair share of enemies, according to Jerry.
Oh, and Jerry’s team had run DNA analysis on the men who’d paid a visit to Cole’s house, and they thought two of them might be Russian. Boy, was I glad to be a sidekick and not an actual investigator .
Ari summed things up. “So there are two possibilities? Either Cole is the target and Jimmy is our main suspect, or you and Lucy McCall were the victims of unrelated attacks and Cole’s involvement is purely coincidental?”
“That’s about the size of it.”
“What’s your gut telling you?”
Jerry considered the question for a moment. “I think Cole’s the target.”
“Why?”
“Originally, I figured the hit squad was after yours truly because that was the obvious assumption, and it would have been a good place to catch me—I was slightly drunk, potentially naked, and definitely distracted.” Whew. “Plus I have a permanent bullseye painted on my back. But I’m not easy to hit. Not to brag, but if a person was serious about taking me out, they’d have sent a better team.”
“Also, the attack was at Cole’s property.”
“That’s stating the obvious. We’ve installed cameras to monitor the yard, but if we need in-person surveillance, we’ll have to use a vehicle. There aren’t any vacant rentals nearby.”
“You checked Airbnb?”
Jerry gave Ari a look . “There are six suitable properties listed for short-term rent, and they’re all occupied right now. We have a reservation two streets away from next Friday in case we need it.”
“We can’t ignore Occam’s razor. I’ll agree that Cole seems the most likely target.”
“Which brings us to yesterday morning. The driver of the vehicle left a message for Lucy’s boss. She has two of those, but the incident happened at the Galaxy. If the message was for the Diamondback Devils, why didn’t they hit her at the Steel Horse?”
Ari’s turn with the look. “Because fifty angry bikers would have chased them down, but I take your point. Assuming Cole is the target, we need to work out why. Is it due to his involvement with the Galaxy, which has been brief? Or did he piss off somebody unconnected to the hotel?”
“He’s only lived in Vegas for a few months.”
“You’re certain of that?”
“Speak with Alexa—she background-checked him. But yes, his home is in San Gallicano, and he’s planning to return there.”
“We still need to dig into his personal life. He slept with you the first night you met, right? Did he check you were single? What if he pulled the same trick with another woman and stirred up a possessive boyfriend?”
“I came onto him, not the other way around.”
“On that occasion. While you’re hanging out, can you indulge in a little light interrogation?”
“I was planning to back off.”
“Off Cole? Why? In case you get caught in the crossfire again?”
“Crossfire?” Jerry scoffed. “I’m not worried about crossfire. I’m just not a fan of commitment.”
Ari tilted her head to one side. “Really? You were committed enough to fly me here from California in a hurry.”
If looks could kill, Ari would have been clutching her chest.
“I was just doing my civic duty,” Jerry hissed.
Ari ignored the danger. She was a braver woman than me.
“Well, can you carry on doing it for a while longer? I need to understand what makes Cole tick, and you’re in a better position than me to dig out that information.”
“That man is fine,” I added. “There’s a picture of him on his boat website, and he isn’t wearing a shirt.”
Oops. Now I was getting the eye-daggers .
“Down, girl,” Ari said, laughing.
“Just do your damn job.” Jerry got to her feet and hobbled away, cursing her crutches as she went. “Find me a suspect, and I’ll do the rest.”
She was leaving? Huh? “Wait, isn’t this your apartment?”
Jerry didn’t answer, and she didn’t come back either. After five minutes, Ari shrugged and ambled over to the small kitchen that was separated from the living room by a counter rather than a wall.
“This isn’t Jerry’s apartment.”
“How do you know?”
“The only things in the cupboard are a box of coffee pods, a package of pasta, and a bag of granola.” Ari checked the refrigerator. “Beer, pickles, bread, butter, an egg.” She sniffed the milk and wrinkled her nose. “This is bad. Guess we’re having our coffee black.”
“Shouldn’t we leave? I mean, this isn’t our place.”
“Jerry wouldn’t have walked out and left us here if she cared. Do you want espresso, lungo, or vanilla? This is a pretty nice coffee machine.”
Strong coffee killed my tastebuds and gave me the shakes. Caffeine was banned in the Promised Land, and the first time I drank an espresso—in Texas after I escaped my old home—I thought I was having a stroke. Science was banned in the Promised Land too. Even when I got pregnant, I still didn’t understand how babies were made. The Prophet said they were gifts from God, and until I ended up with one inside me, I assumed they came, like, wrapped in a box or something. Talking about childbirth was forbidden too.
“I’ll just have water.”
As we sat at the cosy dining table in the questionable apartment, sipping our drinks, Ari laid out the plan. We’d head to the Galaxy—yay, another lunch, because it would be weird if we didn’t eat anything, right?—and find a suitable surveillance spot. Then I’d keep an eye out for Jimmy while Ari worked other angles. The picture Jerry had supplied wasn’t good enough for facial recognition software, apparently, but was adequate for me to tag a guy as a possible suspect for further investigation.
“I hate cases like this,” Ari said. “Scenario one, Cole is the target. Scenario two, Jerry and the MC are the targets, and there’s no crossover between the two matters.”
“Which option are you hoping for?”
“The first. Better to be hunting a guy who has a beef with a reluctant casino owner than go head-to-head with the kind of enemies Jerry or the Diamondback Devils might make. Plus we’d have one case instead of two. What we really need is a better picture of this guy, one Alexa can feed into her computer.”
All of which had led us to the Library bar, a table with the perfect view of the “staff only” door that led to the executive offices, and two dudes who loved the sound of their own voices. Right now, they were complaining that people just didn’t want to work these days. Youngsters had no drive. No ambition. I thought that was rich coming from men day-drinking in a hotel bar, but telling them that wouldn’t have fit with Ari’s “fly under the radar” directive, so I bit my tongue. Which hurt.
I’d brought a notebook and ordered an afternoon snack—chicken wings and the previously mentioned fries. In the Promised Land, unhealthy food was forbidden, although the Prophet determined what counted as healthy, so pineapple was banned while butter was fine. I hadn’t tried chocolate until I escaped, and honestly, I’d dreamed of sneaking back to Riverside County and tossing Hershey’s Kisses over the fence because those girls didn’t know what they were missing. I wished I could have brought them all with me, shown them that the world beyond the gates wasn’t as terrifying as they thought, but most of them were too brainwashed to leave. If anyone had breathed a word of my plan, my husband would have shackled me to the bed.
Anyhow, I was making up for lost time, and Ari was eating a salad. She seemed happy with that.
“Try to keep this table,” she said. “And tip the bartender well. If you tip more than anyone else, they’ll let you take a table for four, especially when the place is quiet.” Ari looked around. “Which I suspect is most of the time.”
“I think everyone else is at the all-you-can-eat buffet downstairs. Did I tell you about the year we had the Ascension buffet at the Promised Land and everyone got food poisoning? Literally everyone. The line for the bathroom was unreal. Only one person died, though.”
“Only one person? Gee, that’s fine then.”
Was Ari being sarcastic? I thought she was being sarcastic.
“Folks from People’s Promise didn’t believe in medicine, only God’s will. If my dad had died at home instead of at the feed store, nobody would ever have found out.”
And the whole course of my life would have been different, Ari’s too.
Dad had only gone to the feed store because a neighbour had stolen his layer pellets. And I was eighty percent sure the neighbour had stolen the layer pellets because Dad had borrowed his spade and returned it broken. He’d only returned it broken because a different neighbour had run it over when he left it on the ground. And he’d only left it on the ground because a pig had escaped and he ran off to catch it. I didn’t eat pork anymore. I figured it was bad luck.
Sarcasm turned to sympathy. “I’m so sorry you went through that,” Ari said.
“Me too. What’s the budget for tips? ”
“Jerry didn’t give an actual?—”
The car guys at the next table were staring at a phone now. “Hey, man,” the douche with the moustache said. “Aruba, huh? How’s the weather? Hot?”
“Of course it’s hot,” Ari muttered. “It’s freaking Aruba.”
“Hold on a sec, I can’t hear you.” Moustache Guy turned up the volume. “Okay, say that again.”
A third idiot joined the conversation. “Yeah, hot outside, but hotter inside. I brought Leonie.”
“Leonie?” Moustache Guy asked, and Phone Dude turned his camera toward a woman sleeping on a sun lounger. “Hey, I know her. She was married to my cousin.”
There was a blessedly long moment of silence before Phone Dude said, “Huh?”
Non-Moustache Guy looked puzzled. “ That Leonie? Didn’t they get divorced after a month?”
“They split after a month. The divorce came later.”
“What did she do?” Phone Dude asked.
Ari clenched her fists. “Maybe she didn’t do anything? Maybe she had a lucky escape?”
The three men glared at her. Yup, even the one on the phone because Moustache Guy had propped it against the napkin dispenser and the douche was in full view.
“This is a private conversation,” Moustache Guy snapped.
“No, it really isn’t. You’re in a public place, and you’re speaking loud enough for everyone on the Strip to hear.”
“Nosy bitch.”
A girl on the other side of the bar stood up. “Man, you did not just say that. Someone should tell Leonie to run.”
A pretty brunette turned around. “You want his Instagram handle? He was practically yelling it in the restaurant downstairs yesterday.”
The tall blonde at the table behind them grinned. “Sure, give it to me. We should find Leonie and warn her. ”
The two men slunk out as all the women in the bar gathered around, phones in hand, chattering about assholes and the importance of sisterhood.
“What happened to keeping a low profile?” I whispered to Ari.
“I can still see the door, and someone needs to save Leonie from making another mistake.”
We didn’t even need Alexa this time. Becky—the blonde—tracked down Leonie in under five minutes and fired off a message. Then the bartender introduced herself as Janine, put a finger to her lips, and comped us drinks while we high-fived all around.
Yeehaw.
Hey, maybe this time in Vegas would be fun after all?