Authors: Elizabeth Lowell
Las Vegas
November 3
Early afternoon
T
he sound of groaning
woke Tim up. Vaguely he realized that he was the one making the low, ragged sounds. He opened his eyes and tried to focus. It didn’t work. All he saw was a big gray stripe with light kind of shining down either side.
And he hurt. God, he hurt.
Memory slashed at him like knives. A glass case full of gold and jewelry. Greasy gun rags. A spitting sound and Joey flopping around on the floor. Socks kicking him. Handing Tim a gun.
“Oh, shit,” Tim groaned. “I killed him.”
Then Socks shooting Tim.
His old jailhouse buddy.
He tried to kill me.
Spinning and falling and grabbing at the file cabinet.
Jesus, that’s what’s in my face.
With a shove and a twist of his lean body, Tim slithered out from under the metal file. He would have worried about the crashing and scraping noises, but his chest was a pulsing fire that shot waves of agony and nausea through him. If he hadn’t already been on the floor, he would have fallen there.
Joey lay less than six feet away. Mouth slack, blind eyes open, skin white as only the dead can be, stinking of death.
And Tim had killed him.
Gotta get out of here.
After a struggle he got to his hands and knees and from there to his feet. The pain made him whine like a whipped puppy, but there was no one to comfort him. He staggered toward the back door, the one that led to an alley. From there it was just a few more alleys over, and he would be home.
It felt like miles of walking naked over burning coals, only the fire was in his chest rather than his feet. All that kept him going was the same animal will to survive that had made him team up with Socks in the first place. In jail, if you didn’t have a strong buddy, you were everybody’s bitch.
It was pretty much the same on the outside.
He fell on his hands and knees again when he reached his mama’s back door. Opening it, he went full length onto her kitchen floor.
Miranda shrieked before she realized that the intruder was her son. “Timmy! Oh, my God! What happened?”
“Shot.” He flopped over on his back and passed out.
Even Tim’s wild Hawaiian shirt couldn’t entirely hide the spreading patch of blood. With a sobbing prayer, Miranda went to her knees. The one joy of her life was lying bleeding on her kitchen floor.
“Timmy?” she cried.
He didn’t answer. His breathing was hoarse.
The world went cold and very clear around her. Without hesitation she went to the phone and dialed the number she never wanted to remember and never could forget. When someone answered, she didn’t waste any words.
Very quickly she was put through to the man at the top. She didn’t waste any words with him either.
“Your son has been shot. Send help to my house
now.
”
Las Vegas
November 3
Afternoon
A
lmost reluctantly Risa
watched her office door close behind the smiling Smith-White. With quick, ripping motions she stripped off her exam gloves and fired them into the nearest wastebasket. She wasn’t looking forward to what was coming next, but it had to be done.
“You do realize that you have just spent two-point-four-seven million dollars on goods you can’t exhibit?” she asked Shane.
“Plus the ten thousand no-questions-asked reward, and who says I can’t exhibit them?”
“I do.” She held a palm out as though pushing him away. “No. Don’t interrupt. You hired me to advise you, and now you’ll damn well listen to what I say. The provenance Smith-White offered is a joke. A bad one.”
Expressionless, Shane looked at the provenance Smith-White had provided for the incredible gold artifacts. “Purchased from an unnamed South African private collector during World War I by another private collector, James Madison, an American on a world tour. Said transaction not validated by paper but by recollection of Madison’s great-grandson, who sold the gold to J. E. Shapiro last week to cover a gambling debt. Shapiro sold it to William Covington, who sold it to Smith-White. All three recent transactions duly recorded.”
“Do you believe that?”
“What do you think?”
“I think I want an answer!”
Shane smiled slightly. “I’m sure you do. So do I. Until we find out who is going to answer first, plan for a trip to Rarities ASAP. I want these artifacts put through every scientific wringer they have. I’ll leave it to you to sort out what we can of their stylistic history. Tell Dana that we want special care with the photos they take. One of them is likely to be the cover for the Druid Gold exhibit catalog.”
“You call Dana.” Risa’s eyes were narrowed, furious. “I quit.”
Shane’s dark brows lifted. “Everybody will assume you slept with me.”
“So my reputation as Ice Goddess takes a hit. So what? Better that than being linked in print with stolen goods.”
“Prove it.”
“I will, just as soon as I can afford a full Rarities search on the objects.”
“You’ll have to be working for me for that to happen,” Shane pointed out with a thin smile. “Rarities won’t look at shit for you unless you own said shit and request its examination by them.”
Risa wanted to scream. He was right.
Damn him.
“However,” he added, throwing Smith-White’s record of past sales on her desk, “if you’re still working for me, you won’t have to pay for a thing. And you can always quit later, when you have the very proof that I will have thoughtfully, and at great expense, gathered for you.”
Risa had the uneasy feeling that Shane was both laughing at her and pleased that she was willing to quit over provenance. “I don’t get it.”
“You will. That’s a promise.”
“If I don’t, my resignation will be retroactive to this moment.”
“Agreed. Now, call Dana.”
Risa was reaching for the phone when it rang. She picked it up and said curtly, “Sheridan.”
“This is security at the front desk. Ms. Cherelle Faulkner would like us to make another key for her. Apparently she lost hers.”
“Some things never change,” Risa muttered, thinking of her friend’s lifelong lack of interest in keeping track of keys and other small things. “Make her another key.”
“Should I change the electronic combination?”
“Hell,” Risa said through her teeth. The last thing she needed right now was to be running around getting new keys for her own apartment every time Cherelle lost another one. “No. Same combination.”
As she hung up, she met Shane’s questioning green eyes. She could see that he wanted to know what was going on, but she was out of patience with him, herself, and the world. Worse, there was no short explanation for Cherelle, lost keys, and an old friend’s bittersweet presence in Risa’s Golden Fleece apartment.
“I don’t have time to go into it now,” Risa said as she punched in Dana’s number.
“Later, then.”
She moved her shoulders, trying to loosen knots tied by Cherelle and guilt and impatience and stolen gold. She really didn’t want to talk about it.
Any of it.
“Risa?” Shane pressed.
“Sure. Later. Whatever,” she muttered as she gripped the phone. “No, not you, Dana. My boss. Sorry.”
Shane listened while Risa set up an immediate courier delivery of the four gold objects for a complete Rarities search. But it wasn’t gold he was thinking of. It was Risa’s unwillingness to talk about the woman whose tab was at $9,678.23 and counting.
It was one thing to give an opportunist like Cherelle Faulkner a place to stay and permission to play with the charge account. It was quite another to give her the key to the Golden Fleece’s secure floors.
Las Vegas
November 3
Afternoon
C
herelle smiled at
the earnest young man behind the guest-services section of the front desk. It was the kind of smile that was guaranteed to raise male blood pressure and hope, among other things. Though balancing packages in both arms, she still managed to caress the hairy fingers that were holding out her new key.
“Thanks, sugah,” she said as she took the key.
“Let me help you up with your packages.”
“Oh, I can’t take you away from your work.” She brightened her smile and backed away before he could point out that helping guests
was
his job. “But I’ll be sure and look you up the next time I come in from shopping.”
“You sure?”
“It’s a big ol’ promise,” she said over her shoulder.
The instant she turned away from the man at the desk, her smile vanished. She knew that Socks would be after her. She just didn’t know how soon he’d be in any shape to stake out the Golden Fleece and watch for her.
Before I rang his chimes, I should have asked him what he did to Tim,
she thought bitterly.
Then I could have called the cops and sicced them on Socks.
Too late now. Oh, she still could call the cops and report a missing person and mention Socks as the last one who’d seen Tim alive, but the cops wouldn’t do dick until two days or two weeks had passed. That was way too late to do her any good.
Unless a body turned up.
Cherelle’s rapid steps jerked, then steadied. She wanted to believe that Socks wouldn’t kill his old jailhouse buddy, but she hadn’t believed in fairy tales since . . .
Never.
She had always seen pretty stories for the con they were.
Here’s some candy, little girl. Get in my car and we’ll take a nice little ride. Oh, yeah, baby, I love you.
If Tim was still alive, he would just have to take care of himself. The candy he handed out was great, the ride had been the best she ever had, and whining about losing either one was a waste of time she didn’t have. Besides, maybe he was fine and just hiding until she cooled off.
And maybe dogs shit diamonds.
She pushed thoughts about Tim away to the dark corners of her mind. With the gestures that had quickly become routine, she balanced packages, keyed elevators and doors, and hurried down hallways until she reached Risa’s apartment.
Even as worried as she was, she still felt a spurt of surprise laced with pleasure that she was actually walking into a place with city views, plush carpets, vivid colors, a bathroom you could host a football team in, and not a lick of work to be done by her except to enjoy it all. No cleaning, no cooking, no laundry, no picking up Tim’s crap, no cracked bathroom floors laced with black slime, and no cockroaches crawling out of rusty drains.
No cocaine either. She hadn’t had time to make a connection. Yet even without blow, living here for a day sure had been fun. Too bad it was over. But it was.
She dumped her packages on the bed and began going through them with quick, raking fingers. Short brown wig. Sports bra guaranteed to turn mountains into molehills. Golden Fleece T-shirt, triple-X large. Really baggy jeans. A variety of nylon security pouches. Tennis shoes. Oversized man’s heavy nylon windbreaker. Enough safety pins to hold up a building. Baseball cap and generic sunglasses. Big maternity cushion.
The last item made her snicker. She would bet every bit of gold she owned that she was the first woman to boost a “full-term” pad from a maternity-store dressing room.
With one eye on the clock, Cherelle emptied out her two suitcases. She jammed all she owned except the gold into one of Risa’s nifty little suitcase trolleys. Everything fit but the big lime green purse. With a stab of regret, she tossed it aside. She couldn’t carry it openly. Even someone as dumb as Socks would recognize that purse if he saw it again, no matter what the woman looked like who was carrying it.
Carefully she wrapped each of the gold pieces in toilet paper so that they wouldn’t clank. Then she put the objects into the various nylon pouches that had been designed to carry cash, credit cards, and small jewelry against a person’s body and away from pickpockets. Safety pins flashed as she fastened straps to other straps, pouches to other pouches, and straps to neighboring pouches.
By the time she was satisfied, she had rearranged the gold around herself five different times and was down to her last card of safety pins. Carrying all the gold on her body was turning out to be a big ol’ bitch of a job. Even after she took out the two heaviest gold pieces and hung them under her arms, she still waddled instead of walked. When she finally had everything strapped into place, she felt like a mule and looked like a burrito.
“How do they do it?” she muttered, balancing her weight over her hips by leaning slightly back. “Pregnant women gain, like, fifty pounds and still walk around. Shit, I’m not carrying near that much and I’m staggering.”
She jiggled up and down experimentally. Nothing clanked. Everything stayed put, more or less. After a last jiggle she grabbed the maternity cushion and strapped it on over all the lumps.
The jeans barely fit over her bizarre “pregnancy,” but the tough denim helped to keep everything in place, especially after she used the last of her pins. She yanked the sports bra on, swore, and shifted herself cautiously until the bra stopped pinching and the gold stopped biting her tender underarms. The gaudy black and gold T-shirt hid a multitude of strange bulges. So did the blue nylon shell.
Five minutes in the bathroom took care of all her makeup and got the wig pulled into place. She dumped her huge leather purse upside down on the bed. Driver’s license, car keys, cash, cell phone—all went into the jacket pockets. The rest went into the trolley.
She settled the baseball cap gently into place over the wig and her own hair stuffed up beneath it. The hat was almost as gaudy as the casino shirt, but she wasn’t going for invisible. She just didn’t want to look like a well-dressed blonde with great tits.
Two more minutes at the mirror assured her that nothing showed that wasn’t supposed to. She grinned at herself in the glass and then laughed out loud. There was nothing she liked more than conning the dumbs.
Too bad Risa couldn’t come along for the fun, but her old friend would just have to do what Cherelle was doing.
Take care of herself.