Running Scared (21 page)

Las Vegas

November 3

Afternoon

A
ll the way down
the hall to her apartment, Risa told herself she was dragging her feet because she was tired, not because she simply didn’t feel up to a second night of playing Remember When with Cherelle. The shared memories only made the present distance between herself and her friend more obvious, more painful.

The discreet magnetic card that requested no service please was stuck on the door above the lock to Risa’s room. She let out a relieved breath. If her luck held, Cherelle would either be out shopping or adrift in another sea of bubble bath. Whichever, Risa would have a chance to get her second wind before she had to be sociable.

For the space of several breaths she stood and savored the quiet elegance of the carpeted hall, the fragrance of fresh flowers in their bronzed wall niches, and the gilded yet simple frames of the botanical drawings that dotted the long, peaceful hall. But she couldn’t put off going inside forever. With a muted sigh she shrugged out of her sensible business jacket, kicked off her high heels, tucked everything under one arm, and slipped her key into the lock.

“Cherelle?” she called out from the doorway. “It’s just me. Don’t—” Her words stopped abruptly. “My God, what happened?”

Everything had been ripped apart. The contents of drawers, cupboards, closets—everything that could be lifted and thrown had been. The mess was incredible.

She started to call out to Cherelle again before old habits of fear kicked in. Her friend might have had a fit and trashed the place, but not likely. Which meant that someone else had been here.

Might still be here.

Waiting.

Risa started to spin away. She wasn’t fast enough. A thick hand closed around her wrist and yanked her through the doorway into her own apartment. The door started to close automatically, only to hang up on the shoes and jacket she had dropped when he grabbed her.

“Where is it?” the man demanded through the opening in his black ski mask.

“Where is what?”

Socks glared at the pale lady with the big blue eyes and trembling lips. What did she think he was, stupid? “The gold,” he snarled. “Where’s the fucking gold!”

“I think you’ve mixed me up with someone else. The only gold I know about is locked in the casino’s safe along with—”

Fingers closed like steel cables around her wrist. “The gold she got from that geezer in Sedona.”

Risa wanted to think she was in the grip of a madman wearing surgeon’s gloves and a ski mask. She had a sickening, spreading fear that he wasn’t crazy. He was mad, period, as in furious. “Look, I’ll be glad to help you find whatever you lost—”

“The bitch stole it,” Socks cut in. “I didn’t lose it. What kind of dumb fuck loses millions in gold?”

“Which bitch?” Risa asked, and prayed she was wrong.

“Cherelle Faulkner, who else? You know any other dumb bitches that live here?”

Just me,
Risa thought bitterly.

“So where is it?” he demanded.

“If you could describe what she took,” Risa said with aching control, “I might be able to help you.”

Socks looked the offer over from all sides, searching for hidden traps. While he was at it, he looked his captive over, too. She was worth the effort. Classy but not a stick. Really nice tits under that loose shirt. Hard to tell about the ass under her straight dark skirt, but it showed promise. Too bad his dick wasn’t up to that kind of workout yet.

Risa didn’t like the greasy, dark-eyed appraisal. She had seen it in too many men’s eyes once she grew breasts. But none of her fear or disgust showed. That was another thing she had learned as a kid. Show emotion, especially fear, and you’re dead meat.

“Are you Cherelle’s man?” Risa asked, trying to get his eyes back up above her collarbone.

Anger and something a lot darker tightened his mouth. “I coulda been, but the bitch stole my gold.”

Risa wondered if that had been before or after he had swiped Cherelle’s key to the Golden Fleece’s secure apartments, and what had happened to Cherelle and her new key in the meantime. But those were questions Risa wasn’t going to ask.

She might not like the answers.

But no matter where Cherelle was now and in what condition, Risa couldn’t help anyone until she got free of this jerk in the explosive Hawaiian shirt and scary ski mask. Gently, very gently, she tested the man’s grip on her wrist. Not as tight as it had been. The fact that cold sweat was slicking her skin helped.

“What kind of gold?” she asked. “Coins? Jewelry? Watches?”

“I didn’t see all of it.”

Risa didn’t point out that if he hadn’t seen the gold, how could it be his? Her captor might not have been particularly bright, but he was plenty strong.

Just like the old days,
Risa thought savagely.
My brains against their brawn.

“Can you describe what you did see of the gold?” she asked, letting a subtle whine creep into her voice. “I really want to help you, mister, but I can’t unless you tell me what you’re looking for.”

Socks frowned. “Well, there was two little statues that looked like a dog or a buck or something. Then some freaky kind of pin. And an armband that was pretty cool. Looked kind of like a skull. The other stuff must have been the same.”

Risa’s stomach turned over, then clenched. It couldn’t be a coincidence.

And it sure explained why Cherelle had been interested in Risa’s work for the first time in memory.

“Cherelle stole those from you?” Risa asked.

“Yeah, and a bunch of others.”

“A bunch,” Risa said neutrally, yet her head was spinning.
Jesus, Joseph, and Mary. There are more Celtic artifacts.

The thought was staggering, but she was careful not to show it. Instead, she let her voice and her words slide backward into the time when she and Cherelle prowled their rural world like healthy young animals, a time when men like this one were all too common in the girls’ lives.

“So . . . a bunch,” she said. “Is that a big ol’ bunch or just-a-few-more-than-four kind of bunch?”

Brawny fingers tightened on her wrist again. “What do you care how many?”

“Jeez, I’m just trying to help. If it’s one or two, then she might have left them in the powder room in my office. If it’s a big ol’ bunch, then they’re somewhere else.”

“From what Tim said, there gotta be at least twenty.”

Holy Mary, Mother of God.
“Okay. A big ol’ bunch, so we forget the powder room in my office.” She made a show of looking around the shambles that was her apartment. “I’m thinking she didn’t leave them here or you’d have found them.”

“Unless you got some secret place?”

“Is that what she told you?”

“Bitch wasn’t here.”

Relief flickered through Risa. Cherelle wasn’t somewhere underneath all the mess, hurt or beaten or worse.

“I don’t have a secret place except . . .” Risa let her voice trail off. It was a long shot, but sometimes you didn’t have any choice but to bet the odds that the game handed you.

Socks jerked on her wrist hard enough to stagger her. “Where?”

“Downstairs in the public restroom by the auditoriums.”

“Huh? Why’d ya use a dumb-ass place like that?”

She shrugged. “It works.”

Socks muttered and looked around again. No inspiration came. He lifted his big shirt enough to show her the butt of a gun. “Don’t get wise with me.”

She swallowed hard. “Hey, I’m with you on this, okay? No need to get snake mean.”

“Just so you know.”

He shouldered her out the apartment door. Side by side, her wrist clamped in his fingers, they walked to the elevator. He had an odd hitch in his stride. Not quite a limp, not quite a roll. More like a creaky old man than a young one.

But there was nothing weak about the grip on her wrist.

She prayed that whoever was on “God” duty at the cameras would be experienced enough to understand that if some guard barged in right now with his gun blazing, a lot of people would get hurt.

And Risa would be first.

Getting caught in that kind of crossfire was a guaranteed trip to the emergency room. Or the morgue.

It took her three tries to get the passkey into the tiny slot near the elevator. Her hand wasn’t as steady as it had been before Bozo the Hawaiian Clown had grabbed her.

When the door opened, he crowded her in and watched while she punched buttons with fingers that were a breath away from shaking too much to be useful. What was making her really nervous now was the fear that he would spot the discreet camera in the elevator ceiling and panic. Being locked alone in a falling metal box with a twitchy gunman wasn’t her idea of fun—and that was exactly what would happen if she triggered any of the obvious or subtle alarms on the elevator panel.

As the elevator slowed, the man yanked off his mask and stuffed it in his back pocket. She was careful not to look at him. There was no point. The cameras could do a better job and not make him nervous.

When the doors finally opened on the lobby floor and Risa stepped out, she wasn’t a whole lot happier than she had been in the elevator. She didn’t want her captor to go nuclear in the middle of the crowded casino. What she needed was a distraction, just a second or two, just long enough to wrench her sweaty wrist free and run for cover.

Across the room a long buffet line of hungry tourists waited for the chance to spend fifteen dollars each for a place at the all-you-can-eat trough that was one of the Golden Fleece’s big attractions. To either side of the room the flash and glitter and strike-it-rich noise of the slots called out a siren song of instant wealth. The loudest—and best-paying—slots were parked near the street doors of the Golden Fleece, where everyone who came inside would be tempted to drop a little change into the pretty machines that seemed to pay off every third roll. And then drop a little more money farther inside the casino, and a little more at the tables, and then a little more . . .

Gotcha.

The slots were Risa’s target, but not the high-traffic ones. She wanted the less popular slots, where only the bleary-eyed and dedicated pumped smudged coins into the Las Vegas equivalent of a cosmic black hole. At the end of the row of quiet slots were the two auditoriums, closed now between shows. Between the auditoriums was a restroom that the employees called the Maze because people got lost in it so often. There was a west door and a south door to the restroom, but almost nobody read the signs on the way in, so they found themselves in the wrong area of the casino when they came out.

Risa was counting on her captor being one of the people who didn’t read. If he wasn’t, at least she might get a chance to body-slam him against one of the vacant slots. Then she could get away without endangering crowds of people.

Socks looked at the icon on the bathroom door. A skirt. “Where the hell do you think you’re going?”

“To look for the gold.” Risa gave him a clear-eyed glance and prayed she hadn’t lost the skills Cherelle had taught her. Among them was how to lie: always meet their eyes. “Just like I told you. There’s a big ol’ vanity in there with a drawer she could have—”

“But that’s a women’s can!” Socks cut in.

“She wouldn’t hide it in the men’s, now, would she?”

Socks chewed on that. “You got one minute to get back with the gold. Then I’m going to come in there and beat the shit out of you. And forget hiding in the stalls. I’m onto that bitch trick.”

A look at Socks’s flat, dark eyes told Risa that a minute was fifty-nine seconds more than he wanted to give her.

Sixty seconds wasn’t much, but it was better than what she had now.

The instant his grip loosened on her wrist, she shot through the fancy gilt doors. By the time the doors closed behind her, she was sprinting toward the west entrance to the bathroom. She had only one thought—getting to the nearest employee elevator without attracting any attention, closing the doors behind her, and hitting all the alarms at once.

She went out the other door with a long-legged stride that was almost as fast as a run and attracted a hell of a lot less attention.

She might have made it all the way to the elevator if one of the slots hadn’t hit a big one just as she got close to it. Like everyone else in the place, Socks turned to look at the lucky jackpot winner. The first thing he saw was Risa quickstepping away from him.

“Hey!” he yelled, yanking out his gun.

Risa knew the layout of the casino by heart. The bozo in the Hawaiian shirt was between her and the doors leading to the street. The closest employee elevator was through the heart of the baccarat and craps tables, which lay like obstacles directly across her path.

At least the action was light around the tables now.

She hiked her skirt above her hips and ran flat out. Forget about going around. She vaulted up onto a craps table and then down the other side, darted between two other tables, missed her next vault, and scattered baccarat bets, bettors, and dealers in every direction. The fact that she was yelling the whole time—“He’s got a gun! Get down! Get out of the way!”—might have had something to do with the near absence of people in front of her.

Socks’s first shot shattered a slot machine. His second one gouged a fist-size hunk from a craps table. His third exploded a drink glass on the baccarat table Risa had just hurtled over. She cut right and vanished behind steel ranks of slots.

“Fuck!”
he snarled.

He might not have been an IQ wonder, but he was plenty street-smart. He knew if he wanted to spend the next few years of his life smoking crack and screwing women, he had to leave.

Fast.

With surprising speed for a man who had trouble standing up all the way straight, he turned and raced for the front doors. People ran in all directions to clear a path for him. None of the casino guards fired their weapons, because their orders from Shane—and the Las Vegas PD—in situations like this had been direct and unmistakable: don’t put civilians in danger.

Before the first sirens started screaming toward the Golden Fleece, Socks was sitting in his purple baby, sweating and breathing hard. His abused crotch ached like a bitch. So did his head from trying to think. But no matter how hard he thought, he couldn’t see any way to get to the gold. One gun just wasn’t enough.