Authors: Elizabeth Lowell
Las Vegas
November 5
7:00 a.m.
G
nawing on the inside
of her mouth, Cherelle sat in the middle of the unmade bed and stared at the television. She had gone through a whole cycle of news promos and ads for breath mints, “sexergizers,” and gambling tips. Other than running the tape of Socks busting through the Golden Fleece and saying that the police had identified him as Cesar Firenze Marquez, nephew of the CEO and part-owner of Roman Circus, John Firenze, who was cooperating with police in the search for his nephew, the news had nothing to say about the apprehension and lockup of Socks.
“Well, shit,” Cherelle said.
She dragged her fingers through her hair so she wouldn’t have to look at their fine trembling. She wanted some crack. She wanted it bad. Not that she was hooked. She could take it or leave it.
Right now she wanted to take it.
Problem was, she wouldn’t have any money to get crack unless she hit another jackpot, sold her ass on a street corner, or Socks got nailed so she could sell the gold without falling on her face from looking over her shoulder the whole time.
“How many cops does it take to find one stupid asshole?” she asked.
The TV cut back to the judges of the Santa Claus bikini contest. They had big hair and tits like rocket ships, probably used to find out if a man had any working equipment under his big belly.
“You dumb bitches! Give me some news! Tell me the cops took him down!”
Somebody in the room next door pounded on the wall and yelled at her to
shut-the-fuck-up.
Cherelle came off the bed like a tiger and started to heave the lamp at the wall. All that stopped her was that the lamp was nailed to the bedside table. Cursing, she yanked until her nails were bloody. Then she caught a glimpse of herself in the dresser mirror. At first she didn’t recognize the woman with the pale, sweating face and dull hair standing out in all directions. Then she did.
Christ Jesus. I look like some whacked-out crackhead. That isn’t me!
She stopped pulling at the lamp. Carefully she smoothed her hair down and forced her breathing to level.
“It’s okay, mama-chick. You’ll do fine. You always do. Take a big ol’ shower. Get some coffee. Some food. Maybe a beer or two. If they haven’t caught the dumb fuck by then, he’s left town, and you don’t need to worry no more.”
Nothing answered her words but an earnest middle-aged man on the TV, telling her that her sexual troubles were over. No prescriptions. No harsh chemicals, just Mother Nature’s own—
The shower came on, drowning out everything else for Cherelle but the gnawing need to sell the gold and get a little crack.
Not much. Just a little.
Just enough to take the edge off.
Las Vegas
November 5
7:00 a.m.
H
ands empty, Shane
leaned against his car. As soon as he’d seen that the woman wasn’t Cherelle, he put the briefcase full of money into the trunk and locked it. He would have turned around and driven off, but the closer he got to the Bronco, the more his instincts were reminded of how it had felt at Virgil’s house.
Only stronger.
Almost as strong as when he’d picked up the first of Smith-White’s offerings and felt time peeling away like smoke in a hard wind and he was standing in an oak grove with the moon in his face and a solid gold knife in his hands.
“No gold until I see the money,” the woman said for maybe the sixth time.
Though she was dressed like a tart in crotch-length black skirt and half-unbuttoned see-through blouse, Shane knew she wasn’t in the business of selling herself. He couldn’t have said why he was so certain, but he was. Right clothes, wrong everything else.
“Lady, you can huff and puff all you like,” Shane said. “You aren’t Cherelle. Your Bronco has Nevada rental plates. That’s two big strikes against you. Until I see the gold, you don’t see the money.” He looked at his watch. “Fifty seconds more and I’m gone.”
“There are other markets for—”
“Forty-five,” he cut in calmly. He’d heard it all from her before. It hadn’t impressed him the first time. It was downright tiresome the fifth time.
Body armor itched in awkward places.
The woman looked at his stone green eyes and discovered what many another player had—Shane Tannahill didn’t give away anything he didn’t want to. She could pick up the cards he dealt or she could get out of the game.
With a hissing curse, she turned on her four-inch platform shoes and swung her hips hard all the way to the back of the Bronco. She yanked open the cargo door, reached inside, and unzipped the lid of a small suitcase.
“Okay, big man,” she said. “Drag ass over here and take a look.”
None of Shane’s relief showed as he slowly straightened and reached into his pocket for exam gloves. He hadn’t expected the woman to be so stubborn about not showing the artifacts; it had made him wonder if this might be some kind of scam after all. If it hadn’t been for the prickling along his nerves that reminded him of a dead man’s gold, he would have been long gone from the parking lot.
He wondered if the cops had found Virgil’s body yet. If so, it hadn’t made the Vegas news. But then, there was no reason it should. Lots of old folks died every day. Some of them were murdered. There probably hadn’t been enough left of the corpse to determine yet if Virgil had died on his own or had a big shove off into the night.
“You coming?” she asked.
Casually Shane snapped the gloves into place, walked the few steps to the back of the Bronco, and glanced into the open cargo door.
Gold glowed against red velvet as though lit from within.
The woman started to move closer.
Shane stepped away. “Give me room. Or do you really think I’m going to grab and run?”
The woman hesitated before she backed up a few steps. Her glance moved restlessly over the parking lot before darting back to him.
He shifted position so he could keep an eye on her as well as the gold. He was vulnerable to attack while he examined the gold, but his greatest danger was when she saw the money. If she had any confederates parked around the lot, that was when they would act.
Though everything in Shane yearned to savor the artifacts like a fine, rare wine, he held each piece for only a few moments. The torc was magnificent, heavy, shimmering with power. Two brooches, each as extraordinary as the one he’d purchased from Smith-White. Each with a current of power. The figurines were obviously part of a fertility ritual. A golden phallus and an impressively potent bull.
And a ring like the one he wore.
He knew it would fit on Risa’s hand. Perfectly. It was all he could do to put the ring down.
Fingers tingling, Shane zipped up the suitcase and moved back. “Where did you get these?”
She laughed derisively. “Where do you think?”
“I don’t know. That’s why I’m asking.”
“Cherelle had them. She sold them to me. I’m selling them to you. You want paperwork, you don’t buy shit in parking lots.”
Without a word Shane went to his own car, unlocked the trunk, and opened his own suitcase. Bundles of used hundred-dollar bills filled it. He gestured to the woman and backed up to give her room.
She bent over and riffled through five bundles at random in the manner of someone who is used to judging stacks of money. Then she closed the suitcase, picked it up, and turned to him.
“Looks good to me,” she said, and headed for her vehicle.
Shane took her suitcase out of the Bronco and laid it in his open trunk.
As he closed the lid, the woman grabbed a gun from the side pocket of the Bronco’s door. When she spun toward him, the sun flashed on a very modern kind of gold.
“FBI, Tannahill,” she said, showing him her shield. “You’re under arrest for receiving stolen property.”
Las Vegas
November 5
Afternoon
C
herelle had gnawed
at her mouth until beer stung like iodine whenever she took a drink. Crumpled cans lay in front of the TV, losers in a drinker’s demolition derby. No matter how many empties she threw at the screen, the newsreaders still kept silent on the subject of the apprehension of Cesar “Socks” Firenze Marquez.
She hesitated, scowled at Gail Silverado’s number, and decided Socks must have headed out of town. Even if he hadn’t, he was too dumb to find a smart one like her. All she had to do was swap the gold for money, shake the dust of this losing city forever, and find a new place where mirrors didn’t show her something out of a freak show.
It took ten minutes and five levels of assistants, but she finally got through to the big lady herself.
“Ms. Silverado, I’m told you like buying gold before Shane Tannahill can.”
“Depends on the gold.”
“You can see for yourself tonight. Seventeen pieces.”
“Will Shane be there?”
“His curator will be.” Cherelle smiled and rolled the word on her tongue again. “This meeting is just for chicks.”
“Who else?”
“Just the two of you. And me.”
“Who are you?” Gail said, her tone irritated and interested at the same time.
“Someone who has a suitcase full of fancy Celtic gold. Minimum bid is one million cash, used bills.”
Gail laughed. “Well, you don’t lack balls. Give me a number. I’ll call you after I check with my bank.”
“I’ll call you in an hour. Be there or Tannahill gets it all.”
Las Vegas
November 5
Afternoon
R
ich Morrison opened
the office door himself and gave Gail a kiss on her softly powdered cheek.
“Lovely of you to come by with a surprise for my wife,” he said for the benefit of his executive assistant, who was fading back into the wallpaper in the adjoining office.
“You only celebrate this kind of occasion once,” Gail said easily, kissing his cheek in turn.
The door shut with an expensive-sounding click behind her.
“Bet half of Vegas thinks we’re having an affair,” she said, tossing the gold-foiled box of candy onto the nearest chair.
“Half of Vegas would be right. The other half.”
Laughing, she stepped back. “A woman called about twenty minutes ago. She has seventeen pieces of Celtic gold to sell to me or Shane Tannahill. Wants one million. Cash. Used bills.”
Rich’s eyebrows lifted. “Interesting. She give a name?”
“What do you think?”
“No.”
“I can go five hundred thousand without setting off alarms from my investors,” Gail said, “but no more. Shane can go the whole way twice and give me change. You want him bad enough to spend half a million of your own money?”
“Yes.”
“That fast, huh? Don’t even have to call your money men?”
“They’re waiting to wash eight hundred million a year through here. We skim ten percent for the service. You’re good at numbers. You do the math.”
“Okay, half a million is chump change for them. But not for me. I’ll need the money by tonight.”
“Early or late?”
“She didn’t say. She’ll call back with the particulars.”
“I’ll send someone as soon as the money is packed. Used bills, I trust?”
“It’s all I’d be comfortable with.”
He smiled. “You’ll have the money in two hours, maximum. Anything else?”
She gave him a sideways glance from under her thick lashes. “What do you have?”
“More than you have time to enjoy.” Then he smiled wryly. “Hell, Silver. It’s too late for us now.”
“Haven’t you heard? Take a pill and turn into a teenager.”
“New wives aren’t that easy to find.”
“Especially ones with the kind of political connections you need.”
“Especially not them,” he agreed.
“You going to be our next governor?”
“I’d prefer a position with more power.”
“Senator?”
He shook his head.
“C’mon, Rich. You’re not going for president, are you?”
“I like Nevada too well. I think I’d make a very good head of the Gaming Control Board, don’t you?”
She whistled. “Can you take the background check?”
“Of course.”
“Talk about the fox guarding the henhouse . . .” Gail snickered, then laughed aloud.
She was still chuckling when she shut the office door behind her.
Las Vegas
November 5
Afternoon
D
own the center
of the table, resting on what looked like unused Halloween napkins, six gold artifacts lay, gleaming condensations of time and human dreams. Shane felt their presence like a sigh just below the level of hearing, a breath moving softly over his skin.
Minus handcuffs, he and the artifacts waited in an anonymous room in an anonymous government building two miles and worlds away from the Golden Fleece. The furniture was turn-of-the-century waiting room—steel frames, worn battleship-gray seat cushions, metal conference table, a water dispenser in the corner, a plastic wastebasket half full of paper coffee cups. No rug, no telephone, no computer, and no windows.
Two people who had declined to give him a name or a badge number had taken turns trying to get him to agree to handing over the four pieces of gold already in his possession on the grounds that they, too, clearly had been stolen from the same source as the six he’d been arrested for buying this morning.
Other than noting to himself that the Rarities search for the source of the gold artifacts was attracting all kinds of sharks, Shane ignored the questions—and the questioners—until they gave up and left. They were only place-holders until the real power arrived. He knew it even if they didn’t.
Finally, too late, a pattern had become very clear to Shane. Now all that remained was to figure out what his losses were and then cut them without having to give up the gold.
His lawyers were somewhere in the building raising hell with everyone who might have the power to get Shane released. Other lawyers were on the phone raising hell with lawyers in Washington, D.C., who would in turn raise hell with whatever government officials might get the job done.
Because no charges had been filed, it was hard for Shane’s lawyers to get any action. According to the only paperwork available, he had come to the building “voluntarily.” If that meant he’d agreed to come to the building and talk to government-issue employees instead of being formally booked, locked in a cell, and communicating with his lawyers through a speaker in a glass wall, then Shane had indeed volunteered to be a temporary guest of Uncle Sam.
The door opened. A petite woman with black hair, measuring black eyes, and the absolute confidence of a tiger walked into the room. And like a tiger, she was as deadly as she was beautiful. She shut the door behind her. Though she wasn’t wearing a name tag, he knew who she was.
“Hello, April Joy,” Shane said. “I was wondering if you would show up personally.”
April gave him a tiger-measuring-prey look that said he would wish she had stayed on the West Coast. Crossing her arms over her chest, she leaned against the door and simply stared at him for the space of a slow ten count.
“It would have been much easier on all of us if you’d agreed to work with me the first time you were contacted,” she said.
“About the gold?” He knew what her answer would be, but he needed to hear the words. He had overlooked too much in his obsession with the upcoming Druid Gold show.
And with Risa.
April dismissed the gold with a wave of her elegant hand. “The Red Phoenix laundry is all I care about.”
Bingo.
With his fingertip Shane touched the gold ring in the center of the table. The outer runes called upon gods more Nordic than Welsh to protect the wearer. The inner symbols were purely Celtic, speaking silently of gods who bent to listen to the Druid king. His own ring had ogham symbols on the outside, Celtic on the inside. He would have bet his life that both rings had once belonged to people who had the power of earthly gods.
“The two agents who took turns on me cared about the gold,” Shane pointed out.
“Their problem. I don’t care except inasmuch as the Brits are leaning on D.C. to repatriate it. If Uncle decides to pass the bad cess down the line to my department, you’ll hear about it from me until hell won’t have it.”
He half smiled. “I don’t doubt it.”
“Then why are you being such a prick?”
He gave her the other half of the smile in a flash of white that did nothing to soften the stone green of his eyes. “I learned it at my daddy’s knee.”
“If you think being Bastard Merit’s kid will get you out of this, think again. You’re swimming alone in the shit. When we made a courtesy call, he said you were fair game and he didn’t even want to hear about it.”
“That’s my daddy.”
April tilted her head to the side. In her years working for various departments of the floating alphabet soup that was Uncle’s way of sliding under Congress’s radar, she had taken apart some dudes who thought they were the toughest men ever to swing their balls when they walked. Before she finished with them, they were boys looking for Mama. She liked to think it would be that easy with Shane Tannahill.
Experience told her it wouldn’t.
She looked at her watch, muttered a few carefully selected phrases in Cantonese, and decided to save everybody some time. She looked at the gold, then at Shane. “Are you working for Rarities on this one?”
“I’m self-employed.”
Black eyes narrowed. “Okay, tough guy. Is Rarities working for
you
on the gold?”
“Why do you care?”
“If you were a tenth as dirty as your reputation, Dana Gaynor wouldn’t touch you with fire tongs. When it comes to her core customers, she is one very picky bitch.”
This time Shane’s smile went all the way to his eyes. “That she is. She has even been known to sidestep Uncle Sam on occasion.”
April waited.
He got his pen out of the pocket of the green wind shell and began walking the slim gold cylinder over his fingers.
She leaned harder against the wall and kept waiting.
Click
as gold met gold. Silence.
Click.
Silence.
“Basically,” he said after a time, “you don’t have enough on me to stick up a fly’s ass.”
Click.
“In order to prove that I was receiving stolen goods, you have to prove that the goods were stolen in the first place. You can’t.”
“You seem real sure of that.”
Click.
“I am.”
“You don’t think they were stolen?”
“When? Last year? A hundred years ago? A thousand? Two thousand?”
“I’ll let the lawyers dance on that pinhead. Meanwhile, you can help me out or you can spend time in jail while everyone does the dance.”
“I’d be out on OR before you were back on the West Coast.”
“On the gold, yes. On money laundering? Uh-uh, slick. You’d do some time. I’m the head of the interdepartmental task force that’s been working to bring the triads down.”
“So that’s where the FBI came in.”
She showed him a curve of hard white teeth.
“I don’t launder money, and you know it,” Shane said.
“I thought I did. Then a little birdy did the tweet-tweet thing in my ear, and I went and got a piece of paper from a judge that says I can vet your casino computers right down to the last byte.”
“Be my guest.”
April smiled. It made her looks even more striking, more intense. “That’s what Dana said you would say. So suppose you and I will make a little bet, slick. You show me your computers without benefit of the search warrant. If you’re clean, I’ll bow out and let the lawyers dance, and you’ll be home in an hour. If you’re not clean, I’ll bury the evidence—if you’ll help me set up a sting that will shut down the Red Phoenix casino laundry before it really gets going in Vegas.”
It didn’t take Shane two seconds to get to the bottom line. “I’m out of here now. The gold goes with me. Not negotiable.”
April didn’t like it, but she had expected it. She straightened from the door and reached for the handle. “All right. Let’s go.”
“Not quite yet.”
She turned so quickly that her cranberry-colored jacket flared out. “What.”
It wasn’t a question.
“Since I’m being such a generous and helpful citizen,” he said, “one who isn’t even yelling about false arrest on top of entrapment, I think Uncle should give me something in return.”
“A gold medal? Lunch in the Rose Garden with the Secret Service passing the salt?”
“Nothing that fancy. I just want Uncle on my side when it comes time to explain to the Brits that unless and until they prove the gold was stolen from them
at a time when ownership of the antiquities was covered by international law,
they shouldn’t expect me to hand over millions of dollars’ worth of Celtic artifacts just because I’m such a sweet guy.”
“And if they can prove ownership?”
“It’s theirs.”
“I’ll do what I can. No guarantees, Tannahill. Antiquities are a hot-button topic in international diplomacy.”
He gave her an amused smile. “You think?”
“Yeah, I think.” Smiling in spite of herself, she shook her head. “If I didn’t know better, I’d think Dana chose her core male customers by their shoulders and their smiles.”
Shane laughed. “You’d probably arrest me if I told you why I think Uncle sends you after men.”
She lowered her dense black eyelashes and gave him a very female kind of smile. “If I had thought that approach would work with you . . .”
“It wouldn’t. I can appreciate without touching.”
“Yeah. That’s what the three women we ran past you said.”
His eyebrows shot up. “Three? When?”
“Jesus, you didn’t even notice. They’ll be heartbroken.” Shaking her head, April opened the door. “After you, slick.”