Sleepless in Las Vegas (31 page)

“Advantageous. Helpful.”

“And instead of a salary,” she continued, “I’d like Drake’s family ring and first choice on other loot you gather from tourists vacationing in Las Vegas.”

His eyes narrowing, he set down the bottle hard. “How you know about ring?”

“Jayne Diamond, my boss, told me,” she lied. “She and Drake have been friends for years.”

Yuri took a sip, swallowed, a thoughtful look on his face. “Yes, Jayne Diamond. Big casinos use her as gatekeeper for granting big-dollar credit lines.” He stubbed out his cigarette. “My first job for you. Give me some of her big-money clients’ information.”

Jayne sometimes conducted exhaustive asset checks on high rollers for casino credit departments, in the course of which she accrued wealthy people’s confidential data—Social Security numbers, bank account information, stock and real-estate holdings. Confidential financial information that a criminal could use to electronically steal their wealth. Looked like Yuri was keen to commit some white-collar electronic fraud.

Exactly the kind of dirt Drake wanted on the Russian.

If only if there was a way to surreptitiously turn on the recorder app on her phone. She listened to the continuous sound of rushing air from the device that Yuri had turned on. Wouldn’t matter if she tried to record their conversation, the white noise would block out their voices.

If she wanted to help Drake, she had only one option.

“Yes,” she said, trying to sound delighted with the prospect, “I would love to work for you, Yuri.”

* * *

A
FTER
THE
MEETING
, she headed to the valet and waited for her car. She’d quaffed two shots of vodka with Yuri but had faked indulging in the third, so she had a light buzz, nothing more.

The temperatures were cooling and the air thickening with humidity thanks to the incoming storm clouds. While waiting for the valet to deliver her car, she texted and called Drake. No response.

If Yuri was inside Body Double, Drake had to be safe. That’s all that mattered. Probably busy checking out places Marta had visited. If he was interviewing someone, he couldn’t stop to answer her call.

But she’d feel so much better hearing his voice.

Cranking up the air-conditioning, she drove through Theo’s Burgers, got a diet cola and chili-cheese fries. Driving home, she tried calling Drake again. No answer.

Okay, now she was concerned. The guy lived and died by his smartphone, so he should have called or texted her back by now. Something was wrong. She needed to find him.

Turning around, she headed back to Diamond Investigations.

There, she drove around the back lot, checked if his pickup was in the fenced-off parking space. It wasn’t. She parked in the front lot, went inside and headed to the connecting door and knocked. Knocked again. Even though his pickup wasn’t here, didn’t hurt to check if he was inside his office. She retrieved the spare back office key from her desk and checked out his man cave. No Drake.

Before leaving Diamond Investigations, she called Dorothy Morgan. Not wanting to alarm her, she said Drake had asked Val to call and check how the new surveillance cameras were working. Fine? Good. Had he already called to ask? Val’s spirits plunged when Dorothy said she’d last talked to him yesterday evening.

There was only one more place she knew to check: Li’l Bit’s. Even if Drake wasn’t there, she could ask his friend if he’d heard from him lately.

She didn’t know Li’l Bit’s real name, so she ran an online search on the nickname, found a comment Li’l Bit had left at a Marijuana for the People website that included his email address, nathan@boss_services. She ran that through a property database and learned Li’l Bit, aka Nathan Davidovitch, lived in apartment 3B at the Willow Creek Apartments.

As she walked across the lot to her Toyota, the clouds began spitting rain.

* * *

A
T
FOUR-THIRTY,
she knocked on the door marked 3B. Fat gray clouds now hovered over the city, obliterating the sun. The air had cooled to an almost comfortable temperature, which in Vegas meant it was no longer three-digit heat. After her adrenaline-pumping meeting with Yuri and the hyperanxiety of looking for Drake, her energy had taken a sharp spiral downward. Maybe she should’ve skipped the chili-cheese fries.

She heard Hearsay bark on the other side of the door.

“Who is it?” asked a sleepy-sounding male voice.

“I’m looking for Drake.”

Hearsay barked again. “Don’t know a Drake, man.”

She reread the number on the door—3B. Definitely the right place. “Are you Li’l Bit?”

“No.”

She thought back to the email address. “Nathan Davidovitch? Of Boss Services?”

“You need a process server?”

Oh, for heaven’s sake. This was Li’l, or Nathan, who owned Boss Services. That was Hearsay barking behind the door. Why was he lying about not knowing Drake? Took her all of a second to understand the reason. Being a good friend to Drake, Li’l Bit was protecting him from Yuri’s Mafia types.

“Nathan, I’m Drake’s friend. We work together. I need to find him. I’m worried. He could be in danger. Please, open up.”

Another pause. “What’s his nickname?”

She frowned. “He never told me his nickname. But I know his mother’s name is Dorothy, and his grandmother’s is…” Shit, she forgot. “Well, she’s Grams. And his dog’s name is Hearsay.”

Who woofed. Followed by a “Dude, chill.” Then, “You know Yuri?”

“Yes! Not that I want to know him, but unfortunately I do.”

Silence. “Drake doesn’t live here, man.”

She glared at the door. Her adrenaline slump was on the rebound, spiking high and fast.

She was beginning to wonder if Drake was inside and in trouble. Maybe Hearsay’s barks were alerting her that something was wrong.

“If you don’t open up
right now…
” She looked around, spied the potted plant. “I’m going to pick up this plant in its heavy-lookin’ clay pot and throw it through your damn window.”

“Lady, you and your negative energy need to leave, man.”

One more
man
and she’d lose it. Hell, why wait. She was ready to lose it now. In fact, she
deserved
to lose it. As her beloved Saints said, and if they hadn’t, they should’ve,
Go big or go home.

“No, me and my
negative energy
have had one hell of an extremely
trying
day, and we’ve decided nobody, and I do mean
nobody,
is gonna stand in our way, so I suggest you step back from your window ‘cause,
man,
the glass is gonna fly!”

As she bent over to lift the clay pot, which in fact was extraordinarily heavy, too heavy to back up her glass-flying speech, she heard a click and the slithery slide of a lock.

The door opened, and a paunchy guy wearing a pair of cutoff jeans and a T-shirt with the word Abide in big red letters about the color of his eyes, stared at her. He reeked of buttered popcorn and beer.

Hearsay scampered onto the porch, his tail wagging. She reached down, petted his head, then pushed past Li’l Bit into the living room. On the TV, a young David Bowie with bright orange hair was walking through some kind of space-age desert.

Li’l Bit followed her, dragging his hand through a mass of tangled hair. “This is a private residence, man.”

She heard a loud clunk, followed by an expletive, from down the hallway. A not-so-subtle panic crossed Li’l Bit’s face.

“What’s back there?” She glanced down at Hearsay, who looked overly alert, as though saying, “You need to check it out,
now.
” Or maybe she was projecting her thoughts onto the dog, but it was a good idea anyway.

Drake was missing, nobody seemed to know where he was, he obviously lived in this very apartment and Li’l Bit was one odd, zoned-out strangeoid who was definitely hiding something.

No guts, no glory.

She speed walked toward the hall. Hearsay yapped, scampering along with her.

“Dude,” he yelled, “I’m going to call the police!”

She broke into a jog, catching scents of incense and marijuana. Passing the bathroom, she glanced inside. A bag of weed in the sink, towels all over the floor, tapestry-print shower curtain. She headed for the closed door at the end of the hall.

Li’l Bit, heaving breaths, passed her, blocking the door with his body. “Look, man…” He waved his hands in the air as though dispersing her angry aura. “You need to go away now.”

“Is Drake in there?”

“Not really. The cops…they’ll arrest you on…first-degree trespass.”

Not really?
What, just some of his body parts were in there? Although her heart was doing its best to rip free from her chest, and her brain was preparing to burn graphic images into her cortex that would haunt her the rest of her life, there was no way she wasn’t going in.

“If you don’t open that door,” she snarled, “they’re also going to arrest me for attempted homicide.”

Mumbling something about Mercury in retrograde, he opened the door and quickly stepped out of her way.

But she didn’t enter. Instead, she looked inside the room, frozen at the sight.

Drake, reading a magazine, lounged on a bed covered in a fluffy, purple-paisley bedspread. He wore earbuds whose wire connected to the smartphone he held, his head bobbing to whatever he was listening to. The room was a hodgepodge of tie-dye, books, an orange vinyl bean bag chair, a poster of a clipper ship titled “Where’s Our Wooden Ships?” and macrame curtains threaded with feathers and beads. Except for the bed, it looked like the inside of a hippie van following a Grateful Dead tour.

Hearsay plopped down on the floor at the foot of the bed, and chewed on a rawhide bone lying there.

As she stepped into the room, Drake looked up, a surprised look on his face. Setting aside the magazine, he pulled out the earbuds and flashed a lazy, sexy smile, his eyes grazing her body. He wore a polo shirt and jeans she’d seen him wear before, but his hair was longer and stylishly textured.

She stopped at the foot of the bed, stupefied. “What happened to your hair?”

One side of his mouth lifted in a cocky grin. “What’s wrong, doll, did I put on too much gel?”

He sounded like Drake, but the smarmy come-on wasn’t him. Plus, Drake had never called her
doll.
And she seriously doubted Drake had ever touched a bottle of gel, much less used it.

Li’l Bit wandered into the room, clutching the bowl of popcorn to his chest. “Dude, I wasn’t sure if she was Marta or not. That accent, hard to tell. And she didn’t know Aqua Man’s nickname. Tried to get her to leave, man, but she threatened to break my window and kill me.” He shoved a handful of popcorn into his mouth.

“S’okay, Li’l Bit,” he said, “she’s not one of Yuri’s people.”

Val walked closer, checked out the magazine.
Men’s World.
The articles on its cover sounded like
Cosmo
for guys: “How to Dress Like Tom Cruise,” “Summer Muscle Foods,” “Double Your Endurance.”

She shifted her gaze to his face. Same gray eyes, arrogant nose, but totally different hair and no tiny white scar on his hairline. She caught a whiff of his musky cologne. A scent she’d smelled today…on somebody pretending to be him.

“You’re Braxton,” she murmured.

For a moment, she felt no emotion, no nothing, just numb, as though somebody had shot her with a tranquilizer gun. Except she wasn’t going to fall over, unconscious any moment. Instead, she was stuck in this alternate universe, trying to make sense of it.

“We needed to swap him out with Drake,” Li’l Bit said around a mouthful of popcorn, “so he could psych out that nihilistic dipshit Yuri, man, who torched his place…”

Letting Li’l Bit’s voice roll over her, she stared at Braxton. Her insides twisted. So that had been Drake back at Body Double. He couldn’t have given her a hint it was him? Maybe not while sitting at the table with Yuri staring her down, but before? Like outside at the bar when he’d kissed her?

“…wanted to help Drake out, man,” Li’l Bit continued, holding on to the bowl as if it was a life preserver, “because he’s been good to me, once got me out of an unfortunate incident involving some unpaid parking tickets and a shipment of guns…”

A spark of anger flickered to life inside her. She deserved better than to be the last to know. Maybe she was an intern, and had mishandled a few situations lately, but hadn’t Drake said the two of them were a team? Yet he’d entrusted his confidences and welfare to a lounging rake and a popcorn-eating weed dude, leaving her completely out of the loop.

She was insulted.

“What’s your name, doll?” Braxton asked.

“For starters,” she said tightly, “it’s not
doll.
”

“Feisty,” he murmured, “I like that. Also like that strict little librarian dress you’re wearing. Have I been bad and forgotten to pay my late-book fines?”

“Her name is Val,” said a familiar voice. “She’s a top-notch P.I. in the making, and if you say one more disrespectful thing to her, Brax, my fist is going to be visiting your face.”

Drake stood in the doorway, still wearing the blue suit he’d worn at Body Double. Hearsay bounded over to him, sniffing the suit, licking his hand, wagging his tail.

Braxton held up his hands in surrender. “Sorry, bro.”

“Here’s something else you should know,” Drake said, his black eyebrows snapping together as he drilled a look at his brother. “She put herself on the line today for our family, did some gutsy brokering, better than I’ve seen some professional negotiators carry off, with Yuri for the possible return of our family’s heirloom ring.”

Val stared at Drake, her anger taking a backseat to her ego, which wallowed in his glowing appraisal like a pig in mud. Top-notch P.I. Better than some professional negotiators. Almost made up for not being included in today’s twin-swap shenanigans.

He turned his head, those gray eyes gleaming as they met hers. “I cannot believe what you did today. Jayne said you had been heroic…and today I witnessed it firsthand.”

“I wasn’t…” She gave her head a small shake. Maybe survivors never felt like heroes, and one day she’d finally accept that. As for today, she hadn’t felt courageous at the time. But in retrospect, hell, yeah.