You Know Who I Am (The Drusilla Thorne Mysteries Book 2) (3 page)

Colin had shown some real pendulous testicles with his shove-back at Coffey, because in reality no other casino was interested in us. I admired him for that. It wasn’t like he’d done it out of love.

Behind Coffey was his main goon, Vin Behar. If Coffey was my number-one
bete noire
, Behar was not far behind. Of course, Behar had nearly gotten me killed tonight, so he was moving up the list fast.

“I’d like to know where he is as much as you would,” I told them.

“You would, huh? So would I. That’s my money.” Coffey waved his cigar around. He grabbed my arm, his fingers digging into my bicep, and he leaned in close. Ugly cigar smell, masking something…uglier. “Where is he?”

I looked him right in the eye. “I recommend taking your hands off me.”

Coffey grinned at me as he let go. “You’re his wife. So until I find him, I’m keeping your ass under hard surveillance.” A nasty grin, his gaze fixed on my tits. A grin that meant that one way or another, I was on that hook Colin had disappeared off of.

He was kidding himself if he thought he’d get anywhere with me without some part of his body snapping off. Any part. I wouldn’t be particular.

“Find him. And you’re not going anywhere, until I get my money back. One way or another.” In case I didn’t get his meaning, he stuck his cigar back in his mouth. The man had all the subtlety of the rhino he resembled.

I grabbed his hand and twisted his arm behind his back, and then kicked the back of his knee. He was face-down on the ground, lighted end of the cigar dangerously close to his cheek. “Don’t touch me. Or next time I’m going to break this. Slowly. And with a great deal of pleasure.” And I yanked his arm up a tiny bit more before letting it drop.

Which I would. I’d done much worse than break someone’s arm when they hurt me. The first time you hurt someone, it’s the worst thing in the world. After that, it gets easier. I have learned my lesson over the years: I don’t make threats. I make promises I am absolutely willing to keep. It helps to make everyone understand where we all stand.

All the stagehands avoided me as I returned to the edge of the stage. Kristin came over to me. “It’s a mess. No one in the audience is leaving.”

“Go tell the ticket sellers there’s no second show tonight.” I thought of Coffey. “And give refunds.”

Kristin nodded, but she didn’t move. She had a lost expression in her eyes. “What are we going to do?”

Her real question was, what am I going to do? And not only about tonight, but tomorrow, and the day after. Twenty-four, out on her own, her first job since coming to Vegas to be a showgirl. I had no sympathy. When I was her age, I’d been on my own for eight years, dragging Stevie behind me, scared to death our father would find us.

I kept rubbing my wrist, wrapped with a bandage, not a bracelet. That bracelet could, in the wrong hands, cause a lot of problems. For me, and for other people. Mostly for me, though. I had no idea what Kristin was going to do, but I knew what item number one on my agenda was.

“I’m going to kill him,” I said.

C
HAPTER
T
WO

IT TOOK ME six weeks to find where Colin was hiding.

I still visited the Marrakesh on the sly, hoping to pick up information about Colin, avoiding Barry Coffey where possible. He yelled a lot, but he kept his distance. So instead, he set Vin Behar on me. Every day, the walrus parked outside the apartment I shared with Stevie. A couple of times, he sent one of his flunkies to sub for him, and they used the same car he did. But mostly it was Behar. He followed me to the Marrakesh Casino, and he followed me home. When I went running in the middle of the night, more than once he followed me by car.

But never any closer than that. He stayed in the car.

I grew to loathe that brown sedan. On the twentieth day in a row, I peered out the front window and muttered, “Goddammit.”

Stevie’s grunt from across the room reminded me to watch my language.

“Sorry. Zeus damn it? Zeus smite them all to Hades?”

My elf of a sister smiled up at me and went back to her computer.

My clever sister tried all the standard ways to find Colin. Stevie sat at her computer, curled up in her tight pretzel and nibbling on the bottom of her braid, and pulled his cell phone records. And then a lot of the phone records for different Marrakesh departments. Honestly, computer security at the world’s largest firms still sucks, even after all these years of practice they should have had. A few hours spent social hacking via phone—a friendly chat here, a short pretense at being a field rep there—and it didn’t take much for me to get Stevie the information she needed.

The phone records didn’t find Colin, though. At least, not directly. One of the ways I earned money during those six weeks was doing “intuitive” readings for some of the people I knew at the Marrakesh. The ones who couldn’t be convinced my act was a put-on. I put on a good show and they got their money’s worth, okay? The Thai hookers had one segment of the job market sewn up and drug dealing had never appealed to me, so I became psychic and it paid our bills. My biggest fan was Barry Coffey’s administrative assistant, Eliza, and I was her biggest fan, because she paid in cash. Eliza had dated Colin briefly, before I was even in Las Vegas, until Coffey told her her job depended on being available to him. Eliza was a friendly, helpful little gal.

And then one day she wouldn’t look me in the eyes and her laugh was a little too fake.

I told Stevie to pull all the records on Eliza’s office phone, her home phone, and her cell phone. Stevie found a call to the office from Los Angeles from a phone belonging to someone named Anne da Silva. A cell phone that had been registered after Colin’s disappearance. Anne da Silva was a writer for
People
magazine who already had a cell phone number (same cellular provider), a landline at her house, and a work phone.

Usually that sort of person doesn’t need yet another phone line.

Stevie checked the location of the number that had called Eliza. Cell providers keep records of phone locations—Stevie told me they do that in order to improve service, not to track people, although the ability to track people doesn’t hurt. The GPS coordinates for the phone showed it mainly being in two locations over the past six weeks: near Anne da Silva’s house, and in an area of Hollywood filled with apartment buildings. The GPS coordinates were specific enough we knew the spot on the block.

Modern technology rocks.

The next day I went straight to Coffey’s office, where Eliza was doing some paperwork. Without saying a word to her, I picked up her phone and dialed the number we’d found.

A man said, “Liza?”

I slammed the phone down. “He asked you to get his final paycheck, I presume?”

Eliza looked as though I might hit her. Word of what I’d done to Coffey had gotten around.

“You don’t say a word to him,” I purred. “Nod if you understand.”

Eliza nodded.

I called Stevie and told her to get ready.

At six thirty the next morning, I stopped by Vin Behar’s car, parked as usual by the parking lot to my apartment building. As I had on at least six other occasions, I handed him a foam cup of coffee. This time, in addition to the cream and sugar I usually added, I’d put in enough Rohypnol to stop a rampaging herd of rhinoceroses. In Behar’s case, that probably would only make him sleepy for an hour or two. He thanked me completely insincerely. I went back into the apartment, got Stevie downstairs to the car with the two small suitcases I’d packed, and then drove past Behar, completely knocked out.

When we were ten miles outside Los Angeles, Stevie logged on to the cell network’s records again. Colin’s phone was in Hollywood, so I headed that way.

The GPS did not steer us wrong: we found Colin’s Camry in the stall marked “22” underneath a shoddily-built apartment building. Same car, only the Nevada plates had been removed. Before going to see my beloved life partner, I decided to poke around his car. A quick use of handy tools unlocked it for me. The interior was spotless. Nothing in the glove compartment.

In the trunk, I found a brochure for the Marrakesh, a spare tire, and nothing else.

Dammit. I checked under the mats; I checked the interior of that tire. No bracelet.

I bounded up the stairs and knocked on the door of twenty-two. Then I stopped knocking and started banging.

No one answered. That was frustrating. I’d come quite a ways to find him, and now here he and his car were, and yet my bracelet was nowhere to be found.

“I’m going to go in and take a look around,” I said.

In my earpiece, Stevie said, “Are you certain that’s a good idea?”

I pulled a pair of latex gloves on. “We’re married. I get half of everything, remember?”

So I let myself in and looked around. Colin’s new digs in Los Angeles made the apartment Stevie and I had left in Las Vegas that very morning look like a palace. The construction was cobbled together out of plywood and glue, with terrible insulation and carpets that closely resembled secondhand samples and weren’t cut to fit the floor space closely. There were no closets at all. The bathroom had a tiny stash of supplies stuck under the sink in a basket.

“Oh yes, this is the right place.”

In my earpiece, Stevie said, “Then please do this as fast as possible.”

My sister: always worrying.

The bedroom had a futon on the floor, a chest of drawers against the wall, and a clothing rack like you might see outside the dressing room in a department store. The bed was a mess. The clothes I could see on the rack were Colin’s standard mix of fitted tees and form-fitting sweaters and pressed denims. The man definitely liked to show off his physique as often as possible.

The clothes on the floor looked like a mix of Colin’s standard wardrobe and a few more feminine pieces heavy on the lace and paisley. Since I would bet money I didn’t have that Colin wasn’t a secret cross-dresser, he clearly had a lady friend.

Of course he did. Colin always had someone.

The only thing on the counters in the kitchen was a pile of mail, including a utilities bill for this apartment made out to the mysterious Anne da Silva. The only cabinets in the place were extremely low-end kitchen units that could easily have been swiped off the sidewalk after someone’s remodel. I checked all of them: they contained three pots and pans, a few dishes, and Colin’s extensive collection of hard liquor.

I recognized several of the bottles I had bought in Vegas. They were my favorite brands, not Colin’s. Typical bastard: Steals my things, takes my drink.

My liquor. But not my bracelet.

I slammed the last kitchen cabinet door shut.

The door made a different sound than the other door I’d also shut a little too fast.

I reopened each kitchen cabinet door and then slammed each one closed again. One of them made a lower-pitch thud that didn’t last as long as its compatriots.

I knelt down and checked the cabinet, which was the one with the liquor. I took some of the bottles out and then felt around the cabinet.

The back of the cabinet had been removed. How on earth he’d done it I had no idea, but Colin was a clever one with the hacksaw and the screwdriver, and that skill didn’t stop at the edge of the stage. The back of the cabinet box was now a case he’d wedged in there, hard to reach and almost invisible in the dark behind liquor bottles. I removed the rest of the bottles out, and then wrenched the case out.

It was a large briefcase.

What. The. Hades?

The briefcase was locked. Something hidden that well had to have interesting things in it, right? I fiddled with the combination and it popped open on Colin’s birthdate. My poor dear estranged husband, always sticking with the classics. Inside were a bunch of boring-looking papers, a novel, and some actress’s headshots. Maybe she was on some show Stevie liked.

The briefcase also had what had to be one of the worst false bottoms I’d ever seen. It might fool most civilians who wouldn’t notice something tiny out of place, but to someone like me, the fake edge around the bottom of that briefcase stood out like a Maserati in a Safeway parking lot.

Of course, given where he’d hidden this briefcase, he wasn’t expecting snoops to get this far.

I poked one fingernail under one edge of the bottom and lifted it up.

“Holy mother of Poseidon,” I said.

“What is it?” Stevie’s voice asked.

The bottom of the briefcase contained five neatly arranged packs of hundreds. Each packet was worth ten thousand dollars. Colin had fifty thousand dollars casually stuck inside the wall of this stupid, crappy apartment.

“Found a little stash of mad money,” I told her. I fitted the bottom back into the case and closed it back up. I returned all the liquor to the cabinet and swept up all the sawdust. The case came with me as I continued to search the apartment.

Why did Colin have an extra fifty thousand dollars lying around? And were twenty-five thousand of them legally mine? Because I could use the cash.

After finding the briefcase, I did two more thorough sweeps through the apartment to reconfirm that my bracelet was not there.

He had my bracelet. I had his briefcase. We were going to make a trade. And then I was going to be completely done with Colin Abbott.

I returned to the car. Stevie, small and curled up in the passenger seat, put down her book as I got in.

“It’s not there.” I opened the case and started pulling up the bottom. “This was.”

Stevie’s sudden gasp reminded me how long it’s been since we were around so much money. While growing up, this would have been the Christmas bonus for the employee my mother
didn’t
like. “How much did you take out of here?” she asked me.

“None!” I was shocked. Pocketing a few dollars hadn’t even occurred to me. Dammit, I was getting sloppy.

“Well, don’t,” she said. “We don’t know where it’s from.”

“As in, are the bills sequential, listed as stolen by the Treasury Department.”

“Yes, precisely.”

“This money could go to a very good cause, like buying us a hotel room tonight.”

She shook her head. “No, Dru.” She held her hand out, and when I figured out what she wanted I slapped a pair of vinyl gloves into her palm. She slipped them on before refitting the false bottom into the case.