Call of the Wilde

by Jenn Stark

  “Seriously?” I frowned. “Was he Connected?”

  “Nope, at least, not officially. He had something in his system though that was hinky, and he was waiting outside his cab when I approached, not inside, which was why I even noticed him. He flagged me down, offering the cab, and I touched his arm.” She shuddered. “Some things, you can’t unsee. But he had Dixie front and center in his mind, and he was determined to take us wherever we wanted to go.” She slanted me a glance too. “He also had a burst of negativity toward you—nothing I instigated, you were just on his mind. You know him?”

  I frowned, trying to remember the guy. “Not at all.”

  “I didn’t think so. Like I said, weird.”

  “I’m having a hard time imagining Dixie as a kingpin, but that’s a problem for later. Where did the girls disappear to?”

  “I let ’em go really quickly, didn’t want to spook them too much. They confirmed that their last name was Mendala, insisted they were fine, but I didn’t believe them. I dropped a tracker on their clothes. That’ll have to do.”

  “Is that safe? What if they’re searched?”

  She shrugged. “I put Detective Delish on it. He came out right behind us, was ready to charge after the girls on foot, but I gave him the monitor and told him to cool his jets. He’ll be on ’em like feathers on a showgirl inside of five minutes. They won’t get to wherever they’re going, but he’ll tail them as close as he can, see if he can get answers before he picks them up. He was muttering something about a traffic stop when he hustled away, so if the girls get in a cab, it’ll be easier. And they’ll almost have to at some point, their shoes were only slightly less ridiculous than mine.”

  “You believe their story? What did their minds say?”

  “Their minds were on Dixie and something they wanted to get from her—no, that wasn’t quite right. Something they thought they’d gotten from her, only they were confused by it. Not drugs specifically, meaning they didn’t imagine little blue pills or anything, but it was still a little sketchy.”

  “Did they use the word Charisma?”

  She blinked, then frowned, clearly searching her memory. “They did, yes. There was more, though. Another thought…no. It’s gone. I’ll have to see if it comes back to me later.”

  I nodded, thinking about what Dixie had told me. “Well, it’s possible they were looking for drugs, and it’s possible said drugs were bogus.” I filled her in on Dixie’s claim of becoming the newest drug lord in glitter-pink nail polish. Nikki was full-on staring at me by the time the elevator popped open.

  “Is she insane?” she demanded, and I lifted my hands.

  “You know her better than I do. Could she care that deeply about her people that she’d put herself in so much danger?”

  “She’s way more the coffee-and-bingo kind of den mother, not the AK-47 kind,” Nikki said. She scanned the parking lot, but we didn’t have long to wait. Almost as soon as the elevator doors closed behind us, a limo’s engine started, the sleek vehicle cruising toward us. I tensed, but Nikki waved it down.

  “It’s ours,” she said to my unasked question. She peered at the driver through the tinted glass. “Thank God that guy’s too small to be Ma-Singh. I do not want to deal with Papa Bear where we’re going. Speaking of…” She cocked a glance at me. “How much time do we have?”

  “Not much. I don’t know how long Hera is going to spend on her chat with Dixie. It seems like if you’re a goddess, reading minds would be a pretty quick and painless process, without the need for all the fawning.”

  “Yeah, but if you’re a goddess, you’re probably pretty okay with fawning. Seems like it would come with the territory—especially if you’ve been deprived of it during a three-thousand-year-long nap.”

  “Maybe.” We slid into the vehicle, and I was glad to see the panel to the front of the car was open, the driver and Nikki clearly recognizing each other. The car shot out of the underground access floor and up onto the surface streets of Vegas, heading toward Dixie’s chapel.

  “Make a circuit first,” Nikki said, her eyes on the road. “I don’t think we were followed, but I don’t want to walk into anything stupid.”

  But Dixie’s network apparently didn’t extend to 24-hour limo surveillance, and we made it to the Chapel of Everlasting Love in the Stars without incident. Though the Drive-Thru wedding awning was lit up like a prison yard, the rest of the chapel appeared to be closed. The limo slid to a stop in front of the tattoo parlor next to the chapel. The lights still flickered in that shop’s window, but the lot only had three other cars in it, and those looked like they’d been there awhile.

  I glanced up at the storefronts as we got out of the car, focusing on the largest establishment, Darkworks Ink. It’d been a while since I’d visited the tattoo parlor or its very unusual owner, but the place looked closed despite the lit-up signs. There wasn’t an OPEN sign in glittering neon, just images of Hello Kitty, Death, and a Hermit.

  I frowned. I hadn’t remembered the Hermit as one of the signs at Darkworks before, and I certainly hoped that Hello Kitty wasn’t the next candidate for Council membership after Hera. Although at this point, I wouldn’t put it past Armaeus.

  “You good, dollface?” Nikki prompted me, and I nodded.

  “Yeah.” She patted the hood of the limo, and the driver backed out again, the car purring quietly away. There were shouts and bubbling laughter from the drive-up lane, and Nikki and I took the opportunity to approach the chapel from the other direction, skirting the set of dressed stone geese, who now were, perhaps fittingly, all wearing Elvis wigs and leather jackets, including the Elvis-impersonator bride whose outfit also included a bright-white satin dress beneath her bolero-cut bomber. Dixie was always one for details.

  Nikki paused at the entryway to the chapel, tried the door, then reached up to the sill above it. A moment later, she pulled down a key.

  “She hides a key on her sill,” I said, my voice flat. “In Vegas.”

  “There’s a security service hooked up inside. The code hasn’t changed since 9/11, though. If it’s even turned on.”

  It wasn’t, as we discovered quickly. There was a chime but when Nikki squinted at the keypad, the system merely read: disarmed.

  “Well, she’s clearly not worried about attack,” I muttered, and Nikki chuckled.

  “The place is constantly open, and it’s a wedding chapel. That’s sort of hallowed ground, even in Vegas. And of all the places to knock over if you’re a run-of-the-mill thief…”

  I nodded. “Probably not a wedding chapel.”

  “Yup. It’s bad juju.”

  We continued deeper into the chapel until we reached Dixie’s office. This door was locked, but Nikki apparently stayed prepared, even in designer glitter. She pulled out a lockpick set from her bra, taking the number of devices she’d been carrying around in the industrial-strength garment up to three. I didn’t want to even think about where she was stowing her gun.

  The lock was the work of thirty seconds to open, and then we were inside, Nikki carefully shutting the door behind us before flicking on the light.

  I blinked at the sudden brightness while Nikki let out a low whistle. “Girl has definitely been busy.”

  She was right. The enormous map on the wall was now segmented out with color-coded craft tape, easily movable as the borders changed. But borders for what?

  “These are the main drug gangs in the city,” Nikki answered, though I once again hadn’t felt the touch of her mind against mine. She shot me a look, grinned. “Don’t worry. It was the first obvious question. But she’s got their territory mapped out, and these pins are their specialties.” She pointed to a legend of sorts alongside the map, and I read the names out loud.

  “Cocaine, Heroin, Carfentanyl, Tech-A, Tech-B, Tech-C. There are three strains of technoceuticals in Vegas right now?”

  Nikki nodded. “At least—probably a dozen more, but these may be the top hybrids. It’
s a nasty place, being on the street right now. No idea what’s getting cut into your product.”

  “Fremont Street is still in the picture.” We’d done some work there before, and neither of us had expected the place to stay clean.

  “Yeah, but doesn’t seem to be the site of any of the MPs. Look here.” She gestured to clusters of white-tipped pins, mostly lining the Strip. “That’s pretty focused. And this place…” She tapped another cluster, off the beaten path. “I don’t know about that. Trailer park, I think. Or RV camping site. Lake and everything.” She gave a scoffing chuckle. “Not that it’d be much of a lake, I’m thinking. More like a puddle of water.”

  Despite myself, I smiled. When I’d been seventeen and on my own for the first time in my life, I’d landed in the center of a group of RV travelers, most of them easily fifty years my senior. It’d been a good way to hide, and that was exactly what I’d done for a solid five years. But our troupe had never come anywhere near Vegas. Which, now that I thought about it, was kind of odd. This place was a mecca for the Midwestern retiree set, which made up a fair portion of the RV community. “Disappearances from an RV camp wouldn’t be immediately obvious, though, right? I mean, it’s by nature a transient community. How’d anyone even know that someone was missing?”

  “Good point. Place must be made up of more trailers than RVs there. I mean, there’s that lake and all.”

  Nikki moved her finger to two more clusters. One was in a shopping mall, the other well south of the city. Easily two or three pins of each cluster were connected with strings to a point near Lake Mead, but a sticky note with a question mark on it immediately disputed even that tenuous connection.

  “Black pins are deaths,” she mused, and to my surprise, there were fewer of those than I would’ve expected, scattered along the Strip and at Fremont Street primarily, with only a few elsewhere in the city. “Surely there’s more than that.”

  “Maybe she’s only pinning the ones she thinks are relevant.” I turned and scanned the rest of the office. There was a laptop, shut, but next to it was a pink notebook, trimmed in lace. I went for the notebook, flipped it open.

  Lists of names and addresses stared up at me, along with notations, and I pulled my phone out and took several photos of the pages, not trying to focus on any one thing. Even with my speed, however, the name Mendala jumped out at me. I stopped.

  “Um…you said the Mendala sisters were pretty clearly them, based on your conversation?”

  “Yup, why?” Nikki moved over to me, and peered down. “That’s weird.” She snapped her gaze up to the board again, found the corresponding pins. “What the hell is blue supposed to mean?”

  “No idea.” The notations in the notebook were cryptic, no doubt a peculiar blend of Dixie shorthand, but they included the word “Turned.” And nowhere on the map was any indication of what blue meant.

  “Turned, like how? Maybe flipped to a rival gang, or from one?”

  “But that would imply Dixie’s gang is actually a gang, not just a group of her coffee buddies doing it for show.” I still couldn’t wrap my head around Dixie as a drug lord, but I could imagine her playing at it.

  “We got any more Turned notations?”

  “Let me check…” I flipped through the pages, and found a half-dozen more. Sure enough, they each corresponded to a home location pinned in blue. “They’re all on the Strip too. Casino based.”

  “So not rank and file carnies, even if they are Connected.”

  “So it would seem.” Nikki tapped a long lacquered nail against her lip. “If they haven’t been here awhile, maybe younger? Less experienced? More easily swayed, anyway.”

  “Maybe.”

  We looked for a little longer, but nothing came up. We’d just let ourselves out of the room when Nikki’s impressive assets started to shake.

  “Brody?” I asked, and she gave me a broad grin.

  “I can’t wait to let him know how good it was for me. Let’s get out of here first.”

  Chapter Seventeen

  Once more blanketed in the cool night air, Nikki swiped on her phone and put it to her ear. “I got Sara,” she said immediately, before Brody could speak. “What’s up?”

  Whatever he said made her face go pale, even in the shadows. “You’re kidding me.”

  More terse barking on the other side of the phone, then Nikki shot a look to me. “Car’s close, but I’m going to need to check that out. Any idea where Dixie is?”

  By now I was ready to crawl out of my skin with annoyance, but Nikki raised a hand to forestall my questions. “Right, got it. I’ll keep you posted. No,” she said, glancing again at me. “I won’t. I’m sending her next door.”

  There wasn’t any response to that on the other end of the line, and Nikki winked, though her face remained set and serious. “You good with that?” she finally prompted.

  I couldn’t hear Brody’s answer, but his tone was that of grudging resignation. Nikki signed off, and blew out a long breath.

  “Okay, dollface. This isn’t pretty, but we gotta move fast, so I’m cutting to the chase.”

  “What happened?”

  “The Mendala sisters didn’t make it out of their car.”

  My stomach dropped. “What are you talking about?”

  “I mean they entered a town car at Paris, drove two miles off Strip, entered a parking structure. By the time the LVMPD tail cruised by, there was no movement, but the car was still running, so they made another circuit, radioing backup to watch the exits and the elevator. They had eyes on the car nearly the whole time, pinned to the back doors. By the time they pulled even a second time, the car had been shut off. They stopped, announced themselves, approached. The girls were in the back of the car, shot in the head. The driver was gone.”

  “Gone,” I repeated. I’d seen these girls alive less than two hours ago. “What do you mean? Where’d he go?”

  “Best guess, he hid in one of the other vehicles or maybe is still hiding. They’ve got a net out, but they don’t hold much hope. He probably slipped out as soon as our guys made the first pass, the girls were likely dead before he entered the structure. They’ve got it on lockdown, but it’s a big building and open air on the first floor. He could have gotten out in a hurry before the cops dropped the full net.”

  “But…why? You touched them yourself. Those girls didn’t know anything.”

  “Didn’t know anything that could have gotten them killed, no. But they were in the club with Dixie, clearly looking for her. What if someone thought they’d found her?”

  “Or…”

  Nikki nodded tightly. “Or what if Dixie realized we’d gotten ahold of them, was afraid they’d talk.”

  “Except they already talked! They talked to you and had nothing.”

  “They talked to me and had—maybe more than I realize now.” Nikki tapped her head. “Been a long time since I did a download like that, but I used to do it all the time. Before I can get to it, though, I need to check Dixie’s office again. Clearly those girls meant more to Dixie than just your average missing Connecteds, though that’s bad enough. You said she looked like fire and brimstone when they first came in?”

  “Yeah, but…then she changed back to sweetness and light. She could have been having a hot flash when I first looked at her, I have no idea.”

  “More likely she’s able to block your third eye.”

  “I don’t know…” I frowned. “Kind of defeats the whole purpose of a third eye if someone like Dixie can shut it.”

  Nikki made a face. “Something stinks to high heaven here, and Dixie’s wrapped up in it. She’ll have information in her office, though, I know she will. I just need to case it more thoroughly—and get into her laptop.”

  “I’m coming with.”

  “No, you’re not. Brody doesn’t want you in there if things go south. On the other hand, if they do go south and I’m the one snooping around in Dixie’s drawers, as it were, I can
talk my way out of it—we used to work together, after all. Plus, I’m packing. You’re not.” She pointed across the parking lot. “You go see if Death’s home, see if she can give us any idea of what’s been going on at the chapel, who’s been coming and going, like that.”

  “There’s nobody over there, Nikki.”

  “Guess again.”

  Still annoyed, I followed the trajectory of her pointed finger and picked up the glittering neon OPEN sign.

  “Death likes you, and she gives me the creeps. If she’s been on-site, or if Jimmy has, they’ll know if there’s been unusual traffic at Dixie’s.”

  “Dixie wouldn’t be that stupid to have anyone important meet her here.”

  “You don’t know that. You’d like to believe it, but you don’t know. Dixie’s playing thugzilla, and there’s no telling what she would have thought was normal for that kind of charade, you feel me? She’d maybe want to show off her casual disdain for security. God knows we broke into her office easy enough.”

  “Or we think we did.”

  Nikki gave me a baleful glance. “Dollface, this is Dixie we’re talking about. I’ve known her a long time. She’s not going to win any awards for strategy.”

  “She’s Connected, and she’s amped on something—we don’t even know what. I wouldn’t underestimate her.”

  “Which is why I need to get my ass back in her office and stop arguing with you. Now go. And stay inside until I give you the high sign, or until Brody shows up with an ambulance.”

  “Not funny.”

  “Still stalling.” Nikki shooed me on, and I went, reluctantly. Ten seconds later, I heard the chapel door ease shut. I picked up my pace, suddenly feeling self-conscious in the late-night gloom. The neon cast a harsh glare on the sidewalk as I approached, and when I tried the door, it opened easily.

  I stepped into the foyer of Darkworks Ink. The tattoo parlor hadn’t changed at all since the last time I’d entered. The walls were lined with prints taken from tattoo books, with discreet numbers at their lower right, and more books lay on waist-high stands with their pages open, inviting the curious or those trying to get their guts up to peruse the million and one ways they could permanently ink their bodies. Also decorating the walls were photographs taken of happy customers, most of their tattoos rimmed with a bright-red heat rash that indicated the pics had been taken immediately after the needlework had been completed. There were tats that ranged from the simplest of woodland animals to complex, layered portals revealing fantasy settings or, more disturbingly, accurately rendered depictions of bone and sinew, as if the user was giving a peek beneath the skin. Celtic and tribal tats abounded, and even a few religious symbols, though there was far less of that than I would have expected in an ordinary tattoo parlor.