Lucky Ride (The Lucky O'Toole Vegas Adventure Series Book 8)

by Deborah Coonts

  “No, we tried everything we could to keep them out of it.”

  “You know about the doctor who was killed on the farm in addition to Bethany’s grandmother?”

  My father turned to stare out the window. “He was the only link. We thought so, at least. Then Dora Bates. It’s starting to add up to something crazy.”

  His eyes were red-rimmed when he settled back in his chair and buckled his seat belt.

  “So, who’s the killer?”

  “You wouldn’t believe me if I told you.”

  “Try me.”

  He ignored me.

  A shovel, so new the bar code decal still stuck to the concave face of the long blade, the wood of the handle blond and unsullied, lay across the seats on the other side of the aisle. Closing my eyes, I counted to ten. That didn’t work, so I kept counting. When reached one hundred, I gave up. Opening my eyes, I fixed my father with a stare.

  “Grave robbing. A first-degree felony?” I should’ve put Squash Trenton on retainer.

  He waggled his eyebrows and gave a bad impression of an impish smile. A man raised in mobbed-up Vegas, my father had toed the line but never fully embraced corporate Vegas. Despite not wanting to know the particulars of his past, right now riding with a guy with that particular experience set was maybe a good thing. And, unfortunately, my father’s daughter had an authority issue, so this sort of game got my juices flowing.

  I should be bothered by that, but constraint bothered me more, always had. Probably why Mona had seen fit to rid herself of me when I was fifteen. Not an excuse, but perhaps an explanation—one I’d accepted. The guilt of what I must’ve done resonated at the core of my being. Maybe I’d been trying to make up for whatever it was ever since?

  I’d been joking, but the ring of truth reverberated.

  How did somebody fix that? How did one erase the sting of abandonment by the one person who should never, ever abandon them?

  What would fix that kind of broken?

  And there it was, what I had feared all along—I was a living FUBAR: Fucked Up Beyond All Repair.

  The clouds hung heavy over Reno—somehow appropriate. Our wheels kissed the ground just as we broke through, not that the scenery changed much. Only slight differentiations in the shade of gray distinguished land from sky, tree from dead grass. A short flight and yet we’d landed in a world devoid of the light and color and energy of Vegas. Same state, light-years between the cities—in every way.

  Reno—the Biggest Little City in the World. That’s how they liked to think of themselves. But really, dwarfed by the legend of Vegas, Reno was the Biggest Little City None Had Ever Heard Of.

  My take, but I’m biased.

  Reno would always be a wannabe. Not that that was a bad thing—it had its own charm, and I’d always thought they’d be better off sticking with the whole beautiful mountain, gateway to Tahoe thing. But, a city could run pretty well off of gaming revenues, so all Nevadans chased them, with varying degrees of success.

  Today, gray gloom snuffed out the Reno charm. The snow lining the streets was days old and now mounded in forlorn brown piles melting slowly into the gutters. Rivulets of water wallowed tunnels under the snow and a thin crust of translucent ice. The low clouds hid the mountains to the west—the mountains that captured Lake Tahoe, one of the most beautiful places I’d ever seen. For years, I tried to get the Big Boss to open even a small property there. Too close to Reno, he’d said, which had made no sense at the time.

  But now, I was starting to get a glimmer.

  True to his problem-solver personality, my father had arranged a car from a property owned by one of his friends. Despite corporate consolidation, the old guard still hung on—a few dinosaurs like my father. He’d told me once that if I ever sold to a conglomerate, he would come back and haunt me—a ghost with a baseball bat and an attitude. I believed him.

  I checked my phone. No message from Romeo. And here I was on this crazy chase. My father seemed intent on purging his soul. My mother? God knew. “Can’t we just catch the killer the old-fashioned way? I’m really not dressed for grave robbing.” My silk pants in a stunning royal blue, matching sweater, and kitten-heeled Lou-bous were the perfect uniform for shoveling bullshit, figuratively speaking, but little else.

  The driver held the door and pretended not to have heard—that was one of the reasons they got the big bucks. He didn’t meet my eye as I leaned in and whispered, “I’m kidding,” as I helped my father into the car—he insisted on riding up front.

  “Lucky, you drive,” my father ordered as I shut the door.

  The driver hesitated, but my father had issued the order with a finality we both heard.

  “If it’s any consolation, he could write a check for this car and not miss it.”

  “I could lose my job for this.”

  “Me, too.” Among other things.

  As he rolled the keys through his fingers, he glanced at the shovel I was holding, but, a true pro, he didn’t ask. In fact, he was so good his expression didn’t even change. Perhaps sensing my good humor was evaporating fast, he relinquished the keys. “How long will you be?”

  “As long as it takes. The FBO has hot coffee and warm cookies. They’ll take care of you.” As a driver for a casino in Reno, he should have intimate knowledge of the perks of waiting at the airport in the Fixed Base Operator’s offices. They had lounges and TVs for the pilots, snacks, and non-alcoholic libations. In fact, our pilots had made a hasty retreat inside out of the cold.

  “You made the right choice.” I palmed the keys and climbed behind the wheel. “You want a job in Vegas?” I asked before I pulled the door closed.

  He glanced at the shovel. “Not on your life. You folks push my boundaries.”

  “Mine, too.” I pulled the door shut, leaving him staring through the side window. He looked like he was contemplating a career change.

  So was I…as if I had a choice.

  Blood, the tie that binds.

  So many ways that could be interpreted.

  “Very clever how you got rid of all the witnesses but one,” I said to my father as I maneuvered the big car out of the enclosure at the FBO. With a sinking feeling, I watched as the driver faded out of sight.

  My father was acting really weird, which was uncharted territory.

  And he wasn’t telling me much other than we were en route to commit a felony. Right now, my life was nothing more than the Bermuda Triangle of Bad Shit. The set of my father’s jaw told me there was nothing to do but soldier on.

  Of course, with the lure of answers hiding in the misty gray, I wouldn’t run back now even if I had a choice.

  “You know where we’re going?” After the Ferrari, the big car took some getting used to.

  “Not really.”

  Now, that was a surprise. “You’ve not been here before?”

  “It’s been a long time since I thought about this place.” He pulled a few sheets of paper from his inside pocket, then pressed them flat against the dashboard.

  The squiggles I could see looked like a map.

  “Terrific. A dead-body scavenger hunt,” I muttered, mostly to myself since my father was ignoring me. “Could today get any better?”

  My father stared out the front window. “It couldn’t get much worse.” He pointed straight ahead. “Go north until you hit the 80, then head east two miles or so.”

  As the day slipped away, my father looked worse and worse.

  “This date with the past isn’t looking too good on you.” I kept the tone light but I wasn’t feeling at all good about any of this.

  “A date with the Devil,” he muttered.

  “What?” I thought I’d heard him right but couldn’t be sure.

  He waved my question away. The veins stood out, purple against the white skin of his hand. Old man hands. Since when? “Something your mother said.”

  “What part does she play in this?” Knowing Mona, she was up to her hairline in this bad business.

  �
��She’s at home.” A non sequitur as an answer—he was adopting his wife’s ways. Not a good thing.

  “Did she draw that map?”

  “Lucky.” He looked so tired and strained.

  I let it lie. Forcing answers wouldn’t make him any better, nor any of this go away. We’d come to do what he wanted to do—I’d signed on. And that was that.

  Not that I liked any of it.

  And, while I’d manhandle my mother in this situation, I’d follow my father into any battle, or let him lead any charge. A slavish attitude, misplaced loyalty, a lone lemming…right off the cliff. I tried not to think about it. Instead, I let myself be carried along on a wave of curiosity.

  With nothing to say, my father clutched the papers, the shovel across his lap as he stared straight ahead.

  The casinos north of the airport slid by. We headed northeast. Occasionally, he’d give me a direction—turn here, straight ahead, that sort of thing—and I did as I was told. The trappings of civilization disappeared behind us. My phone made the out-of-service sound. If this went south, we couldn’t even summon the cavalry. And I didn’t have my gun—to be honest, I couldn’t remember where I’d left it. That was probably a felony, too.

  The bleak landscape, caught in the vise of winter, loomed around us. A few pines gave a hint of color, but, for the most part, it was as if each low shrub, each naked tree, the grasses pressed low by the scouring wind, even the sky, had been painted from a bucket of gloom.

  I felt a Hitchcock movie coming on.

  Why did I feel like laughing as I clutched the wheel and tried not to look at my father? Panic, sheer panic.

  “Do the letters S. S. mean anything to you?” I asked the question casually, not expecting a response.

  My father focused on me—I caught his intense look out of the corner of my eye.

  “Where’d you hear that?” His attention wasn’t the only thing that had sharpened—his tone could cut steel.

  “They were shaved into the coat of Dora Bates’s daughter’s horse.” I’d touched a nerve and somehow, I felt like I’d missed something, something important.

  “Why didn’t you tell me this before?”

  “The grave-robbing thing derailed logic.”

  After a moment, he relaxed back in his seat. “Get off here!” He pointed to an exit that was barely makeable at our speed.

  I cranked the wheel hard to the right, then turned back into the skid as the rear end broke loose. With a car this heavy, momentum usually won. We slid for the guardrail. But today, I was the lucky one. The wheels regained traction, giving me control. We narrowly missed the railing as we rocketed down the exit, then blew through the stop sign at the bottom. Rural Nevada, no cars, not even a cow to avoid.

  My lucky day.

  When I’d gotten the car to a full stop, my father said. “Go back. Head north from the last intersection.”

  I took stock of my surroundings and figured the best way to get where he wanted me to go was to back up the service road. My father white-knuckled it but kept quiet as I arrived back at the intersection almost as fast as I’d passed it.

  Manhandling the car felt good—a modicum of control in a life spinning beyond my ability to even hang on, much less direct it.

  I’d settled into a slightly excessive speed for the patched and potholed asphalt road. Straight as an arrow, the road to perdition stretched to the horizon.

  The flood of adrenaline brought me back. “Could you give me a head’s-up next time?”

  “I’m doing this from memory.”

  “An old one and not your own, must be a challenge.” Okay, there was a question buried in there that he ignored.

  He stared at the map now, studying it, then glancing out the window to his right and occasionally straight ahead. “Landmarks have changed. Trees grow or are cut down. Buildings are erected or razed.” We bounced along for another several miles. “Your mother said it was pretty far off the highway. That you’d never know it was there unless you’d been put there or knew someone who had.”

  Interesting choice of words I didn’t quite understand, but I knew now was the time to be quiet. The past pressed in around us. I imagined the whispers of ghosts and I shivered. This whole thing was creeping me out.

  A road off to our right came up quickly. It was more of a rutted cow path now that headed east from the hard road. Two columns of stone about three feet high bracketed the turnoff. One of them wore the years better than the other—it tilted precariously. The top half had already succumbed to gravity and lay scattered and broken among the weeds and dead grass.

  “I think that’s our turn.” My father squinted at the drawing as if trying to intimidate it into giving up its secrets.

  My reaction time in tatters, I missed it. Maneuvering the big car back around on the narrow blacktop took a minute. Patches of ice kept me from throwing the thing into reverse and doing what I’d done before. This time, I thought it would be better if I had a good view of where my tires were in relation to the road and the ice—the road was barely wider than my axle as it was. Finally, I accelerated back the way we had come, then slowed as my father leaned forward in his seat. I stopped at the turnoff. “Are you sure?”

  “No. But it’s the only one that’s even close. Let’s try it.”

  The ruts were deeper than I’d thought at first. Even still, it looked like they’d been carved a long time ago, then the road had been abandoned. The dirt was unmarred by recent tire tracks. “No one has been down this way since Christ was a corporal.”

  “Yes, the sanitarium closed right after…”

  “Sanitarium?”

  “Hmm…” the faraway, pained look told me he wasn’t really listening. “Loudon was a bad place. Nothing good happened there.”

  “Loudon Sanitarium? Like for the mentally ill?”

  “Yeah. I guess they tried to make it a nice place, but that’s hard to do with folks as sick as the ones housed here. It was a farm, if you will, with animals for the patients to care for or at least interact with. Didn’t do much good—most were beyond help. The inmates called it Suicide Shores, an inside joke.”

  “S. S.,” I whispered. “Dora Bates was here at about the same time as your…association?” I raised my voice in question, hoping he answered both.

  “Yes. That’s what your mother said.” He shot me a look—he’d been more open than he intended. “I’m sure this is it. Can you go down the road? It’s only a few hundred yards, if I remember correctly. I can walk but I’m not sure how far.”

  No way was he walking. I eased the car off the paved road, wincing as I did so, but the scraping I expected didn’t come. “Barring any potholes, we ought to make it.”

  The further we inched, the paler he became, his hands fisted around the shovel. Behind a copse of trees that sheltered it from the road, an imposing stone manor house came into view. All the glass had long ago been broken. Torn and tattered curtains wafted in the slight breeze, ghosts shaking their laundry. The double wooden front door remained resolute, closed to those searching for secrets.

  I parked on the cracked and crumbling concrete of what had been a circular drive and killed the engine. The quiet amplified the creepy. “I’ll try the door, but it looks like we’ll have to skinny through a window. You stay here.”

  “What we’re looking for won’t be in there.” My father’s voice held a note of grim reality.

  “So you’ve implied. But it wouldn’t hurt to take a look around while we’re here.”

  “What are you hoping to find?”

  “Honestly? Courage.” I buttoned up my sweater and popped the door. “I’ll let you know when I find it.” I scanned the front of the building and the part of the side I could see for a window wide enough and close enough to the ground to accommodate my bulk and my age. Only one looked promising, but the lead latticework of a lost stained-glass window barred easy entry.

  My father’s hand on my arm stopped me. “The building was cleaned out years ago. Anything we cou
ld use is long gone.” His hand tightened as he turned to stare at the building. “If it was ever here.” He let go and buttoned his overcoat, then lifted his chin, indicating something ahead of the car. “The stables were behind the house. But we need to go just beyond the stables, down over that ridge. We need to go that way. Take the car as far as you can, then we’ll go the rest of the way on foot. Over the rise, the hill drops down to a small pond next to the stables. What we’re looking for is there.”

  At the top of the hill, I stopped and peered over. What had passed for a road now turned into a goat trail. “We’ll have to hoof it from here.”

  My father carefully folded the sheets of paper and eased them back into his inside pocket. His hand on the handle, he hesitated, then, with a nod, opened the door and eased his legs out.

  I left the lights on as I rushed around to help him. Ignoring his attempt to brush my help away, I grasped his hand and elbow and pulled him to his feet. His breath came hard and fast with the effort. His skin was cold and clammy. “I really don’t want to do this,” he said, surprising me.

  “I don’t either.”

  “Turn off the lights. You’ll kill the battery.”

  I glanced at the gray sky. The sun had already dipped below the mountains to the west. A bare hint of pink colored the clouds, but it too would soon be gone.

  “We won’t be that long anyway.” His way of capitulating. As he leaned on me, I could almost feel the extra weight he carried.

  “I don’t need to remind you this was your idea.” The instant I said it, I felt like a schmuck. Nothing like adding to the load that already threatened to break him.

  “We have to know.” Fear radiated off him—not at all like him. “If your mother is right, we’ll know who you’re looking for and why.”

  That was the prod I needed to get over my whine. “I’ll carry the shovel.” Never letting go of him, I reached back inside and grabbed it. “If we can keep him from killing again, I’ll dig up as many bodies as you need.”

  He let me steady him as we made our way down the path. In the shadows, ice hinted along the edges of the stagnant pond where it had caught the snow, which remained a stark white in the safety of the cold. As a final resting place, this place was right out of Hollywood—Bela Lugosi would feel right at home. Chills chased through me, from the cold or my overactive imagination, I didn’t know. Remnants of a barn, the wood graying with time and inattention, the door hanging open, one side missing altogether, leaned away from the wind. A year or a good snowstorm would take it down.