Royal Flush

by Stephanie Caffrey

  My bouncer-friend Carlos tapped me on the shoulder on my way back to the locker room.

  "Slow night," he said. "I don't get it."

  I shrugged and fanned my wad of twenties in front of his face.

  He smiled. "Guess it's not so slow for you."

  "Don't worry about me, Carlos. Hey," I said, on a whim, "you want to go to Hakk?" I assumed that was what the cool kids called Hakkasan.

  "To what?"

  "Hakkasan, the club over at MGM."

  He cocked his head sideways. "I'm on 'til three. And since when do you go clubbing?"

  "I'm not going clubbing," I said, as though the word were toxic. "It's for a case. And I'll pay you more to come with me than you'll make here." Carlos sometimes rode shotgun with me when I wanted some muscular backup. I had never known him to turn down the opportunity to work with me.

  He frowned, considering it. From experience, I knew he would come, but he'd squeal in an effort to get more money out of me. It wasn't going to work.

  "I would, but—"

  "Just punch out. They'll be happy since it's slow anyways."

  "Can't do it. I promised Javon I'd take his spot later."

  Now I knew he was bluffing, since he never traded shifts with anyone.

  "Suit yourself," I said, and turned away. I put the over-under for the time it would take for Carlos to come crawling back at five seconds. The under won.

  "All right," he said, hustling immediately after me.

  I turned around and allowed a little smile to creep up my face.

  "Bitch," he muttered, knowing he'd been played by a master.

  That B word made my smile blossom. It meant I'd gotten under his skin. "Just give me a minute to change, and meet me at your car."

  "I'm driving?" He protested.

  "I walked here."

  He pouted, as though asking him to drive the three miles to the MGM was like asking him to walk across hot coals. I rolled my eyes and headed back to my locker.

  My yoga outfit was not going to fly at the club, which I knew had a dress code, but I had plenty of slinky outfits in my locker. Unfortunately most of them were a little too revealing—about the kind of stuff you'd expect a stripper to wear around a strip club, or the kind of outfit your slutty friend might wear at Halloween. I found a dark red cocktail dress and squeezed into it. On my way out I deliberately refused to check myself in the mirror, afraid of what I might see.

  Carlos raised an eyebrow at my outfit when I met him at his car, a black Mustang GT with whiplash-inducing acceleration. Wisely, he kept his mouth shut.

  We climbed in, and he pulled out of the parking lot with a loud and unnecessary thrust of the accelerator. The Strip at one in the morning was just getting warmed up. Throngs of tourists packed the corners, waiting for lights to change, slurping away at their yard-long glasses of watered-down margaritas. The High Roller observation wheel (don't call it a Ferris wheel, the locals said) was lit up ostentatiously, offering its passengers a 360-degree view of Las Vegas in all its glory. We caught mostly green lights through the heart of the Strip, passing Caesars Palace and Bellagio on my right, and then the City Center complex and Monte Carlo. Carlos got into the left lane and turned left on Tropicana, where we eased into a U-turn and then into the valet parking lane at the MGM Grand.

  CHAPTER NINE

  To say that the MGM Grand valet gave me a once-over as he helped me out of the car would not do justice to the prodigious gander down my top to which he helped himself. In fact, he ogled me so thoroughly that it made my skin tingle, which was a hard thing to accomplish after my decade of exotic dancing. I flashed him a thin smile and bit my lip, remembering that I was the one who'd spent ten grand on fake boobs and was currently dressed in clothes more commonly worn as a gag Halloween costume. What the hell did I expect? I figured I should have been upset if he didn't leer at me.

  As Carlos stepped into the lights under the valet area, I grimaced.

  "You know they have a dress code, right?"

  He shrugged. "These babies get me in the door anywhere," he said, before laying a big smooch on each of his bulging biceps. Classy. He was decked out in the standard bouncer attire, which was designed to accentuate his muscles in an effort to dissuade potential hooligans from causing mischief. His off-white T-shirt clung to his massive pecs, and the aforementioned biceps were threatening to rip the fabric on his short sleeves.

  It wasn't a bad look, but it wasn't going to work at the club.

  "Let's get inside and look around first," I said. "We might have to go shopping."

  Carlos pouted again, which drew a stern elbow in the ribs from me.

  We walked into the MGM Grand and immediately went up the escalator, which led us right to Hakkasan. Not that we needed directions. The thumping music coming from within would have made it more than obvious. A modest line of glittering girls and young men extended out the door. I left Carlos behind and approached the door, squinting at a sign posted outside. The dress code was pretty basic, but it did require a collared shirt for men. I should have expected that.

  I sighed. "I don't think there are any clothing stores in here, but I'm sure they have a gift shop."

  Carlos cringed. "This is gonna mess with my image, isn't it?"

  "Almost certainly," I said, grabbing his left bicep playfully. It was like grabbing an over-inflated football.

  "Try this one," he said, thrusting his right arm toward me.

  I gave it a squeeze. "Impressive."

  He seemed quite pleased with himself. "Now it's my turn to squeeze something," he said, staring at my cleavage.

  "Dream on. And we're in the middle of a giant casino, you troglodyte. Come on, let's go."

  Carlos's lusty ways had long ago ceased to bother me. In the years he'd worked at Cougar's with me, he had openly proposed all kinds of sexual acts, and he was never shy about abandoning his bouncer duties in order to take in one of my acts. It was flattering, to be honest. With all the beautiful and younger naked ladies surrounding him, I was still clearly his favorite. And now that we sometimes worked together outside of the strip club setting, he was growing on me. On the side, he was attending business school at UNLV, and he owned a string of apartment buildings, which he also found time to manage.

  Carlos was standing there as if he was glued to the floor, so I dragged him by the bicep, which required two hands, and we made our way back downstairs and through the ding-ding-ding of the casino toward the lobby, where a large store called Grand was still open. Casino hotel stores all carried an amusing array of products—everything from booze and wine to Preparation-H and Zantac, the kinds of things almost every Vegas visitor needed at some point on their trip. One thing they all had in common was an array of cheesy Vegas-themed clothing, and I dragged Carlos in the direction of the clothing racks in the back of the store.

  "Everything with a collar here is lame," he muttered, thumbing idly through some golf shirts with the MGM Grand logo on them.

  "Just pick one," I said. "Nobody's going to be looking at you anyway."

  He smiled. "That's what you think."

  I found two shirts and held them up in front of Carlos. One was a Tommy Bahama-style button-down shirt with a logo from KÀ, the long-running Asian-themed Cirque du Soleil show playing at the MGM. The other was a pink golf shirt with MGM's lion logo on the breast.

  Carlos shrugged apathetically.

  "Large?" I asked.

  "Whatever."

  I grabbed his muscle again. "For a guy with such big muscles, you sure act like a spoiled little kid sometimes."

  He looked me up and down, a tiny smile breaking out on his face. "I'm supposed to take advice from someone dressed like Elvira?"

  "Is it that bad?" I asked, suddenly worried.

  "Let's just go," he muttered, grabbing the golf shirt.

  I put the shirt on my credit card, and Carlos went to the bathroom to change.

  When he emerged, I had to stifle a giggle.

  "That is totally
you," I said. "Pink must be your color."

  He shrugged off my sarcasm. "I actually like it," he said. "So let's get in there and get this over with."

  I guessed the reason he wasn't protesting more was that the shirt was about two sizes too small for his buff torso, and Carlos obviously counted bulging out of shirts among his many hobbies.

  By the time we got back upstairs to the club, there were only a few people in front of us waiting to get in. Not being a regular clubber, I was amused by the fact that admission for men was ten dollars more than for women. When we entered, we found ourselves in a large, chic room filled with swanky-looking lounge areas, where well-dressed groups of people were hanging out and mingling. An Asian theme permeated the atmosphere, with deep reds and blacks covering the walls and an abundant use of expensive-looking bamboo.

  "Let's do a walk-through," I said.

  "With pleasure," Carlos said, eyeing one of the waif-like waitresses passing by. "By the way, who are we looking for?"

  I gave Carlos the short version as we wandered around the lounge area. The lounge tables were lit with attractive little candles, which seemed to flicker in concert with the loud music thumping in from the rest of the club.

  "Drinks?" said a little voice from behind us.

  When I turned around, the waitress couldn't hide a grimace as she glanced down at my top.

  "Not right now," I said.

  Carlos piped in. "Jack and Coke, please."

  She wrote "JC" down on her pad and flitted away.

  "Jack and Coke? That's what college kids drink."

  Carlos shrugged. "I like it."

  "But why mix expensive bourbon with soda? It doesn't make sense."

  "It's not bourbon, bourbon comes from Kentucky. Jack is from Tennessee. So keep your snobby opinions to yourself." Carlos was enjoying himself a little too much. But he had a point—I had to admit.

  There was no sign of Jojia anywhere in the lounge, so we stood in the corner like idiots and waited for Carlos' drink.

  "Seventeen," the waitress said. Carlos didn't bat an eyelash at the price, and he didn't move a muscle, either. After a few awkward seconds, I realized he was waiting for me to whip out my credit card. I sighed and went along with the program, although I refused to leave more than a dollar as a tip.

  "Let's head in," I said.

  We found ourselves in one of the largest rooms I'd ever been in, a two-story cathedral of metal girders and spotlights. In the middle were a few hundred people jumping up and down to the pulsing music coming from a stage on the far side. The stage had about ten giant TVs perched above it, all proclaiming the name of the DJ, a guy calling himself Wolfhound.

  "You ever hear of Wolfhound?" I asked Carlos in an almost-yell, trying to cut through the music. He was about a decade younger than I was, so he had a better chance of knowing what the cool kids were up to.

  "Yeah, he's big. I think he's here probably three times a month."

  "Hmm. Well, let's move around and see if we can find her. Then I'll come up with a plan."

  We started with the oversized couches that encircled the dance floor, most of which were filled with people who looked like they'd had too much to drink. No sign of Jojia anywhere, which meant we had to hit the dance floor.

  "Care to dance?" I asked.

  Carlos looked at the crowd skeptically. "That ain't dancing." The crowd was mostly gyrating to the heavy bass.

  "What, you prefer to waltz?"

  "Beats the hell out of whatever this is," he said.

  I dragged his arm again and pulled him behind me out into the crowd. Carlos and I half-danced while we looked around for Jojia. With the multi-colored spotlights shining down on us, and with the strobe effects from behind the stage, it was hard to get a really good look at anyone. Still, after fifteen minutes of squinting and craning my neck, I was beginning to think she wasn't there.

  "Let's take a break," I said. We found ourselves a spot on a half-occupied couch off to the side of the dance floor.

  "So why are we looking for this chick exactly?" he asked.

  "I find her interesting."

  Carlos smiled. "Good enough for me."

  "She's tight with Kent, the guy I'm checking on. I don't want to get too close to him, but this Jojia could provide us some good information. I'm dying to know what he's told her about himself."

  "You mean whether he's some kind of fancy prince over in England," Carlos added.

  I nodded, pulling out my cell phone. I pulled up Jojia's Facebook page again, and sure enough, her page showed a photo of her taken only forty-five minutes earlier. She was standing in a friendly pose next to a tall, black man who was wearing a white satin shirt. Both held flutes of champagne. The photo was tagged as being taken at Hakkasan.

  "She's here," I said, showing Carlos the picture on my phone. "Or at least she was forty-five minutes ago."

  "She's not sipping that stuff down here," Carlos shouted. "It looks quiet where she is."

  "I know," I said, looking around. "But it's not in the lounge we checked, either. The color scheme is different. There must be somewhere else in the club."

  Carlos pointed. "Look up."

  I hadn't noticed it, but there was an entire mezzanine level above the dance floor.

  "How do we get up there?" I asked.

  Carlos shrugged.

  I flagged down a waitress and pointed up, trying to communicate using hand signals over the noise of the music. The waitress pointed me to a staircase in the far corner, and Carlos and I headed in that direction.

  When we got upstairs, a VIP host greeted us.

  "Do you have reservations?" she asked, pretending not to recoil in horror at our appearance.

  "No," I said. "We're meeting Jojia Takada here."

  She looked at me skeptically but then waved us in without further comment.

  "Well that was easy," I muttered.

  Carlos shook his head. "They don't really care if you have reservations or not. The drinks up here cost even more. Probably five-hundred bucks for a thirty-dollar bottle of booze. So they're happy if you're sitting here and not dancing around down there."

  "You sound like you know what you're talking about," I remarked.

  He shrugged. "I was young once."

  I laughed. "Let's go on the prowl."

  The VIP rooms were semi-private, meaning they were partly enclosed by walls but still open to prying eyes, probably a calculated effort to appeal subconsciously to people who worked in cubicles. Laughter spewed out of the first one we walked past.

  I peaked in. She wasn't in there.

  "There," Carlos whispered, cocking his head to our left. I turned and saw a tall black man in a white shirt leaning against the railing across from us, looking down on the hundreds of dancers below us.

  "That's the guy in the photo, you're right," I said. I squinted, trying to see if Jojia was anywhere to be seen. I couldn't quite tell. The distance to the other side of the mezzanine was probably fifty yards, and the multi-colored spotlights above us were flashing on and off in every direction.

  I nudged Carlos along, and we headed over to the other side of the mezzanine. As we got closer, I didn't have much of a plan, but I had a sense that Jojia was so friendly we'd hit it off in no time and become BFFs. The black man leaning against the railing was making no effort to hide his appreciation for my ridiculous outfit, or at least what was underneath said outfit.

  "How you doing?" he asked, completely ignoring Carlos. I could almost feel Carlos' left pectoral muscle flex in protest.

  I smiled at him shyly. He was very good looking, with dark eyes and a sculpted face. His gray sport coat stood in contrast to Carlos's ridiculous getup. "You here with Jojia?" I asked.

  He gave me a knowing nod, as though he was a member of some kind of private club, and I'd just said the secret password.

  "But why don't you and I go chat for a little bit?" he asked. He had a syrupy sweet low voice, which made it hard to say no.

  Carlos bu
tted in before I had the chance. "He's half your age, you know," he whispered in my ear.

  "I didn't catch your name," I said. "I'm Raven. This is my little brother, Carlos." I pinched Carlos's cheek for effect.

  The man smiled at me, clearly enjoying the role of the alpha dog. "I'm Charles," he said. "I hope you'll stay."

  I nodded. "We're just cruising around, you know. Hitting all the spots." I signaled to Carlos that we should move on. "We'll be back, don't worry."

  Carlos and I took an oh-so-casual peek into the booth closest to where Charles had been hanging out. Sure enough, Jojia was sitting at the table, surrounded by a half-dozen others. She was wearing a cute black dress and had her hair up in some kind of narrow arrangement. In front of her lay a bottle of water and a little baggie that looked as if it had pills in it.

  We breezed by the booth and turned around a corner to talk in private.

  "What the hell was that?" Carlos asked. "Your little brother? Come on."

  I shrugged. "The bigger question is, were those pills in there?"

  "I saw them," he said. "I'm guessing your friend Charles is standing guard out there in case the cocktail waitress swings by at the wrong time."

  "What do you think they are?"

  "Probably ecstasy, or something like it. Club drugs, you know."

  I frowned. "No, I don't know. This isn't my scene, remember?"

  He made a point of looking me up and down. "No kidding."

  I brushed Carlos off. Making fun of my outfit was too easy, and I wasn't about to get upset about it. I thought for a minute, not sure I wanted to get involved with Jojia if she was using drugs. I had been planning on having a casual chat with her, but now it looked as if she was up to no good. And she even had a lookout working for her.

  "Maybe that's why she's so popular," I wondered aloud. "If she's supplying half the county with free club drugs, it's no wonder that she has five thousand friends."

  "Why do you care that she's popular?" Carlos asked.

  "I guess I shouldn't care. It's just something that's been bugging me. Makes me think back to high school."

  "And this has something to do with the case you're working?"