Her 24-Hour Protector

by Loreth Anne White

  Defensiveness flared in her. “Imprisoned? Hardly. And my father has always been good to me.”

  “I know, I know. I’m sorry.”

  She shook her head, pulling a face. “It’s okay. Lord knows I probably deserve some payback considering the hell I put you through at that auction.”

  Lex turned down a deserted street. The sky was lowering, darkening over them, a strange kinetic energy filling in the air. The torn fronds of a lone palm fluttered in the hot, mounting wind. Litter scattered in squalls across the streets.

  This section of town was a far cry from the glittering epicenter of Jenna’s existence. She began to feel nervous as they passed lowbrow gambling halls, dim bars, a few homeless people huddled in a corner, sharing a smoke. The streets seemed strangely empty for a Saturday evening, compared to the 24/7 buzz that was the Strip.

  Lex swerved to the curb suddenly and slammed on brakes, his tires screeching.

  “What is it?”

  “I saw someone—” he rammed his SUV into reverse, backed up a block, fast. Across the street an older woman in a gypsy skirt walked briskly down the sidewalk, black shawl fluttering in the wind. She turned and abruptly vanished into a narrow alley.

  “It’s her!” He reversed farther.

  “Who?”

  He turned the ignition off. “Jenna, I need to check something out. Can you wait?”

  Nerves fluttered irrationally in her stomach. She glanced out the window at the darkening street. The first fat plops of rain were beginning to fall. “What is it, Lex? Who was that woman?”

  “Someone I’ve been looking to question for months. Every time I come out this way, I seem to miss her, like ships that pass in the night. I won’t be long.”

  Jenna sat in the SUV as he jogged across the road and disappeared down the same alley that had swallowed the woman. Craning her neck to see over the backseat, Jenna tried to peer down the alley and caught the flutter of the woman’s shawl as she vanished into a tiny storefront that had a broken pink neon sign over the door. Jenna could make out the first two words: Lucky Lady. The c was missing.

  Hot wind gusted outside more fiercely. Bits of newspaper swirled off the sidewalk and danced up in a wicked little dervish. The sky turned a deeper purple. A man pushing a shopping cart wandered by, stared at her.

  Jenna double-checked that the doors were locked.

  But after a few minutes, she was feeling real uneasy. The streets were growing eerie with the dusky dark orange glow of the coming storm. Heavier drops of rain bulleted down onto the car.

  Jenna reached for the door handle. There was no way she was going to sit here alone in a full-blown storm. Then she hesitated. Few places in the world had tighter security than the big resort hotels clustered in downtown Vegas. But outside those populated tourist areas Sin City had the same urban ills and muggings as any other big metropolis. Common sense had always had Jenna sticking to the busy parts of town, the well-lit streets.

  These were not.

  She removed her ostentatious emerald bracelet and the diamond pendant around her neck, then opened Lex’s glove compartment. But as she was about to stuff them in, she saw a plastic sleeve containing old newspaper cuttings. One headline immediately caught her eye: “Reno Mother Brutally Slain While Son Hid in Closet.”

  Curiosity quickened through her. Wind rocked the vehicle slightly, and Jenna grew edgy as she scanned the news cutting. But as the words of the report sunk in, her blood turned to ice.

  It was a story printed in the Reno Daily thirty years ago about a croupier named Sara Duncan—a single mother aged twenty-seven who’d been slain in her own home while her five-year-old son, Lexington Duncan, had hidden in the bedroom closet.

  Jenna quickly read the second article contained in the plastic sleeve. Sara’s child had actually witnessed his mother’s throat being slit through the louvered slats of the door, but had not been able to speak for well over a year. And when he had started speaking again, Reno police learned he was unable to identify his mother’s killer. He’d only seen the man’s pant legs and hands. And the knife—the murder weapon used to cut Sara Duncan’s throat.

  Jenna sat back in her seat, numb.

  Lex wasn’t just an orphan. His mother had been taken from him in the most brutal way possible.

  And he’d seen it.

  Suddenly she felt scared. Alone. And beyond curious. She opened the car door quickly. Rain was coming down hard now, the kind of torrential summer downpour that flash flooded Vegas streets notorious for bad drainage, snarling traffic up along the city arteries.

  She ran across the street and ducked down the alley.

  Chapter 6

  Small bells chinked as Lex entered the Lucky Lady psychic store, tendrils of incense smoke curling in the wake of his movement. It was dim inside—no air-conditioning. Shelves cluttered with silver dragons, cards, dice, engraved boxes, fetishes, crystal balls and fat little Buddhas lined the walls.

  This was obviously the Lucky Lady’s game—peddling fortune, fate, magic. Selling a chance to beat the odds, win the dream. Parting cash from those who believed they could control such things. Lex’s eyes adjusted to the light, his gaze settling on a faded old poster that hung on the far wall. It promoted a topless, psychic act at the old Frontline Casino circa 1970s, the same casino his mother worked at. The “psychic” on the poster was a busty, leggy redhead in a belly-dancer costume, shown seductively stripping copious veils.

  “Hello!” Lex called out. “Is there anyone here?”

  A parrot squawked somewhere in the back. Lex tensed. “Hello?”

  Suddenly, from behind a heavy curtain sewn with a myriad of tiny silver stars, the old gypsy woman he’d seen on the street materialized. Lex’s pulse quickened. She came slowly forward, huge false eyelashes making her unblinking eyes seem surreal. Gold hoop earrings dangled from her ears and small spots of rouge looked comical on her parched cheeks. Her wrinkled eyelids were heavily lacquered with blue-green eye shadow, the color collecting into darker rivers in the creases of her aging skin. Lex realized with a start that she was the woman depicted in the old poster, faded and crumpled and made sadly comical by time as she tried to hold on to the thinning threads of the past.

  “Marion Robb?” he asked.

  She blinked. “Who’s asking?”

  “I’m Lex Duncan,” he said, wondering what this woman could possibly tell him. “A friend of mine, Tom McCall—the old Washoe County sheriff—said I might find you here. He…suggested I come talk to you.”

  Her features grew guarded. “What does the sheriff’s office want?” Her voice was husky, the sound of possibly too many cigarettes, cheap whiskey and loud bars.

  “McCall is retired. He doesn’t want anything, it’s me who—”

  “You a cop?”

  “I’m here for personal reasons.”

  “You are a cop then.”

  “FBI.”

  “What? You want a reading?” She jerked her head toward her rate board. “I’m about to close up shop, but I can maybe do a fifteen-minute session.”

  The parrot squawked again, and thunder rumbled low and close outside. Lex could hear the splat of rain coming down heavily out in the street. A gust of moisture-tinged air chased through the store, and a door somewhere banged upstairs.

  Lex cleared his throat. “I didn’t come for a reading, ma’am. Tom McCall told me that you once knew Sara Duncan, a croupier who worked at the old Frontline Casino about thirty years ago.”

  Her face remained expressionless, but he detected a shift in her body tension. “What you say your name was?”

  “Lex Duncan.”

  She stared at him for a long while, and as Lex watched, her features seemed to melt, and her hand went to her neck. “My oath,” she whispered, voice hoarse and low. “You’re her boy.”

  Lex’s chest constricted, his mouth going dry. “I…wanted to ask you some questions about Sara, about my mother. Sheriff McCall helped work my mother’s homicide case along with
the Reno police all those years ago. He mentioned you had been a friend of my mother’s, that you and her used to work together at Frank Epstein’s Frontline Casino.”

  She nodded. “Before it was razed to make way for the Desert Lion. Yes. Yes, I worked there at the same time Sara was there.” She drew the curtain back hastily, hooking it up into a silver loop. She pulled out a chair at a small round table that was draped in midnight-blue velvet. “Sit.” She fluttered her hand full of rings at the chair.

  He held up his palms. “I didn’t come for a reading—”

  “No, no…you must sit.”

  Lex edged awkwardly onto the tiny chair at the little round séance table. The old woman seated herself opposite him, reached over the table, clasped both his hands in hers, her skin papery, dry, her fingers bony. “I can’t believe it,” she whispered. “Sara Duncan’s boy.” Moisture filled her eyes as she considered him intently. “You have her features, you know? And the color of your eyes, it’s the same green as hers. Sara, she turned the head of many a man…you’ve come looking for your father.”

  Lex shook the chill she gave him. It would be obvious that he’d be looking. “Yes,” he said.

  Always, he was looking.

  She narrowed her eyes. “But mostly you want the man who killed your mother.”

  He said nothing.

  She sighed heavily. “Son, you’re seeking a past in a city that holds no memory. Not only that but there are still people in this town who will go to great lengths to ensure that the past stays where it belongs—buried.” She leaned forward, bony fingers tightening around his. “You go trying to mess with that, and you’re looking to be messing with some real bad ghosts.”

  “I’m looking for truth. Not ghosts.”

  She shook her head. “Honey, what you’re looking for is trouble.”

  Lex heard the storefront bells tinkle suddenly, as if someone had entered the store. He couldn’t see the door from where he was sitting—he was tucked behind the curtain. Besides, he couldn’t tear his eyes away from the woman’s strange, lined face. Probably just another gust from the storm, he told himself. The bells blew again in the wind. Thunder clapped right overhead. Candles shimmered, sputtered in wax. His pulse quickened. “What are you trying to tell me?” he said quietly.

  She closed her eyes, began to rock backward and forward, her voice taking on a strange and dissonant monotone. “A past…buried in the Mojave sands. Sands of time…a grave…”

  “What exactly are you saying?”

  She rocked some more. Then her eyes suddenly flared open. “Bodies!” she hissed.

  Tension wedged into Lex’s throat. “Look, I didn’t want any reading. I just wanted to ask you some questions about my mother.”

  Her eyes refocused on him. “People used to bury bodies out there, in the desert, you know? Before the feds ran them out of town.”

  People? Feds? Was she alluding to the fact he was a federal agent, or was she referring to Las Vegas’s dark mob past? Lex thought of the fat envelope of cash that used to arrive for his mother, delivered by a guy in a shiny blue Cadillac convertible. “Are you trying to say my mother might have been involved with organized crime?”

  “Everyone—” she whispered “—was touched by those tendrils of evil. Everyone.”

  Lex grew agitated. He didn’t believe in this woo woo crap, yet this woman was managing to rattle his cage nevertheless. He tried to get back on track. “Did Frank Epstein ever mess with my mother, while she was working there?”

  She shook her head. “Don’t even go thinking about it. Epstein is not your father. He used to bed a different woman every night, but once he met his Mercedes, then a showgirl from the Flamingo Club, his whole world changed. From the moment he laid eyes on Mercedes he never, ever touched another dame. And he never touched your mother.”

  “Why did Sara leave Vegas after she was fired from the Frontline?”

  “I honestly don’t know. She just packed up one day and vanished.” A sadness filtered into the Lucky Lady’s eyes. “I figured it was because you were on the way. Maybe she wanted a fresh start.”

  “She wasn’t seeing someone special in Vegas at the time?”

  “Lexington, I loved your mother. We were close, real close. Like sisters. You need friends in a town like this, and she was mine. But not once did she talk about a special man in her life, and I never saw her with anyone who might be special to her.”

  Lex was startled by her use of his full name. No one but his mother had ever called him Lexington.

  “Sara broke my heart, you know, when she left? Took me almost a year to learn she’d actually ended up in Reno. By then you were born. I visited her a couple times, but she was different…distant. She was getting regular money from some place. I reckon she must’ve had a decent gig going because she bought her own house in a Reno suburb, never talked about Vegas.” She inhaled deeply. “Look, maybe she was seeing a married guy and he was paying her to keep quiet about his kid. Or maybe she was hooking again, high-class stuff.” She met his eyes. “I would tell you if I knew who your father might be, Lexington. It was terrible what happened to her. Just terrible.”

  “You think my father might have killed her?”

  “I don’t know. And that’s what I told the cops when they came to question me. They came because I was her friend.”

  Lex leaned forward. “Marion, my mother used to get cash, once a month, delivered by some guy in a pale metallic-blue Cadillac convertible. The car had a little sticker on the bumper, like a logo. It looked like cartoon lion standing up, with a crown on his head? Do you recall anyone who drove a car with a sticker like that? Maybe from the Frontline?” It wasn’t something Lex had thought to tell the police when he was five. He hadn’t even remembered that bumper sticker until very recently when he’d gone to see a woman the FBI occasionally used as a forensic hypnotist to aid witnesses in recalling crime detail. He’d done it because there was this hole in his life—this need to know what had happened that day, thirty years ago, and why. Because not once since that horrific moment had Lex stopped searching for the man with the sandpapery voice who’d slaughtered his beautiful young mother.

  It had become a driving force in him.

  It was why he was back in Vegas. And while he was here, he was going to keep looking. Until he found that man.

  Dead or alive.

  And this time, if that killer was still alive, Lex would be able to move. Instead of being frozen with fear in a cupboard. He now had a badge, and he had a gun. And he had the power to take the man’s freedom. He was going to fix what he hadn’t been able to fix three decades ago.

  But the woman’s face had suddenly shuttered at the mention of the Cadillac and bumper sticker. Her eyes grew flat. “That’s all I know.”

  Lex sensed there was more. A lot more. He also sensed he wasn’t going to get it by pushing. He’d come back again in a few days, win her confidence in increments. He had time on his side now. As long as he held this Vegas post.

  He jutted his chin toward the faded old poster behind the woman, the one promoting the sexy topless psychic act at the Frontline Casino. “Is that you?”

  “Back in the day.”

  “Nice.”

  She didn’t smile.

  Lex placed a wad of cash on the table. The woman stared at it.

  “Please, Marion, take it. And thank you.” He placed his hand on the wad, pushed it closer to her.

  She closed her eyes suddenly and slapped her hand down hard over his, on top of the wad of notes, making him jolt. “A diamond!”

  “What?”

  “I see a diamond…a big diamond. Tears.”

  An ice-cold shiver rippled over Lex’s skin. Damn, this woman really was psychic. “What about a diamond?” His voice came out slightly hoarse.

  “Very, very powerful stone…” She began rocking again, faster, harder. “Great danger…. No! Great love. A curse and a promise wrapped in…death…” Her voice started to fade to a thin pap
ery whisper. “Death…buried in sands…sands of time…death to be avenged…” Her eyes opened. She said nothing more. Just stared at him, features a blank slate. It was as if the woman inside the body was gone.

  Hiding his uneasiness, he got up. “Uh…thank you.”

  “Be careful,” she hissed.

  “I…I don’t believe in this stuff.” He felt compelled to say it. To convince himself, more than her. Being involved with that Mayan rock of the Rothchilds’ was getting to him.

  “You can’t not believe,” she whispered. “You can’t work in Vegas for any length of time without coming to believe, at some point, that luck, fortune, fetish, fate play a role in all of our lives. No matter how you try to control your destiny, Lexington, you can’t not believe in magic. Not in Vegas.”

  Oh, yeah, he could not believe if he wanted to.

  But his blood still ran cold as he stalked toward the store exit, needing to get the hell out of here, and fast. But he did a sharp double take when he saw Jenna standing wide-eyed near the door.

  He grabbed her arm. “Geez, Jenna, how long have you been standing there listening?” he snapped.

  “Did you hear what she said? About The Tears of the Quetzal?”

  “Keep your voice down,” he growled as he ushered her out into the pelting sheet of rain. They ducked their heads against the deluge, ran hand in hand to the car, got in breathless and wet. Both sat in silence for a moment.

  Jenna turned to him. “Lex, she had to be talking about The Tears of the Quetzal.”

  “It was nonsense,” he said brusquely. “And even if she was referring to the ring, it was probably because she read about Candace’s murder and the diamond in the papers. Damn it—” he ran his hand over his rain-soaked hair “—she probably recognized me from the newspapers the minute I walked in there, played me all along. And then you go and walk in.” Anger stirred, and he swore again. “If she goes to the press with this now, if she tells the media that you and I were together in that place, after they splashed me kissing you on that front cover—” Lex slapped the steering wheel.