Vegas Lies ( Lies Mystery Thriller Series Book 3)

by Andrew Cunningham

  That was assuming we could even get her back.

  Dickie finally called around noon and identified himself very simply.

  “Dickie.” He was a man of few words, I guessed.

  “Del.” I could play that game. Trouble was, he didn’t respond, so I finally had to say, “Where are we meeting?”

  “We’re not.”

  I wasn’t expecting that.

  “We’re not?”

  “We’re not.”

  This “man of few words” crap was starting to get to me.

  “Why?” I asked.

  There was noise in the background. I could hear lots of voices and the clinking of glasses. Was he at Luke’s Place?

  “I’ve got my reasons,” he said.

  “We can give you more money.” I was feeling a bit desperate.

  “I’ll think about it and get back to you,” he said.

  In the background, I heard someone answer the phone. It was probably our friend, the bartender. “Luke’s Place,” he said. There. Now I knew where he was. A little stupid on his part.

  Dickie hung up his phone.

  “He’s not meeting?” asked Sabrina.

  “Nope. He’s having second thoughts. But, I know where he is—Luke’s Place. If we get there in time, maybe we can follow him and get him alone.”

  I called down to the valet and asked them to bring our car around, then we quickly got ready to go. Sabrina and I got ready, anyway. Mo just followed behind us quietly. I wasn’t sure she even cared anymore.

  “Assuming he’s there,” said Sabrina, once we were in the car, “what’s the plan?”

  “I guess we just follow him and hope that he will lead us to Peep.”

  “Her name is Priscilla,” said Mo from the back seat. “Call her Priscilla.”

  It was over. If Mo didn’t want to call her by her affectionate nickname, it was definitely over.

  It took us a while to get to Luke’s Place. Traffic was particularly heavy. Why is that always the case when you’re in a hurry? As a result, it took us close to an hour to go the few miles. I hoped we weren’t too late. The question was, how would we know? We couldn’t really go in. He’d see us in a second. We had no idea what his car looked like, so it wasn’t like we could stake it out. We were just going to have to wing it.

  Luke’s Place was busy for early afternoon. The parking lot was almost half full. I found a remote spot that gave us a good view of the front door. We were just going to have to wait and see if he came out—assuming he was still in there.

  Mo hadn’t said a word. She just sat quietly in the back seat staring out the window. It was kind of scary. She would recover of course. She was strong. Somehow these things always got better over time. But how long it would take was the big question. I was pretty sure we wouldn’t be able to rely on her for any great ideas for a while. I couldn’t really relate. Until I met Sabrina, I had never been in a committed relationship. I had dated, of course, but the longest relationship had only lasted eight months. In that one, we both knew it wouldn’t be permanent, but I think we were both kind of desperate, so we stayed in the relationship about seven and a half months longer than we should have.

  So we were just going to have to be patient with Mo.

  We didn’t have to be patient with Dickie. We had only been there about fifteen minutes when he emerged from the front door and sauntered over to a black Mercedes. Had Ludwick bought into a Mercedes dealership? Dickie didn’t see us. He really didn’t seem to notice much of anything. He started up his car, pulled out of the parking lot, and headed back toward Rt. 15. My guess was that he was going back to Vegas. I stayed a half a mile behind him. It was easy to follow him. He drove like an old lady.

  We spent the next hour cruising the streets of Las Vegas. Finally, he took a road that led outside the city. The traffic was better, but I had to fall back a little more so he wouldn’t see us.

  He turned down a side road. Shit! I was going to have to pull back even further. I was used to New England and its twisty roads and millions of trees. Out here were rocks, sand, and long stretches of nothing.

  “Do you think he’s seen us?” I asked.

  “I don’t think we have much choice,” said Sabrina, apparently the only one listening.

  I turned down the road and followed him for about two miles. On the right side of the road was an old abandoned gas station. He pulled in. Luckily for us, there were some large boulders by the side of the road. I backed up so our car was hidden from view from the gas station. No wonder it was out of business. Who would open a gas station in the middle of nowhere? It looked as if the station had been closed for decades, so why would Dickie be stopping there?

  “I think that’s where Peep … Priscilla is,” I said. “What other reason would he have for coming here?”

  “Unless this is a drop off and pick up point for his drug trade,” said Sabrina.

  “True,” I said. “But my gut tells me not. This would be the perfect place to hide someone.”

  I told the others to wait while I checked. I got out of the car and went over to the end boulder. I peeked around the corner just in time to see Dickie unlock a door and go in. I ran back to the car.

  “Dickie’s inside. I think we should call the police,” I said.

  “Can’t,” said Sabrina. “No service out here.”

  We could go back and bring the police,” I suggested. “Dickie might be gone, but maybe Priscilla would still be in there.”

  “Or maybe not,” said Sabrina. “He knows we’re looking for him in connection with Priscilla’s abduction. He might move her out.” She hesitated. “Or do away with her.”

  “Aw fuck it,” said Mo from the backseat. She opened her door and got out. “There are no other cars, so it’s probably just him. I say we go confront him. Let’s get this over with.”

  She didn’t wait for a response. She walked very purposefully across the long-abandoned parking lot toward the door. Sabrina and I got out of the car and ran to catch up.

  Had we finally found Priscilla?

  Chapter 26

  They fell for it. It couldn’t have gone any better.

  Richard was pretty pleased with himself. There was no way he was going to set up a meeting place with these people. He’d get there and find a bevy of cops. Or at worst, it would give Priscilla’s friends time to prepare for the meet, and he didn’t want that. He needed them surprised. He needed them to disappear without a trace. Ludwick was clear in his instructions. Catch them unaware. Make the abduction fast and unexpected. The whole process shouldn’t take more than a few seconds.

  Getting them to fall for it was so simple. He made sure Sam, the bartender, pretended to answer the phone at the appropriate time, tipping them off to his location. It took them longer to show up than he thought, and for a while he didn’t think his plan had worked. Now he was going to drive around for a while and lull them into a false sense of security, leading them to believe he had no idea they were behind him. The driver—probably the guy—was terrible at tailing, by the way. A driver would have to be a moron not to know they were behind him. He was having to work hard to make sure he didn’t lose them by mistake.

  This was all Priscilla’s fault. From day one it was Priscilla’s fault. She almost ruined his life. If he hadn’t hooked up with Ludwick, his life would have been over. Luckily, Ludwick had recognized his skills. If he hadn’t, Richard wasn’t sure where he’d be now. Dead would be the most likely option. His only regret was the name Dickie. It was a stupid name. When he met Ludwick, he told him his name was Richard, so Ludwick called him Dick. Dick somehow turned into Dickie. He hated it. It made him sound like a ten-year-old.

  When he met Priscilla, he thought his life was set. She was cute, but more importantly, her family was wealthy, and her father seemed to like him. It was a whirlwind romance and they were married in a matter of months. Did he love her? Not really, truth be told. He didn’t think like that. He was all about opportunity, and this had the po
tential to be a windfall opportunity. He was pretty sure he’d be able to get the old man to invest in his business of the moment. But her father proved to be a hard sell, unwilling to part with his money.

  And then Richard found his opening. Old Randolph Hollister turned out to be a pervert, diddling his two daughters on a regular basis from the time they were in grade school. His wife had died young, leaving him with his two playmates. Richard didn’t find out any of this from his new bride, but rather, from her sister Andi, with whom he started spending more and more time. When he heard the story of her father’s years of abuse, the logical course of action was to blackmail him. Duh, right? So, over a period of a few months, he started to financially suck the man dry.

  Richard hadn’t considered himself a bad man. Yes, he was never able to pay back the people who invested in his failed schemes, but he never purposely cheated them. Randolph was a different situation altogether. The man deserved to be conned for all he had done to his daughters.

  It was during this time that he and Andi started to get close. He was pulling further and further away from Priscilla, who had turned out to be rather cold and not particularly interested in sex—probably due to her father. There was a calculating quality about her—almost business-like. Andi, on the other hand, hadn’t let her father’s ways stop her from enjoying sex. She was fun-loving and carefree. In fact, she almost went overboard the other way. It was natural then that she would eventually become a whore.

  Priscilla killing her father began a chain of events that would change him. It made him bitter.

  He got it. He understood why she killed him. Hell, the man deserved to die. Doing that to your own daughters was just sick. And he and Andi had surmised that, with Priscilla’s marriage beginning to fall apart, their father might have tried to resume his perverted relationship with her. That would be enough to make someone snap. But the timing of her killing her father on the same night Richard and Andi were skipping town was weird. Had she known they were leaving and wanted to get back at them? Was it just coincidence? Andi thought it was calculated. He didn’t know and now he didn’t care. But why couldn’t she have just admitted that she had done it? Andi would have testified in her defense. There was no way she would have been convicted. That was why Andi was convinced she had blamed Richard out of anger and spite. After all, her husband was running away with her sister. An age-old story, and one that rarely worked out well for the cheaters. Over the years, the more he had analyzed it, the more he knew that Andi was right; Priscilla had accused him on purpose. That took guts and an evil mind. Those were almost the actions of a sociopath. But again, it didn’t matter now.

  Unlike his feelings for Priscilla, he had truly loved Andi, but it was not destined to last. They split up in less than two years. Two things got in the way: 1) Thanks to Priscilla, he was now a wanted man, so he had to keep to the seamier side of life. The friends he made and the associates he dealt with on a daily basis were fairly slimy, slowly bringing out his own darker tendencies, which had always been lurking just below the surface. Andi didn’t like that part of him and as time went on had less and less tolerance for his actions; 2) Andi herself was changing. She loved the nightlife of Las Vegas and was becoming a real party girl. Sexually, Richard just couldn’t keep up. And then she learned that she could make money doing something she loved. Andi was smart—really smart—and set up her own prostitution business. She had no pimp. She worked on her own and developed a group of influential man-friends who made it clear to everyone that she was not to be bothered by the pimps and the mob. She was good at what she did and had a lot of very satisfied regular customers. If he had to guess, Richard figured that she was quite wealthy by now.

  Andi was also very honest, and Richard’s actions hadn’t set well with her. He got angry with her and one fateful night tried to force her to come back to him. By then she had developed her circle of protectors and they beat Richard pretty badly. He was working for Ludwick by that time. Ludwick stepped in and negotiated a tenuous truce between Richard and Andi. As long as Richard stayed away from Andi, peace would follow.

  But the reappearance of Priscilla had shaken his world badly, and he knew he had to do something. She could create a lot of trouble for him. He was pretty impressed with himself for how quickly he handled the situation. The minute Priscilla left the trade show, he was on the phone to some of his fellow Ludwick employees—those who had an expertise in the abduction of women. They made it to the strip in record time. Richard wasn’t sure if he’d be able to find Priscilla again, so he was surprised to see her sitting in a chair near the doors. He left by a different door and met his friends outside. They gave him a syringe and told him that it would work almost instantly on her.

  He could have had one of the other guys perform the actual abduction, since his size made him kind of conspicuous, but while they were willing to provide him with the necessary drug, they wouldn’t do any of the dirty work without Ludwick’s instructions.

  He had followed Priscilla down the strip, hoping she was going to her hotel room. That would make it simple. Unfortunately, after ten minutes of pursuit, staying about a half block behind, he got the feeling that she was on a mission, and that mission didn’t include a hotel room. She kept glancing at her phone and was heading in the direction of the Mirage. GPS, maybe? Who needed GPS to find the Mirage? Regardless, it indicated to Richard that Priscilla was on her way to meet someone. The time was now.

  She was approaching the entrance, so he quickly closed the gap. She was a hundred feet from the doors when he caught up with her. Quickly, before she could react, he put his arm around her, and using his other hand, stuck her in the side with the needle. He pressed the plunger, emptying the contents of the syringe into her. He was told it was fast-acting, but he was amazed at exactly how quickly it worked. In less than five seconds she went limp in his arms, not even realizing it was him.

  “Honey, you’ve had way too much to drink,” he said loudly enough for any bystanders to hear. “I need to get you back to the hotel.” He waved to a taxi.

  Priscilla’s head had lolled forward. He subtly turned her face toward him and saw that her eyes had glassed over. What was this stuff?

  He reached the taxi, opened the door and got in, gently pulling Priscilla in after him.

  “Too much partying?” asked the driver.

  “Yeah, I think the last one put her over the top.”

  He had the driver take her back to his parked car, then transferred her to his car and drove her to Ludwick’s house. Ludwick was big-time pissed at him and made it clear to Richard that he had screwed up by abducting her. Ludwick told him that it wasn’t done that way and that he should stick to the drug business.

  Personally, he thought he had been pretty creative in his abduction of Priscilla. After all, everyone in Las Vegas was drunk, so to see a drunk put into a taxi was a pretty normal event.

  So Ludwick was pissed, but it was water under the bridge. Now they just had to get rid of her. The fact that Ludwick could make some money off her had softened his anger toward Richard.

  And now he was about to take care of her friends, too. His transformation from low-class con man to full-blown criminal was now complete. He wasn’t happy about it. He had never intended to be involved in criminal activities, but he always knew when he was convincing people to invest in his failed businesses—and not paying them back—that it had the potential to lead to this. And there was no turning back now. If he had been caught after old man Hollister was murdered by Priscilla, he would have gone to prison, most likely for life. In his new life, he was making a lot of money, he had power and freedom, and no one knew his background except Andi and Ludwick … and now Priscilla.

  He turned down a rural road. He was almost there. In his rearview mirror, the guy driving the car following him was trying to stay far enough back not to arouse his suspicions. He laughed out loud. The driver of that car was an idiot. If he was following a blind old lady he might get away with it, but
otherwise he was about as obvious as you could get.

  Up ahead was the trap. It was an old abandoned gas station. Good, there were no cars. That meant his men were in place.

  He almost felt sorry for the idiot and his two friends. Their lives were about to change forever.

  Chapter 27

  I thought Mo was going to go kick in the door or something, but no, as she got closer, she quietly approached the door and tried to listen through it. She looked back at us and shook her head. She motioned for us to wait there and she went around the other side of the building. She was only gone a couple of minutes when she returned with a crowbar. She called us aside, away from the door.

  “There’s no place to hear what’s going on inside,” she said. She held up the crowbar. “I found this.” She handed it to me. “You might need it.”

  Well, that was insulting. They didn’t need it, but I did? Sadly, it was probably the truth.

  “I say we just barge in and try to surprise him,” said Mo. She tried the door handle. It was unlocked. “Ready?”

  I held onto the crowbar tightly, but my palms were sweating. If I needed to swing it, it would probably go sailing across the room.

  We all took deep breaths. Mo flung the door open and we barged into the building.

  Then we stopped short.

  Priscilla wasn’t there, but it wasn’t empty.

  Four men were there, and they all had guns pointed right at us.

  “Welcome,” said Richard, one of the four. “We’ve been waiting for you.” He looked at me. “You can drop the crowbar. It’s not going to do you much good here.”

  I dropped it.

  “This was all planned, wasn’t it?” asked Sabrina.

  “It was, and it couldn’t have been easier.”

  He looked right at me when he said it. Did I look like the stupid one of the trio?