Vegas Stripped (Raven McShane Mysteries Book 2)

by Stephanie Caffrey

No response. Mike and I exchanged a look. He moved to the screen door and tried sliding it, but it was locked.

  "If you really think he's in trouble, we should get in there."

  I nodded at the door. "That's just a screen there. You have a big key?"

  He fiddled in his pocket and pulled out an old-fashioned car key. His Buick might come in handy after all, I thought. He poked it through the screen next to the latch and then used the key as a saw to pull apart the little screen wires. When the hole was big enough, he reached his index finger in and found the inside latch and pushed up. The door slid open.

  "That's the easy part," he whispered. He pulled on the heavier sliding glass door, but it was locked too.

  Mike looked around the yard and frowned. "See any bricks?"

  I began walking around the yard looking for an object heavy enough to break the glass. The trouble with professionally manicured lawns was that there was never a jagged old half of a brick lying in the weeds when you needed one.

  Mike pulled a metal stake out of the garden. "This will do."

  He turned away from the glass and then gave it his best Babe Ruth swing. The glass cracked and shattered, but not enough to enter.

  "I'm swinging left handed, just so you know," he whispered.

  A second and third swing did the trick, and he reached his arm through and undid the latch on the sliding door. He slid it open, and we moved slowly inside. As we entered, an impending sense of dread came over me. Something just wasn't right.

  The kitchen was empty and showed nothing out of the ordinary. Mike pointed to the large foyer and made a motion suggesting he wanted to go upstairs.

  I decided to call out first. "Bob? Are you here?"

  "Quiet!" Mike hissed. "Did you hear that?"

  I perked my ears up and thought I detected the sound of a door closing. Outside.

  "Is that a car door?" I asked.

  "Out!" Mike yelled.

  We ran out the back door and around to the front, where we saw the Mercedes speeding backward down the driveway. There were two people in the car, but I couldn't identify them.

  "Let's go," Mike said, tugging at my arm.

  We ran down the driveway and got into my car. I spun the car around and floored it, trying to keep up with the Mercedes. Somehow we managed to keep up with the car despite the onslaught of traffic. Eventually, it ran a red light, and I had to follow it. I quietly hoped a cop would see me and come along for the ride too.

  "You bring your gun?"

  Mike patted his side. "Nope. Didn't think we'd need it to go visit Ethan's mom."

  He had a point. We were heading north at about forty, weaving between a few cars but keeping up nicely with the Mercedes. I was beginning to wonder about our endgame.

  "What if he's dead already? We never got to check the whole house."

  "I figure he probably is," Mike said casually. "We've got to find out where these guys are going, get their plate number, that kind of thing. Then we can call in backup."

  I nodded. It sounded reasonable enough, and I didn't feel like getting into a fight with loan shark thugs over a guy I hardly knew.

  We were heading into the outskirts of town, an area I had never had occasion to visit before, north of Summerlin and the Beltway. "Where do you think they're going in this neighborhood?" I asked.

  "Nothing much out here except industrial and a few ranches."

  The traffic lightened, and within a few minutes the Mercedes's brake lights began to glow.

  "He's turning," Mike said.

  I was two cars behind it and slowed down just in time to make the turn. It wasn't a street but a long private driveway leading to a horse ranch. We followed the car in, winding our way toward the ranch house, which had to be a quarter mile up the road, perched on a hill.

  "I'm thinking we should quit while we're ahead," I said. We knew where these guys were, so all we had to do was alert the police and have them figure things out.

  We never got that chance. I slowed my car down, intending to make a U-turn, but I plunged my foot on the brakes when I saw that the Mercedes had spun around and was bearing down us at an alarming speed. At the last second it swerved and hit the brakes, blocking our path. The afternoon sunlight was reflecting off the windshield right into my eyes, rendering me all but blind. A figure got out of the passenger's seat.

  I squinted through the sun and saw the outline of a man standing in front of me. I saw his arm move upward, and I assumed he had a gun. My instincts were to flee, but if he did have a gun, I wasn't going to try to flee going in reverse. We'd be sitting ducks.

  Mike sighed. "Let's get out." He moved his hand to the door handle when the figure boomed, "Don't move!"

  We both instinctively put our hands in the air. The man came over to the passenger's side and opened Mike's door, pointing the gun right at his face. Mike slowly climbed out, his hands still in the air.

  "Now you!" All I could see through Mike's door was a gun waving at me. I slowly undid my seat belt and opened the door. When I climbed out, the blistering heat assaulted my senses almost as much as the figure pointing a Glock at my right eye.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

  "Raven," the man hissed, keeping the weapon squarely pointed at my face. "I thought I liked you."

  I found myself staring at the seventy-five-year-old face of the singer Jerry Conn. It didn't make any sense.

  Conn yelled at the car's driver to get out of the vehicle. A harried and ashamed Bob Weber reluctantly pulled himself out and stood staring at the ground.

  Mike fixed me with a quizzical look. Before I could say anything, Conn told Mike to lift his shirt, which under other circumstances I might have enjoyed. "I'm not armed," he said, annoyed.

  My mind was racing. What the hell was Jerry Conn doing with Bob Weber? Was he the money funding all the loan sharks?

  I decided to plead with Conn, who was holding all the cards. "Jerry, I don't know what this is. It's a mistake, that's what it is. I was just checking up on Bob, and all of a sudden you lead us out here and are pointing a gun at us."

  Conn sniffed. "You don't know, do you? This guy owes a lot of money, and I'm helping him make good on it. I don't know why that's any of your business."

  "How are you—"

  Conn interrupted, looking annoyed. "I told you, none of your business."

  Mike spoke up. "What happens now? We will just get out of your hair and never see you again. This is clearly some kind of misunderstanding."

  Conn smiled. "I don't think so. What we're going to do is walk back to the house. Come on—make a line." He waved the gun at the three of us. "You first, tough guy." He sneered at Mike.

  I wasn't liking this one bit. The sun's relentless heat was making my whole body heavy, and trudging up a big dusty hill at gunpoint was not how I had planned to spend my afternoon. I was in the rear, behind Bob, making sure to keep my distance so that Conn wouldn't think we were up to anything. I couldn't die like this, I kept thinking. Pretty much all I had accomplished in life was take my clothes off for thousands of strangers—not exactly a net contribution to greater society. I did contribute to charity, I reasoned, but not enough to make a difference. If I died now, I'd leave without leaving any discernable trace.

  "Faster!" Conn growled behind me. Apparently my pity party had slackened my pace below his expectations. We were almost at the house now, a low-slung but immense white ranch landscaped with hundreds of decorative shrubs, some tall and narrow and others short and squat.

  "What are you going to do, Jerry?" Bob pleaded. We'd all been wondering the same thing, but I didn't want to piss Jerry off any further by asking.

  "Just keep walking," Conn barked. "Go up into the backyard there."

  As we made our way up to the house and the backyard, I tried imagining ways we could overcome Conn. He was in his seventies but appeared in great shape. If we all rushed him, he'd have no chance, but he'd definitely get off a few shots in the process. It might be worth the risk, I figured, especia
lly if he was planning to simply kill us execution style, which seemed a pretty good bet.

  The problem was communicating this to Bob and Mike. If we started talking, I had little doubt that Conn would just pull the trigger right then and there. I felt awful when the thought jumped into my head, but Bob would make the perfect sacrificial lamb. He didn't have much to live for anymore, so why not take a few bullets to give Mike and me a chance at surviving? It was a plan as selfish as it was practical.

  We finally made our way into the backyard, which wasn't so much a yard as a wasteland of rubble and dusty scrub brush—in other words, Nevada. The driveway snaked back here to a five-car-garage house, but otherwise there was nothing but land. Depressing, naked land. For some reason seeing all that empty, barren land brought everything home for me. It made my fate seem real, palpable. And meaningless. It struck me that it would be the easiest thing in the world for Conn to shoot all three of us and bury us out here, where we'd become nothing more than untraceable and insignificant dust. The only question was whether he'd make us dig our own graves.

  "All right, stop," Conn said. "Move a little farther apart, there." He was waving his gun at us. My heart was pounding now as the gravity of the situation set in. A hole in the desert, that's where I was headed. But why? I still couldn't figure out Conn's connection to all of this, not that it mattered anymore. Maybe I could get him talking and buy us a few extra minutes. It was at least worth a try.

  "Jerry," I began.

  "No talking," he said angrily, his face dripping with sweat from the oppressive heat.

  I gulped. It wasn't like I had anything else to lose, so I tried again. "Can you at least explain what's happening here? I mean, I was just checking in on Bob, and now I've got a gun pointed at me."

  Conn smirked. "Yeah, that's all you were doing, little miss innocent. That's a load of—"

  "Seriously, Jerry," I pleaded, cutting him off. He didn't like that. He stormed toward me and put the gun right up against my cheek. I began quaking and shuddering as the cool steel of the gun slid across my hot, slick face.

  "Seriously, I told you to shut your—"

  Mike seized the moment and tried to take Conn from the side, but Conn saw it and swiveled just in time. He fired the gun at Mike, but Mike had crouched down low and was springing up from the ground to seize Conn's arm, and now the two of them were locked in a battle, with Mike's hands grasping at Conn's gun while Conn was trying to kick him away. I jumped Conn from behind, wrapping my forearms around his neck, but my attack gave him enough backward momentum to pull himself out of Mike's grasp, and he managed a good kick that caught Mike in the jaw and stunned him long enough for Conn to pry my arms off his neck.

  He was stronger than I had imagined, and the fact that both of us were covered in sweat made it hard to get a handle on him. Conn managed to shrug me off and back up enough so that he could point the gun at us and get off a few rounds if we decided to rush him. Crap, I thought. We'd botched our chance, and Conn wasn't going to make the same mistake again. And where the hell was Bob in all of this? He was standing idly by, making whimpering sounds. This was the complete stranger whose plight had made me concerned enough to check in on him, and now he had very probably led me to an early grave. So much for karma.

  Ten paces away from us, Conn was heaving from exertion and looked angry as hell. His white shirt was translucent with sweat. "Nice try," was all he said.

  "Jerry," I pleaded again. "I think—"

  I shut up real quick as he leveled the gun at my face. This was it. Conn closed one of his eyes and lifted the gun up to align it with his dominant eye. I closed both of mine, expecting the inevitable. I heard the shot ring out, a deafening explosion that echoed off the house behind us, but when I opened my eyes, it was Mike on the ground, not me. He had apparently rushed Conn at the last second, and he now was lying on the dusty hardscrabble clutching his right side, his shirt bright with fresh blood. I instinctively moved toward him to help him, but Conn wheeled on me and set out to finish what he'd started. My senses were overloaded, but I could still pick out the whimpering sounds Bob Weber was making behind me.

  "Just shoot me," Bob whimpered. "Jerry, just do it. I don't think she even knows!"

  Conn looked disgusted. "I can't shoot you, you idiot." He shook his head and returned the gun to my face. He held it there a second before looking up ever so slightly, as though he was looking at something behind me. Conn straightened and squinted his eyes.

  The sound of gravel under rubber finally forced me to turn and see what Conn was looking at. A large black van was pulling into the driveway at full speed. It skidded to a halt, kicking up a cloud of dust. My heart began to leap into my throat as we all watched the door open and saw Andrew LaGarde charging at us. In all my life I had never been so happy to see a man wielding a sawed-off shotgun.

  Andrew emerged from the cloud of dust at full speed, and when he was about twenty paces away, I was able to discern a quizzical look on his face. Relief began to rush all over me.

  "Nice job," Conn yelled sarcastically.

  Why wasn't Conn shooting at Andrew? Was he low on ammo? He'd only fired twice, so I figured he must have had a dozen or more rounds left. In all my relief and emotion at seeing Andrew, I hadn't yet figured out that something was not quite right here. Something was, in fact, very wrong.

  Andrew approached with his shotgun at his side, looking at Conn but not at any of us. Mike was murmuring on the ground beside me.

  Andrew spoke up finally. "I didn't think she knew." Knew what? How was Andrew in on this too? I was too hot and exhausted and frightened to care anymore.

  Andrew continued, "We can't do this here. If they ever figure this out, they'll send dogs out here to find them. Plus, I've got a plan for her."

  Conn nodded. "I didn't have much choice. Let's do it your way."

  The confusion and fear that had been coursing through me was being replaced by anger, the kind of anger that makes your chest tight and blood pressure rise.

  "What the fuck, Andrew?" I yelled.

  He looked me in the eye for the first time and shrugged. "Nothing personal."

  As though that made it okay. He was going to kill me, but it wasn't personal.

  Andrew pointed the shotgun at me and smirked. "Get in the van." I wanted to shoot that smirk off his face, but I trudged over to the van with Andrew following behind me.

  "Hands out," he ordered.

  He slid the van's side door open and climbed in, keeping the shotgun pointed at me while he fished around on the floor with his left hand. He pulled out a plastic zip-tie strip and began circling my wrists with it.

  He looked me in the eye again, his eyes cold and dead. "Don't try anyth—"

  I raised my arms up and clocked him on the chin, sending him lurching back against the van, but a voice behind me yelled "Forget it!" and gave Andrew the split second he needed to recover. I turned to see Conn pointing that awful gun at me for what felt like the twentieth time. I let out a big sigh and resignedly placed my hands out so Andrew could zip-tie them.

  "No," he said. "This time we'll do it in back."

  I moved my hands behind my back, and he cinched the tie tightly—too tightly—around my wrists.

  "Bitch," he muttered. "Get in."

  "What about them?" I protested, motioning at Weber and Madsen.

  He grunted. He turned to Conn and spoke in a barely audible tone. "Finish that guy off, and I'll be back in about an hour to help you clean up."

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE

  Andrew's van had no windows in back, and the ones in front were tinted. The pitch blackness was disorientating after being out in the brutal sun for so long. Andrew stomped on the gas, and when the van roared to life, he made a U-turn out of Conn's driveway. As we drove out, I heard a single gunshot ring out. It could only have meant one thing. He'd finished off Mike. A lump rose in my throat, and I began muffling a whimper. With my hands tied behind my back, I couldn't wipe away the tears streaming down my fa
ce.

  Andrew stepped on it and cruised out of the driveway, barely stopping to check for oncoming traffic. It had been hard enough driving with him a few days earlier when I was buckled in, but now I was perched on the edge of my seat with my hands tied behind my back, swaying dangerously back and forth with each turn he made.

  "Where the hell are we going?" I demanded.

  Andrew remained silent and grim faced in the front.

  "And what is this so-called plan you have for me?" I had briefly entertained hopes that he was being rough with me to fool Conn and that he'd let me out of the zip tie as soon as we got away from the house, but those hopes had been dashed with his continued hostile attitude.

  He grunted. "You ever see a headline in the paper that goes like this: 'Hooker Overdoses on Drugs?'"

  I shook my head at his odd question. "Um, I don't think so."

  He smiled. "That's the point. Hookers overdosing isn't news. No one cares. Get it?"

  "Not really."

  He sighed. "You're going to overdose. Get it now?"

  "I'm not a hooker," I protested.

  "Big difference. Stripper, hooker. The point is, there will be no investigation, no cops, nothing. They're just going to find you on a deserted street corner with a bunch of needle marks on your arm."

  A sense of overwhelming dread passed over me, a sense greater than the one I'd had when Conn was aiming his gun at me. To get shot was one thing, but to die in disgrace was something else. What would my family think? A few of them knew what I did for a living, and they weren't thrilled with it, but I had never been into drugs. And Andrew was dead right. The cops didn't have the resources to go investigating everyone who overdosed, especially when she had no family in the area and worked in the skin trade. I was getting sick to my stomach.

  We drove in rough silence for several minutes. To avoid thinking about my impending death, I tried focusing on how and why Andrew and Jerry Conn and Bob Weber were all connected. Their behavior suggested I had stumbled upon something I wasn't supposed to know. That much was obvious. Weber had told me himself about rigging things so that Mickey Mayfield got the job instead of Ethan. But what did that have to do with Andrew and Jerry Conn? It made no sense.