So Damn Lucky (Lucky O'Toole Vegas Adventure Book 3)

by Deborah Coonts

  “I’m considered an authority on the ancient astronaut theory and monolithic structures.”

  “You mean like Tiahuanaco, Teotihuacan, Baalbek, Rapa Nui?” What can I say? Sleepless nights and a History Channel addiction…

  He looked at me with a glimmer of respect. “Exactly.”

  “And now researchers are noting similarities between some of these structures and ancient landforms found on Mars, which raises some interesting questions,” I said, as if everyone was discussing this stuff.

  “Precisely,” Jenkins said warmly. “My life’s work is to prove these structures are connected.” Dr. Jenkins’s face lost its mask of anger as he warmed to the subject. The man was mine. “The Mars finding adds a level of proof to what I have known for years: We’ve been visited by ancient astronauts before, and in all likelihood, will be again.”

  For the past several years, the spookies had been praying for an academic with stellar credentials to lend credibility to their cause. Apparently Jenkins was the chosen one—their messiah to lead them out of the murky realm of fringe science.

  “So, Dr. Jenkins, you’re here with the UFO conference?” I asked innocently.

  “I’m the keynote speaker on Saturday.”

  “I would love to sit and talk with you, perhaps at the cocktail party tomorrow,” I said with sincerity—getting a glimpse into what made him tick would be fascinating. “But right now we have a putter problem to solve.”

  Dr. Jenkins nodded; he no longer looked homicidal.

  I turned to the caddie, who had stepped back into his jumpsuit while I talked to Jenkins. “What’s your name?”

  “Brady, Ma’am.”

  “Well, Brady, what plans do you have for that putter?”

  “You mean I can keep it?”

  Dr. Jenkins spluttered, but didn’t erupt.

  “I didn’t say that. I just want to know what you plan to do with the thing.”

  “It’d bring a pile on eBay.”

  Ah, money… the measure of every desire. “Dr. Jenkins, how much is that putter worth to you?”

  “Why are you asking?” A smart man, he could see where I was heading.

  “You threw the putter away. Brady risked life, limb, and the possibility of a nasty infection, to retrieve it. Seems to me that’s worth something. Of course, we could just throw the thing back in the lake and you can dive for it.”

  The rest of the fight leaked out of him as he eyed the water. “I see your point.” He even gave me the hint of a grin, now that we were practically colleagues and all. “You have an amount in mind?”

  “That’s between you and Brady. You two figure it out.”

  Jenkins grabbed the putter from Jay and motioned for the caddie to follow him out of earshot.

  They conferred for a moment, then seemed to reach an agreement.

  “Jay, get our good doctor another caddie.” I crooked a finger at Brady when he came back to the group. “You, come with me.”

  By the time I had stalked back to the hotel, the caddie trailing me like a recalcitrant puppy, I had calmed down enough to use words longer than four letters. Stopping in a corner, hidden from curious stares and eavesdroppers, I turned and braced my young charge. “Son, I should fire you on the spot. You put me in an impossible position with one of our guests, who is not only paying a princely sum to stay in our hotel, but who also forked over serious green to play this course.”

  “But, the guy is a… ”

  I waggled a finger in his face, just like my mother used to do to me. God, was I turning into Mona? Just shoot me now…

  I tucked away my finger. “I’m not finished. And I don’t care what he was. The world is full of jerks. You make serious money here. The list of guys willing to sacrifice body parts for a shot at your job would stretch from Mandalay Bay to the Wynn—and back again. One more screwup, and they’ll get the chance. You got it?”

  “Yes, Ms. O’Toole.” Brady concentrated on the concrete between his feet. “I’m real sorry.”

  “Be smart, kid. That guy wasn’t going in the lake. You could have finished the round, wormed a good tip out of him, then gone back and gotten the putter later. Everybody would’ve been happy.”

  At the softening of my tone, Brady cocked a wary eye at me.

  “Remember, you represent this hotel, and the guest—”

  “—is always right?” he said, finishing my sentence.

  “Heck no. But it’s our job to make him think he is.”

  ***

  “If it isn’t our fearless leader,” Miss P teased when I pushed through the office door. “It’s about time you showed up.”

  Today she sported a peach sweater that draped provocatively off one shoulder and pencil-leg brown pants. Since gold and turquoise go with everything, she hadn’t changed her jewelry. Afterglow had replaced the hint of wicked in her eyes. I never had to ask her about her sex life—she wore it on her face.

  “You’re the one who told me I needed to delegate more,” I quipped. “And I might add you look positively dewy today.” I took the stack of phone messages she extended toward me. “Anything important?”

  “Chef Tastycakes called to confirm your dinner. He said he would provide the wine and, I quote, ‘something special to eat’ if you would bring the pictures.” Miss P gave me a questioning look over the top of her reading glasses—her lascivious grin was overkill. “What kind of dinner are you planning?”

  “I call it seduction over blueprints—sort of my own twist on the whole ‘come up and see my etchings’ scenario,” I said, which of course was patently false, but she dangled the bait knowing I would take it—I couldn’t disappoint. “And you needn’t give me that grin. I know you are quite familiar with Jean-Charles’s penchant for misusing words to achieve the desired effect. We both know he speaks the King’s English better than we do.” Flipping through the messages I handed several back to her and pocketed one from Romeo.

  “Wine at seven, dinner at eight. He said you knew where.”

  “I do.” I saw the question in her eyes, but I was not going there. For some reason lately, I seemed to be a glutton for punishment—handsome men, private meetings. Clearly my unsatisfied libido was running the show and putting me squarely in the line of fire. “Chef Tastycakes? Who’s the wiseacre who came up with that?”

  Miss P tilted her head toward my second assistant, Brandy, who looked sheepish. “Are you angry?” Brandy asked.

  “Heck no. I wish I’d thought of it—it’s perfect.”

  Young, brilliant, and beautiful, with long brown hair, eyes I’d heard nauseatingly described as “bottomless pools of azure as deep and as mysterious as the ever-changing moods of the Aegean,” a body like a brick shithouse, hands that should be registered as lethal weapons, and questionable taste in men, Brandy was the newest addition to my staff.

  “But I would caution you against using Chef Tastycakes in Jean-Charles’s presence—you might get more than you bargained for,” I counseled.

  A world-renowned chef, Jean-Charles Bouclet was The Big Boss’s latest coup. Hired to design and supervise the flagship restaurant at the redesigned Athena, Chef Bouclet was… French. Enough said.

  “Anything else?” I asked Miss P.

  “A call came for you a while ago, but there was no follow-up. Something about a gold Scotty?”

  “A fracas on the golf course. Already taken care of.” At Miss P’s raised eyebrow I said, “And here you thought I’d been loafing the day away.”

  “Oh, and Flash is waiting in your office. She’s been on the phone since she took up residence an hour ago. I sincerely hope she’s not calling Mumbai or Bhutan.”

  “With that woman, you never know.”

  ***

  Federika “Flash” Gordon, was Las Vegas’s most tenacious investigative reporter and a longtime friend. We’d met while students at UNLV—I kept her out of jail, she kept us both out of the newspapers. A night with too much tequila and a busload of NBA players branded her Flash, but th
at’s all I can say—I’ve been sworn to secrecy.

  Flash occupied Dane’s spot from last night—butt in my chair, feet on the desk, a phone pressed to her ear. Balancing a pad on one leg, she scribbled notes in her own unique Sanskrit.

  She grinned a greeting as I stashed my Birkin in the closet. Not wanting to even pretend I owned the mountain of paper on my desk, I took the chair opposite her as she finished her call.

  If voluptuous ever made a comeback, Flash would be the pinup. Short and buxom, with a riotous mane of red hair, breasts large enough to make a plastic surgeon cringe, and carrying twenty pounds too many according to today’s cadaverous standards, Flash regularly poured herself into clothes that resembled rejects from the children’s department. Today she threatened to explode out of a tie-dyed Grateful Dead tee shirt that looked like it had been thrown away in the late 1970s, and a pair of True Religion jeans that gave new meaning to the term “muffin top.” A pair of pink Christian Louboutin stilettos on her feet and a white Chanel J12 encrusted with diamonds on her wrist completed her carefully crafted costume. Behind the bimbo façade, Flash camouflaged a brilliant mind, a nose for the news, and a killer instinct that would make a pit bull proud.

  “That Romeo, he’s a little sweetheart,” Flash cooed, as she cradled the phone and looked at me benignly—the look she always used before she planted a dagger. “He’s my new BFF. You’ve been demoted.”

  “Today’s my lucky day.”

  “With all I do for you, I can’t believe you’re holding out on me.” My friend turned on her all-business mode. “Give it up, girlfriend. I want to know all there is to know about the vanishing magician.”

  “I got the feeling there’s more than meets the eye, but a feeling is all I’ve got.” I picked up a paperweight from the corner of my desk—a cockroach, spray-painted gold and embedded in plastic. It had been a gift from the employees after my battle with a guest who had tried to blackmail the hotel with thousands of bugs. For some reason, I liked the thing—it made me smile. “I’m sure Romeo brought you up to speed.”

  “If that’s all you got, you’re right—you got zilch.” Flash’s feet hit the floor with a thud of displeasure. “Look, I’ve got a deadline every day. This story is huge—it’s captured the city. See for yourself.” She tossed a copy of this morning’s Review-Journal in front of me.

  A one-inch headline topped a half-page article with Flash’s byline. I replaced the cockroach trophy as I scanned the page—a recitation of known facts, nothing more. When I pushed the paper back to her, the top of a photo caught my eye. I flipped the newspaper over to see the whole thing—a picture taken last night in front of the Presidio.

  Something hit me. I squinted at the grainy photo.

  “Mr. Daniels, the owner of the apartment… he looks familiar.”

  “I’m dying here and you want to talk about a break-in?” Flash said. “Of course he looks familiar, he lives in your building.”

  “I’ve seen him.” I tapped the paper as I tried to remember. “Recently. And not at home, which I rarely get to visit anyway.”

  Flash knew me well enough to sit still and let me work it through.

  The tick of the clock measured the seconds, then it hit me. “The Great Danilov! Mr. Daniels is the Great Danilov,” I announced.

  “That mind-reading guy who could bend spoons and give people posthypnotic suggestions so they would jump around and bark like dogs?” Flash didn’t sound impressed.

  I nodded.

  “Are you sure?”

  “He was at the Calliope party. Dimitri even called him onstage with some other magicians to inspect the water contraption. He singled him out, introduced him to the crowd.”

  “Introduced him? As a colleague?”

  “No,” I shook my head as I tried to remember. “At the time I thought Dimitri was rude, almost condescending, but I dismissed it because it was so unlike him. But now, thinking back, I was right—there was something between the two of them, something personal.”

  “I’d sure like to know what,” Flash said, baring her reporter’s fangs. “And don’t you find it rather coincidental that on the night the magician disappears, the Great Danilov’s apartment is robbed?”

  “Don’t go jumping to conclusions,” I cautioned.

  Leaning back in my desk chair, Flash toyed with a pencil. “I sure would like to know what was taken out of the Danilov’s apartment,” she muttered as she cocked an eyebrow at me.

  “No way,” I said, knowing where she was going.

  “Come on. Romeo clams up when he sees me, but he owes you. I mean, you practically made his career.”

  “That is way overstating. He’s a good cop, and if he doesn’t want that information leaked, I would abide by his wishes… assuming he would even tell me in the first place, which he probably wouldn’t.”

  “What about a connection between Danilov and Mr. Fortunoff? Could you hit up some of your sources?” Flash cajoled. Apparently I was now one of her minions.

  “Let’s meet in the middle, “I countered. “You do the legwork. Narrow the scope, find something we can go with, and I’ll find someone who can shed some light on it. Deal?” I pushed myself to my feet. She didn’t say anything, which I took as an indication of her tacit agreement. “Now beat it, I’ve got to tackle this desk before someone declares my office a Superfund site. Then I have to get a very difficult chef to sign off on the drawings for his restaurant, shepherd a group of VIP magicians through the rest of the week, keep the UFO folks in check, finalize the Houdini Séance and the Bondage Ball, and live to tell about it.”

  “No wonder you always look ragged.”

  “I’m so glad you stopped by. You do wonders for my ego.” I shooed her out of my chair and settled in.

  “Is Teddie taking you to the ball?”

  “He’s in Paris, last I heard.”

  Flash squeezed my shoulder. “You okay?”

  “Sure,” I said through a fake smile. I knew she could tell I was lying.

  “You are going to the ball?” she pressed.

  “It’s part of my job.”

  “Do you have a costume figured out?”

  “I thought I’d go as the hotel executive in charge. Besides, I draw the line at parading around in public sheathed only in Saran Wrap.” Halloween was one of the few weekends in Vegas where nudity was not only tolerated, it was encouraged.

  “I’m with you there,” Flash said as she grabbed her bag, stuffing the newspaper inside. “I’ve got mine all figured out—Little Bo Peep with a twist.”

  “I can hardly wait.”

  ***

  Retrieving Romeo’s phone message from my pocket, I pushed aside some papers, then smoothed it out on my desk. I waited until Flash said her good-byes to the girls and closed the outer door behind her before picking up the phone.

  Romeo answered on the first ring. “This is the screwiest case,” he said, diving right in. “I hope you got more than I got.”

  “What do you got?” I asked, not wanting to show my cards until I saw his.

  “An abandoned ambulance twenty miles south of Jean. The guys are long gone. We’re running trace on it now, but I doubt we’ll find anything meaningful.”

  “Who owns the ambulance?”

  “An outfit here in town. They reported it stolen yesterday afternoon. Nobody saw who took it.”

  “We already have a description of the guys who showed up at the Calliope Theater masquerading as paramedics,” I said, showing my flair for the obvious.;

  “I’ve showed you mine. Now show me yours,” said Romeo, the student playing the master.

  I felt like a momma bird that had pushed a fledgling out of the nest and now watched it fly, so I told him about the Daniels-Danilov connection.

  “That raises some interesting questions, doesn’t it?” Romeo remarked when I finished.

  I was smart enough to know a rhetorical question when I heard one. “You wouldn’t happen to know what the thief was after, would you?”


  “It’s not my case, but I know the gal working it. She owes me. I’ll let you know if I come up with anything.”

  “Great. If we could just start making a connection or two.… ” I mused out loud. “What about Molly Rain, Mr. Fortunoff’s assistant? Did she have anything useful to say?”

  “Molly Rain? I didn’t know she worked for Dimitri.”

  “You know her?”

  “Yeah, we took some magic classes together and we’re both members of the Houdini Club.”

  “She’s a magician also?”

  “Strictly small-time, like me,” Romeo said, sounding modest.

  “Tell me about the Houdini Club.”

  “We’re just a group of amateurs who like to practice the stuff Houdini made famous. Sometimes big names drop by to show us something cool, but mostly it’s folks like Dimitri who help us with tricks and refining our presentations. Marik Kovalenko got the whole thing started years ago. When he shows up, it’s a really big deal.”

  Marik Kovalenko. Now there’s a name I hadn’t heard in a while. We’d both hit Vegas at about the same time. Our paths had crossed when The Big Boss had put me in charge of booking a show for an event with national exposure. Marik had auditioned, but I had thought his act wasn’t polished enough, so I picked someone else. Now an international superstar specializing in escapes and making pachyderms disappear, he’d never forgiven me.

  “Has Mr. Kovalenko been by recently?” I asked.

  “Last week. Why?”

  So he was in town. Interesting. “You never know when we might need a Houdini expert,” I said in reply.

  “Good point,” my young detective remarked.

  “Back to Molly,” I said, redirecting the conversation. “What did she have to say?”

  “Nothing. We didn’t talk to her.”

  “Why not?” I asked. “Molly, of all people, should know something.”

  “She wasn’t there.”

  “What do you mean she wasn’t there? Of course she was there. I saw her before the show, then she ran out on stage crying about Dimitri. Heck, she even gave the poor guy CPR until the paramedics arrived.”