I couldn’t hide my grin as I said, “Delighted. Could you let them know? Then call Dane, ask him to meet me out front in an hour. Do I have the Ferrari?”
She nodded.
“You’re going home soon?” I asked.
“Brandy’s pulling the graveyard.” She held up her hand as I started to object. “Jerry’s holding her hand.”
I gave my fearless assistant a hug, then launched myself into the evening. As I bounded down the stairs to the lobby I whistled “La Vie en Rose.”
***
Jerry caught me racing through the lobby. “I was just coming to find you.”
“What’s up?”
“You know how you asked me to keep tabs on those folks and report anything unusual?”
“A tall task, I know.”
“I feel real bad about not catching the mentalist guy, Danilov, getting rolled last night. He went out to the golf course—I didn’t think that was a big deal—people do it all the time.”
“Jer, we do the best we can.”
“Well, it bothered me, so I started looking for links.”
“I guess you came up with something or you wouldn’t be here.” Jerry loved to string me along when he had something good. It usually irritated me, but for some reason, tonight I seemed impervious to irritation.
“I don’t know what it means.”
I frowned at him—okay, only partially impervious to irritation. “Jer!”
“Okay, Danilov left the magician’s dinner early. He went to meet this woman—short, stocky, wavy black hair. She was giving him the what-for. When she left he was pretty shaken.”
“And that’s when he went out to the golf course?” I asked, not really following.
“Yeah,” Jerry’s eyes narrowed. “But here’s the weird part: Later I saw the same chick bending that astronaut’s ear. When she handed him some amulet on a chain or something, I thought the guy was going to freak.”
“What did he do?”
“I can’t describe it—it was like he was a different person, inhabited by aliens or something.”
So Molly Rain could come and go, not only from my apartment but from the hotel as well, and the police couldn’t get a line on her? Romeo and I needed to have a chat.
“Do you know what’s going on?” Jerry asked.
“Haven’t a clue. Keep me posted if you see the woman again, okay?” Molly was clearly working through the list of known associates of her alleged father—she seemed desperate to find him. I wondered why.
“You got it.”
“Oh, hey,” I called after him as he walked away. “How’d you handle Teddie’s father the other night?”
“That was Teddie’s old man?”
I shrugged.
“He was such an ass I kept him until he was stone-cold sober, which took a while. He filed a complaint before he and the Missus headed back where they came from, but it was worth it.”
“What complaint?” I asked, grinning. The look on his face told me my message was received; Mr. Kowalski’s missive would disappear.
***
My parents had saved a stool for me at the bar, which was perfect—with a large mirror behind, I could watch Jean-Charles reflection as he worked in the kitchen. Straddling the stool after I had given both of them a kiss, I ordered a soda and lime.
“You can’t be my daughter,” my father said. “Wearing jeans on the job and drinking fizzy water.”
“This is the new me—although the jeans are only because I’m going to Rachel to look for UFOs and talk to a radio show host who’s gone commando.”
Both my parents stared at me.
“Don’t ask,” I said, waving away their questions. “So how’s married life treating you?”
They both grinned—my father squeezed his wife’s hand. Question answered.
“So what did you want to see me about?” I asked.
“No reason, really,” my father said. “We just wanted to see you.”
A lie. They were worried about me. I pressed my hand to his face. “I’m fine, really.”
I caught the reflection of Chef Bouclet in midtirade as he ordered his staff around. He was the leader, and everyone else had to follow—and quickly—he’d told me. His reputation depended upon it. I took his word for it—although shouting made me nervous.
If my father and mother noticed my interest in the chef, they didn’t say so.
“I have something I need to talk to you about, Father,” I said, then smiled as his eyes widened at the term of endearment—we hadn’t talked about it, but Father felt right—he didn’t seem to be a “Dad” kind of guy. “Three things, actually. First, do you remember meeting Mrs. Olefson yesterday?”
“The little lady from Saginaw? She’s quite a fan of yours.”
“She wants to live in the hotel.”
His eyes found mine. “What do you think?”
“I’ve worked the numbers.” I pulled out the folded scrap of paper on which Miss P and I had jotted our notes and pushed it toward him. “I’d like to do it. She’s very lonely. No family to go home to.”
The Big Boss didn’t look at the paper. “Then do it. As my daughter has often told me, sometimes there are things you can’t quantify—they are simply the right things to do.”
“Right,” I nodded, momentarily taken aback—apparently there was an epidemic of “different” going around. “Okay, next thing. I want to sell my place. I’d like to live in the small apartment next to yours until I find a home that suits me.”
“Fine.” My father kept his expression passive, his voice modulated.
“Honey, are you sure?” my mother asked, leaning across my father.
“Yeah,” I said. “It’s not because of Teddie and all of that. I just don’t fit there anymore—the place is like someplace you rent while trying to figure out who you are and what you want.”
“Do you know what you want?” my father asked.
I glanced at the reflection in the mirror, then back to him. “Getting there.”
“What’s the third thing?” he asked.
“When were you going to tell me about the Athena?”
Surprise registered on his face and he immediately shifted to defense mode. “Don’t get mad. I’m not trying to maneuver you—I know how much you hate that.” He relaxed at my grin. “The truth is, I need you—I can’t do all of this by myself anymore. You’ve run several of my properties. You’ve managed every department at least once—this business is in your blood and you know what you’re doing.”
“I can’t sit in an office all day talking to accountants and bankers,” I objected. “And going over Profit and Loss Statements. My strength is handling people—it’s where my heart is.”
“I’ll deal with the bean counters,” my father said. “I’m smart enough to know you’re the grease that makes all of this work—the glue, if you will. I couldn’t afford to keep you squirreled away in an office. You’ve already been intimately involved in the redesign. Remember your idea for a service-centric boutique hotel—one that is very hands-on in the finest European tradition—the one you’ve been harping at me for years about? Here’s your chance, you’ve earned it.”
For once, I was completely at a loss.
I didn’t know whether to shake his hand as a colleague or throw my arms around his neck as a daughter.
Jean-Charles rescued me. “Sir,” he said as he extended his hand to my father, then faced mother, “Mrs. Rothstein. I am honored.”
My mother beamed.
Then he turned to me, indecision in his eyes.
My whole world had changed today. I no longer knew what rules defined it…and I didn’t much care. Standing, I faced him. This was his restaurant, his staff, his guests—he could choose a greeting he felt comfortable with.
Running his hands down my arms, he caught my hands. He pulled them around behind his back and leaned in for a long, lingering, delicious kiss. He stepped back, his eyes still closed.
When he opened
them, my heart tumbled.
“Bonsoir,” he whispered.
“Mmmm, you too.”
A few of the patrons and most of the staff whistled appreciatively. We both turned to the amused glances of my parents.
My father leveled a stern gaze at Jean-Charles. “You will be good to my daughter?”
Watching my chef’s face, I tensed, waiting for a reaction.
He kissed me again. “I promise.”
“When did you find out he’s my father?”
“Your relationship was obvious the first time I saw him look at you—it was the look a father saves for his daughter.”
“It doesn’t bother you?”
“Lucky, it is not him I wish to make love with.”
“Well,” my father blustered. “I can’t tell you how relieved I am to hear that!”
This time it was my turn to capture Jean-Charles’s lips with mine. Mother was right—he was truly delish. As I reveled in the feel of him, the taste of him, I wondered what Christophe would think of his father’s recent choices.
And how the heck would I handle intimacy with a co-worker—championship level stupidity for someone as inept as me?
And why did my resolve to go slow, to keep work and play separate, vanish like fog under the heat of the sun when the handsome French chef looked at me? Clearly my brain had abdicated the throne and another body part was running the show—first my libido, now perhaps my heart—sort of like the inmates running the asylum. I was so screwed.
Death and destruction, or bliss? Once a gambler…
Time would tell, I guess. One hurdle at a time
“I’ve got to go,” I announced, reluctantly. “I leave you in good hands,” I said to my parents. I turned back to Jean-Charles. Tracing the line of his jaw, I said, “I’ll see you tomorrow. I’ll think of you in your new home tonight. Enjoy it. You are starting a new adventure. And I’m here to tell you, life in Las Vegas is magical.”
***
Dane waited by the Ferrari.
I tossed the keys to him. “Want to drive?”
“Serious?” His eyes widened and I thought he might drool as he stared at the car.
“I feel like living dangerously,” I said as I waited for him to open the passenger door, then I slipped inside.
Overcome with car lust, he didn’t even have a witty innuendo to offer in reply as he settled himself behind the wheel. Instead, he ran his hands over the leather, touching each control briefly.
“Are you familiar with Ferraris?” I asked.
He shook his head, still unable to verbalize any thought whatsoever—assuming he still had any. Men and fast cars…
“They’re very simple, really.” I gave him the short course in clutchless transmissions, paddle shifters, and almost five hundred horsepower, then settled back for the ride.
Even though the night had turned cold, I insisted on opening the roof and setting the heat on “high.”
Dane didn’t seem to mind. With quick reflexes and a natural feel for a machine that probably had served him well as a pilot, he threw the car around the curves, accelerating smoothly through the apex, his confidence growing.
I tightened my seatbelt and enjoyed the speed-rush. Staring up at the night sky as the lights of Vegas retreated, I marveled at the multitude of stars in the Milky Way and how small and insignificant I was—just a speck of cosmic dust. Even still, my life was important—worth fighting for.
Dane took the Ninety-Three exit off the Fifteen heading toward Ely, then settled the car down at an even hundred miles an hour. The open two-lane wound up a long valley, following a spring-fed creek that the locals had dammed at various points, corralling precious water into several small lakes.
“I can’t put my finger on it, but there’s something different about you,” Dane said, both hands on the wheel, eyes on the road.
“Maybe, for once, I’m getting comfortable in my own skin.”
“We all get to the point where we chuck the BS and concentrate on what matters.”
“When did that epiphany hit you?” I turned on the radio and was delighted to find Louis Miguel still in the CD player. I set the volume low, for background music—a clear night, a good friend, and an adventure needed a soundtrack.
“I guess I grew up on my first tour in the Persian Gulf War. It’s amazing how getting shot at on a regular basis reduces life to its most elemental.”
Immediately I felt guilty for all my juvenile vicissitudes. “So how come no girl back home?”
“I guess I’ve never found where I fit, never found home.”
Kicking off my tennis shoes, I put my stocking feet on the dash—probably a cardinal sin in Ferrari-land. “I always knew where I fit, just not exactly how.”
“Getting any closer to figuring it out?” Dane downshifted nicely through a tight turn, then accelerated out of it.
“Some of the pieces are falling into place.”
***
We passed the rest of the ride up to Alamo with me regaling Dane with tales of the weird and wonderful UFO lore surrounding Vegas, Area 51, and Rachel—our destination.
“For as long as I can remember, the desert around Vegas has attracted all kinds of reports of UFOs. I don’t know whether it’s the Air force and the flight testing they do out of Area 51 on all their experimental aircraft, or what.”
“I’m pretty much of a skeptic,” Dane admitted. “But as a military pilot, I heard some of the rumors. Didn’t the Air Force have some program to look into all the reports?”
“Project Blue Book. However I don’t think they were really trying to prove the existence of UFOs as much as they were trying to cover up any embarrassing sightings by their own people.”
“Which did nothing but pique interest and fuel the ‘cover-up conspiracy’ theory which had its birth with the Roswell incident,” Dane said. He knew more than he was letting on.
“I’m not much of an expert,” I told him, “but we’ve had a couple of UFO crashes, one near Ely and one out toward Mesquite—neither of which has been satisfactorily explained. And the Air Force shut up at least one of their pilots who claimed to have been followed by UFOs—they passed him off as a head case. Which is how all the debunking continues—the powers-that-be point fingers and shout that anyone who has seen something weird is a nutcase.”
“Do you believe that?” Dane glanced at me.
“No. The military is covering up something—whether it’s the existence of their Black programs and experimental flying machines or extraterrestrials popping in for a visit, I don’t know. And it doesn’t much matter at this point. Vegas and Rachel get a lot of mileage out of the whole thing.”
“So you’re willing to throw logic out the window for the bottom line?”
“That bottom line makes my paycheck possible. And since when did logic have anything to do with Vegas? Vegas is like Brigadoon—a magical city that appears when the sun sets and the lights come on, where anything can happen.”
“Even aliens?”
“Can you think of a place on this planet where they would feel more comfortable?”
***
North of Alamo, we hit the turnoff for the Extraterrestrial Highway, heading west again, into the desert, away from the vegetation and life along the creek.
A tiny hamlet on the north side of the Area 51 Federal Reservation, Rachel was the kind of town that kept records such as: 1974 population: 3 women, 2 teenagers, 2 children, and 62 men. Which, if you think about it, makes you wonder—3 women and 62 men? Normally those odds might sound appealing, but in light of recent experience, I didn’t think the women had as much fun as one might think.
The town began as a mining town in the 1970s and would probably end as the mecca for UFO hunters and alien spookologists. Most of the industry in the region (one mine and a futile potato farm) had long since pulled up stakes, leaving only two alfalfa farms hanging on the ragged edge of economic viability. The kids were all bused to Alamo for school—fifty miles away. Heck, the
poor folks of Rachel didn’t even get a stop sign until the 1990s, not that they needed one. Now, most folks simply ignored it.
The epicenter of Rachel is a conglomeration of buildings known as the Little A’ Le’ Inn. I stopped there once in May—I was the only living, breathing human from horizon to horizon except for the proprietress who had her nose stuck in a novel as she sat behind the bar. I asked her when her busy season was. She announced, “This is it!”
So you can imagine my surprise this evening when Dane eased the Ferrari into the potholed parking lot and we couldn’t find an empty space.
People spilled out of the bar and the tented addition. They sat on rocks and bumpers of cars. They gathered around a time capsule embedded in concrete by the crew of the movie Independence Day, which had been filmed in the area. They touched the “alien spaceship” that hung from a tow truck parked next to the road.
Finally, we gave up searching, parked the Ferrari on the frontage road, and hiked in.
I stopped two men coming out of the Inn who looked weird enough to know Junior Arbogast. “You guys seen Junior?”
“At the bar,” one of them announced, letting the door slam shut as I reached it.
They didn’t use their manners, so I didn’t use mine. However, Dane, being a graduate of the Texas School of Chivalry and Kind Acts, used his, opening the door for me. Stepping through, I stepped back in time. Wood floors creaked under the weight of the mass of humanity stuffed inside the rectangular room. Computer renderings of UFOs and aliens were tacked to the white walls. Along the left wall, in between the single-hole, single-sex restrooms, hung a panoramic picture of Area 51 taken when it was still possible to climb a nearby peak named Whitesides Mountain and look down into the installation. Glass cases, bookshelves, and racks of tee shirts occupied part of the front wall and all of the rear—everything in the joint was for sale. A bar stretched the length of the wall to the right—red vinyl upholstered stools supported patrons guzzling beer and small clear bottles of Alien vodka. Music from the 1970s whined from the jukebox, and smoke, mingling with the smell of a hot-fat fryer, hung like a cloud.
So Damn Lucky (Lucky O'Toole Vegas Adventure Book 3) Page 26