“You’re crazy, lady. I just want to do some back scratching so we can both profit.”
Uh-huh. “If you don’t help me save a life, I won’t help you, you jerk.”
His eyes narrowed to scary slits. He didn’t look so much like a choir boy any more. “You’ll be sorry, Bee Cool.”
“We’ll see who’s sorry,” I said, hustling into the ladies’ room as soon as I could. Only as the door was easing shut did I see the TV cameras passing by in the hallway. Dammit, were eyes everywhere? I wasn’t doing anything wrong and somehow it might look like it. I had to get Terry out of the game and thus reduce the chances he’d drag me into trouble.
I snatched the sunglasses off the top of my head and set them on the counter, suddenly remembering Ringo. Where had he been? I felt a shot of guilt that I hadn’t missed him with his usual sunglass check when I’d started the game. Fortunately, I’d had about five pair in my purse and had plucked one out without any thought. I looked in the mirror—I’d put on the Stylists, now on the top of my head. Since I’d started playing tournament poker, I hadn’t had to do without Ringo at the start of a game. It was a bad sign.
I dialed Ringo now and got no answer. Maybe he was off enjoying Vegas and not obsessing about my game. I hoped so. “Hey, Ringo, I just wanted to let you know without your expert opinion today, I went with the Stylists. I hope that’s okay. See you soon!”
On the way back to the table, I prayed Terry would jump out from behind a potted plant and agree to give me information on Affie. Of course I was dreaming. He was seated and started tapping the moment he saw me as a creepy reminder. It didn’t take long to eliminate him, though. The first deal was a pair of eights, which made me pause, and frankly, with now seven at our table, I would have folded had it not been for my fury. Terry was tapping furiously. I was ignoring him. I had the small blind, which gave me good enough reason to see The Flop. The pair of Aces on the board should have only convinced me to bail. But I checked and rode out the hand to Fourth Street where a four fell. The muck made everyone fold but Terry, the man who held the Ace in his pocket—three of a kind—and me with my dead man’s hand.
Two pair—eights and Aces—were what Wild Bill Hickok held when he was shot dead at the table. What a portentous sign.
The eight on The River saved me. I had regained what I’d lost in the span of the last couple of hours and knocked another out. Terry held only enough chips for the next blind and he’d have to get lucky to last. He didn’t, and faded away when he caught the next small blind. “Damn you. You should have taken my offer because now you won’t be the only one who’s sorry.”
The rest of the table looked at me and shared bemused glances, before watching Terry as he slammed his chair back and stalked out of the room.
The WSOP officials announced the dinner break before I could even consider who I might want to share dinner with. As I strode out the ballroom door and into the hallway, Trankosky sidled up next to me. “Your boyfriend spent the day in the cop shop.”
“You did that on purpose,” I said more vehemently than I’d meant, worried about the lost time finding Affie.
He ground his jaw. “Yes, it was on purpose. Because of a murder investigation. I’m insulted you’d suggest otherwise.”
“I’m insulted you’re letting a man get in the way of the job you have to do.”
“We let him go and I see he didn’t come running back to you.”
“He has a job to do.”
“What exactly do you know about his job?”
“Why do you care?”
“That’s a loaded question. Do you really want to hear the answer right now?”
I held his gaze. Oops. “No.”
“I didn’t think so.” He slid his hand across my shoulder as he walked on. “You let me know when you want to hear the answer.”
“Bee!” I turned to the sound of the voice and saw Ringo and Carey hurrying up to me.
Beyond the facts that Carey was dressed in breast-to-thigh gold spandex, Ringo wore rainbow plaid Bermudas and it was Vegas, this was certainly an odd pair—Carey nearly a foot taller than Ringo in her five-inch light-up platforms. They were jostling, giggling and generally being goofy. Uh-oh. “What are you two doing?”
“Girlfrien’! Ringo was stressing because he didn’t get here in time to make sure your sunglass attire was squared away,” Carey said.
“Good choice.” He approved the Stylists.
“What have you been up to?”
They exchanged a look, then burst out laughing. “I’ve been showing Ringo my Vegas.”
I grabbed Carey’s arm and told her, “Be gentle, he’s very sweet.”
Carey hooted. “She thinks you’re sweet, dude.”
Ringo blushed. I rolled my eyes; clearly this relationship was beyond my control. “Okay, I have a job for you two. Listen up.”
Because I’d had to share a rather morbid dinner at Rotoo’s—one of my favorites—with Joe, who not only was ticked at me for speaking to Trankosky, but was probably more ticked Frank had given him babysitting duty, I hadn’t eaten much. The lack of appetite was completely unlike me, but as it turned out, it was a good thing, because the last couple of levels tested my stomach.
I was fortunate that none of the big-time pros was at my table, but I was less fortunate in that some real wild cards were. They were all totally unpredictable. It was justice, I suppose, that I was playing a half dozen of me. What the hell kind of strategy was I supposed to adopt?
In the first hand, one guy who called himself an Internet pro and who was chip poor coming into the deal, pushed before The Flop with a deuce/five unsuited and won a boatload on the bluff. That kind of pissed people off, so on the next hand the guy to his right, who was a dealer from New Orleans, went all in on the Jack of hearts, King of hearts, 3 of hearts Flop with only a pair of sixes in his pocket that he rode all the way to Fifth Street. I had folded both those hands, losing a small blind when I thought the water was a bit too turbulent to try to navigate safely. By the time I was ready to bet, the Internet pro had busted, and everyone at the table was reeling from shell shock.
I had to drag my mind from Frank on his way to rescue Affie from the Medula and play my way back into the game.
Four grueling hours later, having fought my way into the final table, I dragged myself back to the Mellagio, slid my key card and opened the door to the suite. Exhausted, I pitched my Kate Spade bag over the back of the maroon couch and swore when it slid off onto the floor. But when I turned back to get it, I saw I had much bigger problems. The floor was wet with blood.
Twenty-six
In my shock and rush to get around the couch to see if the source of the blood was Shana or Ingrid or Ben, I tripped on the carpet and almost landed right on top of the corpse of the Skincrawler, aka Drew Terry, his throat slashed as Tasser’s had been. I fought the urge to run to the bathroom to vomit and kicked off my shoes instead, carefully reaching around the blood and into my purse for my canister of pepper spray, which I’d learned the hard way was a handy and effective weapon. Armed, I tiptoed through the suite to check for the murderer or more bodies.
I found neither.
I returned to stare at Drew Terry, wishing I could ask him what the hell he was doing in my suite.
Then I went to throw up.
As I came back into the living area, I heard a noise behind me, spun and sprayed.
And got Ingrid square in the face. I dropped the spray and tried to grab her as she went down. Shana, who’d been behind her, started coughing from the fumes. Ingrid was gagging, gasping, writhing on the floor. I hurt for her. Pepper spray was the worst experience I’d ever had, and lately I’d had some bad experiences. It worse than burned your sinuses, lungs, mouth—I’m sure acid did more damage but it couldn’t hurt more than pepper spray.
“Ingrid, I am so so so sorry.”
She was hacking now, her corneas bloodred, eyes streaming with tears. The destruction of her perfection was almost as upse
tting as hurting her.
“I thought you were the killer,” I explained.
Shana had run to the bathroom, and I could hear water running. She returned, still sniffling, with a washcloth which Ingrid took and breathed into deeply.
“What killer?” Shana asked me.
I cocked my head at the couch as I covered Shana’s mouth with my hand just in time to muffle the scream. “What happened?” she said behind my fingers.
Ingrid struggled to her feet and stumbled over to the couch. She shook her head, gagged out a nasty swearword and lurched into the bathroom, battling a new fit of coughing.
“Who is this guy?” Shana asked as we heard the shower running.
“He was a jerk at my tournament table. He tried to get me to collude, but I knocked him out instead. He made a scene in front of everyone and told me he’d get even,” I recalled. “It was very disconcerting. I kept thinking he might be connected to the gang who has Affie, but all the pieces don’t fit. Especially now.”
“What are we going to do?” Shana asked.
An obvious question with no obvious answer. I didn’t want to call Frank right now in case the cops had the phone tapped. It would be nice to call Trankosky to take care of things, if I wouldn’t be the immediate first suspect. I doubted he could get me out of this one if he wanted to. Joe had disappeared some time after dinner, leaving me either with a Frank-ordered tail I didn’t know about or alone to walk back to the Mellagio.
I’d disabled Ingrid, so I looked at Shana and said: “I guess we’ll have to take care of him.”
“‘We’?” she wiped her nose with a tissue. “Are you kidding?”
“Do you have a better idea?”
The phone rang and we both jumped. We stared at the phone. Ring. We stared at each other. Ring. Ring.
I reached over and picked it up without answering. “I guess you’ve found our little message.”
“Your message?”
“Don’t be coy, Bee Cool, it doesn’t become you. What you found will be the way you will find your goddaughter if you don’t cooperate.”
Hurry, Frank. “I have been cooperating.”
“Not entirely. You were lucky to win tonight. You should have let our friends in the right places help.”
“I’m not doing anything illegal,” I said bravely, as I stared at the gaping bloody smile on Terry’s neck. Except harbor a murdered body in my suite.
“You’ll do what you have to, I imagine,” he said rather sagely. “And, by the way, you might want to get rid of our little message before the police catch you because if you can’t play tomorrow, Aphrodite dies.”
“But, I don’t know how to get rid of, um, it.” I spared a glance at Terry and grimaced. “I know the police can trace hairs and fibers from our clothes, our fingerprints.”
He laughed. I shivered. “I don’t care if they catch you two days or two weeks from now after they do their tests on the body, you stupid woman. I just care if they catch you in the next twenty-four hours. So get rid of it now!”
I fought the wave of nausea filling the back of my throat. He continued, “Tomorrow, you’ll have to find a way to win on your own because, as you can see, your help is no longer available. During the game, order a vodka gimlet from the waitress and the location of the drop will come with the drink. When they cash you out, you bring the money directly to the drop.”
“Where do you expect me to end up?”
“This mission had a particular earning ratio and that should be met if you end up in the top half of the final table. Just don’t win first.”
“Don’t win first,” I repeated, trying to calculate his mixed language that sounded like it was coming from both a general and a CEO.
“First drags in too much attention; you won’t be left alone for weeks.”
“I won’t win first. And what about Affie?”
“We get our money and you’ll get her back. In that order.”
“But—”
“I think you’re not in any position to try to bargain. Just hope your luck holds beyond the tournament.”
The base of my throat closed with tears. “Why are you doing this?”
“Because we can.”
I could tell Shana had been holding her breath as she listened, because she began to weave. I forced myself to be strong for her. I hung up the phone and put my arm around her shoulders, easing her down onto a barstool. “This is about to be over. Frank’s on his way to her now.”
Nodding, she said: “We called him with more information about her location that Moon gave us tonight. Now what are we going to do about that guy?”
I followed her gaze to the corpse. I’d been knocking around possibilities in my mind but nothing that I could even seriously consider. They all revolved around the fact that Terry had threatened me, so I would have some sort of self-defense option. I looked closely at him, trying to figure out if he’d been killed on the couch or somewhere else. It was hard to tell how much blood was in the couch since it was essentially the same color. There were no splatter marks, though, which would seem to be a requirement if you sliced a jugular vein. I didn’t know what the security cameras in the hallway had recorded—when he’d arrived and with whom, so claiming he’d broken in and tried to kill me probably wouldn’t fly since the wound was older than the twenty minutes I’d been in the room.
“Let’s throw him out the window,” Shana said. “You’ve done that before.”
“I have not done that before!”
“Well, sort of. Someone fell out your hotel window. Same difference.”
“Not really, Shana. Besides, what about the people you’d hit with the body? Wouldn’t you feel bad if you squished a half dozen tourists in the process?”
“Oh. Won’t they get out of the way?”
“Do you regularly look up when you’re on the sidewalk to make sure bodies aren’t raining from the sky?”
She stuck out her lower lip. “It was an idea. It’s more than you have.”
Maybe not. If the killers were smart, wouldn’t they have dismantled the security cameras so they couldn’t record the killers’ presence?
Hmm. Ingrid came, still sniffling, coughing and gagging, out of the bedroom, wearing my robe. “I can’t see.”
“That happened to me too,” I told her. “Get some Visine out of my makeup bag, lie down on the bed and close your eyes for about thirty minutes and your vision will get better.”
“But, we need to take care of the body,” Ingrid argued.
“We’ll do it,” I said.
Her bloodshot eyes gave me a totally skeptical look. “Just…” She paused for a coughing fit. “…wait for me. You don’t know what you’re doing.”
“Okay, Shana and I will have a drink with him while you get better.” I smiled, guiding her into the bedroom and shutting the door. Putting my finger to my lips to make sure Shana didn’t say anything, I let myself out into the hallway. Bingo. There was a maintenance man on a ladder examining a light fixture that I know had been operating when I’d walked down the hallway minutes ago. “Good evening,” I said cheerily. “What’s up?”
“Ur, bulb’s out,” he grunted.
“Too bad,” I commiserated as I kept walking toward the elevators.
The third one from the left opened and another maintenance man hollered at his colleague, “This one’s down too, Hector. We gotta go get the camera equipment.”
Hector cocked his head at me and I smiled largely at the man coming out of the elevator as I got in. “Good evening.”
I pressed the button to go three floors down. As soon as I got there, I pressed the elevator to go back to my floor. When the doors opened, the maintenance men were both waiting by the freight elevator.
“I am so stupid,” I giggled. “I forgot my purse!”
They nodded, rolling their eyes only after they thought I wasn’t looking. I ambled back down the hallway, making sure I didn’t reach my room until they’d disappeared.
“Sh
ana, go get one of Ben’s shirts out of the dry-cleaning bag in his room,” I whispered as I rummaged through Frank’s briefcase for the evidence gloves he kept in a side pocket. I donned a pair, then snatched a pair of scissors out of my purse and began cutting the bloody shirt off Terry.
Shana returned with a red button-down. “Good thinking,” I said as I handed her some gloves.
We struggled and got him into the shirt. A two-hundred-pound rag doll is not easy to dress. “Now, sneak into my bedroom and get one of my scarves. Preferably a dark color.”
I heard Shana say something to Ingrid as she slipped in, returning an instant later with a floral-print scarf. “That doesn’t match the button-down,” I commented.
Shana gave me an exasperated look. “Just joking,” I said.
She shook her head. “Why are we re-dressing him?”
“Because we have to hold him between us as we walk down the hallway in case anyone comes out. He’ll just look drunk. Hurry.”
I opened the doorway and peeked both ways. The coast was clear for now, so we panted, struggling to keep him upright between us, on our way toward the elevators, which seemed marathon miles away instead of mere meters. Our luck held and the hallway stayed empty. I reached over to press the button for the elevator. “Press both,” Shana recommended.
The problem here was we had to stand here until the right elevator came along—third from the left. I kept an eye on the freight elevator, praying the maintenance men would take a few more minutes. The first elevator dinged, going up. I held my breath. It was empty. I pressed the up arrow again. The second elevator dinged, going down. It opened and I cringed as a man poked his head out. We were angled away, so all he could see was our backs. “Hey man, got two for the night, huh? Menais je tois. Want a fourth?”
“Sorry, buddy.” Shana used her best fake Jersey accent. “Three’s our lucky number.”
As the doors slid shut on that elevator, ours arrived. Now we just had to hope it would be empty.
It wasn’t empty. Of course. But the couple who was in it was rather busy. Shana gasped. I tried to figure out what that position would be called as I held the up button to keep the elevator in place. “I gotta go, I gotta go, this is our floor,” he was saying as she chanted, “Yes. Yes. Yes!”
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