He disappeared. God, he was worse than a Whack-A-Mole Game. Where was my bat? “So what does Jean-Charles know exactly?”
“Not sure…exactly.” A bit too much lilt infused his response.
“I’m very glad you are having so much fun at my expense.” I eased my legs back under the covers, then leaned back, careful to keep my head balanced over my shoulders lest it roll away.
“It’s not as bad as you think. Okay, some of it, maybe, but not the Jean-Charles part.”
I didn’t pursue that because, right now, I needed to believe him. “Are you going to tell me what happened, how I ended up here?” My pain threshold long exceeded, I kept my voice slightly above a whisper—apparently, Teddie could hear it.
“You had…an episode.”
The buzzsaw of the blender sliced through my brain making words impossible. I yelped then clapped my hands over my ears. My pissed-off switch still flipped, my anger flared. But my head would most likely explode if I threw off the covers and stalked into the kitchen in search of a knife, so I opted to dream about homicide rather than commit it at the moment. But I was conflicted: kill Teddie or just shoot myself?
The truth, like emotional road rash, stung with a fire. I wasn’t mad at Teddie, not really, not anymore. I was mad at myself. But, swine that I could be, I felt like taking it out on Teddie.
So incredibly, embarrassingly human. My superpowers were nowhere to be seen.
Maybe he deserved it, maybe not, but most of the time when we didn’t get what we deserved, it was a bullet dodged rather than a windfall. I tried to take solace in that.
The blender flicked off.
I eased my hands off my ears, keeping them poised in case I had to slap them on again. Moments of silence and my confidence bloomed. “I thought I was going to get a warning.”
“Sorry.”
So passive-aggressive.
I guessed that also was something I’d taught him in spades. Reflecting on my recent treatment of him, I felt the prick of shame. The high road had always been the one I wanted to stay on. Apparently, I’d drifted to a lower path…much lower.
Holding a full glass, he wandered back in. With one hand, he hiked up his jeans. He’d lost weight. It didn’t look good on him. For a moment, he hesitated.
I patted the spot he’d vacated.
Back where we were, he handed me the glass. “A bit slower this time. Hair of the dog is a good thing, but there is a limit.”
“Limits. Apparently, I’m pretty good at blowing through them.” I took a sip of the drink, then another for good measure. The pain muted a tad, but stayed just sharp enough to give me a pointy-end-of-a-stupid-stick poke.
“You said Jordan made the first glass.”
“I lied to get you to drink it.”
Yeah, he so got me. I both hated that and loved it. “How did I get here?”
“You don’t remember?” Teddie looked like he was enjoying this.
I opened my mouth, but it was Jordan Marsh who answered as he breezed into my bedroom. “That’s the problem with going toe-to-toe with a bottle of 101. You don’t remember, but everyone else does.” Jordan, in town to rehearse a show he and Teddie would be performing in the Babylon’s theater, was my de facto roomie, staying in the second bedroom in my owner’s suite.
“Well, aren’t you a breath of fresh air.”
He waved a paper sack at me. “Be nice. I’ve brought provisions.”
“Ice cream?” The words came out with a reverence I felt from the tips of my toes.
“Please, a concrete from Neilsen’s.” Concretes were the latest things in Vegas. Just extra-frozen ice cream, but oh they went down easy. “Paolo had me believing that limo really was a performance vehicle moonlighting as a stretch. But what you don’t know…”
“Will land on my desk tomorrow.” As our head chauffeur, Paolo answered directly to me. A casino was nothing more than a small town, and everything Paolo did ended up in a memo to me as his corporate parent.
I took a moment to drink Jordan in, watching him as he pulled three tall cups out of the bag and peeled off the lids.
Dark, tall enough, handsome in a way that put him in Cary Grant rarified air, swoon-worthy in every aspect, Jordan was the top of the A-List ladder in the movie universe, the stuff of female fantasies the world over. In a cruel twist of fate, he was also gay, a fact I’d hidden for the better part of two decades. Thankfully, as of a few months ago, that little secret was common knowledge. Jordan and his partner, Rudy, now lived in the open, happy and content.
Nothing like living one’s true life.
I’d love to do that…if I could figure out which variation on the theme of my existence was the valid one.
“Vanilla for me,” Jordan said with a wink. “Because I’m such an ordinary Joe. Peach for Teddie, because he’s a real one. And coffee for you.” He eyed me with a hint of serious. “Because you come with a kick.”
“Cute.” I accepted my cup and tried not to drool. It slipped in my hand a little from the frost coating the outside. Teddie handed me a spoon. I didn’t look at him, and I was careful not to touch him. If a scent could take me so far back, I didn’t want to feel what a touch could do.
“I do try to entertain,” Jordan said with a wink as he settled opposite Teddie on the other side of the bed. “But last night, you stole the show.”
I didn’t press, opting instead to enjoy the last few moments of blissful ignorance as I spooned in, then savored, the first cold dollop of lusciousness. “You spoil me.” The words were muffled by the cold creaminess I held in my mouth like a kid hanging onto the last days of summer.
Flanked by two such handsome, kind, fascinating men, I should be over the moon. But not even an overabundance of male pulchritude could mask the sordid story they were trying to deflect me from pursuing. “Tell me.”
A look passed between the two men.
Finally, the not knowing trumped the self-loathing to come. “Somebody man up. I’m going to find out anyway, but I’d really like to do some damage control, if possible.”
Jordan shook his head. “Probably beyond even your formidable skills.”
My heart sank. “Did I remove any clothing?”
Again a glance between the men, but no ready answer offered.
“Seriously? I took off clothing?” I screeched a bit, but the pain brought my decibel level back down.
Jordan patted my leg through the bed covers. “Don’t worry. Your singing voice is really quite nice. I never knew.”
“I sang?”
He bit down on a laugh, which earned a glower from me. With no real information and fear taking root, my stomach clenched and my mood, teetering on the edge of abysmal, took the final plunge. What had I done?
The muffled peal of my phone saved me from speculation or at least distracted me enough for me to find some emotional balance.
Nobody moved. I glanced under the sheets. No way was I parading around in my skivvies to find my phone. “Somebody get my phone before the world as we know it is forever altered.”
“Somebody has an overinflated opinion of herself,” Jordan muttered as Teddie jumped to do as I asked.
I bristled—apparently my skin was a bit thin today, but I had no one to blame but myself, which wasn’t helping. “I believe I held your life in my hands for the better part of two decades.” Snarky and a desperate attempt at collecting the shards of my self-respect, but as a tactic it was a good one.
“You did.” If he felt remorse at his jibe, it didn’t show.
“Now that you don’t need me anymore, the gloves are off, is that it?”
“Of course not, but you need to lighten up on yourself. We’re all human, Lucky, even you.”
Human. That sounded like a severe case of underachieving.
“It’s in here somewhere, but I can’t find it. Why do women wear so many clothes with hidden pockets?” Teddie pawed through a pile of cloth that I was alarmed to recognize as the clothing I wore yesterday. At least
it seemed as if I’d made it home with all of it…I thought.
“Pocket of my pants, right side.”
All he had to do was lift my pants and find the weight. How hard was that? But that simple calculation seemed beyond him—proof positive the Y-chromosome lacked the finder gene.
With phone in hand, he passed it to me. Somehow, through all of that, I was able to answer before the ringing stopped. “O’Toole.” My voice sounded like me, even though I was light-years from feeling like myself. And I’d traveled all that way in less than twelve hours. A new low…or an alternate universe I’d found by diving through a wormhole of self-immolation. A parallel reality, that’s what this was. It had to be as everything was not quite right, a movie reel projected at the wrong speed.
“We have a problem.” Miss P’s whisper evaporated my hopes that this all was the aftermath of bad fish for dinner or something.
“Why are you whispering?”
“I thought you might have a headache.” Her voice returned to normal modulation and normal attitude.
“You know.” A statement, not a question.
Jordan gave me a know-it-all look I tried to avoid. “The great thing about getting shit-faced: you don’t remember, but everyone else does.”
“You said that already.” I stuck out my tongue at him, then returned to Miss P. “I’m all ears.”
“Break-in last night. Bungalow 7.”
“Anybody hurt?”
“Thankfully, the guests were at Babel until well after 2 a.m. They didn’t recognize they’d been robbed until they sobered up this afternoon.”
“Afternoon?” I’d just gotten up. I’d assumed it was morning. “What time is it?”
“Three.”
“In the afternoon?” I shouted that last part then ignored the stupid-stick jab of pain behind my left eyeball.
Silence greeted my outburst.
I tried to focus on the job I was supposed to do. If I could do that, then maybe I could find me again. Somewhere between last night and this afternoon, the me I used to be had gone missing. “What did they get?”
“Sports memorabilia.”
I started breathing again. “Okay, not too bad.”
“Four-million dollars’ worth.”
“What?” My voice screeched like a violin in the hands of a two-year-old.
More silence. Miss P knew I processed bad news slowly.
“How’d they get in?”
“There’s the kicker. No sign of forced entry, no windows unlocked.”
“Door was locked?” My thoughts scrambled for a toehold.
“Lucky, it locks automatically. Key card is super secure after we had that hiccup with the software.”
Hackers had discovered a flaw in the software of all the high-end keycard locks in hundreds, if not thousands of hotels. Worse, the manufacturer hadn’t built in a way to update the firmware, so all the master boards in the locks had to be individually replaced. We’d just completed the entire retrofit. Talk about taking decades off my life. Our insurance guys almost stroked out. The lawyers produced a flurry of hot air and paper. And, when the dust settled, we had new boards in all the locks and no huge claims to pay or litigate. We’d gotten off light.
“You double-checked the board was replaced on the locks on Bungalow 7?” Even though we’d been anal about the replacements, with over three thousand guest rooms alone, we could’ve overlooked one. The odds would be infinitesimal, but nothing was one hundred percent—not even me.
“Affirmative. It’s showing as replaced and checked. It passed the last security check done four days ago.”
“Shit.” I swung my legs over the side of the bed as I eased myself to a sitting position. The pain was tolerable. I’d inhaled half my concrete, which calmed the hunger beast, at least for the moment. I put my hand over the tiny mic on my cell phone. “You two scram.” I shooed Teddie and Jordan away.
“You don’t want the down and dirty about last night?” Jordan asked. Still in the doghouse, Teddie wasn’t that brave—or perhaps was that wise.
From the Cheshire-cat grins on the two of them, I knew the knowing would be worse than the not knowing. “No, I can’t change it so I’ll live with it, whatever it is.” I took my finger off the mic and returned to Miss P. “Romeo?”
“My next call.”
“Jerry?”
“He’s fine. Doctor will release him maybe later today, but we have to work through the drug protocol in-house.”
“That’s absurd. He didn’t take anything willingly. I’ll handle it.” We both knew that could be problematic, but I wasn’t going to admit that just yet. The rules had yet to be rewritten for the new reality that included Fentanyl. All previous drugs had to be ingested or injected. I wasn’t sure I was ready to live in a world where readily available drugs could kill on contact. Thirteen-year-olds could buy the stuff on the Internet, and I had no idea what to do with that.
“Your call, but I agree. It’ll just be a dance with legal and the insurance guys, mainly legal though.”
Yeah, having the Head of Security suspected of drug use could cause all kinds of blowback.
“How do you think they got in?” Miss P asked, knowing anything I said would be raw speculation.
I knew she, too, was worried we’d overlooked something, something big. A possibility, remote, but there—a taper to light the worry wick. “I don’t know. Have Vivienne meet us there.”
“Got it.” A pause. “Do you think our burglar is back?”
“If he is, I’ll kill him myself.” I disconnected and tossed my phone on the bed.
Teddie and Jordan both paled at my blooming smile. “You two are coming to a party with me. Tonight. Ten-thirty. Black and white. I need a costume, too. Now scram. I’ve got to take a shower and get back in the game.”
JEAN-CHARLES DIDN’T ANSWER the three times I called on my way down in the elevator, not that I blamed him. At this time of day, I figured he’d be upstairs in his eponymous restaurant—well, marginally eponymous. JCB Prime had been a compromise. His mother—yes, I’d called in the heavy artillery—had been the deciding vote. I’m not sure he’d forgiven me, and I didn’t blame him. But his choice, JC Prime, sounded to me like a New Age Evangelical Eatery. In a moment of weakness, I’d dug in my heels at the thought of denigrating a deity. Not my usual blasphemous approach. Not sure what that was about, not that it mattered.
Anyway, thoughts of unimportant things distracted me from worry.
It took years of maternal brainwashing to keep me from riding up to the top floor and finding my chef and smoothing things over, if possible.
“Let them come to you, Lucky.” If my mother had said that once, she’d pounded it into my head with her verbal hammer enough times to soften my skull. Maybe that was my problem.
Besides, mea culpas often stuck in my craw and went no further. The importance of fixing it would determine the level of groveling I would resort to. The only way to know that for sure was to face it.
And the jury was out on that.
But I couldn’t fix it if I couldn’t get him to answer his phone.
Conflict wasn’t my best thing—unless it could be solved with an elbow to someone’s nose. I didn’t think that would be a wise choice with Jean-Charles.
Something was wrong with me, and I didn’t know what. So I did what I always did: I ignored it and dove into the deep end of my job, a great hiding place that would suck me under if I weren’t careful.
The elevator spit me out in the lobby of Cielo. Subtle fountains and waterfalls, walls of growing grasses, furniture of natural and humane fabrics and wood responsibly harvested contributed to the overall Zen vibe. The place had been feng shuied by the masters.
An oasis in a city of crazy.
At least that was the theory.
My choice to forego a casino had prompted derision from the old guard. I compensated by having the most indulgent spa in town. So far, the occupancy rate supported my gut feeling this would work, but the pro
of would be in the long term. Right now, we still had the new-hotel smell, but Vegas denizens could be notoriously fickle. We needed to cultivate cool to stay.
My staff nodded to me as I walked through the expected quiet. A few folks relaxed in the bar. Everyone else was either at the spa or drinking in all Vegas had to offer before they rushed back to the peace.
But the bottom line wasn’t my priority right now.
A burglary in Bungalow 7. The outside security experts had assured me it was an impenetrable fortress—a requirement for the kind of clientele we charged very real five-figure money to stay there. We’d made that promise, and we’d failed to deliver.
And I had no idea how.
I pushed through the front door and immediately cringed against the assault of the sun. Tears hit my eyes. Pain stabbed. Eyes closed to slits, I rooted in my Birkin—a ridiculous gift from the Big Boss and, as such, something I both loved and found too showy.
As usual, caught between two versions of me.
How do you reconcile the yin and the yang? I felt like Dionysus with one face smiling, one face tragic. But straddling the fence could get downright uncomfortable, not to mention inflict serious damage to soft parts. However, doing something about it would come only when the discomfort exceeded my very high tolerance for pain.
But Jean-Charles might force me to one side or the other.
Momentarily blinded, I squeezed my eyes tight. Rooting through the detritus of my life that had found its way into my startlingly cavernous bag, my hand finally closed on my sunglasses. I stuffed them on my face and tentatively opened my eyes. Tolerable. Like I said, high tolerance for pain. And for humiliation, if Jordan’s and Teddie’s insinuations could be believed.
Through the years, I’d taken my share. I’d live through this—few died from embarrassment.
The valet had my ride waiting. Young, eager, and way too chipper, he waited by the open driver’s side door of a red Ferrari, top down, engine idling at a low growl. Not my car—I’d borrowed it from the dealership at the Babylon. They’d been nice about the extended loan, but I knew I was perilously close to exceeding my corporate privilege. I had a brand-new vintage Porsche, a gift for my very recent birthday from Jean-Charles, but I couldn’t bring myself to hand her off to the valets. So she stayed in the garage at Jean-Charles’s house, safe from a car-loving kid who couldn’t resist a quick joyride. Jean-Charles only pretended to understand. He felt slighted. I could see it in his eyes when we spoke of the car: one of the rarest Porsches available, a 1953 356 American Roadster. The car of my dreams. I should drive it, but I couldn’t bring myself to drop it in the ubiquitous potholes all over town.
Lucky Score Page 13