by Jenn Stark
“Exactly.”
Dixie’s laugh brought our attention around to the far end of the bar. She was leaning over a printed list of names, the angle allowing her impressive assets to spill out over the document. Brody’s scowl had gotten deeper, and I almost felt sorry for the man. Almost. “You find out anything about Brody’s involvement with the Rarity?”
“His role, I think, is done,” Nikki said. “Like I told you, glad-handing and the face man. From here on out, I don’t think you’ll have to worry about him until you want to.”
The second she said the words, I knew that was too much to ask.
“Sara? You have a minute?”
Brody’s voice sounded a little too crisp as he waved at me from the edge of the bar. as if we hadn’t already been at each other’s throats already once this week. “What the hell?” I muttered.
Nikki also pitched her voice low. “Dix doesn’t like you coming into her chitchat either. Tread lightly, Kemosabe. I’ve got your back.”
“Right.” I moved off the barstool and trudged to the end of the bar. Shoving my hands in my pockets, I rocked back on my heels. “Can I help you?”
Dixie kept quiet, her face perfectly sweet-tea, but her sharp eyes missed nothing. I dug deep and straightened under Brody’s narrow-eyed gaze.
“You look like hell,” he said.
“Noted. Anything else?”
“Who do you know on this list?”
He pointed at the list of names that Dixie had been hovering over. She, thankfully, had scooted back enough for me to see it without getting an eyeful of cleavage, and Brody moved the paper toward me to emphasize the separation between Dixie’s view of the situation and mine. Very cute, very cop. I sometimes forgot about how much I remembered about this man.
Shaking off that thought, I scanned the list and tried to keep my voice neutral. “I’ve heard of some of them, but I can’t say I really know any of them.”
“None of them?”
“I mean, not really.” I leaned forward, committing the list to memory. It read like a who’s who of Connected. “I know a few of the names from, you know, gossip.”
“They’re all Connected. You’re a Connected.” He swiveled his gaze back to Dixie. “You both are.”
I rolled my eyes. “It’s not like we all have the same 401(k), Brody. The community doesn’t work that way.”
“She’s right, it doesn’t.” Dixie’s voice was a touch harder-edged too. Still sweet, but with enough steel to drive her point home. And at least she wasn’t directing her irritation at me. “Which you’d know if you’d ever shown an interest before now.”
“Consider me officially interested. Who are these people, and, more to the point, why are they in my city?” He shifted his glance to me. “The people on this list aren’t here for solstice. And all of them can’t be interested in the Rarity, no way.”
I shrugged. “Come on, you don’t think Connected folk like to gawk at pretty trinkets? We’re still human. Most of us.”
If I’d wanted to unnerve him, I didn’t succeed. At least not outwardly. Instead, he got that long-suffering look on his face, like he’d somehow drawn the short end of the stick, but by God, he was going to make the best of it.
“Thank you for your time,” he gritted out. He swiveled his gaze to Dixie. “Always a pleasure, Dixie.”
“Always will be.” She smiled with enough force behind her interest that Brody blinked, a faint rush of color flaring along his cheekbones. Dixie opened her mouth to keep going, and I wheeled around, heading toward Nikki. Dixie Quinn had more game in her little finger than I had in my whole body, and I suddenly didn’t feel so good. I made it back to Nikki in time for her to grab my arm in an iron fist, her hand all that was keeping me upright.
“What did he say to you? You look even worse than before, and I didn’t think that was possible.”
“It’s nothing—nothing.” I didn’t shake off her hand, though. “What do you know about Roxie Meadows?”
“Grifter Queen of the Seventies?” Nikki chortled. “She’s practically Dixie’s inspiration—knew everyone who was anyone in Vegas, back in her day, literally had the who’s who of the Connected community in her little black book. Hit it big with a card-reading act that apparently sucked in everyone from the mob to the pope. Cashed in with a series of rich-as-Croesus hubbies and bought a huge mansion west of the Strip. She hasn’t been out and about much, but what would she be—seventy now? More?”
I thought I’d test out my new-found information on her, see what stuck. “Is she the Empress?”
“Oh, hell no—” Nikki’s eyes widened as she stared at me. “I mean—there’s that fairyland-castle place. That’s the Empress’s crib. Roxie’s home is way off Strip.”
“So you do know her?”
“Well, I don’t know-know her. I know of her.”
“You’ve been here how long and have never met the woman herself?”
“Well—I wasn’t really—” Nikki shook her head. “Look, doll, when I first got here, I was totally rookie grade. I couldn’t see any of the Council’s digs until Dixie pointed them out to me. Once I knew how to see, I was fine. Before…” Another head shake. “Dixie was the one who showed me Armaeus, Eshe—eventually the Devil. She never mentioned the Empress, not once. And she’s talked about Roxie a lot.”
“They still friends?”
“Sure they are.” Nikki shrugged. “But like I said, Roxie is getting up there.”
I grinned at her. “Not if she’s on the Council she isn’t. What say we check it out? I figure if Dixie doesn’t know about Roxie’s extracurricular club membership, she’ll appreciate the heads-up. Especially given everything going on.”
“You’ve got that right.” Nikki’s gaze swiveled to Dixie, who was now chatting on her bedazzled white cell phone. “This…is gonna be good.”
Chapter Fourteen
“Roxie’s not the Empress. She should be, she’d be the perfect Empress, but she’s not,” Dixie said for about the fiftieth time since we’d left SLS. “She’s not the kind of woman to hide her light under a barrel.”
“Well, maybe she had a good reason,” Nikki said reasonably. “She sure lives rich enough, despite the fact she’s off Strip. You said yourself that she looks like a million bucks.”
“Probably because she’s paid a million bucks to do so.” Dixie shook her head, her blond curls catching the sunshine. “And I haven’t seen her in—Lord, it’s been forever. She’s been a recluse for years.”
We were tooling north on the Strip in Dixie’s white convertible, leaving behind the high-rises and even the low-rises, heading deeper into the city. Nikki was at the wheel, and Dixie rode shotgun. Now Dixie turned around to me.
“Roxie’s refused the last four or five times I’ve asked her to meet. Said she didn’t want to be seen when she wasn’t at her best. Instead, she has a thriving telepsychic service and website—totally international. She makes more money than God.”
“But she’s not on the Council.”
“No—I mean…” Dixie sighed. “I surely would be surprised.” Her gaze swiveled to meet mine. “Not as surprised to learn you were born Sariah Pelter, though.”
I was getting really tired of that name coming up. “That was a long time ago, Dixie.”
“Vegas has a way of making you face your past.” She laughed at my expression. “Don’t give me that look. Detective Rooks didn’t out you. He clearly knew you from somewhere, and I know he’s never been stationed anywhere but Vegas and his hometown. Even back in the dark ages of actual newspapers, stories were archived, you know. It wasn’t all that difficult to find Brody Rooks’s name in Memphis and cross-reference it with members of the community who showed up more than once. Especially when one of them was a teenage girl whose mother was—”
“I’d be super careful if I were you.” My words were mild, but not mild enough. Dixie recoiled. Down girl.
“What I’m trying to say is, I understand the energy between you
two now,” she said. “I couldn’t figure it out before, the push-pull of his emotions. He never would let me read his chart, and I get the feeling you don’t know exactly when you were born, so that’s not incredibly useful. But there was clearly a connection there, and now I know what it is.”
Beside Dixie, Nikki’s eyes snapped up to the rearview mirror. She didn’t have to speak inside my head for me to get the message. Go with it.
I uncurled my fists and leaned back against the white leather seats, letting my eyes drift shut. “Yeah, well, like I said. A long time ago.” The sun baking down on me felt better than it had any right to. “When’s the last time you saw Roxie?”
“Two thousand and…” Dixie’s voice held a frown. “You know, I don’t know. We were thick as thieves when I first got to Vegas. She introduced me to the community, helped set me up, really. I secretly think she got financing cleared for the chapel, and then the loan was canceled—I owned it free and clear.”
I opened one eye, unsurprised to see Nikki staring at me in the rearview mirror. Totally sounded like a Council move.
“She do that sort of thing a lot?”
“I don’t know—probably. She was generous to a fault. And her parties! Lord, they were famous, especially in the seventies and eighties. Before my time, of course. But I’m sure she’s kept up her connections.” She pursed her mouth into a perfect moue. “I wonder if we should have Detective Rooks with us?”
“No.” Nikki and I both spoke the word at the same time. Then Nikki angled onto I-15, and Dixie turned forward again, no one bothering to talk once we hit the highway. I was glad of it. Seeing Brody again today had been…unnerving. I still felt beat to shit, psychically and emotionally, and when he’d commented on my appearance, it sounded so much like the younger Brody, it brought back an entirely new, unwelcome flood of memories.
He’d looked so much younger then too. So strong and earnest and all “just want to see if you can help, Miss Pelter. Finding these kids, it’s what we have to do.” He’d filled my whole world with the belief that if you simply fought hard enough, long enough, you would win. If you kept searching far enough, deep enough, you could find anyone. My skills might have been mine at birth, but I had gotten better at them after I started working with the Memphis children’s crime unit. Just not good enough.
Not ever good enough.
I burrowed farther into the seat, trying to lose myself in the upholstery. It had been good practice, honestly, for what came after. By the time I’d found Father Jerome, learned about the plight of the young Connecteds, I was better at my craft. Quicker. Smarter.
Most importantly, I knew what I could—and couldn’t—do.
Some of the kids I’d tracked back in Memphis had been Connected, but not all. I hadn’t realized then that there even was a psychic black market. I’d thought I’d been more or less alone, that my abilities made me special, separate. And they had, in the middle of Tennessee. But the world was both a much bigger and a much smaller place now that I was grown up, now that I worked in the community. Now that I’d seen so much more.
We finally slowed, turning off the highway into an area completely different from the scrubby, sun-beaten homes I’d seen close to the Strip.
“You can live here on a fortune-teller’s income?” I stared at the houses we were passing, each bigger than the next.
Nikki snorted from the driver’s seat. “Roxie wasn’t just any fortune-teller. She started out as a carnie queen, yeah, but she had a thing for the rich and famous—men, women, she didn’t care. She’d party with any of them, and the more she partied, the more prescient she became.”
We turned up into a steep driveway, and I gave an appreciative whistle. “She seems to be doing okay.”
Dixie laughed. “This place was her wedding present from her third husband, and she’s remodeled it from top to bottom. It’s nice.”
We turned onto Orient Express Court, snaking up through palatial homes landscaped within an inch of their lives. A fair amount of that landscape involved green. Never mind that we were in the desert.
When Nikki turned boldly into a gated driveway whose gate was open wide, though, I frowned. “Is she expecting us?”
“Open-door policy.” Dixie said. “You’ve got a question for Madame Roxie, she’ll send out a minion to meet you. And that minion will tell you first what your question is, and then what you can pay if you truly want to know the answer.”
“Really.” I considered that. “That’s a pretty neat trick. If I guess the right question and have a reasonable idea about the answer, I’ve won the lottery.”
Dixie grinned. “It’s what got her the third husband.”
We pulled up to the front door of the mansion. A valet trotted out from a small, air-conditioned guardhouse, all fresh-scrubbed youth and earnestness. Every one of my bones creaked in response. “Welcome to the Aerie,” the kid said cheerfully, taking Nikki’s keys. “Madame Roxie is receiving in the front sitting room. She’ll be with you herself in a few minutes.”
I slanted Dixie a glance. “I thought you said she was a recluse.”
She shrugged, clearly surprised. “She must be feeling better.”
I reacquainted my feet with the concept of moving, not missing the way Nikki hung back to keep an eye on me while Dixie clicked forward in her stiletto heels. She’d shimmied out of her neon swimsuit and into a white shift and shoes, but her clutch purse provided the necessary pink—a bubblegum-hued base with large white polka dots. I tried to remember the last time I’d carried a purse that wasn’t for any other reason than to hold a gun. Couldn’t.
“You’re doing great, dollface,” Nikki said. “You’ll be the bait. Given your beat-to-shit face, ain’t no way Roxie won’t figure out you’re the one with the question.”
We entered the house and were transported immediately into a different world. The outside of the mansion looked perfect Vegas chic—the pool, the landscape, the sweeping views of the Strip. Inside, we were treated to an interior designer’s nightmare.
“Not exactly relocation beige,” I murmured.
“Well,” Dixie shrugged delicately, “I’ll allow she’s a bit nostalgic.”
“Really.” The foyer was stuffed with memorabilia—sandwich-board signs hawking palm readings, flyers for everything from séances to spectral audiences, black mirrors, pink lanterns, crystal balls, sequined scrapbooks stuffed to the gills, and Aladdin’s lamps. The walls were shrouded in ornate purple and red hangings, forcefully setting the scene. “Has it always been like this?”
Dixie gazed around the space, appropriately awed. “I’ve only visited once, right after we met. Then she was working the whole Arabic Fortune-Teller motif—imagine tents. A lot of tents.”
“Got it.”
A woman dressed in an old-time movie usher outfit emerged from a back room, her smile radiant under her sleek blonde bob. “How lovely of you to come,” she said warmly. “Madame Roxie is delighted to welcome you and heal your pain.”
The girl addressed us all, but her gaze drifted to me. Beside me, Nikki stiffened, but with my newly acquired sensitivity, I could feel it all on my own. The girl was definitely Connected.
“Yep,” Nikki said quietly as we followed the young woman to the right, through large oak doors into an equally shadowed and draped room, this one set up like a miniature theatre of the strange. “She’s got the gift. It’s pretty strong too.”
“Please, make yourself comfortable.”
There was a small stage at the center of the room, with a table, two chairs, and an honest-to-God fainting couch. Surrounding the stage was a semicircle of chairs. I kept glancing around for Penn and Teller, but it appeared we were alone in the room.
“You’ll be the focus of Madame Roxie’s reading, yes?” Our usher set a glass of ice water in front of me.
That jolted me. “She told you that?”
“She’s very eager to see you.” She smiled at me, and reached out her hand. It was gloved, so I took it. You
simply couldn’t be too careful around Connecteds. She drew me up on the stage and offered me the couch. I took a chair. Nikki sprawled in one of the viewer seats.
“Have you worked with, ah, Madame Roxie long?” I asked.
“Oh no,” she said. “Madame Roxie allows her assistants to stay a year each, at the most. But it has truly been an honor. She’s paying for my graduate studies in psychology.”
“My stars! That must be exciting. Where are you going to school?” Dixie drew the woman’s attention away, giving Nikki and me the chance to exchange glances. Yearly interns? That was interesting.
A bell sounded deep in the house, and the assistant straightened, her pleasant demeanor taking on an edge of excitement. “You’ll see. She’s unlike anything you’ve ever encountered before.”
She was wrong, of course.
The woman who swept into the room took Dixie’s bombshell status and raised it several notches. The first thing you noticed about Madame Roxie was the bourbon in her hand; the second was the Venetian half mask that covered her upper face, tucked neatly into her flowing golden curls. But there was no denying that beneath that mask flowed the smoothly perfect skin of a young woman. Wrapped in a fire-engine red silk dressing gown that was slit up to her thighs, Roxie strode boldly forward with both hands outstretched to greet us, her red lipstick smile stretched almost to the breakpoint over straight white teeth.
“Darlings! How perfect that you’re here.” Her voice was bright, sunny and, like everything else about her, way too young for the age we knew her to be.
Dixie gawked, totally losing all sense of decorum. “Madame Roxie? You’re…you’re the Empress?”
Roxie turned to Dixie, startled for a second, then appeared to take her presence in stride. “Why, Dixie Quinn. I didn’t think I’d see you again. Cooped up here in this house as I am, I don’t much entertain my old friends.” She surveyed Dixie critically. “You’ve aged. Pity. Still, now that we can all verify that I did at least try for discretion regarding the Council, there’s no need for this silly thing anymore.”