Fast and Loose

by Fern Michaels

  “Yep, all ten thousand of them. The other buildings over to the left are where the workers stay. Actually, they’re mini-apartments. I have thirty employees. All good people. We need to patrol at night and keep torches lit, so the coyotes don’t come out after the chickens. We have wolves and stray dogs that are part wolf. In some respects, it is a hard business, but I’m getting used to it. I actually like it better than working the Vegas clubs. Showgirl to chicken rancher! I get a kick out of myself sometime.”

  Maggie laughed. She liked this young woman and was having a hard time with the why and the how of her being involved with the rest of the women milling about. And yet . . .

  “Do whatever makes you happy, Kitty. That’s what life is all about. How did you get involved in”—Maggie waved her arms about to indicate the other women—“all of this?”

  “It’s a long story. I’m not actually involved. It’s more like I’m doing a favor for some of the girls. Please don’t feel like you have to—”

  “Grill’s ready!” one of the women shouted.

  Whatever she was about to say ended with Kitty running over to the patio, where the grill awaited the thick Kobe-beef steaks that Vegas was known for, piled high on a huge platter.

  Maggie blinked, then blinked again. The scene she was watching reminded her of the sisters out at Myra’s farm as they worked in sync at mealtime. How many times had she participated in that very action? Too many to count, that’s how many. But—and there was always a but to situations like this—there was an undercurrent here, a frenzied, almost frantic rush to cook, to eat, to drink so they could get down to whatever it was they were going to get down to and share with her. If she didn’t screw things up. She needed to start acting.

  Maggie meandered over to the serving table to pick up her plate and cutlery. She smiled, a sickly effort, as she made small talk.

  “You look sad,” Misty Sanchez said lightly. “This is girls’ night. You’re with friends here, Maggie. We’re all here for you. We meant what we said today at lunch. We’ll do whatever we can for you. Always remember, there is strength in numbers.”

  Maggie nodded and mumbled something under her breath. Misty leaned closer. “What did you say?”

  Maggie looked up, tears puddling in her eyes. “That guy I told you about . . . he fired my brother this afternoon. I found out when I got back to the hotel. My brother, my only living relative, is blaming me. I never should have come here. I’m such a fool. But the heart wants what the heart wants. I’m going home in the morning. He told Jack to clear out his things. And he told him he was going to ban him from Babylon.” Sobs shook her shoulders.

  “Hey, girls! Come here and listen to this! Tell them what you just told me, Maggie! Never mind. I’ll tell them. That rat that dumped Maggie—he just fired her brother this afternoon and kicked him out of Babylon!”

  The shocked silence bothered Maggie for some reason.

  Kitty turned from the grill, her beautiful eyes narrowed to slits. “Why?”

  “Because of me, that’s why,” Maggie wailed. “Because I was a pest when I asked for answers. I wouldn’t go away and insisted on a face-to-face. Jack . . . I think Jack might have said something to him. I don’t know for sure. Now he’ll blackball Jack, and he’ll never get another job in Vegas. All because of me. That man has some serious clout,” she continued to wail.

  “Well, honey, we have some serious clout of our own,” Kate Davis, a tall, leggy redhead, said with spirit.

  The others shouted their agreement.

  Kitty flipped the steaks. “Where is your brother now?”

  “Packing his stuff up. He was staying in one of those apartments that Babylon owns that guys share. Kind of like a dormitory, but with all kinds of privileges. The hotel pays half, and the guys pay half. He didn’t even give him twenty-four hours. Just told him to go now and to take his sister with him. Meaning me, as I am the sister. What a louse he is. How could I ever have loved someone like that? My God, how?”

  That was some pretty good acting, Maggie thought as she blew her nose into a wad of paper napkins. “I just want to go home. Can someone call me a cab? I’ll go straight to the airport and maybe get on standby. I don’t want to be here anymore. I can’t take it. Now my brother blames me and hates me at the same time.” She let loose with a fresh waterfall of tears and decided she was almost Academy Award material.

  “You aren’t going anywhere,” the women chorused as they gathered around her and led her to a deep, comfortable-looking chaise longue. Suddenly, there was a glass of wine in her hand and a thick circle of women staring down at her.

  “Listen up, Maggie Spritzer, because we are going to tell you a story you are not going to believe. We want and need your full attention here. Do we have it, Maggie?” Lena Adams asked.

  Lordy, Lordy, here it comes, Maggie thought. She sniffled and nodded.

  “Take the steaks off, Kitty, and get over here!” Lena shouted.

  Maggie turned off her tears, and her jaw dropped and her eyes almost popped out of her head as she listened to the women’s accounts of their relationships with Dixson Kelly. From time to time, she managed a sputtered expletive or two to show she was into it, along with the women.

  “That’s why we formed this little club and call ourselves the Dixson Kelly Alumnae Club. We just voted you in as a member. We are going to get even with that son of a bitch. And here is the best part, Maggie. There are more of us. Some of the girls couldn’t get here today, because their schedules changed. We numbered forty at last count. That’s forty women that bastard conned,” Lena said.

  “Forty! Did you say forty? I don’t believe this! I can’t believe this! I do believe it. That rat fink. Am I forty-one?” Maggie let loose with a tortured scream of denial.

  “We have a plan.”

  Thank God someone does, Maggie thought. “What kind of plan? Are you going to kill him? Although killing is too good. He needs to suffer the way he made us suffer, and he has to pay for firing Jack. What’s the plan?”

  “We are going to set him up, frame him, then rob the casino!” Lena continued.

  Maggie almost jumped out of her skin. “You mean like that movie Ocean’s Eleven?”

  “No, no, nothing that elaborate. We have it all figured out. And we have a secret weapon!” Lena said. “And she’s standing right over there, our ‘hostess with the mostest,’ as the saying goes. Kitty is our secret weapon. You know that old saying, ‘You always want what you can’t have’? Well, Dixson Kelly wants Kitty so bad, he can’t see straight. She’s stiff-armed him for months now. She has him right where she wants him. Excuse me . . . right where we want him. All we have to do is pick a time and a place and go for it.”

  “But how . . . the security . . . What makes you think you won’t get caught?” Maggie said, dithering. Robbing the casino, even playing a pretend part in it, wasn’t something she wanted to think about. Not now, not ever.

  “Well, for one thing, Gwen Sanders and Dona Jordan have been dating the two cops who drive the Guarda armored truck with the money. And Erin and Pam are in serious relationships—at least the guys think they’re serious—with the two drivers in the backup vehicle. The girls have been picking their brains for months now. We’ve just been waiting for the right moment, and today, when you walked into that restroom and met Hana, we all knew it was meant to be. We just haven’t chosen a date yet. Why aren’t you looking as excited as we are?” Lena asked suspiciously.

  “I’m in shock, that’s why,” Maggie sputtered. And she was in shock. Of all the things she had thought they might come up with to get even with Dixson Kelly, this particular method of revenge had never entered her mind. Well, damn.

  “Do you approve or disapprove?” Kitty asked. Her voice was so cool and flat, Maggie felt herself shivering.

  Be careful, she warned herself. This is uncharted territory.

  “I’m with you all the way,” she said. “Yessiree, I am with all of you! Ooh, I can just see him in prison, some
inmate’s bitch!”

  The women hooted with glee when Maggie finally got her tongue to work.

  “He’ll get all the loving he can handle on a daily basis, a good-looking guy like him,” Misty Sanchez said.

  The women laughed uproariously. Maggie didn’t know whether she should laugh or cry. Then she did a reality check. How was she going to get out of this?

  The wine and the beer flowed; the Kobe steaks and the rest of the food were forgotten. Suddenly, no one was hungry, not even Maggie, who could eat anytime, anyplace due to her out-of-whack metabolism. It didn’t take long for her to realize that she and Kitty were the only two women who were stone-cold sober. Her right eye started to twitch, a warning that something wasn’t quite right.

  Maggie moved to the table and sat down on the bench across from Kitty. “How much money are you guys talking about?” she asked between hiccups.

  “Millions.”

  “What are you going to do with it? How will you divide it? I guess it’s the reporter in me. Like, who would get the most is dependent on who was hurt the most . . . what? Or equally?”

  Kitty burst out laughing. “Oh, we aren’t going to keep it. Once Kelly is in jail, we’ll give it all back.”

  The reporter in Maggie immediately discounted Kitty’s statement, because while those luscious pillow lips of hers were saying one thing, her bedroom eyes were saying something else. “But they’ll just let him go then, and they’ll pay him a bunch of money for something he didn’t do. He wins in the end. Didn’t you all think of that?”

  “That will be months down the road, and in the meantime, he’ll be in jail. No women! That alone is a killer for someone like him. It’ll do him in. Then we’ll all sell our stories to the tabloids and make our money that way. Now do you get it?”

  Maggie forced a laugh she didn’t feel. “Awesome. I can see where you all gave this a lot of thought.”

  “Night and day for months. You know what, Maggie? When Lena first approached me, I said no. Then I met the women and listened to their stories and felt sorry for them. They all truly, truly fell in love with Kelly. Like you, they believed what he told them. They thought they had met their perfect soul mates. Maybe if the guy had changed his MO just a little, it would have been easier for them to swallow, but he handed out the same line to all of them. How he ever kept it straight is beyond me, but he did it.”

  She’s lying through her teeth, Maggie thought. “Burner phones,” Maggie said, authority ringing in her voice.

  “What? What does that mean?” Kitty asked.

  “The way to keep you all straight. Burner phones, no way to trace them. Usually prepaid. A few years ago, I did a story on a guy who was running a scam to bilk people out of their money. A lot of people. The only way he could keep it straight was to assign a phone to each one. He had nineteen that I know of. They were all labeled, and attached to each phone was an index card with notes, along with the phone number. All in all, it was pretty amazing. Did you and the girls ever compare notes as to his phone number? Did you all call his personal cell?”

  “I never asked. Hold on.” Kitty put her fingers between her lips and let loose with a wild, high-pitched shrieking whistle that got everyone’s attention. “Girls! Girls! I need to ask you a question. One by one, tell me the number you used to call to reach Dixson Kelly.”

  The women rattled off the number they’d been assigned by heart. There were no two that were alike. Everyone asked why, and Kitty explained what Maggie had just shared with her.

  The women reacted as one, shouting, “We were nothing but burner phones to that creep, that skunk, that low-life, bottom-feeding scumbag!” And on and on they went, till they ran out of hateful names.

  “Someone needs to write this down, because it’s one more thing that skunk has to pay for,” Pam Logan shrieked.

  “We should write it down in blood. His!” someone else shouted.

  Maggie just watched as the women went at it. She hoped they never got their hands physically on Dixson Kelly. Not that he didn’t deserve something happening to him by way of retribution.

  The big question now was, what should she do? She, Maggie Spritzer, Post reporter. Part of her wanted the women to succeed simply because she was a woman and hated the way Dixson Kelly had played fast and loose with them. The other part of her knew she had to tell the boys what was happening. Or did she? Something simply was not adding up. All this had nothing to do with RCHood, whoever he was, ripping off the casinos. Dixson Kelly had had no part in that theft. That had to mean Kelly was fair game, since he wasn’t involved in any way with that end of things. Still . . . she wanted to side with the women because she knew, could see, how badly they’d been hurt emotionally. They’d become bitter and hateful because of Dixson Kelly. Why shouldn’t they want revenge? She wasn’t one of them, and yet she wanted the revenge for them. Sort of.

  Her back stiffened when she heard Hana Frey say, “So what you’re saying is, we were just hunks of fresh meat with a burner-phone number to identify each of us. That’s what you’re saying, right?”

  Maggie didn’t trust herself to speak as she looked around at the women, who suddenly all looked sober. She saw tears on every woman’s cheeks. She watched as they swiped at them before they came together to start the cleanup, just the way the sisters did back at the farm. She could see the dejection, the rejection, the slumped shoulders. They were going to give up. She could see that the fight was suddenly gone from them.

  Suddenly, because she was sober, Maggie found herself standing on the picnic table and screaming at the top of her lungs. “No! Come on! You aren’t going to let what I said make you cave in, are you! Come on! Ten minutes ago, you guys had a plan. You were ready to kick some ass and take names later. You are not hunks of meat and a burner phone. You are beautiful, wonderful women who have hearts and souls but had the misfortune to fall in love with a badass who gets his jollies from lying to women. I might be new here, but I’m not going to let you give up!”

  One of the women at the front of the group snapped, “Who died and appointed you ruler of the universe?”

  “You all did when you invited me out here. Chew on that, toots!”

  “Wow! You’re a spitfire, aren’t you?” Kitty said, smiling. The only problem Maggie could see was that the smile didn’t reach Kitty’s eyes. While she was beautiful, as was her smile, her eyes were cold and calculating.

  “Yeah,” Maggie drawled. “That’s what my boss calls me.”

  Chapter 15

  Abner trotted down the hall toward the kitchen, from where he heard noises. Phil was up early. He looked down at his watch. Six thirty. He didn’t know why he was surprised to see Mary Alice sitting at the counter, with her hands around a mug of coffee, but he was. She looked like she’d been up for a while.

  “Good morning, Abner! How did you sleep?” Mary Alice asked.

  “Very well, as a matter of fact. I feel right now like a freshwater eel. Something smells good.” He looked around to see what smelled so good as he poured himself a cup of coffee.

  “Fresh cinnamon croissants right out of the freezer. The orange juice is also frozen. Only the coffee is truly fresh. Mary Alice and I have been talking. We’ve both been up since five. I’m not much of a sleeper,” Philonias confided.

  “What did you talk about?” Abner asked curiously.

  “Nothing earth shattering. More like getting to know the flesh-and-blood side of each other. I now know that she likes to walk barefoot in the rain. There is no way I could ever have known that just being cyber friends. What do you want to share, Abner?”

  Abner thought about it. “I like walking on the beach as the tide is coming in. I own a lot of beachfront property, but somehow I never get a chance to enjoy it. That’s going to change when I get back. What about you, Phil? What does the flesh-and-blood Phil like to do that the cyber Phil doesn’t do?”

  Philonias smiled. It was a nice smile, Abner thought, but he could see it was rusty at best, as though he
didn’t smile much and was just trying it out.

  “It’s not so much what I do, but more like what I would like to do. Like you, Abner, I simply never took the time. I plan to do that very soon, if I’m not locked up somewhere.”

  “What is it?” Mary Alice asked.

  “I’d like to own an animal farm. All kinds of animals. The kind no one else wants. I want to give them a good life. I want them warm in the winter, cool in the summer, and to know their bellies will always be full. I donate money to a lot of animal causes, but I want my own. I want to . . . I want to give the animals a bath, clean up their messes. I want to be hands on. I never had a pet as a child, and if ever there was a child who needed a pet, I was that child.”

  “Why didn’t you get one, then?” Mary Alice asked.

  Philonias sighed. “It wouldn’t have been fair to the animal with what I was doing. I was on the computer almost twenty hours a day. Animals need fresh air, green grass, and room to run and play. Penthouse living is for goldfish.”

  Abner toyed with the spoon next to his cup and napkin. “Do you have other places like this one, Phil?”

  Philonias nodded. “How did you know? Six, to be precise.”

  “When you leave here, are you going to go to one of them?” Abner asked.

  “Yes. I just haven’t decided which one.”

  “I think you should take Mary Alice with you. Just to be sure she’s safe. Even though the people I’m with are friends, I’m not sure how they’re going to react to the way this all went down and to my . . . um . . . sudden departure, especially since I took her with me. They are going to view it as the ultimate betrayal.”

  “Wait a minute, Abner. What are you saying here? You want us to be safe, but you are going to stay behind. Is this what flesh-and-blood people do? Help me out here, okay?” Phil said.

  Abner drained his coffee cup. He really did not want to talk about this, but he knew he had to. He was the one who had opened up this can of worms. “I don’t know about other people, but it’s what I am going to do. Whatever happens. I held up my end of the bargain. Or if you prefer the word commitment. I also told them from the git-go that I wouldn’t be able to break RC’s work. I tried. I owed them all that much.”