Stephanie Caffrey - Raven McShane 01 - Diva Las Vegas

by Stephanie Caffrey

  Mandy climbed off the man exactly a minute later. He tipped her, and she patted his head affectionately when she left. Easy money. She must have told him I was on my way because he didn’t move. He sat rigid in the chair like a boy about to get a haircut.

  I walked over and stood next to him. “Tonight must be your lucky night,” I said, resting my hand on his shoulder. I moved in front of him to face him and began to pull off my flimsy top. It was then that I looked down at his face for the first time. He was about forty-five, with bushy brown hair and a mustache straight out of the seventies. There was a long gash on the left side of his face, and his left eye was swollen. I inhaled sharply and froze. He was staring back at me with murderous eyes, and I couldn’t shake his glassy-eyed glare. It was the Brawny man. I screamed.

  I was still screaming when I turned to flee. I got nowhere. He grabbed onto my forearm and held me with a vise grip. There was no wriggling out of that grasp this time, and I didn’t have a Corona bottle to use as a weapon. Even in my panic, I wondered what he was thinking. Security would jump on him within ten seconds. And then I saw the knife in his left hand. It wasn’t just any knife, either: it was an 8” hunting knife with an elongated point. I didn’t see his arm move until it was almost too late. At the last instant I managed to duck enough that the blade missed my throat and cut into my shoulder. I shrieked as it sliced through muscle and soft tissue. Tears welled up in my eyes, but I wasn’t going to give him a second swing at me. I stomped down and, somehow, landed true on his right foot. My stiletto heel must have punched right through his leather shoe because he let out a loud snarl and let go of my arm. I ran.

  Two security guys raced in past me as I fled the back room. I watched the scene unfold. My attacker was obviously in pain, but he wasn’t down. He was limping quickly towards the fire exit, but the security guys managed to drag him to the ground before he got out. DeShawn, a six-four former BYU lineman, belted him clean in the face, and Brawny man’s head hit hard against the floor. I wasn’t in the mood to watch the rest of it.

  I ran downstairs to the locker room and grabbed my things. I found some paper towels and cleaned up my shoulder. It hurt like a bitch, but it looked better than I would have thought. It stopped bleeding with a little pressure, so I crumpled up some paper towels and taped them over my wound with some giant band-aids.

  There was no way I was going to finish my shift. They had found me at home, and now at work. I began wondering if I was even safe at the Flamingo. The fire alarm had gone off for a few seconds when the Brawny man tried to open the fire exit, and in their drunken state a lot of the customers seemed panicked. I found Carlos at the front doors trying to calm people down. Once the dancers got back on stage, things slowly got back to normal, and the customers went back to their seats.

  I tapped Carlos on the shoulder. “Want to take me home?”

  He raised his eyebrows. “I’ve been waiting years for you to ask me that.”

  I shot him a look. “Seriously. I need to get out of here. That guy tried to kill me. Again.”

  He put on his serious face. “Okay. It’s not too busy.”

  “Don’t bother punching out. Let’s just go,” I said.

  He nodded. He said something to the other bouncer and took my arm to lead me out. It was a little heavy-handed, but it was comforting all the same.

  “Let’s take your car,” I said.

  We climbed into his black Mustang and he gunned it up the Strip. Halfway home, my cell phone rang.

  “Raven?” The man’s voice was frantic.

  “Yes. Who’s this?”

  “Cody Masterson,” he said, out of breath. “I’m in an ambulance on my way to the hospital.”

  “What happened?” I was wondering why he was calling me, of all people.

  “Car accident,” he said, before correcting himself. “Well, that’s the thing. The truck came right at me. I was driving home right near my house, on Rampart Boulevard, and there’s no median strip or anything.” He was breathing heavily, and his mouth couldn’t get the words out fast enough. “And the guy comes across the lane in this truck—it was like a dump truck or something—and swerves right into me.”

  “Are you okay?” I asked. I was having a hard time forcing my mind to focus on something other than my own pressing problems.

  “My car flipped over when I swerved. I think I hit a fire hydrant, but the airbag kicked in. My arm feels broken, though. It got caught and turned around by the seatbelt when I flipped.”

  “Okay. And you think this was on purpose.”

  “I don’t know how else to take it. The guy rammed right into me and then sped off. Someone must have seen me talking to you. Anyway, if I’m right, they won’t stop until they finish me off. You have any friends with guns?”

  I laughed grimly. “What about the cops?”

  He paused. “I think we need to talk. You were right—I haven’t been completely honest with you. I’m not exactly free to talk right now, though.”

  I imagined there was at least one paramedic in the back of the ambulance with him. “What hospital are you going to?”

  “Spring Valley,” he said.

  “Okay. Tell them to admit you under a John Doe name,” I said and hung up. I wasn’t sure they could do that, but it sounded like a good idea. No sense making it easy to find him if someone was really trying to kill him. “We’ll be there in fifteen minutes.”

  Carlos overheard the “we” part and shot me a pained look.

  “That was Cody Masterson.”

  “Holy…”

  “Exactly. He was in a car accident that he thinks was no accident.”

  “And?” he asked.

  “How’d you like to drive me to Spring Valley Hospital?”

  He could tell it wasn’t really a question. He got into the right lane and turned up Tropicana. We drove in silence for a few minutes, and then I explained what Cody had told me.

  “You have a gun on you?” I asked.

  He sighed for effect.

  “Just for deterrence purposes,” I said. “No one’s getting shot.”

  “I don’t have my big gun, but I’ve got my Glock in the trunk. Only a couple rounds in it, though.”

  “Good enough.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  We pulled into the hospital lot, and Carlos dropped me at the emergency entrance.

  “Oops,” I muttered to no one in particular. I realized I had told Cody to use a pseudonym, but I had no idea what name he’d use. The lobby was surprisingly bustling for a Tuesday night, but then again I had no idea how busy a hospital was supposed to be. I hadn’t been inside one since I was a kid.

  I hit the callback button on my cell phone to dial the number Cody had just called me from. Cody didn’t answer. He’d probably only arrived a few minutes before us, so he couldn’t have gotten very far. And with a broken arm, it wasn’t like they were going to take him to the geriatrics department or the psych ward. I decided to poke around the ER.

  It didn’t take long to find him. A clump of six or seven female nurses and other staff were crowded outside one of the exam room doors next to the ER. They were trading peeks through the door’s small glass window. It wasn’t hard to imagine whom they were gawking at. I waited a minute for Carlos to come in after he parked. When he joined me, I nodded my head in the direction of the nurses pressing their noses up to the window.

  “Gee, I wonder where Cody could be. Wait ‘til those nurses find out he doesn’t like girls.”

  “So much for patient privacy. Let’s get him out of there before they eat him alive,” I said. There were a lot of women who loved dangerous men, even criminals. Combine that with the unexplainable allure of celebrity and Cody’s looks, and you had a recipe for disaster.

  We picked our way through the small crowd, and I got a peek for myself. Sure enough, Cody was seated on the exam table, shirtless, his left arm already in a rudimentary sling. The examining doctor was a short, thin man with thick outdated glasses. H
e had Cody stretching his right arm back and forth, presumably to test for injury. I flashed my private detective’s I.D. at the woman next to me, who seemed to be some kind of tech rather than a nurse. I nudged her out of the way and pushed the door open.

  She stared at me but didn’t say a word, and Carlos and I walked into the exam room. Cody looked up and appeared relieved when he saw me. He had a long gash below the jaw on his right side, but it didn’t look too deep. Other than that and his broken arm, he seemed to have survived the crash unscathed.

  “Excuse me, this is not a public area,” the doctor said. His voice sounded detached, as though he knew his objection would be pointless. Cody spoke up.

  “It’s okay, they’re with me.” Cody said it as if he were in charge of hospital security.

  I showed my I.D. to the doctor. “Is there another room where we could take him? His security is at stake.” I used my gravest voice, although it was hard to seem grave when I had that much cleavage showing.

  The doctor seemed bored by the whole thing and shrugged. “I’ll get someone,” he muttered, and left. I figured there wasn’t too much that a Vegas ER doctor hadn’t seen before.

  Cody looked at Carlos inquisitively.

  “He’s got a gun,” I said quietly, as if that explained everything. Cody nodded and directed his attention back to me. “So what are we going to do?” he asked.

  “What we are going to do is get you out of here, and then we’re going to talk,” I said. “You need a cast?”

  “Yeah. But they said it shouldn’t take long.”

  I thought for a minute. “Carlos, how’d you like to play security guard?”

  He shrugged.

  “How about if you sit in the lobby and see if any bad guys come in. I’ll wait with Cody. Call my cell if anything looks off.”

  He nodded and headed back to the lobby. When he opened the door, I noticed a few nurses and other women were still lingering outside the exam room.

  “You have a fan club,” I said to Cody. “It must be rough. Here you are, all scratched up with your arm in a sling, and you still can’t keep them away.”

  Cody laughed for the first time. “It’s good for the ego, I guess. A lot of times people think I’m in the movies or on TV, and they hang around trying to figure out who the hell I am. Sometimes I sign fake autographs.”

  “Do you sign them ‘Lars Bergstrom’?” I asked.

  He shot me a surprised look. Apparently his real name was a pretty well kept secret.

  I shrugged. “Why don’t you start talking while we wait for someone to move you to another room,” I suggested.

  “Okay,” he said. His eyes seemed a little wild, but he didn’t seem stoned or anything. His voice was calm. “Basically, you were right about the money. I’ve been paying Paul Gonsalves since the trial. I didn’t know him beforehand, but by chance we met up at a nightclub, and I figured it was worth a shot. Now we’re friends.”

  Cody’s shorthand version was basically consistent with what Paul had told me, except I doubted that he had met Paul “by chance.”

  “So you bribed a juror…” I prodded.

  “Even though I was innocent. Yes. You have to remember that it didn’t look good at the time. Everyone thought for sure I was going to prison. Even my lawyers. And I would have been eligible for the death penalty, too. Facing that, I think a lot of people would have done exactly what I did.”

  I tried to process what Cody was saying. It confirmed some of the assumptions I’d been working out in my head, and he seemed to be telling the truth. Finally.

  The bored-looking doctor returned with a security guard and a bulky male attendant pushing a wheelchair. Cody obviously didn’t need to be wheeled around, but they didn’t seem to concern themselves with that detail. Cody proved to be a good sport. He put on the hospital gown they gave him and set himself down gingerly in the wheelchair.

  “Room 604,” the doctor said simply. He looked me over with a faint air of disapproval. “They can put the cast on him there,” he said.

  I grabbed Cody’s shirt off of the exam table and followed them to the elevator and down a long, bleak corridor that seemed to have a few too many fluorescent lights overhead. The gaggle of gawking nurses had finally dispersed.

  I was surprised to find a nurse already waiting for us in Room 604, and I left Cody and his shirt inside and stood guard outside the door. The security guard had stationed himself on a brown faux-leather chair in a mini-lobby near the elevator. He seemed fixated on a summer rerun of The Tonight Show. A young doctor soon arrived and joined the nurse in Cody’s room. The whole procedure took less than a half hour. It was either great service or, much more likely, they just wanted to get rid of us. I thought about asking the doctor to check my own shoulder, but it had stopped bleeding and I wanted to get moving. Maybe I could bum some pain meds from Cody later, I thought.

  Cody emerged a few minutes after the doctor left. He was a sight, and I was forced to muffle a giggle. The sleeve of his yellow polo shirt had been cut open to allow room for the cast. The cast, which was bright blue, forced his arm to jut out upwards at a kind of half-salute. He had a line of stitches running from his neck to his jaw line, making him look like the gay Frankenstein. On our way out, we both gave a half-salute to the security guard and went down the elevator to the lobby. Carlos was lost in a dog-eared copy of Golf Digest.

  “You’re not even paying attention!” I scolded him. “Armed thugs could be after us and you’d never even have noticed.”

  “My divots aren’t big enough,” he said excitedly, like Archimedes shouting Eureka! in his bathtub. I didn’t press for an explanation, but that didn’t stop him from elaborating. “If you hit an iron shot right,” he stood up and demonstrated his swing for us, “you should leave a long divot in front of the ball.”

  “You’ve got to hit down on the ball,” Cody chimed in.

  I rolled my eyes and grabbed both of them by the arms. Two of us had been victims of murder attempts within the last hour, and here they were talking about the dumbest game ever invented. I shook my head disapprovingly at Carlos. “Let’s get out of here.”

  I watched out for any sign of trouble—someone had to—but the parking lot seemed clear. Apparently whoever was trying to bump off Cody either hadn’t realized he was still alive or hadn’t yet thought to check for Cody at the hospital. I didn’t want to hang around too long in case the idea dawned on him.

  Cody’s injury meant he got to ride shotgun. I was relegated to the Mustang’s embarrassing excuse for a back seat. I assumed Carlos didn’t have the Jaws of Life in his trunk, so I decided not to try squeezing my legs into the three inches of clearance behind the front seat.

  “Let’s make this as quick as possible,” I suggested, after hoisting my legs sideways onto the back seat.

  Carlos nodded and hit the gas a little harder. “Where are we going, by the way?” he asked.

  “Cody still has some things he needs to say,” I prodded. “Let’s get us back to the Flamingo. We can disappear in that place, and no one will give us a second look.”

  Carlos checked his watch, which prompted me to do the same. It was just after 11:45. “You got a hot date, Carlos?” I asked. “It’s not like you have to be at the office early tomorrow.” I realized it would be better to have company tonight—armed company—than be alone with a guy who was either the target of a recent murder attempt or a murderer himself.

  “No, I’ll join you,” he said. He didn’t sound too enthusiastic. We let the valet park the car, but before extracting myself from the back seat I grabbed a crumpled baseball cap I’d seen peeking out from under the seat. I thrust the cap at Cody. I couldn’t cover up the royal blue cast jutting out from his yellow shirt, but I thought the baseball cap might at least disguise Cody’s face and hide his golden hair. Cody frowned, but he got the drift and put the hat on so the brim covered half of his face. Carlos discreetly found his gun in the trunk and shoved it underneath a jacket to hide it.

&
nbsp; We headed to the elevators and up to my suite without incident. Carlos whistled dramatically when we entered my suite. “So this is how you roll,” he said, impressed. “Just like I imagined it.” He went over to the bedroom and made a show of feeling the bed. Carlos looked at me suggestively. I flipped him off.

  Cody made himself as comfortable as was possible in one of the leather chairs facing the bed. He wriggled a little bit, as though steeling himself for the Spanish Inquisition.

  Carlos stared out the window at the Strip below, and I plunked myself down on the bed to face Cody. “Why don’t you finish the story you were telling me at the hospital.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  Cody paused for a few seconds. “I need to take a pill,” he said simply. He fished around in his pocket and produced a small foil pack with three pills in it. He went to the bathroom and got himself a glass of water, and when he returned to the same seat he exhaled and looked directly at me. I went into the bathroom and examined the foil pill pack. Tylenol with codeine.

  “Anything I tell you,” he said, “you can’t tell the cops. Okay?”

  I nodded. I wasn’t exactly in a position to promise him anything, but I decided to fake it. “I’m only interested in figuring out who killed George Hannity and who’s been after the two of us. I don’t do very well in this business if I go running off to the cops all the time.” I hoped that would satisfy him.

  He leaned forward and seemed relieved to have the green light to talk. “Basically, you’ve really stepped in it big time,” he said. Carlos grabbed a six-dollar can of soda out of the mini-bar and sat down to pay attention.

  Cody continued. “It started, as far as I know, about five or six years ago. I wasn’t there yet, so this is just what I heard. Phil d’Angelo, the manager, was in the process of taking over the financial end of the casino from a guy named Melvin Block, who was this old Jewish guy with a terrible comb-over. Really old school, and probably mobbed up. But I only worked with him for a few months before he retired. I think he’s living out of state now.”