by Rickie Blair
“Stop worrying. It’ll be fun.”
“Easy for you to say.” Ruby looked down at her feet. Two toes were bandaged, one ankle was wrapped, and every time she rotated her left shoulder she winced in pain. Sam’s job was to make her look like a martial arts expert and he took his task seriously. Despite her injuries, though, it had been fun to learn the moves. The fights in Secret Assassin were choreographed—they were more like dancing than real fighting—but she’d picked up several useful techniques to ward off bad guys. Hari would be impressed the next time she saw him.
If she ever did. Her business partner had not given any indication of when he might return to New York. Their last case together had ended badly. They uncovered a massive Ponzi scheme, but at an enormous cost. Four people had died, including Hari’s new girlfriend. That had been months ago, but Hari was still holed up in London, blaming himself for Leta’s death. The few times they had Skyped, Ruby’s heart had ached at the look in his eyes.
She massaged her shoulder, wincing. There wasn’t much she could do, other than wait for him to get over it. And she had no time to track fraud artists at the moment anyway.
“You know what you need?” Sam said.
She rolled her eyes. A hot tub and a massage?
“What do I need?”
“A trip out of town. Somewhere lively enough to take your mind off your worrying. How about Vegas? It’s only a forty-minute flight. And you can stay at that new hotel, the Starlight.”
She mulled it over. Her best friend had suggested a weekend in Vegas when Ruby first arrived in Los Angeles.
“Good idea. I’ll call Felicity.” She reached for her purse.
Sam looked puzzled. “Felicity?”
“Felicity Chan, my agent. We’ve been trying to get away for a long weekend the whole time I’ve been here.” Ruby pulled out her cellphone to check the time. By now, Felicity’s clients would be jammed into her Century City office in Los Angeles. Her assistant would have dropped a pastrami on rye and a tall black roast onto her boss’s desk along with the day’s résumés and showreels. Felicity would drain the coffee in a few gulps, but the sandwich would end up in the wastebasket minus a bite or two. As energetic as a cricket and every bit as thin, Felicity often ordered mile-high sandwiches but rarely ate them.
vegas this weekend? Ruby texted. When she looked up, Sam had an odd expression on his face. She chuckled. When it came to the film industry, Los Angeles was a small town.
“I take it you know Felicity?”
Sam picked up his gym bag to stuff the rubber stake into it without looking at her.
“We’ve met. It was a long time ago.” He swung the gym bag off the bench and marched to the exit without even stopping at the locker room for a shower.
Ruby watched him go, trying to recall if Felicity had ever mentioned Sam Mitchell. Could he be a former client, or was it more personal? She remembered Felicity mentioning someone she was dating—who might have been Sam—but it was right after Lily’s death and Ruby hadn’t been paying attention.
Her phone beeped with a return text and she looked down.
ur on! i’m booking the starlight right now.
Ruby grinned, the aches from her bruises and sprains temporarily soothed by the prospect of sunbathing, window shopping, and blackjack. Not to mention the chance to grill her best friend about the handsome and mysterious Sam Mitchell. What could go wrong?
Chapter Two
Henderson, Las Vegas
Ruby coasted to a halt at the stop sign as Felicity tapped a scarlet fingernail on the navigation unit embedded in the dash of their rental Audi.
“This thing is sending us in the wrong direction,” Felicity said. “We’re going away from the Strip, not toward it.”
Ruby studied the pale stucco bungalows and their tidy pebble-covered yards with honeysuckle and jacaranda bushes, overhung by eucalyptus and acacia trees. She imagined happy families inside, gathered around board games.
“So? I like this street. It’s nice to see houses after all those hotels and casinos.”
“You won’t be so pleased if we end up in Utah.”
Ruby turned her attention back to the road and sped up through the intersection.
“I’ve never been to Utah.”
“Neither have I, but that doesn’t mean I want to go there today.”
“We can always stop and ask for directions.”
“We took the deluxe rental package so we wouldn’t have to stop and ask for directions.” Felicity tapped the nav unit again. “I’ll tell you one thing. When we take this car back I’m getting us a discount.”
Ruby tried to look solemn.
“What are you thinking? Ten percent?”
“At least.”
Ruby tried not to laugh. Felicity owned a house perched high above the valley with an indoor pool, an outdoor pool, a full-time housekeeper, and a three-car garage that sheltered a Jaguar and a Ducati motorcycle. Ten percent of a three-day car rental wouldn’t cover one of her manicures.
“We’ll miss our dinner reservation,” Felicity said.
Ruby glanced in the rearview mirror at the shopping bags and packages piled in the back seat.
“It wasn’t me who wanted to stay so long at the outlet mall.”
“Does that mean I can have those Manolos you scored?” Felicity said, grinning.
“No, it most certainly does not. Yikes!” Ruby hit the brakes so hard that both women pitched forward and then slammed back into the headrests.
Felicity rubbed the back of her head.
“Sheesh, Ruby. I was kidding about the shoes.”
Ruby pointed to the road ahead. A fluffy white ball ran across the pavement, its little legs a blur, hopped onto the sidewalk and disappeared between two bungalows.
“I wonder what a dog is doing out here,” Ruby said.
“Trying to find the Strip, probably.”
Ruby laughed and stepped on the accelerator. They had traveled only a few yards when she caught a movement out of the corner of her eye. She slammed on the brakes again. The car screeched to a stop, but not before something hit the hood with a sickening thump.
“Oh, my God. Was that—?”
Ruby exchanged a panicked look with Felicity, flung open her door and ran around to the front of the car.
On the pavement, an elderly woman struggled to get up. Blood trickled down her face from a gash on her forehead. Ruby crouched beside her and glanced up at Felicity, who had her cellphone to her ear to call an ambulance.
“Don’t try to get up,” Ruby said, placing a hand on the woman’s shoulder. “What’s your name?”
“Millie Havelock.” She pushed Ruby’s hand away and tried to get up. “I have to find Tinks.”
“Tinks?”
“My dog, Tinkerbelle.” Millie brushed wispy gray hair from her forehead, transferring the blood to her fingers. “She ran away when those men came to the house. They frightened her, coming into the house like that.” Her hand shook as she lowered it. “They frightened me.”
Ruby turned to look around. Men? What men? They were alone on the street. She inhaled sharply and her teeth chattered. Where was that ambulance?
Millie placed a hand on her throat, her eyes wide.
“I have to find Tinks. Help me up, please.”
“That’s not a good idea, I’m sorry.” Ruby tried to remember her first aid training. “Can you move your arms and legs? Do you have any pain?”
“I’m all right. Please—”
“We’ll help you find Tinks, I promise, but first you have to sit in our car and catch your breath.” Ruby helped Millie to her feet and into the Audi’s back seat where she sat with her legs hanging out of the open door. Millie patted her hair, anxiously looking up and down the street.
An ambulance swerved around the corner with a short siren burst and halted. Two paramedics, a man and a woman, walked over. The woman, whose red hair bobbed in a ponytail, placed a medical bag on the pavement and squatted beside Millie.
&nbs
p; “Hello, darlin’, have you had a little accident?”
Millie nodded, her lower lip trembling.
“My name is Carol,” the paramedic said. “What’s your name?”
“Millie Havelock.”
Carol pushed her sunglasses up onto her forehead and looked intently into Millie’s eyes. She pulled a blood pressure cuff from the bag, glancing over her shoulder at Ruby.
“What happened?”
“She ran out in front of us,” Ruby said, wincing. “Will she be all right?”
“We’ll take her to the hospital for a full exam.” She wrapped a blood pressure cuff around Millie’s arm and pumped it up, watching the gauge. Then she unwrapped the cuff and nodded at her partner, who wheeled over a stretcher. Carol patted Millie’s arm.
“You come with us, dear, and we’ll get you all fixed up.”
“I have to find Tinks.”
Carol turned to Ruby with raised eyebrows.
“That’s her dog,” Ruby said.
Carol patted Millie’s hand.
“Don’t you worry, darlin’. This nice lady here,” she pointed at Ruby, “is going to find your dog for you.”
Ruby gaped at the paramedic. How was she going to do that? The sun was going down and the backyards would soon be in darkness. In Florida, people could shoot you if they found you in their backyard after dark. Was that the case in Nevada, too? She scanned the street, biting her lip, thinking about her Jack Russell terrier back in New York and how devastated she would be if Charlie were missing.
A police car glided down the street and stopped beside the ambulance. The lone officer got out, dipped his head at the paramedics, and walked over to Felicity, who stood next to the Audi. He took a notepad from his shirt pocket and flipped it open to a clean page.
Ruby’s heart sank, imagining the headlines. ‘Ruby Danger Runs Down Elderly Woman In Las Vegas.’ The police would phone Philippe Fortier in Los Angeles and he would fire her and she would be right back where she started. A notorious former sitcom star whom no one wanted to hire. Not only that, but if Millie was badly hurt she would never forgive herself. Her throat tightened at a sudden image of her sister Lily lying by the road, victim of an anonymous hit-and-run driver who left her to die. The old familiar anger caught in her throat.
She crouched by Millie’s side and took the elderly woman’s hand in her own.
“Don’t you worry, Millie. I’ll find Tinks for you.”
Millie looked up at Ruby with tears in her eyes.
“Thank you,” she said, a quaver in her voice.
A few yards away, Felicity clasped the officer’s arm with a smile. Then she strode over to the Audi, leaned in for Ruby’s purse, and slipped the driver’s license from her wallet. Ruby watched as Felicity returned to the officer and showed it to him. They talked for a while, then the officer closed his notebook and returned it to his pocket. After more animated conversation, he got into the patrol car with a wave at Ruby and drove away.
The paramedics strapped Millie onto the gurney, wheeled her into the ambulance and left. Except for Ruby and Felicity, the street was empty. The neighbors who had come out onto their driveways at the sound of the siren had gone back indoors.
Felicity opened the Audi’s passenger door.
“Are you coming?” She got into the car and closed the door. C’mon, she mouthed behind the window.
As Ruby turned to comply, a chill raised the hair on the back of her neck. She whirled around and caught a movement in a shadowed side yard across the street. Narrowing her eyes, she took a few steps closer to the house and stopped. She was imagining things. There was no one there.
She returned to the car, got into the driver’s seat and turned the key in the ignition. Leaving the car idling in park, she turned to Felicity.
“Why did that police officer leave? He didn’t even talk to me.”
Felicity ran a hand over her sleek black ponytail.
“He said it clearly wasn’t your fault and he’s filing an accident report that says so. You’ve got nothing to worry about.”
“But it was my fault.”
“No, it wasn’t. She ran out in front of you.”
“I should have been paying better attention.” Ruby replayed the sickening thump in her head. “I should have noticed her.”
“It wasn’t your fault,” Felicity said, stressing each word.
Ruby turned to look at her, her mouth slack. How many times had she repeated those exact words to Hari? It wasn’t your fault.
“Does that police officer know who I am?”
“Your driver’s license is in your birth name, Abigail Ruby Baxter. So no, he doesn’t.” Felicity checked her watch. “We can still make our dinner reservation if we leave right now.”
“We can’t go to dinner, Felicity. We have to see if Millie is okay. And we have to find her dog.”
“We’ll do that first thing in the morning.”
“But—”
“There’s no point in going to the hospital tonight. We’re not relatives so they won’t let us into emergency to see her. We’ll have to wait till she’s admitted. As for the dog,” she pointed at the darkened street, “how are you going to find it now? We’ll get Millie’s address from the police tomorrow and check her house. I bet we’ll find that dog sitting on the front porch, waiting for breakfast.”
“First thing tomorrow?”
“First thing.”
Ruby put the car in drive. As she pulled away, she remembered the look on Millie’s face. She had been worried about more than her dog.
They frightened Tinks, coming into the house like that. They frightened me.
Chapter Three
London
Hari Bhatt slammed the closet door shut with his foot, cursing as the door bounced back and banged against his instep. He limped to the dust shroud-covered bed and slumped onto it with a sigh. No matter how many times he tried to close the damn door, it wouldn’t stay shut. Which made it the fourth one this morning that wouldn’t close.
It had been years since he had last visited his childhood home in London, but he couldn’t recall similar problems. The house was identical to all the other townhouses on South Kensington’s Alexandra Place. Four stories tall, twenty-five feet wide, red brick with white wooden trim, with an outside staircase leading to a basement flat behind a wrought-iron fence. His family home looked the same as it always had.
He shook his head, trying to clear the cobwebs. Fresh air might help. He rose to open a bedroom window and tugged at the handle. The window sash wouldn’t budge. He braced his feet and pushed up on the upper rail with both palms. The sash stayed put. Taking a step back, he stared at the window. Bloody hell. Then he leaned his shoulder against the mullioned panes, trying to loosen the sash.
The glass cracked.
For a moment he slumped against the window with his eyes closed. Then he leaned back with a muttered curse and kicked the wall, leaving a toe-shaped depression and a black smear on the robin’s-egg surface. He stared at the damaged wall with his mouth hanging open, and then turned to trudge out onto the landing. The hell with it. The rumpled sleeping bag on the living room sofa was calling his name.
But as he stood in the deserted stairwell, dust motes shimmering in the light, he could almost hear his parents’ good-natured bickering, feel his sister thunder down the stairs with a book bag over her shoulder, wave at his auntie sitting on the sofa with a cup of tea on her knee. Hari straightened up with a hollow feeling in the pit of his stomach. He was letting them all down. The entire family. How long was he going to mope about, awash in guilt and useless hindsight? Time to get on with it.
He continued down the stairs with a resolute tread and turned into the living room. In the doorway, he paused to survey the stained takeout menus, empty coffee cups, and dirty T-shirts strewn around. With a sigh, he walked through to the kitchen where he paused again.
The counters were barely visible under piles of empty takeout containers and dirty forks. Ne
ar the back door, piles of recyclables tilted precariously. Last week he had tossed a paper coffee cup into the recycling box and it had rolled off the jammed bin and fallen to the floor, dribbling coffee. He had dropped the newspaper sports section onto the puddle to soak it up. When he checked the following day, the paper was stuck to the floor so he had used it as a base for a new stack of recyclables.
That wasn’t all he had ignored. He had turned off the ringer on his cellphone after multiple calls from WWA airline, whose owner wanted Hari to investigate a possible fraud. Eventually the owner himself called. Intrigued by seeing such a famous name on his call display, he had answered that one. But not even William Watson—the Scottish self-made billionaire who started a discount airline from scratch, as well as a cellphone network, a chain of grocery stores, and a Las Vegas casino hotel—had been able to convince Hari Bhatt to leave the sofa.
But today, Hari had awakened on that same sofa, blinked at the sunshine which streamed through the windows, run a hand over his stubbled chin, and decided to face facts. He had to put the past behind him. And he would start by doing what he had come to London to do—getting his childhood home ready for sale.
Which led him to the obstinate doors.
Maybe the carpenter his parents always used was still available. He unpinned a yellowing business card from the cork board in the kitchen, pulled out his phone and tapped in the number. A man answered.
“Hari Bhatt? For real? I thought you were a big time banker in Manhattan now, bruv.”
“Ah, not anymore. Adrian, I’ve run into problems here at the house, sticky doors and the like. Maybe you could take a look?”
“I’m on a job now, but I can come by tonight. Seven do you?”
“That would be great.”
* * *
Hari watched as Adrian, with a level in his hand and a pencil jutting out behind his ear, assessed the four sticky doors and found three more. Adrian shook his head, muttering as he worked.
“Can you fix them?” Hari asked.
“I can shave them, level them, re-hang a couple. But it won’t solve your problem. I hate to tell you this, bruv, but this house has shifted.”