Stanton was the only man Levi had ever loved besides Dominic. Even after their tumultuous breakup and all its accompanying drama, a threat to Stanton riled Levi as fiercely as a threat to his own family.
Now that he knew Stanton was safely tucked away in Switzerland, Levi could relax. He stepped around the couch—and stumbled under a wave of light-headedness that almost sent him crashing to the floor.
Goddamn it, he still hadn’t eaten.
A shrill ringing penetrated the thick fog of sleep smothering Dominic’s brain. His phone?
Nope. Not happening. He ignored it, rolling over in bed and smashing his face into the pillow. The sound stopped, and he slipped back into unconsciousness.
Seconds later, the ringing started up again. He cursed and flailed out one floppy arm with his eyes still shut.
When his hand fumbled through the detritus on his nightstand and came up empty, however, he was forced to open his eyes. As his higher brain functions sputtered back online, he realized the ringing was coming from the wrong direction.
“Fuck me,” he said, squinting blearily into the gloom of his darkened bedroom.
He hung off the edge of the mattress, hunting for his phone in the pile of clothes on the floor. Rebel thumped her tail against the bed while she watched.
He’d spent all of yesterday checking in with his contacts across the Valley, spreading word that he was investigating the kidnapping ring. At this point, he wouldn’t be surprised if the kidnappers came looking for him just to shut him up.
After ten taxing hours of planting those seeds, he’d badly needed to blow off some steam. He’d gone to the Railroad Pass and ended up staying late. Though he had no idea what time it was right now, he knew he’d only gotten a few hours of sleep.
He grunted in triumph as his hand closed around his cell. “What?” he said, answering without checking the caller ID.
“There’s been another kidnapping!”
“Mr. Royce?” Dominic hauled himself back onto the bed.
“One of our K&R policyholders just called me,” Royce said, short of breath like he’d been running. “The subject of their policy, Christelle Perrot—she never came home last night, but her car is parked in her driveway with the cell phone on the dashboard, just like all the other victims.”
“Wait, she was taken last night?” Dominic checked the time on his phone—7:48. “Why are you only hearing about it now?”
“Nobody knew she’d been kidnapped. There hasn’t been a ransom demand. Her family didn’t even realize she was missing until this morning, and it was only because of the Buckner story on the news—”
Firmly cutting off Royce’s rambling, Dominic said, “What do you mean, there hasn’t been a ransom demand?”
“Just that. There’s been no communication from the kidnappers at all.”
Dominic sat upright. Sensing his tension, Rebel cocked her head, alert and ready for trouble.
“In all the other cases, the kidnappers contacted the policyholder within two hours of snatching the victim,” he said.
“Yes.” Royce’s breathing was still labored. “And now it’s been . . . ten? Twelve?”
Something had gone wrong. Again.
Dominic swung his legs over the side of the bed and reached for his discarded jeans. “Did you call the police yet?”
Royce made a strangled noise. “Of course not! You know the first thing the kidnappers demand is that we don’t involve the police. Our crisis negotiators can handle it.”
“Yeah?” Dominic shoved his legs into his jeans and pulled them up as he stood. “Who are they gonna negotiate with?”
“I—”
“Call Detective Abrams,” Dominic said, fastening his jeans one-handed. “Trust me, if I have to call him myself, he’s not going to be happy with either of us.”
“But—”
“He and his partner won’t hesitate to charge you with obstruction of justice. And Detective Abrams has a friend in the DA’s office who’d be happy to cook up a way to charge you with aiding and abetting if he asks her to.”
“All right,” Royce said with a deep, exasperated groan, as if burdened with an unreasonable chore.
“I’ll meet you at your office in an hour.” Dominic hung up and tossed his phone onto the bed before he went in search of a clean shirt.
“I guess kidnapping is the hot new Vegas fad,” Martine said.
Levi sighed, watching the CSIs combing through Christelle Perrot’s car and trying to keep his mind off the memories of yesterday morning it was dredging up. At least this car didn’t have a corpse in it—particularly fortunate in light of the unseasonable heat. The temperature was in the high eighties already, climbing further every hour as the sun beat down.
As soon as Royce had informed him of the kidnapping, Levi had declared the victim’s car a crime scene and dispatched uniformed officers to secure it. This was the first time they’d had fresh access to one of these cars so soon after the incident. Though it was unlikely that professional mercenaries would leave fingerprints on the door or foreign fibers on the seats, everyone made mistakes.
Levi glanced at the palatial Mediterranean-style villa behind them. Christelle Perrot was a French expatriate who held a high-ranking executive position with MGM Resorts. She’d been widowed early in life with two young children, so her mother lived with her to provide support and childcare. Since it wasn’t unusual for Perrot to work late, the entire family had gone to bed last night thinking nothing of the fact that she hadn’t come home yet.
Interviews with her mother and coworkers had allowed Levi to deduce her likeliest way home from work and request traffic camera footage all along that route. If this were like the other jobs the kidnapping ring had pulled off, they’d ambushed her in a surveillance dead zone, drugged her with a needle to a vein, and dragged her into one of their vehicles. Then they’d ensured her car and cell phone were delivered to her house, so the GPS data from both would be useless.
Very clean. Very neat. So where was the ransom demand?
Most likely, the kidnappers hadn’t made any demands because they were unable to offer proof of life in return.
Levi hadn’t hesitated to splash Perrot’s name and picture across every news outlet in the Valley. At this point, after at least eighteen hours had passed with no communication from the kidnappers, exposing the crime couldn’t put her in any more danger than she currently faced. She was probably already dead, though Levi had been careful around her family to maintain an air of optimism.
“Levi? Are you listening?”
“Huh?” He swung his head around toward Martine.
“I said, I think I’m going to back off this one. Seems like you have it under control.”
Her tone was as casual as her body language, and if he hadn’t known her better, he would have taken the statement at face value. But he caught the tiny lines of tension at the corners of her eyes and mouth, the way she was looking just slightly to the right of his eyes instead of meeting them directly. She was offering to back off the investigation so it would occupy more of his time and focus—distracting him from the Seven of Spades.
“I—” He was interrupted by the approach of one of the CSIs.
“Detectives. We’ve pulled a bunch of fingerprint and hair samples off the car, but we need elimination samples from the vic, her family, and anyone else who may have had access.”
Levi nodded. “I’ll talk to her mother. Thanks.”
The CSI ambled away. Overhead, the minimal cloud cover dissipated and the sun blazed even brighter. Martine wrinkled her nose and plucked a pair of sunglasses from her jacket pocket.
Levi couldn’t help getting a kick out of the picture she made. She looked so effortlessly cool in her aviators and sharp navy pantsuit, her coiled hair ruffled by the light breeze.
“I’m going to head back to the substation,” she said. “I have uniforms out contacting all the potential kidnapping victims in person, so I’ll check in on them. Let me know if you need anything el
se?”
“Sure.” As she walked away, he called out, “Martine!”
She turned back.
He’d told himself he wasn’t going to do this, but the question came out anyway. “There’s really no leads on West and Quintana?”
“Not so far. Wayne Reddick’s autopsy revealed ligature marks on his wrists and ankles, as well as a buildup of ketamine in his system. It’s pretty clear that the Seven of Spades is keeping the men drugged and tied up.” She gestured to Perrot’s car. “These kidnappers need an entire team of mercenaries to handle one person at a time, but the Seven of Spades isn’t concerned with humane treatment. Unconscious captives are a lot easier to handle and keep hidden.”
Her words struck Levi with a new thought. As she had mentioned, the Seven of Spades’s drug of choice was ketamine, for which they had some kind of large, surefire supply. After a year of cooperating with the DEA to trace ketamine manufacturing and distribution lines in the western US, as well as painstakingly reviewing the licenses of practitioners registered to dispense it, Levi was no closer to discovering how the killer obtained the drugs they used to paralyze their victims.
The kidnapping ring would have been similarly prepared to sedate their victims. If they were from Vegas originally, they would have banked a supply before they started; if they’d come from outside, they would have brought that supply with them.
What the kidnappers hadn’t been prepared for was minor surgery. Nguyen’s account of overhearing frantic whispered phone conversations between the mercenaries and their boss made it clear that there had been no contingency for the possibility that a ransom demand would be refused. The decision to cut out her eye had been made last-minute.
While it was possible the mercenary team already had a member capable of performing a medical-grade enucleation, they wouldn’t have had any of the necessary supplies. They would have needed to obtain IV bags, surgical tools, antibiotics . . .
“Martine,” he said, “do you still have that CI who’s a nurse at Valley Hospital?”
The man in question, who’d gotten caught one too many times lifting prescription narcotics, had turned informant to avoid jail time and the loss of his nursing license. He’d proved a helpful source, because not only was he dialed in to the local drug scene, he also kept tabs on thefts and black market sales of medical supplies.
Her eyes lit up as she caught his drift. “Yep.”
Levi smiled, buoyed by the anticipatory buzz of a promising lead. “Think you could arrange a meeting?”
Devil Dogs, the dive bar Paulie had pointed Dominic to, was plopped down incongruously in the Chinatown area two blocks west of the Strip. Its blacked-out windows and subtle sign were almost lost in the profusion of Chinese, Thai, and Vietnamese restaurants surrounding it in the shopping plaza.
Dressed the part in a battered leather jacket and well-worn jeans, Dominic pushed the door open. He’d heard of this place, but he’d never been here—it was a Marine bar, though in theory they’d welcome veterans of any stripe.
The interior was clean and stripped-down, your basic local watering hole, with Marine memorabilia on the walls but no other décor to speak of. It was early in the evening, but the happy hour specials had drawn a respectable crowd, chatting in groups at the tables and chilling out at the bar. Nobody paid Dominic any attention beyond the shit, that’s a big guy double-take he was used to getting from strangers.
Dominic spotted his target at the far end of the bar—Doug Ephron, ex-Marine, now an employee of the private security firm Delgado & Vincent. According to Paulie’s sources, Ephron was no stranger to taking side jobs of dubious legality, and had been drunkenly shooting his mouth off in here after the Buckner homicide made the news. He might not have been involved, but he knew more than he should.
Dominic was going to find out what.
Luckily, there was a spot open beside Ephron. Dominic settled onto the stool, cast a sideways glance at what Ephron was drinking, and ordered a shot of whiskey with an IPA chaser for himself. It wasn’t identical to Ephron’s choice, but it was close enough that Ephron would feel a subconscious kinship to him right off the bat.
Ignoring Ephron, he tossed back the whiskey, then sipped the beer. It was a struggle to keep the grimace off his face; he’d never liked IPAs.
When he set the glass down, he pressed his hand just under the right side of his collarbone, over his old gunshot wound. Now he let the grimace break free, rolling his shoulder a few times and exhaling a long, slow breath like he was trying to remain stoic in the face of great pain.
He wasn’t, of course. The injury was many years old, and it never caused him problems anymore. But Ephron—who’d also been shot in the line of duty—wouldn’t know that.
“Bad injury?” Ephron asked, nodding to Dominic’s shoulder.
“Caught a bullet in Afghanistan.” Dominic neglected to clarify exactly when that had happened. “Still bothers me sometimes.”
Ephron slapped his own left thigh. “Same here. Had to get a bone graft and everything, but at least I kept the leg. You a Marine?”
“Ranger, 2nd Battalion.”
It would have aided his budding rapport with Ephron if he’d been able to introduce himself as a Marine as well, but Dominic wasn’t crazy enough to lie about his military history in a bar full of Jarheads. As long as he didn’t act high and mighty like some Rangers did, it shouldn’t cause too much friction.
“No shit,” Ephron said, looking Dominic up and down. “Well, at least you’re not a Squid.”
Dominic laughed. If there was one thing a Marine and a Ranger could bond over, it was distaste for the Navy.
“I’ll drink to that.” He clinked his glass against Ephron’s, then took a deep swallow before adding, “Buy you another?”
Getting Ephron sloppily drunk required less effort than shooting a stationary target at point-blank range. Dominic excused his own slow pace by claiming he didn’t want to mix too much alcohol with the painkillers for his injury, and Ephron was happy to let Dominic buy him round after round. They traded war stories for a while, Dominic guiding the conversation to create maximum camaraderie, until Ephron was slurring his words and swaying on his stool.
“So,” Ephron said, his head weaving from side to side, “what do you do now you’re back home?”
“I’m a bounty hunter. Good money, and I can set my own schedule.”
“Yeah, I know a few guys who got into that. But private security contractors—” Ephron clapped Dominic’s right shoulder, then apologized when Dominic made a show of wincing. “That’s where the real money is, my friend. Way better pay and benefits than you ever saw in the military.”
Now they were getting somewhere. “I’ve heard that, but don’t those places tend to turn into recruiting grounds for . . . you know.” Dominic lowered his voice and glanced around the bar. “Mercenaries?”
Ephron snorted, making a sweeping dramatic gesture with his glass that slopped beer over the rim. “So what? A guy can’t take a job on the side every once in a while to make ends meet?”
“I guess I’d be worried about getting caught,” said Dominic.
“The key is . . .” Ephron hiccoughed, tossed back the rest of his beer, and banged the empty glass on the bar. “The key is to set some rules, see, and stick to them. No kids, no women. That kind of thing. You don’t want to go too far.”
Dominic indicated for the bartender to refill Ephron’s glass. “So you wouldn’t take a job if you thought a woman might get hurt?”
“Hell, no,” Ephron said, puffing out his chest. “I don’t care how big the payday is, you gotta draw the line somewhere. I’ll say it right to the client’s face.”
“Sounds like you’re speaking from experience.”
“It happens. You hear about that murder, up on the west side? Guy with his eye cut out?” When Dominic nodded, Ephron made a noise of disgust. “Fucking amateurs. Knew that job would be trouble from a mile away.”
“Someone tried to hire y
ou for that?”
“I . . .” Ephron managed to focus somewhat on Dominic’s face, narrowing his bleary eyes. “Hey, why’re you so interested, anyway?”
“Just making conversation,” Dominic said, but it was too late.
Ephron’s eyes flicked from his glass to Dominic’s, and his expression darkened. “You getting me drunk on purpose? You a cop or something?” He reared drunkenly off his stool, his voice rising to a shout. “What the fuck kind of game are you playing here?”
Subterfuge was no longer an option. Dominic didn’t even stand up; his right hand shot out, yoked Ephron’s throat, and slammed the man back into his stool so hard it teetered on its hind legs before falling into place.
Maintaining his grip while Ephron slapped uselessly at his hand, Dominic looked over his shoulder. The commotion had drawn the attention of everyone in the bar. A few men and women had gotten out of their seats, glaring at Dominic with hard-eyed looks that said they wouldn’t mind teaching him the meaning of Semper Fidelis with their fists.
“He makes an angry drunk,” Dominic said. “I’m trying to convince him to call his sponsor.”
The mood in the bar shifted to one of pity and sympathy, and he received a few understanding nods as everyone returned to their business. Every vet here had seen the devastation alcohol dependence could wreak on one of their own.
Dominic looked back at Ephron, who was still struggling to free himself, and tightened his fingers a bit. “I’m not a cop,” he said quietly. “Which means I have no problem taking this outside. Do you think you’re up for that?”
Ephron went still, his hands resting on Dominic’s wrist. Of course he wasn’t—he wouldn’t have been a match for Dominic sober, let alone three sheets to the wind.
“What do you want?” he snarled.
Dominic let go. “Someone’s been running a professional kidnapping ring in the Valley. I want you to tell me everything you know about it.”
“Yeah? What’s in it for me?”
“I don’t tell my friends in the LVMPD where to find you.” Smiling at the scowl that earned him, Dominic squeezed Ephron’s arm. “And how about another shot of whiskey?”
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