Suddenly inspired, I bent over to perk up my boobs in the little blue nothing bra and sauntered over to Nate. He was so intent on the computer he didn’t take notice. I sat on the edge of the desk provocatively. He stared at the computer. I toyed with the low neckline of my shirt. He stared at the computer. I leaned over and took his earlobe lightly in my teeth. He stared at the computer. I said, “I’m going to the gift shop.” He stared at the computer.
The slamming door echoed in the hallway. I should have put the Xanadu shirt on—he’d have noticed that, if only to have an excuse to grouch and bitch.
Happily released from the confines of the room, I danced to the hotel gift shop. I played with every toy, shook every snow, er, desert globe and generally behaved like a child at Disneyland. I charged two romance novels and some Pizzeria Pretzel Combos to the room and exited, grinning like a fool.
I let the bag bonk my thighs during my languid stroll to the elevator. I didn’t want to return to the room. Yet… What to do?
“Hey, Red!”
I stared at the elevator until I realised I was Red. My heart sank, and I felt my face drain of blood.
“Yeah, you—Red? Come blow on my dice!”
For real? I turned around and saw an old guy at the craps table, surrounded by the rest of his nursing home. Dapper in a suit, he grinned and beckoned me over. My smile erupted in infectious response to his. Everyone knew only the sauciest ladies got to blow on dice. “Okay.”
I jogged giddily over to him and nodded to his group, out for a day of senior citizen hell-raising.
“What’s your name, Red?”
“Samantha!” I gleefully replied, before immediately realising I shouldn’t have. Oh, well—probably no big deal.
“Blow, baby.” Mr Dapper held the dice under my chin. I giggled and blew. He rolled. He lost.
“Oh, no! I guess I’m not very good luck.”
The old guy laughed with a smoker’s rasp. “Honey, redheads rarely are.” Then he winked at me. Then he patted my ass.
I sucked in a heap of indignation. He winked again. Eyebrows knitted, I backed away from him a few paces and turned to find the elevator. Even grumpy Nate was better than grabby old men. I stared at the elevator doors the way you do when I suddenly shivered. A frisson ran up my spine, and my hair stood on end.
Turning my head ever so slightly to the right, I spied a man eating popcorn and waiting to take the elevator with me. He didn’t look at me. I stared at him. He studied his popcorn. I blinked. He didn’t.
It was probably nothing, I told myself.
My mouth dry, I shifted back towards the polished doors and waited. Out of the corner of my eye, I now found him watching my every move. Nothing, I said again to myself, as if repetition would make it true.
Just El Escorpión’s minion sent to murder me.
“Oh!” I dived in my bag from the gift shop. “I forgot my—” I trailed off noncommittally and backed up a few steps. I turned and broke into a trot straight for a pit boss. Putting on my most charming smile, I said to the giant, impressively-muscled gentleman, “Hello, sir. That guy with popcorn over by the elevators? I saw him counting cards at the blackjack table. He won a ton! He said he was on his way to play a lot more. Cheating is wrong.” I used my big blue eyes to great effect, fluttering them so hard I almost lost a contact. I stuck out my rack for good measure.
He never had a chance. “Thank you, ma’am,” he intoned in a deep voice, smiling down at me.
I returned the smile and nodded before disappearing into a bevy of slot machines. Around a bend, I stole a glance back at my saviour. Mr Giant beelined towards the creep. The minion saw him and froze, popcorn halfway to his open mouth. He skittered away, my faithful giant doggedly trailing behind him.
Breathing for the first time in five minutes, I sped to a different elevator bank and punched furiously at ‘Up’. Thank God no one got in with me. My anxiety rose as the lift did likewise. At my floor, I squeezed past the barely open doors and sprinted down the hall, almost missing my room.
I burst in and hurried towards my bag of worldly goods. “We should bug out. Now!”
Nate turned around in the desk chair. “What? Did you leave?”
“I went to the gift shop. I think a bad dude recognised me. We need to run.”
“Damn it, Sam!” he yelled, face splotchy. “How can you be so stupid?” He crossed the room fast and grabbed me.
“Let me go! I’m not stupid—I told you I was leaving. You just ignored me.”
“You are stupid, and you’re going to get yourself killed!” He released me, and I stumbled back against the bed. His face fell into apologetic lines. He swept a hand across it. “I’m sorry. Did I hurt you? Are you sure someone made you?”
“No, I’m not hurt. Yes, a man definitely followed me, but I put a casino dude on him.” I grabbed my bag and furiously stuffed my last few remaining things in it, including the romance novels and Combos. Wasting Combos was as wrong as cheating, perhaps worse.
Nate slammed his laptop closed and packed. “Damn it! Why did you—? I could wring your neck.”
“Maybe someone else will do it for you.” He shot me a stare full of fear and anger. Slinging my stuff over my shoulder, I crossed the few steps to the door and waited. “Are you ready?”
Nate called the valet for the car. I pressed my cold hands against my temples, my nerves jumpier than a box of jackrabbits.
Nate threw his bag over his shoulder, and pulled mine off my back. “I’ll carry this. Listen to me very carefully.” He took a deep breath. His game face emerged. It was vastly comforting, actually. “We’re going to leave the room. The stairs are down the hall and to the left. We’ll take them down and exit into the casino on ground level. If you see the guy who spotted you, run.”
“But—”
“This is not a debate!” Nate seized my elbow and turned me so I faced him. “Do you understand?”
“Yes.” My blood erupted in a boil. I didn’t want to think so, but I was as stupid as he said and deserved to be yelled at.
Nate pushed my arm away and handed me the gun. “When we exit the casino, you’ll turn right down the main boulevard and right again at the first street. You will wait for me at the corner of Frank Sinatra and Monte Carlo. If you’re followed, and can’t lose them by the time you get there, just keep running south until you get to the Mandalay Bay. Go inside it and hide. I’ll find you. Do you understand?”
“South?”
He rolled his eyes, a nervous half-smile flashing. “Left on Frank Sinatra.”
Nodding, I stuffed the gun into the back of my pants with tingling hands and smoothed my shirt over it. “Ready.” My voice sounded small and far away.
“Let’s go.” Nate paused above the door handle and turned around to look at me. Grabbing me by the hair, he pulled me in for an angry kiss. His furious brown eyes flashed with a million unsaid words. He took a moment, just concentrating on me. Then he smoothed my hair he’d ruffled and said, “Please do what I say. I don’t want anything to happen to you.”
The look he gave me should have been illegal unless it was accompanied by a guy pronouncing us man and wife.
No need to ponder it, though. We’d probably be dead in five minutes.
Holding me back, he peeked into the hallway. Nodding a little, he took me by my already bruised arm and shoved me out into the open, like my mother forcing me onstage at the Miss Juniper Bush pageant when I was eight. Terror doesn’t even begin to describe it…
Chapter Twelve
Sex, Lies and Cheeseburgers
Int. the Miss Juniper Bush Pageant—Day
The ballroom of the Raleigh, North Carolina Ramada is full to brimming with girls aged one to twelve dressed in varying shades of pink tulle. Approximately forty-three per cent of them are crying.
Angle On: Susan Lytton, trying to zip up a pink sequin tutu on her daughter, Samantha Lytton, aged eight. Samantha is dressed as a flamingo.
Susan Lytton: You’ve
been sneaking cookies again, haven’t you, my little piggy pig?
Angle On: Samantha, brushing some crumbs from her chocolate-smeared lip.
Samantha Lytton: No. I thought I was a flamingo?
Susan Lytton: There are no fat actresses, Samantha! And no fat Miss Juniper Bushes, either.
Samantha Lytton: Then can we go home?
Susan tugs and tugs at the zipper, which is stuck on her daughter’s chubby rolls of horrible, disgusting lard. Or it’s just a crappy zipper in a cheap dance costume. Nah, it’s definitely the former.
Susan Lytton: Why, oh, why did you get your father’s genes? They must have all sat on mine.
Samantha bursts into tears.
Susan Lytton: Good! Maybe you’ll lose a pound. Keep crying out that sodium, darling!
Susan takes an enormous girdle from her paisley, quilted tote. Samantha backs away from her mother, really regretting those Chips Ahoy! now.
Susan Lytton: Get out there and win a trophy, Samantha. I don’t expect first. Third place was the best we could ever hope for anyway. We’ll make you jog beside the car on the way home. That’ll help you remember cookies are poisonous to flamingos.
I took off in a run to the stairs at the end of the hall, just as Nate had directed. I bounded down, his feet behind me ricocheting metallic all around, echoing like the inside of a mausoleum.
Bing! Squing! What the hell was that? Whatever it was, it made me run faster. At the fourth floor landing, I looked up and into the face of a man. A fucking man pointing a fucking gun at me. I yelped and continued running, hugging the wall to avoid being in his sights. How many floors up was he? Three? Four? Not enough!
“Go!” Nate yelled unnecessarily, pushing me from behind.
Lungs banging painfully into my heart, heart lodged firmly in my throat, I ran, ran, ran. Bing! The sound of the bouncing shots was horrible, like a dentist drill that was trying to murder you.
At the bottom, we nearly dived into the casino. Nate searched around and found a doorstop on the ground. He picked it up, hissed “Scat!” and jammed it in the foot of the door from the outside.
Thanking God for the tiny, rubber miracle, I ran. Out of the casino and down the long driveway to the street. I prayed for Nate’s safety even as I scurried away like the coward I was. Ignoring the startled people bouncing off me, I ran because my life depended on it, not looking back.
After running roughly eighty-seven light years down Las Vegas Boulevard, finally Rue de Monte Carlo came into view. My eyes popped with stars, my leg muscles screamed obscenities. Distant memories of going to the gym once upon a time mocked me. Mom had always told me being out of shape would be my doom. Cursing the lack of convenient things to hide behind, I kept going, jogging slower until I came around the corner and off the main drag.
Gazing down Rue de Monte Carlo, I panted, painfully sucking in the hot desert air. Why was every block three miles long? Why was I so short? Yet another thing to blame on my mother.
Reminder—guns. Men with guns.
I ran again. Dust coated my sweaty face. It was like swimming in glue. Finishing my sprint, I ducked behind a low wall, from which I could see the street. I fished the pistol out from my butt crack. With all the running, it had gone where no gun ought to.
Nate was driving—shouldn’t he already have been here? Every car that wasn’t the Austin Healey was a death. Wiping the grime from my eyes, I consumed my surroundings, seeing the car over and over again in a mirage only to have it disappear.
The real thing finally appeared. In a roar, the car came to a screeching halt on Frank Sinatra Drive. I scanned the road to make sure he hadn’t been followed. Satisfied, I leapt over the low wall with a gymnastic power I heretofore had never displayed.
“Thank God you’re here!” I leaned over his door and smashed my lips against his.
“Stop that! Help me put the top up.” He pushed the door open, nearly knocking me over. So much for a romantic reunion. I ran to the other side and did what he did, unfolding the top. “Get in.”
At Steve McQueen speed, he took off while I bounced and tried to put the seatbelt on.
“Are you okay?” Nate being concerned sounded like normal folks having an argument.
“Yes!” The car lurched as Nate made a crazy turn. I almost ended up in his lap—one hard hand slid me back into my seat. I attempted to buckle the belt again, breathing easier when I felt the click. Twisting in the seat to see the street falling away behind us, I asked, “Are we being followed?”
Worried brown eyes popped back and forth between the road and the rear-view mirror. “I have no idea.”
He turned onto the highway. I ‘oof’ed as I bounced against the door like a pinball. “Do you have car-chase avoidance skills?”
“Apparently not, since they followed us here.”
I glanced backwards again. “Apparently not, because gun guy is behind us!”
“For the fuck of shit!” Nate hit the gas and the roadster dashed forward.
A slow-motion horror movie flickered into life behind our car. “He’s in the passenger seat of that big white sedan. He’s leaning out of the window. Oh, my God, he’s shooting! Duck!” I screamed and crumpled forward over my legs. The shot blasted the back windshield.
“Nate?” I held my hands over my head and could not look up, no matter how much I willed myself to do so.
“What?”
“Are you alive? Are you hit?”
Nate grunted. I turned to examine him—he appeared whole through my tear-streaked vision. Hot chicks in movies were always so calm during car chases. I was already a blubbering mess two minutes in.
“Hang on,” he muttered. Another couple of shots whizzed past us, cracking more holes in the Healey’s formerly pristine back window. Suddenly, the world lurched. I gripped my seat for dear life as the car squealed and shuddered into a giant turn. My stomach whirled up and out into the road heat.
We switched directions. Nate pulled away, bumped across a median, and got on a different highway travelling south at top speed. There was no cover in this damned flat place—I could see our pursuers clear as day behind us, replicating the highly illegal manoeuvre.
“What is the plan?” I yelled.
“Lose them in Laughlin. Hopefully. Or get shot and die in the desert.” Despite the joke, his demeanour was a perfect graveyard.
I sat forward in the seat and clamped down on my panic, my neck angry and sore from all the stressful stretching. “I vote for Laughlin,” I said without laughing.
On we drove, checking the rear-view mirrors obsessively only to see the same nightmarish sight of the car in pursuit. Las Vegas retreated into the distance, running away from us as fast as we ran from certain death.
Finally, a new civilisation rose from the sands. Nate straightened in his seat, both hands clutching the wheel. “Hang on,” he said again, plunging his foot into the gas pedal. I don’t know where the car got its little burst of additional speed, but I thanked Misters Austin and Healey for their well-built machine.
Grasping the door and seat with white knuckles, I prayed, then prayed more as he rampaged through the town. After three hair-raising, two-wheeled switchbacks I dared to search for the gun-brandishing pursuers. “They’re gone!”
Nate grunted and turned the car into another tizzy.
This latest turn made me close my eyes so they wouldn’t pop out. Finding my courage again, I swivelled to look for the bad guys. “Wait,” I cautioned.
“Wait what? Are they back?”
“No. New ones, though. A new car!” I squinted at the most recent entrants to the death race—a man and a woman in a giant black SUV.
Brows furrowed, Nate’s focus jumped to the mirror. “Hmmm.”
“The other car, too!” I cried.
Like a nightmare, behind us swerved the new set of pursuers in the SUV, followed closely by the old set of evil-doers in the white sedan.
Out of nowhere, the SUV stopped hard. The sedan tripped up on the kerb
to avoid ploughing straight into them. The white car, tyres squealing, rubber burning, smashed over a street sign and hit a tree with a deep and terrible thud.
“They wrecked! Drive, drive!”
Nate drove, drove, pulling around a bend and losing view of the pursuers altogether. “We need to hide,” he said. He brushed one palm, then the other onto his jeans, leaving sweaty trails on his thighs. Briefly, his eyes flicked over me. I made a pathetic attempt at a smile, feeling the onslaught of tears beckoning again. “No, no crying. I can’t concentrate when you do that.”
Well, that was the absolute wrong way to stop my snivelling.
The next minute downshifted into slow motion. Nate turned his head to the front. I followed suit, eyes not believing themselves—the black SUV was coming straight for us. Nate slammed the brakes and spun the car. I screamed as I flew forward into the seatbelt. I threw my arms over my face. The SUV barrelled towards my side of the car like a battering ram.
I’m going to die.
Then nothing.
I hunched over myself in the seat, arms splayed over my head, cradling what was left of my brain. My shaking, jean-clad knees came into focus, and I realised the car had stopped moving. The SUV had not hit us.
“Is someone trying to hurt our pretty boy?” a male voice yelled.
I pulled the gun from the back of my jeans and pointed it, wild-eyed, out of the passenger window.
Nate lowered the barrel. “Put that away.” He took the gun from my hands gently and squeezed my fingers briefly. “The cavalry has arrived.” He rolled down his window, and a grey-haired man with a ponytail leaned in.
The Dimple of Doom (Samantha Lytton) Page 15