Downstairs the casino was already buzzing with die-hard gamblers. Or maybe I should say still buzzing, as most of them looked like they were on the tail end of their evening rather than the bright side of a brand new day – hair disheveled, clothes wrinkled, eyes bloodshot and unblinking as they stared at cards, dice, and slot machine screens.
I navigated my way through the smoky haze to a little coffee shop nestled near the side door. I ordered two black coffees and a couple blueberry muffins to go, schlepping them back up to the room.
I arrived back at the room just in time. In time, that is, to see Trace emerging from the shower. Wrapped solely in a towel. And, considering this was not the Ritz Carlton, the towels were not of a generous size. I did a silent thank you to the gods of cheap management as my cheeks flushed at the amount of bare, tanned, toned-to-perfection skin facing me.
“’Morning,” Trace said, grabbing a T-shirt from the chair by the window.
“You snore,” I blurted out.
I mentally kicked myself. Very suave, Dakota. But as I stared at Trace au-natural (silently praying that the towel slipped off), there seemed to be a disconnect between my brain and my tongue.
Trace grinned. “I know. It’s my one flaw,” he said, throwing the T-shirt over his head. “I hope I didn’t keep you up.”
I cleared my throat, willing no more idiocies to spill forth. “No, it was fine. I tuned it out fine. I slept fine.”
“Well, that’s just fine.” The grin widened.
Mental forehead smack.
I shoved a cup out in front of me. “Coffee,” I said. “And a blueberry muffin.”
Trace grabbed the cup, letting go of the towel at his waist. For a second I held my breath, mentally willing it to fall to the floor.
No such luck. He’d knotted the ends at his hip. Damn.
“Hey, thanks,” he said, seemingly oblivious to my X-rated thoughts. He took a long sip.
I did the same, hoping the caffeine would clear the stupid out of my brain.
“God, this is good. Just what I needed,” he said. He threw me a winning smile as he set his cup down, showing off a dimple in his left cheek. I hadn’t noticed it before, but with a fine dusting of day-old stubble shadowing his face it was just visible.
And sexy as hell.
“You have a pimple.”
He raised an eyebrow at me.
“I mean a dimple! Dimple. In your cheek. It’s… dimply.”
Jesus, I was like a walking fountain of stupid.
Luckily I was saved further moron spew by the sound of Trace’s cell ringing from the nightstand. He glanced briefly at the readout before picking it up.
“Hey, babe.”
Jamie Lee.
I shook off my momentary lapse into ridiculous adolescent drooling and tried to switch back into tabloid mode, listening to his side of the conversation for anything print worthy.
“Well, just order another one.” Pause. “How expensive can a cake be?” Pause. “Christ! What is it made of gold?” Pause. “Seriously? Gold leaf is edible? What do you know…” Pause. “Yeah. Fine. Just send me the bill.” Pause. “Well, I’m not entirely sure when I’ll be home. Soon.” Pause. “What am I doing? Uh… I’m meeting a friend.” Pause. “No, I’m pretty sure you don’t know her.” Pause. “Who? Uh… Carla Constantine.” Pause. “One. But I’ll be heading home right after that.”
With any luck, I silently added.
“Okay. Love you, babe,” he said, then hit the end button. Then he turned to me. “I hate lying to her,” he said.
“Technically, you didn’t lie,” I pointed out. “You just left out a few key details.”
“Yeah, well, the sooner this is all over, the better.”
I couldn’t agree more. The sooner I had this story wrapped up the sooner I could go back to viewing Trace through the lens of a camera. Much safer. Much tidier. Much less tingly.
Fifteen minutes later we were both clean, dressed, and so highly caffeinated we were buzzing in the tiny hotel room – anticipation and black coffee causing my leg to jiggle up and down uncontrollably on its own as Trace paced the room. And it was only nine.
Clearly we needed to get out.
I suggested we take a walk down Fremont, for lack of a better way of passing the time until our assignation with Carla. We were just crossing back through the casino, trying not to inhale the stale Marlboro lingering in the air, when I’d swear I heard a familiar voice.
Calling my name.
I looked up, squinting through the smoky air.
A blonde in a mini-skirt and a three-hundred pound psychic were bearing down on me.
No. Way.
I rubbed my eyes, hoping they were a smoke-induced mirage.
“Cam! Hey, Cameron, over here!”
No such luck.
I watched in horror as Allie and Mrs. Rosenblatt approached us.
“Hey, Cam,” Allie said, skipping up to us. “Good morning.”
That was debatable. “What are you doing here?”
“I thought you might need some help,” Allie explained with a cheerful smile.
“Help with…?”
“Exactly.” Allie gave me a hard stare. If I’d ever thought I’d outmaneuvered the new girl, I was sorely wrong. For moment I glimpsed the news shark behind the co-ed façade and wondered just how much of the bimbo thing was real or an act.
“And you?” I asked, turning to Mrs. Rosenblatt. “Don’t tell me you had some psychic vision of us.”
She laughed. “Of course not. If I’d had a vision, you’d know about it.”
Scary.
“No, when Allie said she was heading to Vegas, I hitched a ride. Max forwarded your email about Johnny Rupert’s crash on the way to Vegas. I figured if we drove out here, maybe I’d get some vibes from traveling in his shoes, so to speak.” She paused. “Plus, I always clean up at craps. Helps to be psychic.” She gave me a wink.
“O-kay.” I shook my head, turning to Allie again. “Look, I’m sorry to disappoint you, but there’s no story here.” At least none I was wiling to share.
“Bullshit,” Allie said. Though it lost some of its rough edge when she punctuated the expletive by blowing a watermelon scented bubbled. “Something’s going on here, and I wanna know what it is.”
I changed my tactics. “No.”
“Excuse me?”
“You heard me. No.” Wow. That word was really fun to say. I was made a mental note to use it more often. “This is my story.”
Allie narrowed her eyes. “You are a photographer. You need someone to write copy.”
“I’ll get Tina.”
“Too late.”
My turn to narrow my eyes. “What do you mean?”
“Felix already gave the story to me.”
“But you don’t even know what the story is!”
She smirked, puffed out her oversized chest, twirled a lock of over-bleached hair. “What can I say? I’m very persuasive.”
I’ll just bet…
I said a silent curse under my breath, aimed at all beautifully buxom girls in general and one in specific.
“So, tell me. What are you doing, what does it have to do with Pacific Storage, and what really happened to Trace that night?”
I pursed my lips together. What I’d really like tell Allie is exactly where to stick that perky little attitude of hers. But, considering she had me backed into a corner, I had little choice but to comply.
I turned to Trace. He just shrugged, seemingly convinced by Allie’s bubble blowing. Or her boobs, I wasn’t sure which.
“Fine. Under one condition. You cannot print anything until Trace gives the go-ahead,” I said, glancing at the actor as I remember our former deal.
He nodded.
“Deal.” Allie stuck out one peachy-lotion scented hand.
I shook it.
And then I told. Everything. From the abduction to the shooting to the drag queen currently holding the mysterious flash drive hostage.
&
nbsp; When I finished, Allie’s perfectly shaped eyebrows were puckered in a look of concentration that looked almost comical in contract to her Barbie appearance.
“Well, is seems obvious to me that the guys who lost the drive have something illegal on there. Otherwise, why not just call the cops to get it back.”
I nodded. “Yeah, plus they had guns. Definitely bad guys.”
Allie lifted a brow at the term, but was wise enough not to comment. “What’s our next move?”
I looked down at my cell readout. “We’re meeting Carla at one and hope to convince her to hand over the drive.”
“How do you plan to do that?”
“We hadn’t exactly worked that out yet,” I admitted, glancing at Trace.
“I was thinking we beat it out of him?” he suggested. I could tell by the way he was still clenching and unclenching his fists that he was only half kidding.
“Hmmm.” Allie pursed her lips together, making little creases in the shiny pink lip gloss. “Well, then I guess it’s a good thing we came along. Sounds like you’re gonna need some backup.”
I glanced from her slime frame to Mrs. Rosenblatt’s bloated one. God help us if this was our backup.
“Wait,” I said, something suddenly occurring to me. “I didn’t tell you where we were staying. How did you even find us?”
Allie grinned. “Journalism 101. I traced your cell call.”
I blinked at her, my jaw going slack. “You can do that?”
“Well, duh!” She rolled her eyes. “Amateur stuff. All you have to do is register the number with an online tracking service and they do the rest, triangulating your position based on cell towers.”
“I thought only the police could do that?”
“Luckily, that’s what most people think. That’s why it works so well.” She winked at me.
I was almost afraid to ask, but… “Where did you learn this stuff?”
Again with the annoyingly adorable grin. “Felix taught me.”
Oh yeah, she was totally sleeping with him.
* * *
After filtering out of the Cowboy Cabana, the four of us made our way to the parking lot where Allie said she’d give us all a ride to the MGM. We followed her to the far side of the lot where she stopped in front of a little green VW Bug. With a daisy planted in the dash.
I looked from Mrs. Rosenblatt to the car. Then back again.
“You’ve got to be kidding me?”
I shook my head as the four of us tried to pile into Allie’s bug, likely looking like one of those overstuffed clown cars. Mrs. Rosenblatt took up the front seat, girth spilling over onto the gear shift as Allie squeezed in beside her. Trace and I shoved ourselves into the windowless backseat, his long legs twisting sideways to fit in the small space. Which left his right thigh sitting squarely against mine. It was warm, hard, and way too intimate. I tried not to have an orgasm on the spot as we rode toward The Strip.
“The Strip” is the common name for Las Vegas Boulevard from about Russell Road to Sahara Avenue. It’s some of the priciest real estate in the country, housing one mega casino after another laid out side by side down the length of the street. As they all compete for land, they also compete for air, one towering higher than the other, and each one touting an over-the-top theme. There’s the Paris casino with its huge Eiffel tower hovering over the sprawling casino (which you can visit the top of for only $15). There’s the New York, New York, which is actually laid out inside like a New York neighborhood, complete with Irish pubs, Italian pizzerias, and souvenir shops on every corner. The outside is made to look like the New York skyline complete with New York harbor, a Statue of Liberty, and the Chrysler building. Circling the skyline is a thrilling roller coaster (that you can ride for only $14). Next to the New York, New York sits the Excalibur – a towering white castle where knights joust indoors at the Tournament of Kings dinner (and you can watch for only $54.95), and beside that the Luxor pyramid where you can walk through an exact replica of King Tut’s tomb (for only $9.99).
And across the street from that sits the MGM Grand, one of the first themed casinos to hit the strip and turn Vegas from a mob-related rundown Sin City to a family friendly destination for all. The MGM is a huge building tinted green like the Emerald City and shaped like a giant T. Inside are theaters, bars, pools, and an animal enclosure to rival any zoo in the world, housing the distant cousins of the original MGM lion. Three of them. That were being fed big, red, bloody steaks as we approached. I watched the first one rip the meat apart, baring a set of teeth the size of steak knives. I shuddered, glad I wasn’t a steak.
Considering we still had a couple hours before Carla was due to show, we wandered the casino, letting Trace do the tourist thing incognito as a cowboy. We ordered drinks by the pool, Allie bought a pair of fuzzy pink dice for her VW from a gift shop, and Mrs. Rosenblatt even won two hundred dollars at craps. (I was beginning to believe this whole psychic thing.)
Finally one o’clock rolled around and we made our way back to the lion enclosure, rimmed with tourists all taking video with their phones of the now sleeping lions. We claimed a piece of ledge on a nearby planter and hunkered down to wait for Trace’s blackmailer.
And wait.
And wait.
After an hour I stood to stretch my legs.
“She’s not coming, is she?” Trace asked. His fists were still clenched and unclenching again, the lines in his face taught.
I looked around the crowd. Families taking pictures, frat boys with tall drinks in their hands, a couple of girls in super short dresses.
“Doesn’t look like it.”
“Shit.”
Clearly Trace was not a guy used to being stood up.
“You think she got cold feet?” Mrs. Rosenblatt asked.
I shook my head. “I don’t know. Maybe.” I paused. “Or maybe she had second thoughts about blackmailing a public figure.”
Allie shook her head. “I doubt it. Her actions strike me as pure opportunist.”
“Takes one to know one,” I mumbled.
“What?”
“Nothing. Go on.”
“Hmm.” She eyed me, but continued anyway. “See, I don’t think she’d just walk away from a payday like this. Hundred thousand would be a lot to someone like Carla. But,” she said, turning to Trace, “maybe she realized it wasn’t that much to guy like you. Maybe she decided to up the price.”
“Sonofa-” Trace clenched his jaw with a click.
“I say we go talk to this Carla chick,” Mrs. Rosenblatt piped up.
“Great plan,” I said. “If we knew where she was.”
Allie perked up in her seat. “I thought you might want to know that.” She pulled a Post-it note from her pocket and slammed it down on the table top with triumph.
I leaned forward. An address was handwritten on the paper.
“You’re kidding me, right?”
Allie’s smirk covered her entire face. “Nope. Behold, the address that Carla called the Informer office from. I did a reverse number look-up after she hung up.”
I stared at the blonde.
She grinned back.
“And you doubted my investigative skills.” Then she blew another watermelon scented bubble, sucking it in with a loud pop.
I hated to admit it, but New Girl was actually coming in handy.
Trace grabbed the Post-it, staring at the address. “Gotcha, you bastard,” he said to the piece of paper. “Man, when I get my hands on you…”
Only he didn’t get to finish that threat, as his pocket began trilling the sounds of ELO. He pulled the phone out and hit the talk button.
“What?”
Immediately, I could tell who was on the other end by the way Trace’s face drain of color. His eyes darted around our assembled group and, as confirmation, he mouthed the words, “bad guys.”
I crowded in close to him to hear the conversation through the phone.
“Your twenty-four hours is up, Trace,” the male
voice on the other end said.
I looked down at my own cell readout. 2:33 on the dot. These guys were punctual, I’d give them that.
“Look, we just need a little more time,” Trace shot back.
“More time?” the guy asked. “Or more incentive?”
I froze, the menacing tone behind his voice sending shivers down my spine at what sort of incentive he had in mind.
“What do you mean?” Trace asked, the wary line of his eyebrows mirroring my thoughts exactly.
“You have something that belongs to us.”
“I told you I don’t have-” he started.
But the guy on the other end didn’t let him finish, instead cutting in with, “And now we have something that belongs to you.”
Uh oh.
“What sort of something?” Trace asked, his voice tight.
Dread curled up in a little ball in my stomach, my breath in my throat as I listed to shuffling on the other end. Then a different voice altogether came on the line. One that, instead of laced with malice, was clearly laced with fear.
“Trace?” came the shaking voice. I could hear tears hovering behind the words. It was scared. Female. And recognizable by anyone who hadn’t been living under a rock for the past two years.
Jamie Lee.
“Oh my God,” Trace whispered, almost to himself. “Babe, are you okay?”
“Trace, they said they’re going to kill me. They won’t let me go unless you give them some flash drive. Ohmigod, Trace, they’re going to kill me. Help!” she screamed as the voice faded into the background with more shuffling.
Trace’s jaw clenched shut, his eyes going dark and unreadable, his skin a deathly pale now as the man came back on the phone.
“Midnight,” he said. “The parking lot behind the New York New York. You show up there with the flash drive in hand and you get your girl back. Otherwise, America’s sweetheart gets a bullet between her big blue eyes.”
Chapter Eighteen
The line went dead, but Trace still stood there, holding the phone to his ear, staring straight ahead, his jaw tensed, his expression the exact same “tortured hero” one he’d worn at the end of Die Tough.
“Trace?” I whispered, almost afraid to break into his silent rage.
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