Chase shrugged.
“One more time,” she whispered for her own benefit as much as Stitts’s.
She squatted and pulled the man’s shirt sleeve up a little, revealing a sparrow tattoo on the inside of his forearm.
It’ll work this time, it’s just taking some time because you’re out of practice.
Chase reached out with both hands this time and gripped the man’s pale arm as if she were preparing to give him an Indian sunburn. The palm of her right hand covered the sparrow tattoo, and it briefly registered in her mind that it was prickly to the touch. And then she squeezed; she squeezed hard.
But there was still no vision.
Chase didn’t hear the clink of bottles as the bartender arranged them prior to the players arriving, nor did she hear the explosion of assault rifle fire, moments before his face was caved in by the ammunition.
She heard, and saw, nothing.
Uttering a curse under her breath, Chase let go of the man and rose to her feet. Then she turned to look at Stitts, who had concern in his wide eyes.
“You sure you’re okay?”
Chase shrugged her partner off.
“Fine,” she grumbled. And then, to no one in particular, she said, “We’re not going to find any trace evidence here. These guys were pros.”
With that, Chase strode from the room, hoping that Stitts was following.
From the outside, she appeared calm; on the inside, it was a different story. Chase’s heart was racing in her chest and her mind was abuzz.
What happened to me? Why can’t I see?
Chapter 15
Her head spinning, Chase made her way into the hallway and leaned her back up against the wall. The entire seventh floor had been cordoned off and was full of uniformed officers and techs milling about.
Somehow, despite the chaos, Chase managed to block out the noise and was in the process of regulating her breathing, when she was interrupted by Stitts.
“You okay, Chase? You seem—”
Chase waved him away.
“I’m fine,” she said for what felt like the hundredth time. “Jesus Christ, do you have to keep asking me that?”
“Alright then, what did you see?” Stitts asked, his face hardening.
The order of her partner’s questions — first asking how she was, and then what she had seen — reinforced Chase’s notion that Stitts really did care about her.
“First, I need to clear my head,” she said. “I need to go for a walk.”
With that, she pushed herself away from the wall, flashed her ID to the officer manning the elevator and stepped inside.
“Hey, wait up,” Stitts said, hurrying after her.
But Chase didn’t wait up.
“Lobby,” she said quickly to the officer. The man nodded and pressed the L button.
“Chase? Hold the elevator,” Stitts said.
Without hesitating, Chase reached out and pressed the close button.
The doors closed in front of Stitts, a confused expression on his face.
***
There was no better place in the United States of America, and perhaps the world, where you could lose yourself as fully and completely as you could in Las Vegas. In fact, that was exactly the point of Las Vegas; to forget about everything. Nothing about it was real. The hotels were fake, made to look like something else — Paris, the Stratosphere, New York, New York, they didn’t even bother pretending to be original or unique. They only had one goal: to transport the visitor to whatever world they wanted. For a weekend, for an hour, for a day, you could be ultra rich, you could be important, you could leave your boring, mundane life at home and be anyone, anywhere.
Which suited Chase just fine.
As she entered the lobby, Chase was immediately inundated by the chimes and beeps and whirrs and buzzers of the slot machines that filled nearly every square inch of The Emerald.
Under other circumstances, Chase might’ve been amused by the facade that was Las Vegas, but not now.
Not after what she’d seen upstairs. Not after the bartender’s face had been obliterated by bullets.
Chase walked briskly, her head low. The amazing thing about Las Vegas was its ability to continue in the face of… well, pretty much anything. When the shooter in Mandalay Bay had taken out hundreds of people at the Route 66 concert below, the hotel never even shut down — not completely, anyway. Even now, with nearly a dozen bodies lying upstairs and millions of dollars stolen, nobody down in the lobby seemed any the wiser.
And this facet posed a particular problem when it came to crime. Sure, Vegas was known for having more cameras per capita than any other place in the world — and Stitts had informed her that the LVMPD was going over the footage not only in the casino, but in the surrounding casinos, parking lots, everywhere they had eyes — but when it came to witnesses? No one tended to see anything. People were in their own worlds, transported by Las Vegas itself.
Chase walked by a woman who looked to be in her mid-eighties, sporting a pair of sweatpants with an unsightly bulge from the diaper beneath. It would’ve been comical had it not been so sad. She watched as the woman tapped a few buttons on the slot machine, and the wheels started to spin.
And this is what it had come to, she thought. Why bother pulling the handle when you can just push buttons and play as fast and furiously as humanly possible?
So many icons filled the screen, that Chase didn’t think it humanly possible to actually follow what was going on. Several lines lit up, and the digital coin total on the corner of the screen started to increase.
But you couldn’t tell that the woman had won by looking at her. Eyes glazed over, the octogenarian brought her Virginia Slim to her mouth and took a puff. When the chiming ended, she hammered some more buttons and the wheel started to spin again.
There was something undeniably sad about this, but something also very familiar to Chase.
In life, it didn’t matter how much you made, how much you lost, how old you lived to; there was just one or two things that really mattered, things that you kept returning to. And for Chase, there was only one thing that still held meaning.
She was partway to the front doors of the casino when a commotion behind her drew her attention.
Several officers started rushing her, their faces grim. Some were barking loudly into walkie-talkies, which was nearly sufficient to knock Virginia Slim from her coma. Her attention locked on the woman at the slot machine, Chase was nearly bowled over by a man wearing a wide-brimmed khaki-colored hat.
“What’s going on?” she demanded. When no one even acknowledged her, let alone stopped, Chase grabbed the arm of the closest officer and flashed her FBI badge.
“What the hell is happening?”
The man, a young cop with green eyes and a square jaw, stared at her for a moment before finally answering.
“There’s been an explosion,” he said under his breath. “Someone’s bombed the Planned Parenthood clinic just around the corner.”
Chapter 16
Chase was surprised to see that the sun had started to peek over the horizon. Inside the casinos, time was like Schrödinger's cat: unless you specifically looked at a clock or watch, you really didn’t have any clue what time it was.
As the officers hurried to squad cars filling The Emerald’s circular drive, Chase went the other way, toward Stitts’s rental. Halfway there, however, she realized that not only was Stitts not at her side, but that she didn’t have the car keys, either.
Chase swore under her breath and glanced around.
Where are you, Stitts?
A hand suddenly came down her shoulder and she spun around.
“Thanks for leaving me at the elevator,” Stitts said sharply.
“Sorry,” Chase grumbled. “Needed to clear my head.”
Her partner gave her a look as they walked toward his rental.
“Looks like there was a bomb at the Planned Parenthood clinic over on Essex,” Stitts said as he opene
d the driver side door and slid inside. Chase nodded as she got into the passenger seat.
“That’s what one of the officers told me — anything else to go on? Fatalities? Damage?”
Stitts shook his head and put the car into drive, pulling in behind the line of squad cars.
“Don’t know yet. The explosion was small, but other than that, details are scarce.”
Chase nodded again and stared out at the skyline as the sun continued to rise.
As Stitts drove away from the strip, the casino skyline gradually flattened. Soon, the glitz and glamor started to wane and was slowly replaced by a brown smudge. Outside of the strip, and perhaps Old Vegas, poverty and crime were much more prevalent. But none of the forty plus million annual visitors wanted to see that, not in a world of their creation. For the most part, it was the authorities’ job to keep these facts from the public eye.
A fire truck blocked access to Essex Ave, but a glut of police cars stopped them long before that. In the distance, Chase could see tendrils of smoke licking the horizon, battling the early morning sun.
Chase and Stitts exited the vehicle and joined the throng of police officers observing the scene. Stitts led the way, holding his badge out in front of him for anybody who wanted to take a quick peek. As they neared the fire truck barricade, a man who looked as if he was in charge, a man with a thick mustache and a shaved head that was mostly covered by a khaki colored hat, stepped forward.
His dark eyes flicked from Stitts to Chase, then to Stitts’s badge.
“FBI Special Agent Stitts,” the man said with a nod. “We didn’t get a chance to meet before, but Director Hampton said that you were on your way.”
He held a hand out and Stitts shook it.
“This is FBI Special Agent Adams,” Stitts said, and Chase shook the man’s hand next.
“Sgt. Steve Theodore,” he offered in return. “I was heading up the investigation at the casino when I got called out here. Looks like we have an improvised explosive device that went off outside a Planned Parenthood clinic. So far, no casualties and damage is limited.”
Chase peeked around the man’s shoulder as he spoke, trying to take in the scene. Someone sporting a thick, green bomb suit moved down the street, following closely behind a bomb-disposal robot.
“Bomb squad is clearing the scene now, but it will be at least another hour before we can get in there and better assess the damage.”
“Any idea on motive?” Stitts asked.
The Sheriff chewed the inside of his lip and tilted his head to one side.
“It’s a Planned Parenthood clinic…” He said, letting his sentence trail off.
An officer appeared at Sgt. Theodore’s shoulder and whispered something in his ear. Theodore nodded.
“Listen, I need to go deal with the press right now. And I’m going to be honest with you, the bombing is likely going to be a top priority moving forward.”
Chase scoffed and the Sgt. shot her a look.
It made little sense to her that a bomb in which no one was injured took precedence over eleven dead and twelve million missing dollars, but she should have expected as much. If the target had been a Walmart or Whole Foods, no one would give a shit. But Planned Parenthood? That took top priority; it was just the political climate in which they all were forced to endure.
“I’ll give you guys all the support you need,” the Sgt. continued, “but you’re going to have to head up the investigation at The Emerald on your own. There’s a free office across the hall from mine back at the station, if you want it. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’ve gotta go feed the rats.”
The man didn’t wait for a response; he simply nodded, turned, and left.
“Feed the rats,” Chase murmured under the breath. She’d never heard that expression in reference to the press before, but rather liked it.
Stitts nodded and pulled out a cigarette.
“Cool new habit you’ve got there,” Chase said. The remark was ridiculous coming for her, given her past, and in particular, the incident at Grassroots moments before Stitts arrived, but she was unable to control herself.
Tyler Tisdale used to smoke like a fiend during their time together, and the second hand always reminded her of him, of a time she desperately wanted to forget.
“Stress,” he replied, taking a drag. “Anyways, we better get going. We’ve got a lot of work to do.”
Chapter 17
Chase couldn’t remember the last time she’d been to a police station that was so empty. Located just off the strip, the station was nearly deserted. There was a secretary out front, someone to flash their badges to, but other than that, there was nobody. If it hadn’t been for Stitts and his keen eye noticing the placard outside of Sgt. Theodore’s office, they never would have found the empty office across the hall.
The door was unlocked and inside they found two desks facing each other, a whiteboard on one wall and a push board on the other. There was also an archaic computer on one of the desks, but Stitts pushed this aside in favor of his laptop, which he immediately opened and started typing away at.
Chase, curious as to what her partner was doing, dropped her bag on the free chair and headed over to him.
She was surprised to find that Stitts was IMing with someone back in Quantico about the bombing.
“Need to see if there’s chatter about the bombing on any of the alt-right channels,” he offered, his tone defensive.
Chase shrugged; she knew that Director Hampton, like Sgt. Theodore, would be all over this, as well.
She didn’t like it, but there was nothing she could do about it, either.
Live in the moment, Dr. Matteo’s voice echoed in her head.
That was difficult to do, given that Chase’s mind was continually drawn back to the scene at the casino, and what hadn’t happened.
After touching the girls in Alaska, and then in Boston and Chicago, her visions had left her feeling nauseous.
But now… now that she seemed to have lost the touch, or whatever the hell it was, Chase felt downright terrible.
What’s worse, was that self-doubt had begun to creep in like a dark cloud.
If I can’t use my skills… if I can’t trust my gut anymore, then what good am I? How will I ever find her?
Chase pinched the bridge of her nose and collapsed into her chair.
Along with self-doubt, something else started to nag at her.
Back in Alaska when Chase had first experienced one of her visions, she’d been drinking. In Chicago, she’d been straight out using heroin. But now, ever since she’d gotten clean—
No, she scolded herself. That can’t be it. You’re better now. You’re better, you’re healthier, you’re smarter.
But even as these words formulated in her mind, she quickly dismissed them. They sounded fake.
They sounded like some cheesy PSA special.
There was a knock at the door, which startled Chase, and she let out a small gasp. Noticing that Stitts was staring at her, Chase felt her face redden.
How long has he been looking at me like that? She wondered.
The man in the doorway was in his mid-60s, with gray hair that clung to his temples and deep grooves around his nose and mouth. In one hand he held several folders, while the other was gripping a wooden cane that looked to be supporting most of his frame. With every step, he grimaced.
“I assume you guys are the FBI agents?” he asked in a surprisingly young sounding voice, given his appearance.
Stitts quickly got to his feet and relieved the man of having to walk all the way over to him for an introduction.
“Special Agent Jeremy Stitts,” he said, before hooking a thumb over his shoulder. “And this is Special Agent Chase Adams.”
The man offered a thin smile.
“Greg Ivory,” he replied. The lack of a mention of rank — be it Officer, Detective, Sgt., Sheriff, Deputy or whatever the hell they had here in Nevada and Las Vegas — struck Chase as odd. “Sgt. Theodore told
me to convene with you guys. I have all of the information we’ve gathered thus far on the security, the bartender, dealer, and some of the players that were at the game last night.”
Stitts took the stack of folders from Greg’s hand and opened the first one.
“He also told me to help out any way I can,” Greg continued. He cast a wistful glance down at his leg and cane. “I won’t be chasing any perps anytime soon, but I know my way around, and I have connections. Anything you guys need, just let me know and I’ll lend a hand.”
Drawing Dead Page 6