She took a deep breath. Tried to settle her stomach. Failed.
Get a grip, she thought. You can deal with this. You have to.
She considered calling in sick and staying home tonight. But what was the point? Stark had somehow tracked her down again, which meant she was no safer inside her apartment than she would be at Tequila Mockingbird.
In fact, the opposite was probably true. At work she would be surrounded by plenty of other people, including the Mockingbird’s bouncers, from the moment she walked through the front door until closing time. It would be difficult, if not impossible, for Stark to do what she knew he was in Vegas to do.
Of course, at the end of her shift she would have to get in her car and drive home.
Alone.
In the dark.
Stop it, she thought sharply as she moved through the apartment switching on every lamp. She would flood the interior of the place with a blaze of soothing light so that by the time she came home, in the two-thirty a.m. darkness, she would—hopefully—be able to muster the nerve to enter.
Finally satisfied, the terrified piano player stepped through her door and into the hallway. Pulled it closed behind her. Double-checked the lock and then walked to the building’s entryway, where she stared out into the sun-drenched parking lot. The intense afternoon heat had turned the scene into a shimmering, almost hypnotic tableau.
The lot was empty.
There wasn’t a soul in sight.
She double-checked. Still nothing. Her stomach rolled like a ship in a storm.
Victoria Welling took a deep, shaky breath and steeled her nerves, then rushed out the door to her car.
10
Blake Arthur Standiford III stood in front of Big Tony Mercadante’s desk, hoping like hell he didn’t look as nervous and uncomfortable as he felt. He was smarter than the fat prick sitting smugly behind the massive, highly polished piece of furniture, there was no doubt in his mind about that, but Big Tony held all the cards in this particular poker game.
Blake waited silently for Tony to speak, thankful he had elected to wear an undershirt today beneath the custom fitted Izod dress shirt complementing his two-thousand-dollar suit. He was sweating like a pig. He doubted Big Tony had learned about Kathy Saldana’s murder—yet—because he had been paying careful attention to the TV news since realizing how badly he had fucked up and had seen nothing unusual.
But with Tony Mercadante, you could never be too sure.
“So,” Big Tony began, lacing his meaty hands behind his head and leaning back. He propped his feet up on his desk and the overmatched office chair creaked like it was being tortured. Blake tried to suppress a grin and wondered whether he would be held accountable should Tony impale his fat ass on the metal frame when the chair inevitably collapsed. It would almost be worth it to see the fat fuck suffer.
He waited for Tony to continue and when it became clear the boss was expecting some kind of response, Blake cleared his throat and agreed, “So…” letting the word hang in the air.
Tony’s eyes narrowed, glittering coldly, and Blake immediately regretted fucking with him. The boss said, “What’s the deal with the Saldana broad? I been getting…reports…about you and her.”
“Reports?” Blake wouldn’t have thought it possible, but his sweating intensified.
“Yeah. Reports.”
“Uh, what kind of reports, boss?”
“The kind that say the two have you have been playing kissy-face around Vegas after I specifically told you to cut her loose. Are those reports true?”
Blake opened his mouth to answer and Tony cut him off with a gesture, like he was karate-chopping a fly. “I wasn’t finished talking. I gotta tell ya, I don’t appreciate having to repeat myself. Maybe I’m mistaken. Maybe I never said nothin’ to you about dropping Shotgun Sammy’s skank wife. Lemme check my notes.”
Big Tony swung his thick legs off the desk and sat up straight. His feet and his chair legs struck the floor simultaneously, and the resulting sound was eerily similar to that of a gunshot. His eyes never left Blake’s.
Despite his best efforts at staying calm, Blake jumped in surprise. Undoubtedly the maneuver was designed to establish Tony’s dominance and ensure he had Blake’s undivided attention, and Blake had to admit it was effective. He could smell body odor and wondered whether his t-shirt had soaked through yet. Soon rings of sweat would begin to appear under his arms and his dress shirt would never be the same.
Tony held Blake’s gaze for another second. Then he glanced down at the empty surface of his desk and said, “Yeah, that’s just what I thought. According to my copious notes here, I ain’t mistaken. You have been seen around town with Shotgun Sammy’s skank wife.”
The office went deadly silent, the atmosphere heavy and threatening. Tony let the moment drag out and then said, “I told you to quit that bitch. Why haven’t you done what I asked?”
“Oh, I have,” Blake answered smoothly, knowing he needed right now to give the performance of his life. Big Fat Tony obviously didn’t know about Kathy being dead—yet—but he did know about Blake still seeing her, and in the eyes of the boss, being disobeyed was almost as bad as killing an innocent person. It could easily lead to Blake ending up face down in a hole if he didn’t handle the situation properly.
He straightened his tie and squared his shoulders.
Looked his boss in the eye.
And lied his ass off.
“I don’t know where you got your information, but I sent her packing just like you told me to. I did it the day after we talked about it. She was, you know, like twenty years older than me, anyway.” He put just the right mixture of respect for Tony and scorn for the jettisoned Kathy Saldana into his voice, certain he was knocking this acting job out of the ballpark.
He could handle this fat old rube. He had been banging Kathy Saldana a hell of a lot longer than Big Tony or anyone else in the family knew. He had fooled everyone for months; there was no reason to believe he couldn’t sell this ruse just as well.
Tony stared evenly at Blake, a small emotionless grin tugging at his lips. “So you ain’t hookin’ up with her no more. I just got bad information. That what you’re telling me?”
Blake shrugged. “Guess so. I haven’t seen her in a while. I assume she’s back in LA.”
“Back in LA.”
“Yep.”
“Good, good, glad to hear it.” Big Tony gave Blake a full smile now, but his eyes never got the message. They remained flinty and hard as he stared Blake down.
Despite Blake’s confidence and the conviction he was twice as smart as his boss, he found himself swallowing nervously.
Big Tony played the moment like a musical instrument, stretching it out for maximum effect. As a master of intimidation himself, Blake could appreciate his boss’s effort, although he wasn’t thrilled about being on the receiving end.
At last Tony grimaced and said, “You stay out of trouble now. Keep your dick clean, you hear me?”
Blake nodded enthusiastically. The interview was over and he couldn’t wait to get the hell out of here. He was almost certain Tony wasn’t going to put a bullet in his back when he reached for the door handle, but he didn’t want to hang around and give the fat bastard the chance to change his mind. Or to ask any more questions.
“Good,” Big Tony said. “Now get the fuck outta here, I got work to do.”
***
The door thunked closed behind The Stupid Horny Bastard and Big Tony Mercadante took a deep cleansing breath and counted to ten, just like his wife had taught him to do when he was starting to feel like he wanted to shoot somebody right in the middle of the fucking forehead.
That feeling was the stress talking, according to Maria, and if Tony didn’t find a way to deal with it, the stress would eventually strike him down with a heart attack, just as it had struck down her father years ago. Of course, Tony had helped the stress do its job with an “accidental” overdose of the old man’s prescription heart medi
cation, but Maria didn’t need to know that.
After he finished counting to ten, Tony blew out a frustrated breath. As relaxation techniques go, he thought, this one sucks hard. “That is one arrogant motherfucker,” he mumbled under his breath.
He thought about The Stupid Horny Bastard standing not six feet away, lying his ass off, and felt his blood pressure begin to spike again. He practically invites me to catch him, waving Sammy’s skank around like a goddamn American flag, and then stands there like some choirboy and thinks he’s conning me with his bullshit song-and-dance routine.
Big Tony took another cleansing breath and counted to twenty this time. He wanted so badly to stick a gun in Blake Arthur Standiford III’s ear that he could hardly stand it.
But farming the job out was the right move.
He hoped.
In any event, he had committed to it, had paid for it, and all he had to do now was wait for the hired gun to come in and take care of business.
But it sure did feel nice, daydreaming about blowing The Stupid Horny Bastard’s brains all over his office wall.
11
Buckled into her car and safely on her way to work, Victoria felt the tension begin to melt away. Slightly. She had long ago given up on ever being able to really relax—and that was especially true now that she had spotted Joel Stark prowling the streets of Vegas—but at least inside her car she felt some small sense of protection with the steel surrounding her and the locks engaged.
She pulled out of the Royal Flush Apartments parking lot—in her very rare moments of whimsy, she liked to think of the shabbily constructed development as the Toilet Flush Apartments, but that sense of whimsy was notably absent today—and turned toward Las Vegas and Tequila Mockingbird.
Seeing Joel Stark yesterday had drawn her thoughts to her parents, as seeing Joel Stark always did. The two most traumatic events of her life had occurred within weeks of each other back in 2008, shortly after her move to Manhattan to attend Juilliard, and would always be inextricably linked in her mind.
It was late September of her freshman year, and Victoria was having a hard time adjusting to the frenetic pace of life in New York after growing up an only child in a sleepy Pennsylvania town. She phoned home one night, depressed and homesick, and her parents had decided on the spur of the moment to collect Victoria’s grandmother and hit the road, traveling to New York to surprise their only child in an attempt to raise her spirits.
They never made it. Driving north on Interstate 95 on a sunny September morning, a tractor-trailer fully loaded with auto parts had lost control for reasons that were never determined. The truck jackknifed, crashing down onto the Welling’s car in the adjacent travel lane, killing everyone inside instantly.
Victoria learned of the accident from a grim-faced New York State Trooper. The officer, not much older than she, removed his hat respectfully as he relayed the news that he was very sorry, but Victoria Welling’s entire family had been wiped out.
Her eyes filled with tears and she clamped her jaw tightly shut. She would not break down out here in the Nevada desert over a tragedy that was more than half a decade in the past. There was no changing history, no matter how much she might want to.
No matter how much she was to blame.
She made the left and right turns that would take her to Tequila Mockingbird, driving on autopilot as her mind chewed on the ghosts of her past. After burying the rest of her family, Victoria had returned to Juilliard, not because she particularly wanted to, but because she had no idea what else to do.
A family friend in Pennsylvania offered to keep an eye on the Welling house and perform routine maintenance while Victoria was away, and that was fine with her. There was no way she could ever bring herself to live in it again.
Once back at Juilliard, she tried to resume some semblance of a normal life, knowing it would never really be possible. Her anchor had been taken away.
Just a few short weeks later had come the second life-changing event. Victoria was lying on the couch in the ground-floor apartment she shared with three other Juilliard girls. It was a Friday night. Her roommates, by now all close friends, had been trying to keep Victoria busy, knowing how alone she felt and how desperately she missed her family.
The plan for the evening was to attend a concert in Manhattan. The girls had bought tickets for the show right after the beginning of the school year and had been looking forward to it for weeks. At the last minute, Victoria decided not to go. She was exhausted, she said, and wanted to catch up on some much-needed sleep.
Unable to convince her to change her mind, Victoria’s roommates had reluctantly left her alone. The moment her friends walked out the door, she changed into a nightshirt and plopped down in front of the TV in the apartment’s small living room. An hour later, she realized she had been flipping mindlessly through the channels and could not remember a single detail about anything she had watched.
It was a clear sign of depression, something that had dogged her since coming to New York and had only deepened following her parents’ death. She turned off the television, then picked up a book and walked into her bedroom.
***
Victoria learned later, through law enforcement and the prosecuting attorneys over the course of two separate criminal trials, the minute-by-minute chronology of the rest of the evening. Her firsthand memory of the events was ugly enough, but she had committed to learning every last detail, not because she wanted to relive that night but because she could not stop herself from doing so.
Stark had loitered for hours in an alley across the street from the apartment building. He was twenty-three years old and unemployed, a street punk bouncing from petty crime to petty crime, and he had been stalking Victoria almost from the moment of her arrival in New York. Where he had first taken notice of her was unclear, but he zeroed in on the tall, pretty redhead like a dog chasing a bone.
By the night of the October concert, Stark had been well familiar with all of the residents in the apartment. He took immediate notice of the fact that all the girls had gone out except the object of his attention.
He knew she was home.
And she was alone.
Stark waited two hours, pacing back and forth alone in the alley, collar pulled up against the biting fall breeze. By nine p.m. he had had enough of waiting. He stole across the street, unobserved by witnesses.
He disappeared into the apartment’s empty courtyard and headed straight for the redhead’s bedroom window. He knew it was her window, because he had watched her through it plenty of times, staring almost as if in a trance as she changed for bed.
Tonight it had been left open an inch or so for fresh air. A locked screen stood between Stark and the object of his desire, but that presented little challenge to an experienced B&E’er. He pulled a switchblade from his jacket pocket and in seconds had removed the screen, cutting it away around the outside of its aluminum frame. Then he pushed up the open window and hoisted himself quietly into Victoria Welling’s bedroom.
She felt herself breathing raggedly, choked by the memories of that awful night but unable to stop herself from reliving them. She approached a red light and realized she had nearly arrived at work, with absolutely no memory of the trip. She took a shaky breath and continued toward Tequila Mockingbird as the mental movie of that long-ago night in New York continued to run inside her head.
Victoria had long since dropped off to sleep, her open book tossed onto the bed next to her. She was lying on her side facing the wall and her short nightshirt had ridden up her legs, exposing her pale green panties.
How long Joel Stark had stood inside her bedroom watching her sleep, Victoria was never able to learn. He was waiting for his eyes to adjust to the gloom, or he was afraid of awakening his prey. It might have been as little as thirty seconds or as long as fifteen minutes. To the prosecutors, it was a minor detail, only worth nailing down as corroboration of their timeline.
But to Victoria that indeterminate length of
time was just as much a violation as the actual rape. Even now, six years and thousands of miles later, the idea of Joel Stark standing in her bedroom running his eyes across her body like ants over a picnic lunch made her feel sick to her stomach, made her break out in a cold sweat and descend to near-panic.
Eventually, Victoria had rolled over, perhaps sensing something amiss in her bedroom. Who could say? She opened her eyes and gasped at the shadowy figure standing a few feet away, and then that shadowy figure sprang forward.
More than an hour later, when her attacker finally left the apartment, Victoria staggered to the phone and called 911. By the time her roommates arrived home after midnight, she was sitting at the kitchen table going over the details of the home invasion/rape with a female NYPD detective.
The rest of the night was a blur: cops taking notes, a trip to the hospital, more cops with more notes, and finally, eventually, against all odds, somehow getting back to sleep—when she had believed she might never sleep again—after the sun had come up the following morning.
Victoria hugged herself tightly as she drove, shaking and sweating, determined not to fall apart just before getting to work.
She failed.
***
After the fall of 2008 and the two events that changed her life forever, playing the piano became more than just a passion for Victoria Welling. It consumed her, offering the rare opportunity to escape the morass of fear, self-pity and self-recrimination she had fallen into.
She was capable of playing virtually any style of music, but her personal favorite was jazz. She loved the distinctive beat and lived for the opportunity to transport her audience through the music, to make them not just hear it but feel it as she felt it, deep in her soul. To experience the music.
This was why she loved Tequila Mockingbird. The place was located off the beaten path of the Vegas Strip and represented the antithesis of the glitzy, style-over-substance clubs catering to the tourist trade all over the city. The Mockingbird’s clientele was overwhelmingly local, mostly loyal regulars, and Victoria had been given free rein by the club’s management to play any music she wished, as long as it kept the customers coming back.
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