by Harley Slate
Gary was already shaking his head. “You hired me. I can help you. I can't help some unknown person I've never even met.”
“I realize that. I just...” She ran down again. This was a waste of time.
“Look, based on what I'm hearing, your best option is to avoid all contact with this individual from here on out. You do your job from the sky. You let the police and the investigators do their job. You don't volunteer to involve yourself off the clock.”
“I think she's being threatened. I don't think she has a choice about her involvement in this situation.”
Was that what Lana thought, or was it merely what she hoped?
Gary looked sad for her. Almost pitying. “I don't doubt it, Lana. Criminals threaten each other. The thing is, you don't need to associate with offenders. You need to keep your job and your gaming license.”
“Based on what I just told you, Dragonhoarde would be within their rights to fire me,” she said. “That's what you're saying.”
He held her eyes without blinking. “You didn't need your big brother to tell you that. You're a smart girl, Lana. You already know.”
Chapter Ten
Time went on. It always does. Lana didn't see Mel anywhere except in dreams. Often, those dreams were tactile, a sensation of being snuggled and licked from behind. She'd wake in a hurry and flip over, but you couldn't wake fast enough to grab a dream. The double futon was always empty on the other side. The pillow forever undimpled, the sheets forever smooth.
Mel wasn't there, she'd never been there. She didn't even know where Lana lived.
Work was tense. Somehow, Durrell found out about Connor's upcoming job in West Virginia, and he had him escorted off the premises before he could turn in his notice. The grim uniforms who came for Connor scooped his personal items into a single cardboard box and marched him out without giving him a moment to hug Lana or anybody else goodbye. He'd been working there for two years, they should have known what he was made of, but they acted as if they thought he'd sabotage the place given half a minute with his hands free.
Durrell walked slowly around the room, his arms folded gorilla-style over his chest. “This is the situation we have. Expenses are up, profits are down, and the GM is looking to lay off a few people. Anybody else care to volunteer?”
Lana held her breath. Everybody did. There were more casinos in Clark County, hell, more legal casinos in the entire country, than there ever were. And yet, somehow, there didn't seem to be as many good jobs. Everything was leaner, more efficient. In the movies, the machines might still spit out those buckets of coins, requiring multiple people to dance attendance on the winner. In real life, though, unless the jackpot was a taxable event, the machines printed out small vouchers you cashed out yourself. Any given casino seemed to run with fewer staff members every year.
These days, a lot of women in Vegas made a decent percentage of their income as girlfriends or sugar babies. Not an option for Lana. She had to make this job work until she could prove she was ready for something bigger.
Catching Mel's team would have been her proof. And yet Lana was just as happy Mel seemed to be taking the hint to stay away.
Lana's empty condo was as depressing as her empty hours off the job. At last, she made a sincere effort to tour the mid-priced furniture stores to arrange for a real bed, a real dining table set, and a real couch. She even had them deliver a brand new fifty-two-inch wall-mounted television.
And yet the place still looked too empty. Too clean, maybe, too uncluttered. More like a hotel suite than a home.
Maybe she should get a puppy. A heat-tolerant desert breed that would enjoy long walks in the early evening. Was that a Saluki? She didn't know as much about dogs as she needed to. Maybe a high-energy outdoor dog wasn't practical for Vegas, maybe what she needed was a pocket dog happy to wear a jeweled collar. She saw women her age carrying those toys dogs in their designer purses through air-conditioned malls. They were cute, they attracted attention, they made it easy to meet new people.
Lana snorted. Who was she kidding? A toy dog in a frou-frou handbag couldn't be further from her style. And, anyway, she didn't even know if she wanted to meet new people.
I'm over Juliet. I'm over Mel. I'm over everybody. And, anyway, Mel and me... we never had all that much of anything to be over in the first place.
There was no reason to feel so lost. No reason to try to message Mel.
Although she did anyway. Only to find out Mel's profile had been deleted from the hookup app.
Of course, the Dragonhoarde had Mel's details on file. The address of the Henderson house. The phone number. Lana could pull up all that information in a heartbeat. But this was a line she couldn't cross. Calling Mel's home, invading her privacy... that got you into stalker territory. Lana had fucked up, but her pride wouldn't let her fuck up quite that badly.
And so life went on. Durrell didn't hire a replacement for Connor. Instead, he promoted a twenty-three-year-old who used to wear a uniform on the floor. Alva was blonde and six feet tall, a Viking goddess with a gun on her hips, but she looked younger upstairs in her street clothes. Her long fingers fondled a pink cubic zirconia she wore at the hollow of her throat on a silver chain.
Vikings, Lana thought, shouldn't wear flea market jewelry.
“I heard something,” Alva said. “They're saying this place is getting shut down, that the owners filed some papers to declare bankruptcy.”
A court filing would be public information, not a backroom rumor. “You know, we're not really supposed to be talking about stuff like that on the job.”
Alva dropped her pink stone and turned back to the bank of monitors in front of her.
There was an awkward silence.
“Hey, look who the cat just dragged in.” Alva had already forgotten her little snit. “Monitor one-twenty-seven.”
“I see her.”
“How many jackpots that chick thinks she's going to win?” That was cute, Alva calling Mel a chick. “I really think it's sad how they keep coming and coming until they give it all back.”
Lana thought of her mother, as she always did at such moments. Then she pushed the thought away. She always did that too. “That's how we keep the lights on.”
Not that Mel's action was paying any light bills. She was going through the same drill she'd done that first day. Strolling here and there, pretending to be interested in the dice table. After observing an older man's roll for a few minutes, she bought in for fifty and bet six dollars each on the six and the eight. The man rolled a seven, and the dealer swept everybody's bets off the table. Mel walked away from the unlucky game still holding thirty-eight dollars in red chips. Now she was looking at the various machines. Leaning over, maybe hitting a button, but never sitting down.
Just another random player with a few random dollars burning a hole in her pocket.
Yeah, right.
“Think she needs a girlfriend?”
Lana nearly swallowed her tongue. “We're, um, not supposed to date guests.”
“I'm just yanking your chain.” Having paid Lana back for the lecture on bankruptcy gossip, Alva was officially in a good mood again.
When Mel looked up at the nearest camera dome, Lana had the uncanny sensation that she could somehow hear them talking about her. After a minute, she turned around and began the long, wandering stroll toward the front door.
“Green eyes,” Alva said.
As if Lana had to be told. Shit. Mel shouldn't be here. This should be over. And even if she was leaving, even if she'd thought better of whatever she had planned...
Lana needed to talk to her. Mel couldn't just waltz in and out like she owned the place.
“Look,” Lana said. “Call in Patricya. Something's come up.”
“Wait, what. You're heading out already? You've been here less than an hour.”
“I made a mistake coming in at all. I've got sniffles in the back of my nose, and I'm worried about coming down with a summer cold.” Would it be
over-the-top to fake a sneeze? Lana decided not to risk it. “Yeah, get Patricya on the phone. If she can take over, I'm going to head on off and get in a few extra hours of beauty sleep.”
“Durrell is going to be so pissed.”
Durrell was from a generation where people made a point of showing up for work even if they were at death's door. Well, Lana couldn't worry about that right now. “That's my problem. He won't blame you. And I'd feel terrible if you came down with this same sludge.”
By this time, Mel was out the door, but it always took valet parking a few minutes to bring the guest's car around. Lana could move faster. She jog-walked through the relatively short corridor to the employee parking exit and jumped into her own car, a black Toyota Camry that had seen better days. Now what? She couldn't risk being caught on camera with Mel Lysander, girl jackpot superhero.
Fortunately, as a member of the security team, she knew exactly where all the Dragonhoarde cameras were and where most of the nearby street surveillance cams were hidden as well.
You can do this.
Lana drove carefully. Once you were off casino property, you entered an ugly semi-commercial, semi-industrial area. The nursing homes were landscaped for a desert climate, and so were the strip malls. Everything looked hot and dusty. The sun was too bright. Afternoon was a bad idea in Vegas.
She pulled into a strip mall notable for its boarded-up windows and a single tiny nail salon with a red OPEN sign in the dark window. Whether it was really a salon or just a front for an illegal operation was anybody's guess. Desert scrub was slowly creeping across a rock garden that hadn't been maintained in months, if not years. She parked in what limited shade she could find under the battered sign that said, “Quail Run Sho_ping.” Lana didn't believe in the quail, but she supposed the missing “p” might still be hidden among the weeds beneath the signpost.
She left the engine running. It wasn't wise to sit out here without air-conditioning. Slumping down, sunglasses on, she watched the road for oncoming cars. There were a lot of silver sedans, and it was hard to be sure of what was coming with the late afternoon sun glancing off the shiny metal. Fortunately, she didn't have long to wait.
The Ford Fusion went by a little too fast, Mel navigating traffic with her usual style and grace. Lana couldn't lag too far behind without losing her, so she had to hope Mel wouldn't think anything was strange about an older black sedan pulling out of a nearly abandoned strip mall.
After all, Mel had never seen her car. Hell, she had no reason to think Lana even owned a car.
And she certainly had no reason to think Lana had ever taken an FBI tactical driving course.
The thought gave her enough confidence to keep fairly close behind the Fusion, often keeping only one or two cars between them. She had little choice, since it was the only way a one-woman operation could keep on such a fast driver's tail. Once the Fusion got through a yellow light, and the car between them stopped, trapping Lana so far behind she lost visual contact. She had to speed up, had to make some fast passing maneuvers, but eventually she spotted that Illinois plate stopped at another red light.
Relief.
As they headed out of town, Lana began to feel uneasy. She couldn't get up that mountain. She didn't know the code. Was there a whole community up there she hadn't seen? Secret cabins, a hideaway village for a criminal organization?
At the time, she thought the meteor viewing spot was one of those places you set up for the brief season and then took down again. The forestry service would never know their road had been temporarily chained off, or that the entrance to the high meadow was guarded by cameras, an electronic code box, and at least one man in night-vision goggles. They might wonder about who trimmed the hedges to make those neat garden rooms, but they wouldn't wonder very hard as long as the area was kept clear of litter like used needles, empty beer cans, and discarded rubbers. There was a lot of desert, a lot of mountain, a lot of forest. They'd have bigger fish to fry.
If she was wrong, if there was an actual community up there, Lana wouldn't have access. Then what?
For a time, Lana could take advantage of a big rig that prevented Mel from seeing her coming up from behind. Of course, most of the time, it also prevented Lana from seeing the Fusion, but she got enough glimpses to know she was on the right track.
The drive went on and on. They must have passed the turn-off for the mountain long ago. Maybe Mel was leaving Vegas forever.
Maybe that was for the best.
Let her go. It isn't your money. What are you trying to prove?
The big rig pulled into a truck stop. Mel kept going. The only vehicles on the road, other than the Fusion and the Camry, were eighteen-wheelers. Was it too obvious now that Lana was following her? She pulled off for a minute. Mel vanished on the horizon. Lana pulled out of the truck stop again at the fastest speed she could manage and still control the car.
Where was she going? And why?
How far was she going?
There was nothing out here, no obvious place to turn. Lana kept going. She had to believe she'd catch up with her again.
Eventually, she spotted a glint of silver far ahead turning into what looked like an old-fashioned fifties-style roadside motel with individual cabins. The Fusion? It seemed like an oddly down-at-heels place for a woman like Mel Lysander, but Lana had to check it out. She slowed to approach with caution.
Places like this gave her that David Lynch or Stephen King vibe. The late afternoon sun was still too bright to show the burned-out tubes in the neon vacancy sign, but you already knew the price would be twenty-five or thirty dollars a night. The carpet would be burnt orange, the bad paintings on the wall would be boats against an orange sunset. There'd be cigarette burns in the faded bedspreads that were, by God, laundered every two months whether they needed it or not.
Mel and her Italian designer jacket didn't belong here.
Hell. Neither did Lana.
Chapter Eleven
Lana turned in slowly. There were so few cabins they were numbered in the single digits, and there wasn't going to be anywhere to hide once she rounded that corner to see if the flash of silver really was Mel's Fusion. Instead, she paused outside the front cabin, the one with the glass window that looked like an after-market installation from one of the booths at a gas station. No one was sitting in the window at the moment. No big surprise there. It was probably a one-horse operation, with an alcoholic owner who spent most of their time snoozing in the back away from the light.
If life was like the movies, Lana could have got out of the car, rapped on the window for attention, flashed her gaming badge, and fooled whoever into thinking she was law enforcement. She could find out if Mel was checked in, get a key to her room, get all kinds of things. Alas, life wasn't a movie, and Lana wasn't going to gamble her gaming license on a possible charge of impersonating an officer.
With a shrug, she went ahead and pulled around. Mel was already out of the Fusion, her hips shifting easily as she settled the straps of a cross-body messenger bag into place. Gucci. Stamped black leather. Probably cost over a thousand bucks.
That was the Mel Lana knew.
The redhead tossed her hair over her shoulder and walked directly over to Lana's Camry to knock on the roof.
Lana rolled down the window, and they looked at each other. It was hot, too hot, to be standing around outside, and they both knew it, but for a minute neither of them could seem to breathe.
“What the fuck, Lana? You fucking followed me?”
“You came into my place, Mel. Again.”
“I'm a VIP guest at your fucking place. I have an invitation in fucking black and white mailed to me at my fucking house that says as much. Want to see?”
“I know all about the fucking fifty-dollar free-play coupon you didn't even remember to play.”
This was stupid. They were both going to die of being stubborn-ass buttheads, a previously unknown complication of heatstroke.
Mel touched the cross-body b
ag. The jackpot money must be in there. “Look. You've got to go.”
“I've got things to say, and I'm not leaving until they're said.”
Mel turned on her heel and walked away. Lana got out and followed. The old-fashioned metal key was attached to a blue plastic tag with the number five printed on it large enough to be read across the parking lot. Terrible security by modern standards.
The door opened on a room exactly as grim as Lana had imagined. Except she'd forgotten about those old window units that rattled as loudly as a big rig passing you on the interstate.
“What the hell, Mel? You couldn't stay in a better place than this?”
Mel folded her arms over her chest, a posture which also allowed her to reassure herself that the cross-body bag was still there. “I didn't choose the meeting place. And you still need to go.”
“You need to go,” Lana said. “I wasn't bullshitting the other day. The feds are after you. People are following you. There's an investigation, and it's going to blow your little scam wide open.”
Mel's cheeks were pink with fury, and her green eyes were flashing. Why did anger look so good on her? “The only ‘people’ following me is you. And you need to fucking stop.”
As Lana fought for calm, she realized the room wasn't as bad as she thought. In addition to turning on the AC, somebody had set out a bucket of ice with a can of generic cola in it. There was even a small package of plastic-wrapped cheap cookies like the kind you'd get out of a vending machine. Maybe the place hadn't been updated since the early seventies, but at least it was clean.
“You drove a long way to say something,” Mel said. “So why don't you go ahead and say it.” This wasn't a question but more of a command.
“Look, I just don't think you understand how serious your situation is. You've already ripped off the casino for well over a hundred thousand dollars. Money like that, in Nevada... we're not talking about a slap on the wrist. You need to listen. Get out while the getting's good. If you keep coming back to the Dragonhoarde, you're going to get caught. It's guaranteed.”
