“Hypothetically, if there was a witness to something one of you guys did... Well, it’s my friend, Lucy… No, I told her not to go to the police…”
Must be love, Delilah thought. That was the only way to explain this. Julie loved her little Artie too much to imagine that he’d put her friend, Lucy in danger. But business was business after all.
All she had to do was go inside, maybe grab the phone or stop Artie or...something. It was all treading the line of being far too intrusive on a mission, so there was that. But, on the other hand, this was an unconventional case. Plus, Jack had the egg and seemed bent on protecting it. Now Lucy was in mortal danger and if she could just put those kids together…
Delilah crossed her arms and listened to Julie tell her boyfriend that her buddy, Lucy, was a witness to a murder perpetrated by Artie’s boss.
First, tell Lucy.
The wheels were about to spin, she figured. She shouldn’t just be standing here. Lucy was doing a shift as a cocktail waitress down the strip and now Delilah took off in that direction, hoping against hope that her crazy plan would work. Katz had seemed to trust her, to heavily imply that sometimes rules had to be bent. Maybe this was one of those cases where the wrong thing was the right thing.
Minutes later, Delilah spotted Lucy in one of those goofy cocktail waitress outfits in bright pink and black. She was carrying a tray of drinks around and looking annoyed even as she stuffed another twenty into her bustier. Delilah waited for her to take a break for a minute behind the bar and then she called her phone, which Lucy was apparently carrying in the front pocket of her little black apron and now she took it out and frowned as she answered it, standing on one leg as she dropped a heel and rubbed her other foot.
Delilah ducked back behind a pillar next to a roulette table and watched Lucy as she spoke.
“Hi,” Delilah said. “Is this Lucy?”
“Yeah… Who is this?”
“I’m a friend,” Delilah said carefully. “I’m a friend who knows what you saw.”
“What-”
She saw the alarm on Lucy’s face and quickly said, “Seriously. I know what you saw. What I’m telling you is, you need to hide.
“Who are you?” Lucy asked.
Delilah grit her teeth. They were wasting time. She needed to get Lucy out of danger while also putting Jack on her tail. She had a full dossier on Jack. He was a cold-blooded businessman, but that was all a front. He was a good guy and he liked to do the right thing. Delilah had a feeling that if he knew one of his showgirls was in this much danger, he would help her without question. There was also the added bonus of her knowing who his good friend’s killers were.
“I can’t tell you that,” Delilah said. “You’ve just got to trust me. You need to hide. Now. Forget work. You can always get another cocktail job. Leave now. Find a place to lay low but not out of town. It’s that or get killed.”
“But-”
Delilah hung up the phone, hoping that would sell her as a mysterious party with Lucy’s interests at heart but not at all a supernatural entity. She watched, frustrated, as Lucy hemmed and hawed behind the bar.
“Come on,” Delilah muttered. “Come on, Lucy.”
Lucy poured herself a shot of vodka and Delilah sighed, watching her take the time to knock it back. But then she was coming around from behind the bar and hightailing it to the back of the casino to the break room. Delilah made a beeline for the back exit, finding a place to watch covertly. She watched Lucy finally come out with her purse, still wearing her cocktail waitress uniform but with a bomber jacket over it, the poofy skirt looking strange flaring out from beneath it.
Delilah tailed her as she hustled her way through town on foot. She could walk pretty quick in heels, even as she shoved her way through the crowds on the strip for block after block. Delilah was stealthy, sticking to the shadows as much as possible as the giant, neon lights flashed and glowed all around them, everyone drinking right there on the street which was packed with cars. Delilah had no idea where Lucy was going but she veered off from the strip eventually, one way and another, eventually ending up at the Blue Suede Chapel, one of many Elvis-themed chapels that littered Vegas.
Delilah stayed stealthy, but she eventually climbed up to a window and got a look at Lucy greeting somebody who appeared to be a friend. They had an animated conversation that went on for a while before Lucy was sent to some kind of lounge room that looked like a lobby in a bordello with a red velvet couch and purple walls. It had a TV and a mini-fridge. It appeared to be some kind of green room for people waiting to get married on the fly in Vegas. Lucy sat down on the couch and took off her bomber jacket, her duffle bag resting in her lap. She sat back and stared at the ceiling and sighed heavily. Delilah waited a little longer until she was absolutely certain Lucy was staying put and she hopped down from her perch and started walking back to the strip. She whipped out her Oracle device and brought up the phone mode to call Jack Damon.
“This is Jack,” an uncertain voice said. “Who is this?”
“This is a friend,” Delilah said, slipping on a pair of dark glasses, even though it was dark out. “I have information for you about the death of Sean Baker.”
“What-”
“There was a witness to Sean’s murder-”
“Who are you?” Jack asked urgently. “How do you know-”
“Oh my God, what difference does it make?” Delilah interrupted, annoyed at the questions. “You want the information or not?”
“Yes, yes!”
“Great,” Delilah said. “Listen, Sean was killed by a pretty powerful guy. But the important part is, there was a witness to his murder, and she’s in danger. She’s one of your showgirls.”
“Who?”
“Lucy,” Delilah said. “The blonde with the cheekbones that can cut glass. She’s your witness and she’s in trouble. They know. She needs protection-”
“Lucy?” Jack said. “She hates me.”
“She may hate you but she needs you,” Delilah said. “She’s cooling out at the Blue Suede Chapel in the back room-”
“She’ll never go with me,” Jack said dryly. “Not in a million years. She would never trust me.”
“Then don’t ask her,” Delilah said impatiently. “You protect her or she gets killed. It’s your call.”
“How do you-”
Delilah hung up before he could finish his question and she took a deep breath. This was an unconventional job, alright. She’d just allowed one of her charges to get a hit put out on her. Usually, you tried to avoid getting your matchmaking targets killed. It was generally one of the aims. But she’d put the two together. Or at least she almost had. Jack had Sean’s egg, and he was about to have the girl. The rest was just...massaging. That Lucy still hated Jack was a potential problem. But Delilah had dealt with worse.
Lucy would cave eventually.
She had to.
5
Lucy
Lucy didn’t like not knowing who was helping her. The voice on the other end of the phone had been firm and somehow Lucy had known, deep in her bones, that she should listen to it. But now that she was hiding out in the waiting room of the Blue Suede Chapel, she had time to think about how strange and scary this entire situation was.
“So stupid,” Lucy muttered now. She kicked off the heels she’d worn all the way from the casino and got to her feet. She locked the door of the little room with its gaudy red walls and purple couch and the glittering chandelier that showered scattered little squares of shimmering light around. She threw her jacket down and paced around the room, finally ending at the mini-fridge where she found some airplane bottle of vodka.
Her friend, Maurice, ran The Blue Suede Chapel. He used to manage the bar at the first casino where Lucy had ever worked before she’d gotten her first job dancing. Maurice was older. He was in his mid-fifties and his chapel was run-of-the-mill for Vegas but he’d been ecstatic about owning his own business. Lucy had attended the first wedding ever of
ficiated at The Blue Suede Chapel between Maurice and his longtime boyfriend, Gilbert. He’d been totally understanding when Lucy had shown up abruptly, begging for a place to hide for an indeterminate amount of time. He’d offered up his own home too. That might be a necessity, Lucy thought now. The truth was, she didn’t know. She had no idea how long she should hide or when this would blow over.
“So stupid,” she said again.
She kept thinking back to telling Julie what she’d seen. She’d just been so riled up and scared and it hadn’t seemed dangerous at all to tell a friend that she’d seen a murder. What were the odds of it coming back to bite her? Apparently, they were high.
She had been stupid enough to tell Julie about the murder. But she wasn’t stupid enough to now to think anyone but Julie had put her in danger. It was obvious, in hindsight, with the way Julie had been acting. That gangster-looking guy probably was a gangster. Why Julie had ratted her out, Lucy had no idea. It hurt and it made her angry. They had never been very close, but they had been friends. It was possible that Julie had told her boyfriend in all innocence but right now, hiding in the back of a quickie-marriage chapel off the strip and sipping vodka from a tiny bottle, she was in no mood to give Julie the benefit of the doubt.
The couch was at least comfortable. She stretched out and turned on the TV, flipping to some old reruns of Law and Order because it was a comfort show. Her favorite type of show was true crime. But fictional crime would do just as well.
She wondered what she should do about work. She’d been told to drop everything and just go. But life had practicalities. She had an apartment. She had stuff there. Julie knew where she lived though, so that was out. She’d lose her jobs. She could just imagine that asshole, Jack Damon, now. He’d be so pissed he’d lost a dancer. He probably wouldn’t even think to ask what had become of her. He’d just be mad he had to scramble to find an understudy so fast. The cocktail waitress job she didn’t care about so much. But her dancing job, while it wasn’t one of those swanky gigs with a residency, had still been quite a feat for her. The truth was, she loved it. Even with the constant hubbub of the casino, she kind of loved that too. She didn’t love sharing tips or avoiding sleazy men or dealing with Jack Damon, but a little part of her loved Las Vegas and everything it felt like. She didn’t want to have to leave or to hide. She didn’t want to have to give up the little life she’d built.
Lucy spaced out watching TV and idly thought that she should change clothes. She had jeans and a t-shirt in her duffle. She had sneakers too. That she hadn’t thought to change out of her heels before walking all the way to the Blue Suede had been a testament to how terrified she’d been.
She was on her second airplane bottle of vodka when she heard voices at the front of the chapel. Her ears perked up. It sounded like Maurice was shouting. The chapel was open and occasionally drunken louts intending to get drunkenly hitched did show up. But this sounded worse than that as the voice raised. She sat up slowly. The door was locked.
She had nothing to worry about, right? She told herself that anyway. The door was locked. Nobody knew she was here. She’d run off as soon as she got that call. The mysterious helper hadn’t said anyone was following her or she would have warned her, right?
Lucy felt a chill up her spine, fear tearing through her veins as she heard a thump and then the shouts went still. The door was locked, the door was locked…
There was a window in the room but it was up high and far too small for her to even contemplate climbing through it.
Lucy closed her eyes and saw that man in the parking garage getting his brains blown out. Those four men in black suits, the echoing crack of the gun and the way he’d merely slumped over when the life had suddenly gone out of him…
She heard footsteps outside the door. She looked around for a weapon, something, anything… But it was too late as all of a sudden the door was broken through, a hulking figure simply breaking it down, taking the thing right off its hinges.
Lucy liked to think of herself as tough but she had no recourse now. She had nothing to fall back on at all as she backed up against the wall and...looked up into the eyes of Jack Damon.
“What the hell,” Lucy whispered. “What the hell are you doing here?”
“Lucy,” Jack said calmly, raising his hands. “I’m here to help you, to protect you.”
It all made sense to her now. Jack, who she had always hated and thought was a brutal and cold-blooded businessman was in on the whole thing. He had probably ordered that murder. How else had Jack Damon built his hotel up to be what it was all by himself? It had started out as a dinky little operation that his parents had owned. He must have been in the mob all this time. It was him. It was him all along.
And now Jack Damon was here to kill her.
“Get away from me,” Lucy whispered, her eyes wild. She’d kill him if she had to. She’d fight him with everything she had. She’d gouge his eyes out, bite off his ear, anything…
“Lucy, I know what you saw,” Jack said. It sounded like more than a threat to her. “You have to believe me. I’m here to protect you.”
Lucy opened her mouth, closed her eyes and screamed bloody murder.
“Goddammit.” Jack came lumbering towards her and she tried to move quickly but he was surprisingly fast and then big, firm arms were holding her fast. He was just too strong. She couldn’t get away now. His arms were like iron. She felt as helpless as a bunny caught by a giant snake and fear made her heart pound. She felt like she might be sick. “I didn’t want it to go this way.”
“Get off me!” Lucy screamed. “Get the fuck off me, asshole!”
Then a damp cloth was clamped against her mouth. It didn’t even occur to her that it was a drug. She simply kept trying to fight him off, even as she knew that she was fighting a losing battle. But suddenly she was sluggish. She couldn’t move, she couldn’t think… The world was blurring around the edges as he held her with an iron grip.
Then everything went black.
6
Jack
Jack didn’t like to think too hard about how easy it had been to buy chloroform on short notice. He’d just asked one of his security guys and then given him a thousand dollars in cash not to tell anyone he’d asked. He also didn’t like to think about how potentially dangerous it was to have security guys who’d take a bribe from a potential kidnapper. But he didn’t particularly want to think about that now.
The chloroform had only been a last resort. He’d fully intended to take Lucy voluntarily. He’d thought he could reason with her. Sure, she hated him. He knew that. He’d run into her feistiness one too many times. Every time he’d knocked into her on the casino floor or in the hotel or in the Cypress Room, she’d given him such a dirty look, as if he was the scum of the earth. He’d never been sure exactly what he’d done to deserve her ire, except that he was her boss and maybe she was unhappy with her job. But that was hardly his fault.
He’d knocked out her friend who owned the chapel. That had been a panicked impulse, and he felt bad about it even though he was trying to save Lucy’s life. It was all a little chaotic. But time was of the essence and he’d had no better ideas now as he hefted Lucy’s limp, unconscious body into his back seat.
He’d never kidnapped anyone before. He was already freaked out by how easy it was turning out to be. How did people not just get kidnapped all the time? Lucy was such an attractive woman too. Didn’t she know how many predatory assholes there were out there? Did she even have pepper spray on her or anything? She could have taken him down with that so easily. He’d been pepper sprayed once by accident. It was the worst.
Now it was broad daylight and there were plenty of people walking down the sidewalk now as he laid Lucy’s body down in the backseat and no one was even looking twice. It should not be nearly this easy to kidnap someone, Jack decided. Shouldn’t somebody say something? Was it that there were so many sloppily drunk people in Las Vegas, everyone just assumed the new bride was already s
leeping one off in the backseat? But still…
“Hold on, Lucy,” Jack said, sighing, as he started up his car. “I can explain…”
He glanced back continually as he drove to his mansion the fringes of town. He’d bought the egg with him. It was nestled in its box in the trunk. That felt wrong somehow too. It felt like putting a baby in the trunk, except it was doubtless the safest place for the egg and it was not like the egg breathed, so he didn’t need to worry about it running out of air.
For a moment, Jack just stood there, realizing fully what he had just done. He had knocked out a woman and was now planning on taking her to his mansion and locking her in a room to take care of a dragon egg.
To save her life, he reminded herself.
Although the egg care wasn’t so much about saving her life. That was more about saving the egg. It was more of a matter of convenience really. He had no assurances Lucy would be down for caring for some guy’s dragon egg, assuming she wouldn’t freak out at the very notion of dragon shifters to begin with. She could just let it die. Jack’s heart convulsed at the thought. He felt terribly protective over the egg. It was an innocent little life, first of all. Plus, he wasn’t sure if he’d ever have the chance to have kids himself. The world really wasn’t crawling with dragon shifters.
He started up the car and made the slow crawl through strip traffic to his mansion. He consoled himself that he at least wasn’t going to be tying the girl up or anything. If she beat him up, well, that was too bad for him. Tying her up was a little too much. Although if she reacted poorly, he had more chloroform until she reacted better. He didn’t want to think about having to use it though.
His stomach churned when he thought too hard about any of this.
Finally, he reached his front gates and slipped his keycard through the slot that opened them. He had a small staff for the mansion that he often didn’t live in but he’d sent them away on paid leave until further notice. They’d been only too happy about the vacation. Now Jack pulled into the empty spot in his garage next to the Rolls Royce and killed the engine.
Vegas Baby Dragon (Guardian of Mates Agency) Page 4
