Lucky the Hard Way

by Deborah Coonts

  Jean-Charles found the phone under his left thigh, which rested on my right one. I didn’t want to think about how it got there, or if I had inadvertently butt-dialed someone in the past few hours, giving a whole new meaning to the term phone sex. Used to humiliation, I didn’t worry about it too much—except for the host of media-types on speed-dial. Reading about my tryst in Norm Clarke’s column, or his replacement’s—I still couldn’t believe he’d retired—in the R-J tomorrow…later today…would not add to my Christmas cheer, even lacking as it was.

  “Still early,” Jean-Charles said between nibbles.

  “So helpful.” I glanced at the caller ID. The Big Boss, Albert Rothstein to the masses, Father to me, was the god of the Babylon properties. And as such, mentioning his name usually prompted a genuflection or some other sign of supplication—not from me, of course. I knew his secrets, one of which was that he was human, and, right now, more human than I could handle. Still, he was one of the few people who centered my world.

  As I swiped my finger across the face of the phone, all vestiges of warmth, sleep, happiness, and hopes for a normal life evaporated. “Is everything okay?” I was proud I hadn’t shouted.

  “Ah, Lucky,” he sighed. “I heard what happened at Minnie’s. When you didn’t call…”

  With a sinking heart, I realized I’d added to his worries. He’d already been shot; he didn’t need another load from me. “I’m so sorry, Father. I only got home a couple of hours ago. Calling you in the middle of the night didn’t seem like a good idea.” Of course, I hadn’t thought of calling him, which added a huge line item to my guilt list.

  This whole family thing was pretty new, and it still surprised me that there were people who worried about me. Until recently, Mona and the Big Boss had kept his paternity secret. It was complicated, but I understood—apparently even in Vegas and even thirty years ago, it was a felony to have sex with a minor. Mona had lied about her age, but that didn’t change the facts—she was pregnant with me. So, instead of ruining the Big Boss’s career, they’d lied. But now they’d come clean, and my family had doubled in size. And my father was a worrier.

  My mother, not so much. Mona had always been there for me, but she slept until noon and wouldn’t even consider worrying until fully caffeinated and the police had issued a nationwide APB. Awakening her usually resulted in an evisceration. To shift from fiercely independent to interconnected at my age was asking a lot. “How did you hear about Minnie?” I asked my father.

  “I know people.” That line was “a joke” between us, considering the Big Boss had come up through the ranks of the Mobbed-up Vegas. But now it didn’t sound so funny. “We need to talk.” His voice held the nobody-fucks-with-my-family tone.

  Jean-Charles started to move off of me.

  “No.” I pulled him back down.

  “No?” My father didn’t sound pleased—he wasn’t used to having that tone ignored.

  “I wasn’t talking to you.”

  “Oh.” Now he sounded confused and perhaps chagrined, as the light must’ve dawned. Used to having me at his beck and call, the Big Boss was still transitioning to the concept of my having a life, a real life, outside of the Babylon. Of course, we both knew that was a clever bit of fiction, but we’d been keeping up the farce.

  Jean-Charles caught my lips in a sensuous kiss. I focused all my attention, savoring, making a memory.

  “Lucky?” The demanding voice of my father in my ear.

  Slowly, reluctantly, I relinquished Jean-Charles’s lips. “I’m here,” I answered my father as I shifted into good-daughter mode. “Are you okay? Mother? The twins who have yet to be named?” Yes, despite my advanced age of thirty…ish, my parents had just given birth to twins. Of course, my mother had been fifteen when she had me, but still. She’d been a hooker after all—you’d think she would’ve learned something. My thoughts took a hard left. My father had been awfully happy lately…. Still squeamish about my parents’ sex life, I shuddered, then wrestled my thinking back on track.

  Good at procreation, bad at protection, Mona still couldn’t settle on names. I wondered what that was about.

  “We’re all fine. But,” he hesitated, which made my heart skip a beat.

  I waited, then felt compelled by worry to jump into the silence. “You know I hate buts.”

  My father was more the bull-in-the-china-shop than a beat-around-the-bush type. Still, he hesitated as my blood pressure spiked. “We need to talk. There are some things you need to know.”

  Ah, the payoff for all that worry—there really was something to worry about. The Big Boss wasn’t good at hiding things either. “Okay. When?”

  “On your way to the airport. They are readying the Gulfstream.”

  “Now?” I clutched my Frenchman to me.

  “It’s important.”

  Two simple words, yet they lodged like bullets in my brain. “Did you send someone to pack for me, too?” Being railroaded was a sure way to piss me off. My father knew that. He did it anyway. I didn’t like what that implied.

  “Lucky.” Now a tone of exaggerated patience that wheezed into imploring. So not like the Big Boss. He never implored anyone other than the Virgin Mary, which was sort of funny, all things considered. Rothstein wasn’t a Catholic name, but we each are entitled to our own beliefs and superstitions.

  “Where exactly am I going?”

  I must’ve still sounded pissed.

  When he answered with a “Lucky, please,” he sounded tired. No, more than that—defeated.

  Oh, this was so not good.

  CHAPTER THREE

  DAYLIGHT was still a pale harbinger of the brightness to come, brushing the eastern sky with color. Like a string of pearls, the lights from the long queue of arriving planes draped against the pinks and oranges. The tourists came from everywhere, all looking for something. A constantly changing kaleidoscope of cultures, genders, races, sexual orientations, we had them all and we made magic.

  Vegas.

  In contrast to the streets barely beginning to fill, the Babylon was already firing at full bore. When I pushed through the heavy glass door, noise and energy buffeted me. Normally I would’ve found joy in that, but not today. Well, okay, I lied. I always found joy in that, even today as I staggered under the weight of the proverbial other shoe.

  I’d lingered in Jean-Charles’s arms, then taken a moment to go upstairs and kiss Christophe. I hadn’t meant to awaken him. He’d looped his arms around my neck, holding me tight, as if somehow he’d known I was going far away.

  “You must be back for your birthday,” he’d whispered in his lilting French accent. “I have a very good present, but Papa made me promise not to tell.” He smelled of baby soap and mischief.

  “I will.” New Year’s Eve. Six days to travel halfway around the planet to save the world as I knew it.

  Piece of cake.

  “Promise?” he whispered.

  There was that word. I took a deep breath. Squeezing my eyes shut, I took the leap. “I promise.”

  “Want to know what I got you?” Still clutching me tight, he held me with those big blue eyes.

  I brushed a curl back from his forehead. Holding a little person was so visceral, bringing peace and contentment—like a puppy, but way better. My reaction had been unexpected. “No. I love surprises,” I lied. The top three things I hated were meanness, untruthfulness, and surprises…and cockroaches, but, well, they weren’t really important now.

  He smiled as sleep tugged at his lids. “No, you don’t like surprises.” Christophe sounded as if that was a crime against nature. He was probably right. “Papa told me.”

  “He was accurate, but not clear. Bad surprises I don’t like. But presents from boys I love. I like those kinds of surprises.”

  With the hint of a smile teasing his lips, his eyelids had closed and he’d drifted off.

  And I’d left—no lingering, no long goodbyes.

  Almost running for the door, I’d taken a passionate kis
s from Jean-Charles, then jumped in the car and left all that happiness in my rearview as fast as possible. A moment longer in that house, in Jean-Charles’s arms, and I wouldn’t have been able to break myself away.

  I had no choice, not really. Not if I was to live with myself.

  And if I didn’t keep my promise to that little boy, I couldn’t live with myself either. So I had to go, and in doing so, I risked never coming back and breaking a little boy’s heart.

  He’d already lost his mother.

  How did normal people shoulder all of these emotional burdens?

  Whether I stayed or went or never returned had never mattered much before. Now it meant the world.

  Hamstrung by my choices, immobilized by emotional responsibility, I paused for a moment in the doorway to the Babylon, absorbing the energy, the happiness. Behind me, the valet eased the Ferrari from the curb, its five hundred horses at a low growl. Irv Gittings had blown up my Porsche and darn near with me in it. The death of a vintage 911—another in the long list of insults and indignities I’d suffered at the hands of that man. My mechanic had wept when I’d told him. Of course, my temperamental car and I had put three of his daughters through college, but I think he really loved that car.

  All I had left of it was the emblem from the center of the steering wheel. A sacrilege and a loss I was still processing. Gittings had torched my apartment, too. And if I hadn’t been up in Teddie’s place right above mine when the bomb went off….

  Everything I used to be had vanished in a few moments of white-hot heat.

  All the magazines touted the magic of personal reinvention. Personally, I thought they were full of it. I liked the me I used to be. But I would never be that me again.

  The guys at our in-house Ferrari dealership had let me drive one of their loaner cars while I tried to make an impossible choice: Italian or German? I had yet to commit, which didn’t surprise anyone who knew me well.

  When I dropped my suitcase at his feet, the bellman nodded and smiled.

  “Give me an hour, maybe not even that long.”

  “I’ll keep it right here, Ms. O’Toole.”

  A twenty made his smile even wider. “Could you also please have Paolo waiting? I need to go to the airport.” As I said it, the trip became real. Most people would jump at a trip to Macau. Sometimes being me wasn’t all I’d hoped it to be. I wondered if everybody felt the same way at one time or another. I suspected they did, but that didn’t make me feel any better.

  Turning back to the lobby, I stopped and drank it in. The huge room of white Italian marble inlaid with bright mosaics topped by a soaring ceiling covered with Chihuly glass—hummingbirds and butterflies arcing in flight always settled me. The beating heart of the Babylon—a first impression if you will, and as such, hugely important and a priority of mine. My staff would gladly attest to that, generally with an exaggerated eye roll.

  The nighttime playlist filtered through the speakers: Sinatra, Dean Martin, Sammy Davis, other crooners…an homage to the Rat Pack era which birthed the modern Vegas. That was my favorite era in Vegas. I had lived it vicariously through Mona’s and the Big Boss’s stories, which probably obscured the truth under rosy-tinted half-truths. History is always better in the remembering.

  To the left, reception desks marched down the wall under bright tents of cloth. At this time of the morning, the lines were short or non-existent. Only two cocktail servers worked the lines, offering flutes of free Champagne. Give it an hour or two and the lines would swell, requiring an army of beverage servers wielding full trays.

  To my right, across the lobby from reception, floor-to-ceiling Lucite windows separated the lobby from an indoor ski slope, replete with rope tow and man-made snow. The grooming crew readied the hill for another day of skiing in the Mojave—an affront to Mother Nature that attracted young and old.

  Occasional shouts emanated from the far recesses in front of me. The casino lay just beyond the lobby and was separated by our own version of the Euphrates, a meandering stream bounded by reeds and grasses and populated by far too many ill-tempered waterfowl that had apparently studied the rabbit’s method of procreation. The vet on staff earned her keep.

  Bridges arced over the stream, providing access to the casino and the opportunity for great photo ops.

  To my immediate left, before reception, the opening to The Bazaar beckoned. A trail of high-end shops with wares worthy of the most extravagant sultan. The Bazaar also held our wedding chapel, The Temple of Love—frankly, I thought we could’ve done better with the name. Something like the Hitch-n-Git, or The Ball and Chain, or maybe even The Life Sentence, appealed to me, but the Big Boss hadn’t seen it my way. Never having taken the plunge, I didn’t argue. Also in The Bazaar was Samson’s, a ziggurat of beauty and pampering with scantily clad young men, each a personification of the namesake, ready and willing to do a woman’s bidding—my kind of place. I’d been rescued from peroxide in that place. Another new-me thing… Teddie had helped with that.

  Teddie.

  We’d been best friends. That was the part I missed the most.

  The Babylon even had its own version of the Hanging Gardens, one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World. Ours were the only tropical climate in the middle of a desert; at least that’s how the marketing department described it. And I was willing to buy into the web they wove. Thankfully, the web worked and the Babylon captured more than its share of the forty-five million visitors drinking, partying, and gambling throughout our fair city.

  All of these parts together were my home, my Shangri-La, brought to life by the people who gave it heart. If I left for very long, I had no doubt I would cease to exist.

  Leave it to me to have a symbiotic relationship with a place. Okay, not only a place, but Vegas. A smarter woman would’ve picked San Francisco or Paris or Rome even, despite the Italian’s penchant for ignoring the necessities of life like fiber optic cable, high-speed Internet access, and some semblance of a workweek.

  Briefly, I considered swinging by my office on the mezzanine, then even more quickly abandoned the idea. Miss P, my right hand-man, was on her honeymoon with the Beautiful Jeremy Whitlock, Vegas’s preeminent private investigator. Brandy, Miss P’s assistant, was in charge—and she had Detective Romeo to fall back on, which didn’t exactly give me warm fuzzies, but, well, birth by fire and all of that. I just hoped no one burned down the Babylon while I was gone. Yes, I have an exaggerated sense of self-importance—one of my many coping mechanisms along with sarcasm, self-delusion, and a penchant for bad clichés.

  But, as Customer Relations people, our job was to keep the cops away and the hotel off the nightly news or the front page of the local rag, the Review-Journal. Brandy was young, but she was good. And Jerry, our Head of Security, had her back.

  Even more telling, and slightly alarming, especially to me and my huge need to be needed, nobody had called me. I’m a pleaser. As part of my Lucky O’Toole Self-Improvement Plan I was working on that, but the work was tedious and slow, and I lost interest fairly regularly.

  I checked my phone. Yep, no missed phone calls. That was sort of odd, but I tried not to let it worry me.

  Maybe just this once, Santa would lighten my load for a bit.

  Yeah, right.

  The Big Boss’s apartment sat atop the west tower of the hotel—a commanding view from the fifty-second floor. My keycard gave me access to the private floor and started the elevator on its ride to the top. Leaning against the back wall, I stared at my reflection in the polished metal of the doors. Sad to say, I looked as tired as I felt, although just a hint of very satisfying sex softened the sharpness of worry that widened my eyes and etched lines that bracketed my mouth. My hair, back to a soft brown from its original bottle-blonde, just touched my shoulders. A fringe of bangs brushed my eyes. My hips were a little wider than the Standard American Emaciated Look so popular with the younger crowd, my tummy a little softer, but, as Mona said, I should be thankful for my height, which helped cam
ouflage most of my imperfections. All in all, I guess I looked like an older version of the me I used to be.

  Whether I was wiser was still a topic for debate.

  As the elevator whooshed to an easy stop, I pushed myself off the wall and straightened my sweater. My clothes were all new—my collection of vintage couture collected over a lifetime had vanished in a cloud of thick smoke when Gittings bombed my apartment.

  Effectively, he’d wiped out the physical talismans to who I was, and, in doing so, inflicted the worst kind of pain.

  He was good at that.

  At the time I got out with the clothes on my back and my bird, Newton, a foul-mouthed Macaw, who had, despite my best intentions, chosen me as his human. To be honest, I would’ve chosen a few other things before the bird, but the bird was what I got. I still wasn’t sure what message the Universe was sending me through that little bit of serendipity.

  Now wearing non-vintage felt odd, as if I wore someone else’s skin. I was me, and yet I wasn’t, which was unnerving but liberating.

  I ran my fingers through my hair, which seemed determined to hang limp and lifeless. This Pavlovian need to arrange myself well for presentation to my boss was an ingrained habit from years ago. I was fifteen, an eager employee, and for all I knew, the Big Boss was simply that, my boss. I should be mad at my parents for denying me the stability of family, but I didn’t have it in me. And I wasn’t sure ours would ever have been considered stable, or even functional.

  Family: folks who you forgive when you would shoot anyone else for the same transgressions.

  The Babylon had saved me, molded me, until I was as much a part of it as the stucco and stone.

  As I stepped into my father’s, and now my mother’s, main living area, I started running my mouth. Even though my father was just home from the hospital, offense was still the best defense.

  “You do know I have a hotel of my own opening in five days. You do know that, right?” I raised my voice to carry through the room. “I’ve got no business running halfway around the world chasing one idiot, two fools, and a girl who would be wise to steer clear of me.”