by Andrews
"Why not?" she replied.
I wanted to say because priests were good, and they were men of God, and they were carefully selected, and they were trained, and they were the men I trusted from my childhood, but I knew that was the idealist, the child, the Believer in me rationalizing.
"There just has to be another answer," I said.
"You'd better find it, then," Callie said sadly. "The ring is the marker. You said it yourself. It's how they know who can order the boys for them. Who would know more young boys than a priest? Brownlee goes through Loomis, so she'll know what room they go to; that's what I'm getting. Then Loomis has to contact someone who knows the boys."
"She gets them from the theater. She doesn't call the priest, for God's sake. Jesus, I don't want her to be calling the priest!" I said like some disillusioned child.
Chapter Twenty-three
Callie and I wandered across the lobby of the Desert Star, deep in thought. I was still troubled over the sight of a priest wearing that ring. I was also fixated on the money that Giovanni said went to the ghost.
Suddenly Callie stopped as if something had beamed in on her at that exact second. "The bogus cop who handed us the ticket said ring the vault. But we don't know which ring. I doubt they all have rings that open the vault. Then you said that Sophia was fingering her Scorpion necklace like a rosary, like she was in church. The Eighth House is the house of death. The cemetery is where they place the dead. Maybe she was trying to tell us that the priest's ring is the one that matters. It's the one that opens the vault," she said.
"Okay, how can you deduce that from that?" I stared at her.
"I don't know, I just do. I didn't say I was right."
"The priest comes to the casino?" I asked, incredulous.
"No, the vault is in the church," Callie said with surety.
"The church spooks me out. I don't want to go there until you have something more concrete than a crazy string of deductions."
We walked across the lobby toward the elevators. To my left through the arches I could see Karla sitting at a table in the bar. I pointed her out to Callie, and we headed in that direction. An older, attractive woman was leaning over, bracing herself with her hands on the edge of the table, and whispering in Karla's ear, making her laugh. On closer inspection, the woman was none other than Manager Barbara Loomis. Karla was having a private chat with her stepdaughter, and Loomis seemed to be in an excellent mood for a woman whose daughter was missing—but then, maybe she didn't know it yet. Upon spotting us, Ms. Loomis waved. "Mr. Elmo!" she said jovially. "Are you enjoying the Strip?"
"If the Strip were a sirloin, he'd love it," I joked. "Good to see you again, Karla!"
She raised her glass in an exaggerated but mute hello.
"The front desk told us you no longer work here," I said to Loomis.
Loomis looked at Karla and registered mock surprise. "Is there something you haven't told me?" she asked Karla, who made a derisive sound that dismissed the entire staff as uninformed.
"Well, good. Now that I know I still have a job, I will go do it and leave you to talk to the guests," Loomis crooned.
"And what questions do you have for me today?" Karla tilted her head like a large bird. "Because you never come just to talk; you always have questions."
"We're writers," I said. "Nosy by nature, inquisitive by occupation."
"You might be a writer, but you're also an ex-cop," Karla said smoothly and then turned to Callie. "And you're the psychic who did the hotel ceiling. I knew it from the first day I met you. You two don't think I've stayed alive in this town by bein' stupid, do you? I got more people feedin' me information than NASA. Don't forget that, huh?" She gave me a penetrating stare and held her empty glass in the air.
A waiter nearly vaulted over the top of the bar to get to her as quickly as possible. It was obvious that as the deceased boss's main squeeze, she held sway.
Callie leaned in and spoke softly. "Karla, Rose Ross is missing, and now, her friend Sophia is missing too. Who would know something about that?"
"How the hell would I know?"
"You know every important person in this town, and you know who is most likely to have taken those girls," Callie said.
"Listen, cutie." Karla's voice was cutting. "This is a town of high stakes. You come here, you roll the dice. You get in the way of the game, and somebody removes you from play. It's a big boy's town. The women know that, the ones who make it."
"What if someone were so naive that she didn't know she was causing trouble, or getting in the way of the game, wouldn't there be room to save that person?" Callie asked.
"The only person I care about savin' is me." Karla laughed. There was a brief moment when I thought she might say something more, but instead she rose from her chair unsteadily. I moved to help her, but she jerked her arm away as if she wanted nothing more to do with us either mentally or physically. We watched her, drink in hand, stagger across the lobby, acknowledging employees with a nod or a wave, like royalty, heading for her waiting limo.
As Karla's limo pulled away, Callie approached the front desk and leaned over to talk discreetly to Loomis.
"What did you say to her?" I asked when Callie rejoined me and we headed for the elevators.
"I told her that we know that Mo Black is her father and that Sophia is her daughter and that Sophia is missing. I told her we can't help unless she points us in the right direction, that we need some serious guidance. We don't know who to trust."
"What did she say?"
"She couldn't have said less if she were a figure in the wax museum," Callie said and sounded discouraged.
Callie, Elmo, and I entered our room and all three of us plopped into bed. I missed touching Callie more than I missed anything I could ever remember. I cuddled up to her, wrapping my arms around her soft middle, trying to forget that we had no future together beyond this trip. I missed her too much to care. Callie hesitated a moment and then embraced me. We both felt the electricity between us, but we tried to act as if nothing unusual was happening.
"Feels like a dead end," Callie said.
"Us or the case?" I asked and she ignored my remark. "Maybe it's just a momentary pause. Let's entertain ourselves." I produced the DVD I'd taken from her suitcase. "I think we should look on the bright side—we would never have a sex video of ourselves otherwise."
"You can't be serious." Callie was shocked.
"Aren't you just a little bit curious? It could be sexy, interesting, educational."
"When I think about it, I think of someone invading our privacy, violating us. I don't see it as sexy."
"We should see it, if for no other reason than everyone else in this city has seen it."
"No, we shouldn't. Our lovemaking will just be reduced to those images, the way the camera caught us, not the way the cosmos sees us."
"But now that we're not lovers, we don't have to worry about the way the cosmos sees us, do we?" I verbally jabbed at her. Besides, how can I not look at it! How will we know how badly we've been violated unless we see what half the hotel and the entire Vegas police force have seen?
She crossed her arms and stared at me.
"If you care for me at all, you won't look at it, and you will destroy it," Callie said emphatically, interrupting my mental monologue. "It's negative energy. It's the product of someone's sick, stalking mind. Why would you ever want to see it? It's not sexy. No one captures our love but us," she said. That last sentence was a window opening, a small crack through which we might reach out to one another again. I stared at Callie Rivers knowing this DVD represented a leap from the fork of a twenty-foot tree into the arms of a lover, a lover's fire walk, a blindfolded trip over hot coals, the consummate moment of trust, and I could tell I only had seconds to make the decision.
"Have you ever seen those wedding rings, where the bride's half fits exactly into the groom's half, making a whole?" I asked, and then suddenly, I snapped the DVD in two over my knee and handed her half. "I
think I'll have my half framed." I grinned.
She stared at me for a long moment. "You're wonderful," she said, and pulled me down onto the bed and kissed me so passionately that I knew for certain I'd made a brilliant split-second decision. "You're an odd combination, Ms. Richfield the honorable vigilante."
"Vigilante's a good word," I said.
"Is that what happened, you were a vigilante?" Her tone made me believe she already knew what had happened when I was a cop but wanted to hear it from me.
"It wasn't so much what happened, it's what I knew could happen," I said.
Callie watched my body tense and my mind race. "Say it out loud," she urged.
"Two men kidnapped a woman to rape her at knifepoint. She jumped out of a car doing eighty miles an hour to save herself and hit the road face first. The highway tore most of her face off. In court, her attackers got off because they hadn't yet raped her, and the judge said it was her decision to jump. A woman was cut up so badly that she looked like hamburger meat from the waist down, and she begged paramedics to let her die. She did die and her murderer got twenty years, paroled in six. When men invented the scales of justice, they tilted them in their favor. I would kill someone rather than waste taxpayer dollars on a system that sucks. If justice is random and one guy gets three years for raping, torturing, and murdering a young girl, and another guy gets twenty-three years for having marijuana in his possession, then my justice is just as valid as theirs. And my justice would come quick and early and would most likely land me in jail. So that's why I quit. So there you are. You don't know everything about me either."
Callie tightened her arms around me. "Yes, I do."
"I'm too angry to be a good cop. For all my joking around, Callie, I'm pretty angry."
"Really?" she said. I ducked my head. "Stop being angry," Callie said sweetly with her mouth curled into a slight smile, and she slid her hands up under my shirt and held my breasts. "I'm going to help you wipe away that anger."
"It might take more than one session," I said darkly.
"I anticipate that," she said, kissing me and watching the tension fall from my shoulders and the anger dissolve into lust.
At that moment, I decided to trust again. The silver-haired man weighed on me. The image of him so close to Callie tormented me, but one thing I knew: I could choose to trust, or I could choose to distrust. The choice was entirely mine. The feelings would be entirely mine. The experience would be mine. I would not let it take away my love for her.
This time our lovemaking was evenly paced. We were savoring one another like a pleasure too long withheld. Her kisses were slow and warm and full. I let myself go, completely dissolving into her, not caring if there was a moment's breath after this moment, so long as I had her now. I marveled at how quickly she turned me into a river of wanting and seemed only to want to swim endlessly in me. When I was so wet I thought I would drift away, we slid into that mutual number that is so intimate that there's no deeper intimacy one can ask. With eyes closed and every other pleasure point pulsing and open, we were in one another simultaneously, not knowing up from down, inside from outside, where I began and she ended. We brought each other to climax and lay bathed in each other's sweet smells and wet longings.
"I can't live without you," I confessed.
"What made you decide to trust me?" she asked, stroking my hair.
"Maybe I just wanted great, impermanent sex with you and chose to ignore the other," I said, trying to recover my bravado after such an unguarded statement about loving her.
"I don't think so. You couldn't make love with that kind of emotion if you were reserving a piece of yourself. You trusted me," Callie said.
"I know." I put my head on her chest. "I just want to so much. I love you."
"I love you too, Teague. In fact, I'm in love with you, which is far more serious," she whispered and kissed me.
Did I hear that? I thought beneath the sensual warmth of her mouth. Did she really say she was in love with me? What does that mean? Does it mean the same for Callie Rivers as it means for regular people? Does it mean she's mine in an ordinary sense or just in some cosmic mumbo-jumbo sense?
"It means whatever you want it to mean," she said, smiling at me.
Chapter Twenty-four
I don't know what awakened me. I think it was the sobbing sound Elmo made. I glanced at him, and the hair on his back was standing up. I looked across the room to see what he was upset about and there at the foot of the bed was a man, the silver-haired man from the bar. I gasped so loudly that I almost choked, and I grabbed Callie's hand, but she was already sitting straight up in bed, having apparently seen him first. How long he was there, I don't know, but it felt like minutes. Is he going to rob us or kill us? I've got to get my gun. I reached for it on the bedside table, but Callie's grip on my arm steadied me; it seemed to be telling me not to move and we would be fine. She never took her eyes off him. His eyes bored into hers as if some form of silent communication was passing between them, and then he slowly faded away before our eyes.
"Jessuzzzchrist!" I shouted, once he was gone. "Did you see that? Did you fucking see that? What was that? Omigod, what was that?"
"Just energy from the other side. He came to deliver a message," she said.
Elmo let out a long, sustained, violin-like shriek, and the ridge of hair that ran all the way up his long back stood up even taller in a terrified salute.
"Well, I don't like messages brought to my room like that!" I sank back in mental and physical exhaustion, my heart pounding. "What the hell was it?"
"Mo Black," Callie said.
"This is freaking me out! He's dead!"
"He's trying to tell me something but I haven't gotten it yet."
"So does that mean he'll keep coming back?"
"I don't know. I'm always so pleased when good spirits try to help," she said.
"Oh, me too," I said with shaky sarcasm. "So, this was the man in the bar...the energy you were trying to feel?"
"Yes," she replied. "This is what I couldn't explain, because you wouldn't believe me."
"You've got that right. I'm not even sure I believe it now! The only thing I like is knowing he's not someone you're coming on to," I said. "So from that perspective, I'm wild about him."
"Randall Ross was as terrified as you—probably more so when Mo Black appeared to him."
"Why didn't you tell me the whole story up front?" I complained.
"That I was hired by a man who saw Mo Black's ghost and wanted me to follow up on the ghost's message about someone trying to murder his daughter and—"
"Okay, you make a good point," I said. "I can't stay in this room right now!" I flipped on all the lights and threw on some sweatpants. Callie followed suit. I grabbed my wallet and my room keys, then took a look at Elmo, who had shoved his head under the pillow and was sobbing.
"Come on, buddy, I won't leave you here alone. You're coming with us." Elmo leapt off the bed, obviously anxious to get the hell out of Dodge. Callie stopped me at the door long enough to give me a comforting kiss and to remind me that she loved me. I was still in shock.
"So do you see these.. .apparitions all the time?"
"No, only when I really need information badly. You're surprised that I see ghosts, but you saw him too."
"Holy shit, you're right! I don't want to see ghosts!"
"Then you won't. You'll subconsciously block their energy. If you're not open to them, they won't appear."
"I'm closed. Totally closed," I said. "When did you figure out that you could talk to them?"
"Everyone can talk to them, but most everyone gets freaked like you, and when you're freaked, you can't talk to the people you know here on earth, much less to them. I learned not to be afraid of them when I was young. There was a spiritualists' church in this little town where I grew up. It was a bakery really, but behind the bakery, there was a big room, and that's where the owner, a wild-haired lady with a wonderful face, held her meetings. People would sp
eak in tongues, and sing, and levitate—or at least try. Most of the time they couldn't." Callie laughed. "Mom would go and she'd sit for hours and listen. I'd get bored and slip into the bakery to see if there were any buns left. One night, while I was in there, I saw a lot of flour had been left on one of the big cutting boards. I heard this kind of shuffling sound like a hand brushing off a countertop, or maybe shoes brushing across the floor, and then the flour on the cutting board parted, as if a finger were drawing in it, and it wrote, 'Hello.' I couldn't believe my eyes. I was so young. I gasped in delight, and then giggled. So it wrote 'Hello, Callie!'"
"Are you kidding?"
"I swear. I was hooked. I couldn't wait to go to the meetings and slip back into the bakery and wait to hear from this spirit. Sometimes it didn't write, and then I would think it wasn't there, but it was teaching me to be attuned to the cold rush of air, the sounds, even the smells sometimes. It was teaching me to know when someone from the other side was present."
"You're creeping me out," I admitted.
Callie laughed. "Sometimes it just did tricks, like knocking a pan off the counter to make a big noise and get me into trouble. Someone would pop in from the chapel and tell me to be quiet because I was disturbing the spirits. I wanted to say the spirits are disturbing me! Anyway, one day, this spirit materialized, and it was very faint, but I recognized her as my grandmother. Of course, I didn't ever know my grandmother, so how did I know her.. .but I did. Then she wrote 'Bye' in the flour, and I didn't feel she was there anymore. I guess my lessons were over or she was needed elsewhere."
I had no doubt Callie was telling me the truth. It was simply that her truth was so far afield from what I had been taught growing up and what I had experienced in my life, that I could not have felt more off balance emotionally. One day I was going about my business writing screenplays, and the next I'd met this amazingly gorgeous, psychic woman, about whom I was crazy, and while I was trying to sort out our relationship, I learned that she saw ghosts— routinely, since childhood—and thought nothing of it! The good news, however, was that she wasn't kissing silver-haired guys in hotel bars. As if she knew what I was thinking, Callie whispered, "I'll never lie to you, Teague."
