Vegas Lies ( Lies Mystery Thriller Series Book 3)
Page 5
The trade show. She’d been at the trade show. But why was she here? It still wouldn’t come to her. There had to be a reason. And then she pictured Richard and all her thoughts began to tumble in.
Richard! Of all the people to see. He was supposed to be dead. She needed him to be dead. Nothing made sense. How did she get here?
She was fading. A moment later she was asleep.
She woke with a start. She had a vague memory of having been awake earlier and of feeling sick. How much earlier? How long had she been asleep? Peep still felt a little sick, but her mind was clearer. She thought again of Richard. Running into him was a massive shock to her system. He was the last person she expected—or wanted—to see. When their eyes met, he had tried to turn away so as not to be recognized, but it didn’t work. There weren’t many people his size. If she had seen him in time, she would have immediately gone the other way. But it was too late. Their eyes met and it all went south from there.
She tried to take the offensive, telling him that she would call the police and turn him in, but he wasn’t buying it and responded with a viciousness she had never seen in him before. He had changed. He was harder and angrier than when she last saw him. But of course he would be. The events of that night so long ago had changed both their lives.
They argued in front his booth at the trade show. She remembered it getting loud and she knew she had to extricate herself from the situation, so she turned and ran out of the show. There were some comfortable seats near the entrance to the hotel where the show was being held and she plopped down on one to try to catch her breath and stop her shaking. She kept looking back at the entrance to the show to make sure Richard hadn’t followed her, but there was no sign of him. It wouldn’t make sense for him to pursue her, but it didn’t stop her from looking anyway.
She sat there for almost a half hour, until it was time to head over to the Mirage to meet with Del and Sabrina. Maybe they could advise her on what to do. But how? She couldn’t tell them the whole story, so there wasn’t much they would be able to do to help her. She remembered wishing Mo was there, but at the same time being happy she wasn’t. What would she tell her? She had never told Mo the whole story of that night. Mo wouldn’t understand.
Peep finally decided that she wouldn’t say anything to Del and Sabrina about her encounter with Richard. She would try to keep the conversation light. Would she be able to pull it off? As it turned out, it was all moot. She never made it to dinner.
She had almost made it, and this was where it was a bit hazy in her head. Exactly what happened? She remembered approaching the Mirage, and then there was a man.
She desperately tried to remember what happened after that, but she could only get images. The man put his arm around her and said something about her being drunk. Drunk? Why would he say that? She remembered a sharp pain in her side … and then nothing.
Now here she was. But where was here?
And then a shiver went through her body. She was in trouble.
Deep trouble.
Chapter 11
We had decided to play it dumb, something I had found myself particularly good at. We were just three people looking for a friend who had disappeared directly after she'd had an argument with one of Ludwick’s employees. We would even mention that we thought the employee might have been Peep’s ex-husband.
What we wouldn’t tell him was that we suspected that it went way beyond one person abducting another. It had to. One person couldn’t have been responsible for shutting down the booth and one person couldn’t have been responsible for cleaning out the IT Gadgets headquarters. There was a lot more going on here.
Ludwick himself opened the door at the sound of the Big Ben chimes that passed for a doorbell. I was expecting a slimy-looking skinny guy with a bad hairpiece and a pencil-thin mustache. Isn’t that what they were supposed to look like in Vegas? What we were presented with was a very respectable-looking older man with short gray hair—real hair—and a well-built body.
I didn’t like him.
Was it because he was twenty or thirty years older than me but better looking and in better shape. No, I wasn’t so vain. Well, maybe a little bit.
It was his arrogance that bugged me. I hated arrogant people and this guy’s arrogance oozed out before he had even said a word. Maybe it was his smug smile as he looked at us standing on his stoop. He knew exactly who we were. He had probably learned it from the police or had someone watching us at the IT Gadgets building. However he got the information, there was no doubt he knew. There was no story we would be able to give him that he would believe, and he was waiting for us to try. So I quickly decided to take a totally different tack.
“We want our friend back. You have her and we want her.”
“Well, I didn’t expect that,” he said. Score one for me. “You’re an idiot,” he added, and slammed the door in my face. Score one for him.
We stood there looking at the closed door.
“Um, I don’t think that was the direction we had discussed,” said Sabrina.
“I improvised,” I said.
“We noticed,” said Mo. “Good job.”
“He knew exactly who we were,” I said. “It would have done no good to try to bullshit him.”
“I’m proud of you,” said Sabrina.
What she meant was that when we first met, the thought of stretching myself beyond my comfort zone was unheard of. I never would have done anything like that. Maybe my comfort zone had expanded since then.
“But let’s try it a different way,” added Sabrina. She knocked on the door. When she got no answer, she knocked again. At the third knock the door was flung open and Ludwick scowled at us.
“My slamming the door in your faces didn’t give you a hint as to where this was going?”
“I’m sorry, Mr. Ludwick,” said Sabrina. “My friend here was a bit impetuous. My name is Sabrina Spencer. I’m a mystery writer.”
“So?”
The fame angle didn’t work. He probably wasn’t a reader.
“A friend of ours was abducted by one of your employees. We are worried about her. We are not saying that you are responsible in any way, but we think you know who is. The longer you sit on the information, the less chance we have of ever seeing our friend again. You can be our friend or our adversary. It’s up to you.”
“Hmm, that’s a tough one. Let’s see, I think I’ll go with adversary.”
“Bad decision,” said Sabrina, giving him the Sabrina death stare. I hadn’t yet seen anyone who could ignore it and Ludwick was no different.
There was dead silence for almost thirty seconds.
“Look lady,” he finally said, now visibly uncomfortable, “I run a big company with a lot of employees. I don’t even know half of them.”
“You have a small grungy building in an even grungier part of Las Vegas,” said Mo. “How many employees could you possibly need?”
“Honey, did it ever occur to you that my business is much larger than that?”
“You call me Honey again and I will fucking snap you in two.”
The real Mo was back.
While they were talking, I was looking into the house beyond Ludwick. A young bodybuilder type was standing in the hallway, a set of keys in his hand.
Ludwick had had enough of us.
“I don’t have any information for you. I have no idea who you are looking for, so fuck off.”
He slammed the door.
“Okay, so that didn’t go any better than your way,” Sabrina said to me.
“I have an idea,” I said. “We need to head back to the car.”
We hurried while trying not to look like we were hurrying. Pretty much of an impossibility, but we were pretty good at fooling ourselves. We made it back to the car and I quickly drove off, not yet telling them of my plan. When I was about two blocks away from the house, I pulled to the side of the road in between two parked cars.
“We’re waiting,” said Mo.
“That muscle-bound goon who was standing behind Ludwick in his hallway was holding car keys. He had the look of someone who was about to go somewhere. If that’s the case, I suggest we follow him. He might take us to wherever they are holding Peep.”
“Or he was going to the store to pick up some bread,” said Sabrina. “Still, I think it’s a good idea.”
“Well, we really don’t have a lot of options,” I said. I was watching the street behind us in my side mirror and saw the nose of a black Mercedes poke out the end of the driveway.
“Here we go,” I said. “C’mon, turn this way.” If he went in the opposite direction, I was going to have to make a quick K-turn and try to catch up. Luckily, he came our way. As he passed us I tried to see who was inside, but the windows were tinted pretty dark. Was that even legal? Did anyone really care?
I waited until he was halfway into the next block before I pulled out. I wasn’t exactly skilled at following people, but I had seen enough cop and spy movies to make me almost an expert.
“Don’t get too close,” said Sabrina.
“Get closer,” said Mo.
Of course, the cops and spies probably didn’t have to contend with that.
We drove for about ten minutes until we hit the part of Vegas that housed the second- and third-rate casinos. I wasn’t impressed. This was probably why all the guidebooks suggested keeping to the main strip.
The Mercedes pulled into a parking spot on the street in front of a particularly low-class casino called The Four-Leaf Clover. Yeah, right. I drove past and found a spot on the next block. We all turned in our seats and watched as muscle-head got out of the car and went into the casino.
“Do we follow?” I asked. I didn’t particularly want to hear the answer.
“Of course,” said Mo.
Especially that answer.
“And then what?” I asked.
“And then he answers our questions,” she said.
Just like that.
Chapter 12
We were walking back toward the casino. There were a few tourists on the street. Probably people who hadn’t read the warnings in the guidebooks. We passed a dive bar that reeked of cigarette smoke all the way out to the street. A big drunk guy emerged from the doorway and staggered toward us. When he saw Sabrina and Mo, his glassy eyes lit up and he reached out and grabbed Mo’s arm.
“Hey, Babe. How much for a …”
I swear I didn’t see her do anything, but he was down on the ground writhing in pain in a millisecond. Heck, maybe half a millisecond. Mo hadn’t said a word and just kept on walking. I glanced back. The guy was now sitting on the sidewalk rubbing his arm from the wrist to the elbow and watching our backs through bleary eyes, probably trying to figure out what had just happened.
Before we reached the casino, Sabrina said, “If I can make a suggestion, confronting him in the casino might not be the best idea. If he has connections in there, which I would guess he does by the way he drove straight here, we might be dealing with more than we can handle.”
“Makes sense to me,” I said. “Any ideas?”
“Assuming there is no one sitting in the car, in which case we are screwed, since they would have already seen us,” said Sabrina, “I say we confront him when he goes back to his car. We get in with him. No one will be able to see us in there.”
“I like it,” said Mo. “Meanwhile, I’m going into the casino to check it out. Del was the only one this guy could see through the doorway, so unless they had a camera and monitor set up in the hallway, he won’t recognize me. I just want to get the lay of the land.”
She didn’t wait for our blessings. She was already heading for the door.
“I’ll text you,” she said over her shoulder.
Now we had to figure out what to do in Mo’s absence. We couldn’t just stand there and we didn’t feel totally safe walking the sidewalk. There was another casino right next door to the Four-Leaf Clover. I suggested to Sabrina that we wait in there. She quickly agreed, so I texted Mo to let her know where to find us.
It was pretty sleazy. I was no expert on slot machines, but based on all of the sleek, colorful machines with amazing graphics that I had seen in the Mirage, I was guessing that these were relics from a bygone era. No one looked at us. Everyone was too busy staring at their machines, hoping for the jackpot that—again, I was guessing—was probably pretty rare in this dump.
By the time Mo texted me fifteen minutes later, I was already down $200.
Mo’s text read: He went into a back office. I’m playing a slot machine. It’s a shit machine.
Even texting, she couldn’t avoid swearing.
A minute later another one came through.
Coming out.
We quickly left our machines and hurried to the door. I didn’t even cash out. Why bother? It was going to keep my money anyway.
Our timing was perfect. As we exited the building, so did muscle-head, followed closely by Mo. By the time he reached his car, the three of us were right behind him. He still hadn’t seen us and as he opened the door, Mo grabbed him from behind, did something to his arm that put him totally in her control, pushed him into the car and clicked the unlock button. Sabrina and I climbed into the backseat and shut the door.
“What the fuck?” I couldn’t tell if he was more scared or annoyed. “If you’re here to rob me, you’ve come to the wrong place. If you are Feds, I got nothing to say to you.”
Annoyed. In fact, he didn’t seem scared at all.
Mo started it off before I had a chance to say anything. Just as well. I had no idea what I would have said.
She still had him immobilized and it looked as if he was in a little bit of pain.
“Here’s how it’s going to go” she said. “You can tell us what we need to know or I break your elbow and you will have to do everything one-handed for a long time.”
“Do you know who my boss is?” he asked through clenched teeth.
“We do,” Mo answered. “Where we come from, Ludwick would be considered pretty low on the totem pole. He’s a two-bit loser.”
I had no idea if that was true, although it probably was. Boston was a pretty big hub for the Mob. What I did know was that Mo was really getting into the tough girl character. If she went any further, she would start sounding like someone in a cheesy 1930s gangster movie.
“You were in the hallway when we visited your boss a little while ago. You heard what we wanted.”
Recognition suddenly set in. Now he knew who we were.
“Yeah, you’re looking for some chick. Aaaah!” Mo had just done something that obviously hadn’t felt very good.
“Her name is Priscilla, not ‘some chick’.”
“Okay, okay. But I don’t know where she is. I’ve never seen her before.”
“But you know about her.”
Dead silence.
“Oh please don’t make me hurt you.”
“I honestly don’t know. Really. I just help out Mr. Ludwick. I don’t get involved in that type of shit.”
“What type of shit?” I asked.
He knew that he had said too much and he wasn’t going to say anything more about it, even if Mo broke his elbow.
“Then tell us about Richard,” said Sabrina.
“Who?”
“Big guy. Probably bigger than you,” I said. “Ex-football player.”
“Dickie. I know who you mean. I’ve seen him around, but I don’t work with him.”
“Does he work for Ludwick, too?” I asked.
No answer. That was a yes.
“He’s the one who abducted Priscilla,” I added.
“I wouldn’t know about that.”
Sure he wouldn’t.
“Who would know?” I asked.
More silence. This was getting us nowhere. I looked at Mo. She seemed undecided in what to do next.
“I think it’s time we turn this turd over to the police,” she said. “He obviously knows more than he’s telling us.”
“Dickie?” I asked.
No response. This guy was becoming a real barrel of laughs.
“We’ll follow him and call the cops,” I said. Mo nodded. My heart was pounding. I hated this stuff. But I had to admit that the more I did it, the easier it got. Still didn’t like it though.
I opened the back door and as I stepped out, my foot caught on the edge of the door and I fell out of the car. I saw Mo turn her head toward me, and at that point she must have loosened her grip on the guy. He pulled his arm away and elbowed Mo in the head, momentarily stunning her. He opened his door, leapt out, and ran down the street.
I stood up and dusted myself off. Sabrina, who was still in the back seat, saw to Mo.
“I’m really sorry,” I said. “Is Mo okay?”
“I’m fucking dandy,” replied Mo, touching what was eventually going to be a large bruise on her forehead.
Sabrina dialed Detective Miller’s number and got him on the first try. She quickly explained where we were and that we had just seen Richard going into the casino. She listened for a minute, then hung up.
“He’s pissed.”
“Whatever for?” I asked innocently, knowing full well what the answer was.
“That we took it upon ourselves to pursue this. We should have left it up to the police, yada yada yada.”
“I suggest we get out of the car,” I said. “Brawny Boy might want to get a little revenge and call the police, telling them that we are trying to steal his car.”
We climbed out of the car and stood in front of a greasy looking diner, keeping watch on the front of the casino. After waiting for about five minutes, three police cars suddenly showed up. They were smart enough to arrive without lights and sirens. Miller got out of one of the cars. Sabrina was right. He looked pissed.