Vegas Lies ( Lies Mystery Thriller Series Book 3)

by Andrew Cunningham

  Sabrina was still crying.

  “He told us you had escaped. I think it was the best moment of my life—until now.”

  “Yes, reports of my death were greatly exaggerated.”

  Mo came over and gave me a big hug. She peeked into the kitchen and said, “You did good.”

  “Cops are on their way,” I said, “There’s another guy outside, but I doubt if he’s going anywhere.”

  The four girls had tentatively stepped out of the room.

  “Are you Emma’s friends?” I asked. They all nodded.

  “You’ll be happy to know that she’s okay. She’s in the hospital in Las Vegas, but she’ll be fine.” Remembering Emma’s fears that her friends would think she had abandoned them, he added, “She was very brave escaping like she did. If she hadn’t, I wouldn’t be here right now. You can thank her for the rescue.”

  Richard still hadn’t moved. Had Mo killed him? I went over and felt his neck. He was alive, but his hospital stay was going to be a long one. Ludwick, on the other hand, was trying to stand up.

  “I’ll get you all for this,” he said through mangled lips.

  “From a jail cell?” I asked.

  “I have connections. I won’t ever see the inside of a jail cell.”

  “Do you mean your connection with Detective Miller?” I asked. “You can forget that. You don’t own him. That was all a scam. It was just a way to get into your organization. But that won’t be necessary now. I think they have enough evidence against you, with a whole roomful of witnesses. You’ll spend the rest of your life in jail.”

  I looked around. “Where’s Peep?”

  “She’s gone,” said Sabrina. “We missed her by a couple of hours.”

  I heard the dull throb of a helicopter, probably coming through the pipe in the kitchen.

  “I think it’s time to go,” I said.

  With the exception of a snarl from Ludwick, no one objected.

  Chapter 44

  As we reached the surface, I heard the sweet sounds of sirens in the distance and the helicopter overhead. The ordeal was almost over.

  It was nice to be breathing real air again, even though it was hot. We had carried Ludwick up the stairs and deposited him in the dust. He had tried to threaten us again, so I kicked him again in the groin. Could it hurt any more the second time? I felt no remorse for doing it. I was quickly becoming a pretty callous guy. We helped the wounded guy from the kitchen up the stairs and dropped him next to a now silent Ludwick. Richard, however, we left in the house. He was way too heavy to carry up the stairs. Nothing could be done for the two guys I shot.

  The four girls were standing in a pack, all looking very scared. Sabrina hugged them all and told them that it was over. They’d soon be reunited with their parents.

  Ludwick was sitting in the dust, now babbling on about how much money he would give us to let him go, and as he heard the sirens approaching, he talked faster and louder. Did he really think that after all he had put us through, we would say, “Oh, sure, give us x-amount of money and you can be on your way?” We ignored him. What I really wanted to do was to get a shovel and put him out of his misery, but I didn’t think Sabrina would approve. Then again, maybe she would.

  I turned in a full circle, looking out at the desert landscape. I was trying to remember how, a week earlier, we were packing for a few days of glamour and noise in Las Vegas. All I could hear now were the sirens in the distance and Ludwick’s whining close up.

  The police arrived a few minutes later, accompanied by EMS trucks and a flock of news station trucks. Great. We were going to make the evening news … once again. That would thrill Sabrina.

  Sabrina and I had hugged each other about thirty times since we dispatched Ludwick and Richard.

  She was frowning at the sight of the news trucks.

  “Don’t worry,” I said, “you still look beautiful.”

  “Ask me if I care.”

  Even covered in layers of dirt and dust, her clothes ripped and her hair a tangled mess, somehow she was still beautiful. As usual, she would wow her adoring public. The “author/adventuress” definitely looked the part of the adventuress at that moment.

  *****

  It took the cops a couple of hours to sort everything out. Sabrina and I did most of the talking. Mo seemed a little lost—lost and angry. Angry at Peep? I figured I would find out soon enough.

  Sabrina made friends with several of the reporters and was treated to the print and online headlines of the last few days: “Author/adventuress Sabrina Spencer … Missing!” “Sabrina Spencer and Friend Go Missing from Las Vegas Hotel. Did She Run to Get Out of the Limelight?” Some convention goers at BookExpo said that they thought it was all a publicity stunt by the publisher to capitalize on Sabrina’s reclusive persona.

  “They might not be far off,” I said. “After all, you really didn’t want to give that talk.”

  She elbowed me in the ribs and said, “I just want a shower … friend.”

  Even though my name was on the cover of Sabrina’s latest book, I think I was forever going to be referred to as “and friend.” Hey, I had Sabrina and Mo back. That was all that mattered.

  *****

  There was no way we were going to be able to sneak into the Mirage looking the way we did, so the cops offered to escort us to our room. It seemed like there were about three dozen of them. Maybe they were just being cautious. Casino-goers had their cell phones out, taking pictures and videos of the procession. And to think a couple of years earlier, I was just some anonymous slob working an anonymous job.

  Mo was escorted to her room and we made arrangements to get together as soon as we had all cleaned up. She was worried about Peep, but the FBI promised that they would track down the plane that had transported her. Breaking some of Ludwick’s remaining men would be easy, and they were confident that they would find her in short order.

  We showered for what seemed like hours, trying to scrub off the dirt and grime of the last few days. Afterward, we just stretched out on the bed and held each other.

  Detective Miller was kind enough to call us a couple of hours later to fill us in. The Four-Leaf Clover had been raided and shut down. In the basement they found a large cache of drugs that had been moved for safe keeping from the IT Gadgets building. They also found the hidden passageway to the casino next door, so that place of business was also closed down.

  Miller said that Richard was crying like a baby and was implicating Ludwick in everything. IT Gadgets was simply a distribution center for drugs and other illegal items. They had set up booths at trade shows all over the country—after all, an IT booth would fit into almost any kind of trade show—and distributed directly from the booth. The convention gift bags contained the drugs and they were only given out to people who gave the right coded phrase. Larger deals were worked out in the booth under the guise of selling the person some computer crap, and pickups were arranged. They stuck to the smaller, regional trade shows to keep the costs and scrutiny low. The larger trade shows were a little more picky and a lot more expensive.

  *****

  We were eating dinner that night with Mo when the call came in from Miller. The FBI had found Peep. They purposely hadn’t told Miller, or anyone on the Las Vegas police force, where they found her. It had become a major international investigation, and the less they shared, the more effective the results would be. They said Peep would be back in a couple of days. They were going to fly her directly to Boston. By then, we’d be back there to greet her. I still wasn’t sure where Mo had landed with her feelings about Peep. I guessed I would find out.

  Emma’s parents had already arrived and their reunion with her was plastered all over the news. The media weren’t allowed to talk to Emma, but her parents had no problem taking up their attention. They said that if it weren’t for me, their daughter wouldn’t have made it. The problem was, they couldn’t remember my name. They kept calling me "the guy in the desert.” Sheesh! Mr. No Name, that's me.


  The other girls’ parents were en route. The girls had been taken to the hospital to be checked out. They were all admitted, suffering from dehydration, exhaustion, and emotional breakdowns.

  Richard and Ludwick were both in the hospital, too, under heavily armed guard. Their futures didn’t look very rosy. The police and FBI were all over Ludwick’s house and his records. It was going to be ugly.

  The next morning, we hitched a ride to Boston with the FBI. Some of their agents were going to connect with the Boston field office and be there to interview Peep when she arrived. It was nice not to have to worry about Sabrina being recognized. It was the last thing we needed to deal with right now.

  As we were flying home, it dawned on us that we had been instrumental, even pivotal, in closing down a major drug, gambling, and human trafficking operation. How many lives had Ludwick destroyed with his greed?

  And how many lives had we saved by closing down his business? As awful as it had been facing danger and death in the middle of the desert, we agreed that the results were worth it.

  Epilogue

  The next couple of months sped by at a furious pace. Sabrina was interviewed by the media about a dozen times before she finally shut down and announced that there would be no more discussion about it. She lasted longer than I thought she would. The fans and booksellers who had come to see her in Las Vegas seemed to have forgiven her for her no-show at the trade show and were inundating her with tweets, emails, and old-fashioned letters. Every week or so Sabrina would get a box of fan mail delivered to her from the publisher. Sabrina, who had always tried to answer her mail personally, finally broke down and hired someone to manage her social media and snail-mail correspondence. We spent much of our time at the house in Northampton, where we could enjoy some peace, quiet, and anonymity. We took many long walks in the hills.

  I talked with Emma a couple of times by phone and Skype. I had reached out to her parents first, not knowing if contact with me—someone connected with her ordeal—was going to set her back emotionally. They checked with her shrink and were given the okay. In fact, the thought was that it might help her. Emma seemed to be doing as well as could be expected. She was seeing her shrink on a regular basis and trying to get back to living a normal life. One advantage of living in a small town was that the townspeople were protective of their own. When reporters came into town looking for her, they were stonewalled. Things slowly returned to a semblance of normalcy for her. I talked to her parents a couple of times, too. They told me that she was quieter than before, but that the experience hadn’t broken her. That was good to hear. It might take a while, but she’d come back. To help her deal with the helplessness often persisting after such a traumatic event, her parents signed her up for private martial arts training. Mo would approve.

  Her friends were a different story altogether. All four of them had been hospitalized for severe psychological trauma after they were rescued, and none of them had yet been released.

  I would have thought that Lucy, from Sabrina's description of her finally finding her courage at the end, would have been the next—after Emma—to begin to return to health, but that wasn’t the case. She suffered a nervous breakdown in the hospital. Her road to recovery was going to be a long one. Sabrina wondered if Lucy's display of courage in the desert house—having to show her breasts to the men—was partly responsible for her breakdown. Or if it was guilt over being too weak to help Emma with her escape. However, she was assured by the doctors treating Lucy that the cause of the girl's breakdown went far deeper than that. It was the experience as a whole, they said, and not any single incident, that caused it. In many ways, Lucy was in the worst shape of the five girls. Rebecca, Hannah, and Lindy were still far away from going home, but they were each making progress, a little bit at a time. So far there had been no interaction between the five girls, but Sabrina and I thought that would be essential to full recovery.

  Richard and Ludwick were in jail awaiting trial and neither was going to see the light of day for many years, if ever. The evidence against them was so massive—and plenty of Ludwick’s goons were singing in plea bargain deals—that a guilty verdict was a foregone conclusion. In fact, Richard had already pleaded guilty to kidnapping and various other charges in the hopes of a reduced sentence. Ludwick, however, wanted to take his chances with a jury. Stupidly confident to the end.

  Sabrina and I had several discussions about Richard. If Peep hadn’t accused him of murdering her father, would things have turned out like this for him? Yes, he was a con man, but would he have ever gone beyond that? It was impossible to do more than speculate on "what might have been" with Richard. The only clear thing was how easily you can screw up somebody’s life with a false accusation. Peep had a lot to be accountable for.

  Each of the Three Musketeers got a complete collection of Sabrina’s books, an 8 x 10 photo of Sabrina that he could put up on his wall and drool over, as well as a handwritten letter thanking him for saving my hide. I also sent them each a thank you note (without the picture, of course), but somehow I doubt if it carried the same weight.

  We hadn’t seen Mo since we returned to Massachusetts. She took a leave of absence from her teaching job—luckily the school year was almost over—and spent much of her time at the hospital with Peep.

  Like the girls, Peep was in bad shape. The FBI had been able to rescue her from a client of Ludwick's who'd been holding her somewhere in Eastern Europe before she was to be sold and would then disappear into the sex-trade black hole. Physically she was fine—except that the trafficking slimeballs had drugged her up pretty heavily—but emotionally and mentally she was a wreck.

  So what did it say about Mo’s loyalty that she planned on helping Peep climb out of her dark place, even though she had no intention of continuing her relationship with her former lover? Peep had crossed one of Mo's immutable lines by falsely accusing Richard of murder, and had crossed another by not sharing that information with the woman who was supposed to be her life partner, her soul mate. My guess was that Mo probably wouldn’t break that bit of news to Peep until she was able to handle it.

  It wouldn't be over for Peep even when she became healthy. She was going to have to answer for what she had done to Richard. If I had to guess though, nothing was likely to ever come of it.

  I got a message through to Angel, letting her know that her sister was alive, but it went no further than that. I knew that she got the message, but she never responded to me and, to my knowledge, never checked on her sister.

  The two who came out of the whole ordeal pretty much unscathed were Sabrina and me. Sabrina, because her years in prison had hardened her to such things as abduction; and me because … frankly, I wasn’t completely sure why. I had changed a lot since meeting Sabrina, and this wasn’t the first time I had had to kill someone. Was I just getting used to it?

  *****

  About a week after returning, we had been lying in bed one night talking about the events that we had managed to survive, when Sabrina gave my arm a somewhat painful squeeze. She looked at me with a glare that meant business—not exactly her death stare, but the version meant for me. Death stare lite, maybe.

  “Del,” she said, slowly and deliberately, “the next time I say that I don’t want to go somewhere, we … are … not … going.”

  No argument there.

  The End

  Haven’t read the award-winning, Amazon bestseller, Wisdom Spring? Read on for an excerpt.

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  About the Author

  Andrew C
unningham is the author of the Amazon bestselling thriller Wisdom Spring, the “Lies” Mystery Series: All Lies, Fatal Lies, and Vegas Lies, the post-apocalyptic Eden Rising Trilogy: Eden Rising, Eden Lost, and Eden's Legacy, and the Cape Cod terrorist/disaster thriller Deadly Shore. As A.R. Cunningham, he has written a series of five children's mysteries in the Arthur MacArthur series. Born in England, Andrew was a long-time resident of Cape Cod. He and his wife now live in Florida. Please visit his website at arcnovels.com, or his Facebook page, Author Andrew Cunningham.

  WISDOM SPRING

  Prologue

  Looking like a waterlogged waif in the periphery of my headlights, she couldn’t have been much more than five feet tall, and had no belongings that I could see. She was standing on the most deserted stretch of highway you could ever imagine, thumb out in a deflated sort of way. In the darkness and the rain, I almost missed her.

  It’s amazing really, how many things can go through your mind in just a few seconds. In the time it took me to put on my turn signal and pull over, I had already questioned the wisdom of picking her up, flashed to my father’s endless stories of hitchhiking in the early sixties as a teenager, and was presented with the sad realization that even if she turned out to be a whack-job, I really didn’t care. I no longer cared about much of anything. But I was oddly intrigued. How did she get to this god-forsaken spot? How long had she been standing there?

  I stopped the car and waited. Despite it being a major highway, there were few headlights or taillights in either direction. The only sounds were the clicking of the turn signal and the soft swishing of the windshield wipers. I switched off the turn signal. The competing rhythms were going to drive me even crazier than I already was—like two metronomes slightly out of sync. That was better. Without the competition, the windshield wipers were fairly quiet—the advantage of an expensive car.