Lucky Now and Then (Lucky O'Toole Vegas Adventure)

by Deborah Coonts

  “He was alive when I heard someone running. I followed the sounds to the bathroom where I found you. I had a choice: I could only grab you or the guy . . . not both.”

  “I understand.” I linked my arm through his and looked over at Romeo who was fielding questions from the group. All of them were too engrossed and too far away to overhear, so I continued, “Crider worked the scene after the fire. He collected the remains, didn’t he?”

  My father nodded. “But he gave them to me. I buried them in the desert—just me. No one else went with me, no one else knows.”

  “Who was the guy?”

  “Some ugly-ass muscle my uncle sent to shake me down.”

  “Uncle?” That was the first I’d heard of family.

  My father shrugged, then sighed. “Yeah, our family is well connected. My uncle was in the family business, if you get my drift. I’d left them all behind, but had been stupid enough to take a stake from him when I moved west. I’d paid it all back, but once you’re in, they never let you out. The muscle followed me to Jimmy’s. And no one would’ve believed that I didn’t kill the guy . . . not then. I was the one with everything to gain by that guy dying.”

  “And Crider helped because he’d gone to the dark side, and getting rid of that guy sent a message back east. Crider went good after that.”

  My father pursed his lips and nodded. “Go on.”

  “Okay, here’s where it gets a bit thin. If you were having trouble from back east—a family connection would’ve derailed your gaming license application. I’m guessing that Davis Lovato was greasing those skids.” I glanced at my father.

  He gave me a solid stare. “You’re batting a thousand.”

  “Rumors of philandering derailed Lovato’s bid for the governorship, and that just reeks of Eugenia Campos. So maybe she had him over a barrel.” I kept going, clearly on a roll. “And back to Crider . . . not only did he hide evidence for you, he also found the ring with your initials.” I paused to make sure I had my father’s full attention. “Which he pawned . . . ”

  My father’s eyes turned flinty.

  “Oh, don’t be too hard on him. Going straight took a bit of adjustment, time to break old habits. And that bomb that darn near killed you and Davis Lovato? And the unidentified woman who died in the explosion?”

  “Eugenia Campos.”

  “But she didn’t die, did she?”

  My father looked shocked.

  “I’m thinking you don’t kill people, even to save your own hide. So you got rid of Eugenia for Davis Lovato. But she’d been doing you favors all along . . . so you got her away, probably gave her a new name, a new start, somewhere else.”

  He grinned and shook his head. “Yeah, the two of us, Eugenia and me, we had it all worked out. She set the bomb. While I kept Davis’s attention, she turned and ran out of sight. She plated the bomb and she knew how to blow it. Boogie had taught her. Then Davis put the fix in, sold the story. We didn’t have a body in that car. I was always worried some reporter or something would go messing through the files. I’m sure they did, but the tracks were covered pretty well. Story held up anyway.”

  “What I don’t get is why she came back here eight years after all of this and tried to hook you in to paying for her kid.”

  “Who told you that?”

  “Boogie,” I started. Then it hit me and I snorted, “He lied.”

  “He didn’t know. When he got out of prison, he came back here trying to pick up her scent. He knew how the game was played, and I don’t think he ever believed she’d died in the car bombing—it was a trifle convenient. Anyway, we floated a bunch of stories trying to put him off. In truth, Eugenia married a real estate mogul who made a mint investing in Orange County. They had a couple of kids. She died last year . . . cancer.”

  “Mother?”

  “She doesn’t know. She was just a kid back then, and the fewer the number of people who knew, the better chance we had of keeping all of this under our hat. Lives depended on it. There were all kinds of rumors floating around, Davis Lovato being so high profile and all. Some folks thought Eugenia had gone back east, some believed she’d died in the explosion, some never believed that—you know how people are. But we all worked very hard to keep the story airtight—to keep the truth hidden. Eugenia deserved that. She wasn’t bad, just in way over her head.” My father looked sad. “There’s a consequence to every choice, Lucky.” He sounded tired. “Without her and Davis . . . hell, without all of them, we wouldn’t have gotten a clean start; I never would’ve been able to put my family history behind me and carve a new future.”

  “And they all got what they wanted. Well, except Davis.”

  My father smiled. “You know, that’s the funny thing about life. We all think we know what we want, but sometimes we get something totally different. And years later, when we look back, we can’t imagine our life any other way than it turned out. Davis’s story is like that. He wanted to be a big shot. Instead, he came home to his family, repaired his marriage, raised some fine kids and spent a happy life flying under the radar, but helped to make Vegas what it is today.” He tugged on my arm that was looped through his, pulling me closer. “I’m sorry to keep you in the dark.”

  “I had no need to know. Not until they found those bones and your ring.”

  “Boogie, working every angle. He used to tell me I’d be sorry one day. I had no idea what he was talking about.”

  “Matilda is an interesting angle. Your secretary. And in return for helping you and keeping her mouth shut, you set her up with the French Quarter.”

  “Hell, I just opened the door. She took the bit and ran with it. Best investment I ever made.” My father shook his finger at me. “Don’t ever cross that woman. Not if you value your hide.”

  “She is a force.” I grinned just thinking of all that conviction in that tiny little body. “And young Albert?

  My father’s eyes turned dark and serious. “The only casualty, really. He’s Boogie’s kid. Boogie was supposed to deliver the kid to Eugenia once she got away. He didn’t—young Albert was his trump card to keep Eugenia quiet. She had some photos of Boogie planting the bomb at Jimmie G’s. He hid the kid away, told him his mother had died. You know the rest. You faced him down on the roof of the Babylon. You heard his story.” The Big Boss sighed. “Darn near killed Eugenia, but there wasn’t anything we could do.”

  “And how did he end up trying to track Boogie down tonight?” I held up my hand, stopping him before he could say anything. “You and Daniel told him the whole story when you made his bail.”

  “Enough of it.”

  In a way, I felt sorry for young Albert. And he’d been partially right: my father had orchestrated the events that lead to young Albert being taken from his mother. But the decisions hadn’t been my father’s alone. “So if the bones in the foundation don’t belong to your uncle’s muscle guy or Eugenia Campos, then who?”

  “Jimmy Hoffa?” My father shot me a tired grin. “Seriously, I haven’t a clue.”

  “Burned fragments aren’t much to go on,” I allowed.

  “Then I guess we’ll never know. Life has a way of working out. Vegas could be rough, but justice got her due in the end.” My father put his arm around my shoulders. “Let’s go home.”

  THE END

  Thank you for coming along on Lucky’s wild ride through Vegas. Please drop me a line at debcoonts@aol.com and let me know what you think. And, please leave a review at the outlet of your choice.

  Coming 26 August 2014

  LUCKY CATCH

  Read a short excerpt below

  LOVE and lust—two four-letter words men often confuse.

  More specifically, a certain man . . . the man standing in my doorway.

  Teddie.

  My heart tripped, then steadied.

  Thinner than I remembered, he still had that tight ass, those broad shoulders, spiky blond hair, soulful baby-blues, and a sippin’-whiskey-smooth voice that could warm me to the core, d
espite my best efforts to douse the fire.

  Teddie.

  Despite serious reservations about turning a platonic friendship into something . . . not platonic . . . I had let him lead me into the deep, dark waters of love. And being an all-or-nothing kind of gal, I’d done a half gainer off the high dive and things had not gone swimmingly.

  He left.

  And now he was back.

  As I looked at him and tried to compose myself—it just wouldn’t do to let him see the splash his return made—I wondered how I’d ever get my heart back. The empty hole in my chest echoed with longing, leaving me winded.

  My office phone jangled, giving me an excuse to avoid Teddie for a few moments longer. I grabbed the receiver. “Customer relations, Lucky O’Toole speaking. How may I help you?”

  “We have a problem.” Detective Romeo with the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department started in without preliminaries—not a good sign.

  “What’s this we shit, Kemosabe?” I tried to make light. Apparently I failed miserably.

  Romeo’s tone hardened. “Dead body. Back lot. Somebody wrapped her head in plastic and killed her with a smoking gun. You’re going to want to see this one.”

  “Dang.” I rubbed a hand over my face. “I never want to see that kind of thing. You know that.” I looked up and locked eyes with Teddie, who stared at me, his eyes dark and troubled.

  “Trust me on this one.” He took an audible breath, then let it out slowly.

  “Okay. Give me fifteen minutes. I’ve got to take Christophe Bouclet back to his father.”

  “I’ll meet you there. This one’s bad.”

  As if they all aren’t bad. “Meet me where?” My only answer was the hollow echo of a disconnected line. Romeo had hung up—he knew how much I hated that little bit of rudeness.

  Men.

  I narrowed my eyes at the prime example of the Y chromosome set standing in front of me.

  Teddie knew me well enough to take a step back. “Romeo?” he asked with a forced lilt to his voice.

  I set the receiver back in its cradle, but refused to let Romeo and Teddie get me all worked up. Problems, I could handle—as the vice president of Customer Relations at the Babylon, Las Vegas’s most over-the-top Strip property, problems were my job. And, if I can say anything about myself, I’m good at my job.

  Now, to the most immediate problem. “Teddie, why are you here?”

  Ignoring my glower, he continued, sounding like an old friend stopping by to reminisce. “Your office door was open,” he began in a casual tone, as if the earth still rotated on the same axis. “I expected to find you in your old office. What are you doing back here in this construction zone? Not VP digs. Congrats. By the way.” Teddie paused when his eyes came to rest on the young boy in my lap who clutched a crayon and concentrated on the drawing in front of him. I saw questions lurking in Teddie’s eyes. Thankfully, he didn’t voice them, choosing instead to give me a tentative grin.

  A dagger to the heart.

  A frown was the only response I could muster as my pulse pounded in my ears and I struggled to remain outwardly calm.

  “This early in the morning I expected to see your staff out front,” he continued, ignoring the fact that this whole situation was fraught with possibilities of homicide. “But the desks were empty. Since you and I are . . . friends . . . I didn’t think you’d mind me wandering back here to find you.”

  What was I going to say? “Get the hell out” seemed a bit extreme. And “no, we’re not friends” would have been too hard to admit. Offering to shoot him the next time he wandered in unannounced also seemed a bit aggressive. Maybe. I opted to duck-and-weave. “If I minded, would it matter?”

  Teddie’s smile dimmed and he jammed his hands in his pockets as he shifted from one foot to the other, his shoulders hunched around his ears.

  I took a deep breath and blew at a strand of hair that tickled my forehead. “To be honest, you were the last person I expected to darken my doorway this morning. Weren’t you just in Prague or Moscow or someplace half a world away?”

  “I quit the tour and jumped a plane.”

  Taking a step inside the doorway, he was brought up short by the look on my face. His arms wide, pleading, he said, “I had to see you.”

  I wasn’t buying it. He always was a bit of a drama queen which, now that I thought about it, went with the whole female impersonator gig—I’d just never noticed it before—or it had never bothered me before.

  Ever the performer, he adopted just the right tone—pleading without the whine. “You won’t take my calls. You won’t answer the messages I send you. You haven’t even acknowledged the song. What did you expect me to do?” He let his arms fall to his sides.

  “Expect?” My voice was flat, hard, pounded thin by the hammer of his insensitivity. And the song he mentioned? Every time I heard the thing, he bludgeoned me anew. Didn’t he understand that? “Teddie, I expected you to stay gone.”

  Hurt flashed across his face as we stared at each other and time slowed to a crawl. He looked like he wanted to explore the subject further, but wisely altered course. “Got a new friend, I see.” He nodded toward the boy.

  Christophe squirmed under Teddie’s scrutiny, then leaned back and looked up at me. While I counted to ten and prayed for self-control and a noninflammatory response, I bent down and gave the boy a kiss on the head. He smelled like baby soap, and with good reason—last night we’d used a gallon of the stuff.

  That was before I’d spent the night with his father.

  “Christophe Bouclet.” My eyes found Teddie’s, then skittered away and back again. Knowing me, I had “guilty as sin” written all over my face. But, Teddie’d been the one to leave. So why did I feel guilty?

  Life had just gotten way more than complicated.

  I had absolutely no idea where to start or what to do. To be honest, I wasn’t 100 percent sure that, once started, I wouldn’t finish by grabbing Teddie by the neck and squeezing the life out of him. As it turned out, I needn’t have worried. My cell phone sang out at my hip, saving me from a long future making license plates at the invitation of the great state of Nevada. Actually it was Teddie doing the singing. In a weak, masochistic moment, I’d installed as my ringtone a snippet of a song he’d written not only for me, but about me as well. Yes, that song . . . the one he’d mentioned and I’d avoided. He’d titled it “Lucky for Me.”

  Apparently he loved irony.

  At the first few notes, Teddie’s eyebrows shot up. I hastily reached for the device and silenced it with a stroke of my thumb. I gave him a steely stare, challenging the surprise that widened his eyes. Never wavering, I pressed the phone to my ear. “O’Toole,” I barked.

  “How do you make a thousand turkeys disappear?”

  “What?” I held the phone in front of me and squinted at the display, trying to bring into focus not only the tiny digits, but life as well. The number belonged to Jerry, the voice belonged to Jerry, but the question came out of left field—even from the Babylon’s head of Security. “Jerry, this really isn’t a good time.”

  “Tell me about it.” He chuckled. “I got turkeys down here—the real things. A thousand of them.” Chaos in the background filtered through the connection. “You know anything about them?”

  I glanced up at Teddie—turkeys seemed to abound today. And to think, Thanksgiving was still a few days away.

  “Lucky, girl, are you there? We could sure use your help.”

  As the Babylon’s chief problem-solver, turkeys like the one standing in my office doorway were my specialty. However, my expertise did not necessarily extend to the feathered variety.

  I put the phone back to my ear. “I’m here, but I’m confused. Where are you? And, just for clarification, what kind of turkeys are we talking about?”

  Jerry replied in a rushed voice, “The basement, Level Two. Your mother . . .”

  The light dawned. “Oh God, she didn’t?”

  “She did.” This time he
burst out laughing. “Mona, she is some piece of work. Better get that woman down here. And tell her, if she plans on feeding the hungry on Thanksgiving, she’d better bring her double barrel and a shitload of buckshot.”

  “Some people are alive solely because it’s illegal to shoot them.”

  Jerry laughed. “Your mother . . .”

  “. . . is their fearless leader,” I said, finishing his thought. “But, you aren’t seriously considering turning a pregnant woman loose in the basement with a loaded shotgun, are you? Remember what she did to the sheriff?”

  “Any other ideas?” Jerry’s voice sobered a bit.

  “Fresh out.” I glanced up at Teddie—a frown creased the skin between his eyes as he watched Christophe, who was working intently on his drawing. “And since answers on this end seem to be in short supply, I’m invoking one of my three vice president lifelines and am phoning a friend. That would be you, by the way.”

  “But I called you,” Jerry reminded me.

  “A mere technicality that is not enough for a get-out-of-jail-free card. Mother is your problem. I’ll get her down there. You figure out what happens next. If you kill her, just let me know where to send flowers.” I flipped the phone shut, terminating the call before he could guilt me into more. My vintage Versace suit and Loubous were hardly turkey-taming attire. And I didn’t really trust myself around Mona right now, especially with a gun within easy reach.

  Today was Monday . . . in every way.

  My eyes met Teddie’s and my heart tightened. Would I ever be over him? Christophe stilled in my lap.

  “It’s okay, sweetie.” I gave the boy another hurried peck on the top of his head. “Ignore the man in the doorway. He’s leaving.” With both hands under Christophe’s arms, I lifted him, slithered out from under him, then deposited him back in the chair. “And so are we.”

  The boy wiggled his legs underneath him. Kneeling, he bent back over the picture he had been drawing when we’d been so rudely interrupted. “I’m drawing a picture of you and Papa and my happy-face pancakes.” He gave me a look designed to melt my heart. God help womankind in another ten or twelve years. “See?” He pointed to one figure. “ You have Papa’s shirt on.”