by Beverly Long
A young woman wearing a very short black skirt and white shirt approached the table to take their drink orders.
“I can speak for their whiskey,” Cole said. “Want one?”
Jules shook her head and ordered an iced tea. Royce did the same. Cole ordered a refill.
As he pretended not to listen, he grew more and more impressed with Jules. She clearly knew her business, knew the details of their financial performance and was very effectively making her argument that investing in Miatroth was smart.
Cole Hager looked convinced. Although Royce suspected that Jules could be spouting pork statistics and asking him to invest in hot dog stands and he’d have lapped it up, because he quite frankly seemed pretty focused on the way her jacket hugged her breasts.
Finally the man, who had looked at his watch at least a half-dozen times during the interview, said that he was late for another meeting and needed to run. He stood and hung on to Jules’s hand just a second too long before walking quickly out of the bar.
Royce waited as Jules gathered up her papers, and then they also left. As they crossed the hotel lobby, Royce said, “Well, that’s an hour of my life that I’m never getting back.”
Jules turned, giving him a look that had probably encouraged junior executives to polish up their résumés.
He was in the wrong. He was being paid to provide a service, and quite frankly, meeting in an air-conditioned bar with Jimmy Buffet tunes playing in the background didn’t warrant combat pay. And he wouldn’t have made the comment to any other client. He’d have kept his damn mouth shut.
But he’d wanted to make some kind of point with Jules.
Which spoke volumes about his maturity level.
“I’m sorry,” he said.
She waved aside his apology. “I’m worried about him. I don’t recall him having a drinking problem, but two whiskeys before cocktail hour begins is hitting it pretty hard.”
“He seemed a little enamored with you,” Royce said. They walked outside and the parking attendant hurried over to get their claim ticket.
“I don’t know about—”
Royce tackled her just as the window behind them exploded in a shower of glass. He shifted, pulled his weapon with his right hand and used his left to grab the back of Jules’s jacket.
“Stay low,” he said.
And then he propelled them both back inside the hotel, away from the windows. “Call 911,” he ordered the wide-eyed desk clerk.
Then he turned his attention to Jules. She was pale and her breaths were coming fast and there was, oh, God no, blood running down her face. Had she been hit?
“You’re bleeding,” he said. “Get me a damn ambulance,” he roared.
Then, with one eye still on the door, he grabbed her hand. “Sit,” he said, pulling her into a nearby armchair. He took a closer look at her injury. She had a horizontal slice at the edge of her hairline, and blood was trickling down the right side of her face. The cut was a half-inch long and he had no way of telling how deep.
It was not a bullet hole.
“I think you caught a glass fragment. You’ll be fine,” he added, reassuring himself more than her.
“Okay,” she said, sounding dazed.
He saw two middle-aged men, both in blue suits similar to what the assistant manager at the Periwinkle wore, quickly exit an elevator. The desk clerk pointed their direction. The men split—one headed toward him and Jules while the other tried to calm a group of women travelers who were screaming.
Jules wasn’t screaming and the good news was that she looked a little less dazed. “What the hell just happened?” she asked, her voice still weak.
“My guess is a high-powered rifle from about a thousand yards out. Just sit tight. Help is on the way.”
Blue Suit stopped in front of them. He had a name badge. Kent Meartz—Manager. He stared at Jules, at the blood that was trickling down her face.
“We’ve called an ambulance,” he said. He wiped away the sweat on his upper lip.
Royce could hear it coming. The siren was getting louder.
But he realized it wasn’t going to get there fast enough when he saw two things that made him unhappy. The first was Cole Hager. He was across the lobby, statue-still, looking right at Jules.
But before he could make eye contact with the man and let him know to keep his damn distance, the man turned and left, practically running.
Now, wasn’t that interesting.
But Royce didn’t have time to think too much about it because the second thing that had made him unhappy was gaining ground. Two men and a woman were running across the lobby, toward the shattered window. He recognized the woman as a local news anchor. One of the men with her had a camera around his neck.
“How the hell did they get here so quickly?” he muttered.
The manager turned to look. Then looked back at Royce, looking even more miserable. “The staff from News 7 uses one of our meeting rooms every other week. Team building.”
Royce looked at Jules, and she had enough spirit to roll her eyes.
He stepped in front of her just as the trio spotted them and veered to the left. Like dogs looking for meat, they trotted over.
“I’m Sky Barker from Channel 7,” she said. “What happened here?”
“No comment,” Royce said.
The guy with the camera took the lens cap off.
The siren noise was now blaringly loud. The paramedics had to be right outside the door. “You’re impeding medical care,” Royce said. He knew he couldn’t keep them from covering a legitimate news story, but he was going to give it the old college try. “Please move out of the way,” Royce said, pointing across the lobby.
Thankfully, the manager seemed to have his head in the game and he motioned for the trio to follow him. “Our general manager will provide a statement for the press.”
Royce remained stationed in front of Jules until they were across the lobby.
“Hey,” she said, “how do you know it was a high-powered rifle from about a thousand yards out?”
Royce turned to smile at her. “Not going to let that go, huh?”
“No.”
“I saw a glint of something.”
“And you knew, just from that?”
“I managed to stay alive in countries where there were plenty of people hoping for a different outcome. You learn not to waste a lot of time when you see something that doesn’t look just right.”
“Do you...” She swallowed hard. “Do you think someone was shooting at me?”
“Given what else has occurred since you arrived in Vegas, I don’t think we can make any other assumption,” he said.
She let her head drop. “I really wish I’d said yes when Cole Hager encouraged me to have a whiskey.”
He didn’t mention that he’d seen the man staring at Jules. But that didn’t mean he’d forgotten it. As far as he was concerned, Cole Hager had some explaining to do.
Chapter 9
Royce had saved her life. Again.
Because he’d seen a glint of something.
Amazing.
She simply had no words. But there was no time for them anyway because the paramedics had entered the lobby and were moving quickly in her direction.
A young man who looked barely legal to drive slapped a blood-pressure cuff on her and looked satisfied when it was 115 over 72. Then he used a penlight to temporarily blind her as he checked her pupils. Finally, he examined the cut on her head. After a little poking, he ripped open some antiseptic pads to clean it. He said, “I’m pretty sure there’s no glass in it, but I think it’s deep enough that you’re going to want to get it stitched up.”
That was enough that when the police arrived a few minutes later and wanted to talk to her,
Royce interceded. He gave the officer both their names and his business card. Then he said she’d been advised to seek medical treatment and asked if she could please provide a statement later.
The words were a request but it seemed rather like a forgone conclusion the way he said it.
Luckily the cop didn’t take offense. If she had to guess, he was mostly relieved that nobody had taken a bullet at the scene and nodded that they could go.
Before she knew it, they were in his car, on the way to an urgent care center that he looked up on his smartphone. As he drove, he was constantly checking his mirrors. “Are we being followed?” she asked.
“Nope. I’m making sure of that.”
“That’s good then, right?”
He nodded. “Yeah, but I have some bad news. As we were exiting the hotel, I saw the photographer. I think he might have gotten a picture.”
She waved a hand. “Nobody watches network news anymore.”
“I’m more worried about how you’ll trend on social media.”
“Ugh.” That made her head hurt more than any chunk of glass ever could. They drove for another minute. “I’m going to have to tell Charity. And Barry so that he can handle the board. And—” she stopped and slid a sideways glance his direction “—if the story gets any traction, probably my father.”
To Royce’s credit, he didn’t crash the car.
“Give him my best,” he said as they pulled into the medical facility.
He stayed close while she gave the receptionist her insurance information. When they called her name, he stood up.
“You don’t have to come back with me,” she said.
“I do,” was all he said.
Once they were in a treatment room, a nurse came in, took her blood pressure again, looked at her eyes again and took her temperature. She keyed everything into a laptop computer and then advised them that a doctor would be right in. Fifteen minutes later, she was proved right.
“A couple stitches should do it,” Dr. Michele Snider, a middle-aged woman who needed her roots tidied up, pronounced after looking at her cut for about five seconds. “I don’t think you’ll even have a scar,” she added.
“There go my bragging rights,” JC said. She smiled at Royce but he didn’t smile back.
Once the stitches were in and covered with a small bandage, she finally pulled a mirror out of her purse to look. She studied her reflection for a minute.
It wasn’t great, but if she parted her hair just a little differently and swept her bangs to the side, it was possible that nobody would even know.
“I should give the police a statement,” she said as they walked back to the car.
“Do you feel up to that? Maybe you should go home and rest.”
“I think I’d prefer to get it over with.”
Royce nodded and scanned through the contacts on his smartphone. In just minutes, he’d connected with the Las Vegas Police Department.
When Royce ended the call, he said, “We got lucky. Mark Mannis is the detective on the case. I met him a few years ago and he’s solid. He’s going to meet us at your hotel in twenty minutes.”
The drive to the hotel took ten minutes. While they were in the car, JC called Barry. He was upset to hear that she’d been injured and really not happy that the news might have snapped a picture. She played it down. Finally, he said he would inform the executive committee of the board but not the full board, unless the story got more play than she anticipated.
Once inside the hotel, she was relieved to see that the suite was empty. She wanted to get the next part over with before she had to talk to Charity.
Ten minutes later, the detective showed up. JC could immediately tell why Royce had been satisfied with Mark Mannis. He was early fifties, had a confident handshake and a professional demeanor.
“Can you tell me what happened?” he asked, addressing the question to her.
“I was a couple seconds behind the action,” she admitted, “but I’ll do my best. We had just exited the hotel and Royce was handing our parking voucher to the attendant. The next thing I know, I’m on the ground and a bullet has hit the window behind me.”
Detective Mannis turned to Royce. “What did you see?”
“Glint of light, about thirty degrees off the horizon.”
“Good eye,” Detective Mannis said. “I’m sorry, Ms. Cambridge, that you had the bad luck to be standing next to Ramone Jakarati when his brother’s war followed him to work.”
Huh? What the heck was he talking about? She looked at Royce but he was frowning at the detective. “I don’t understand,” she said.
“Ramone Jakarati’s older brother has known gang affiliations. We believe he was responsible for a couple murders of rival gang members that occurred this past month but we don’t have quite enough yet to arrest him. Today, the rival gang tried to exact their own justice by killing Ramone, which is a damn shame because Ramone mostly keeps his nose clean. He has parked cars at the Wallington since it opened.”
Royce stood up. “So you think that we got in the middle of a gang war?”
“It’s the most reasonable explanation,” the detective said.
Royce shook his head. “You might not think that once you hear Jules’s story.”
The detective looked between the two of them. “I’m listening.”
Royce motioned for her to tell it. She tried to be concise as she told him about the three letters and the car almost striking her. When she finished, he didn’t say anything for a minute.
Finally, he shifted in his chair. “I want to congratulate you on your decision to hire Royce. Wingman Security is very good at what they do.”
She had not told him about her history with Royce and did not intend to.
“I guess we’re not going to know for sure whether this attack was directed at you or at Ramone until we catch the shooter,” he added.
“What are the chances of that?” she asked.
He shrugged. “Based on where the bullet hit the glass and ultimately landed, we’ve identified a likely origination point. Now that we’ve gotten this additional information, we’ll go back and take another look.”
She’d complicated their open-and-shut case, making them question what they believed to be true.
Well, that was fair. She, too, was feeling rather undone by the last hour. She’d gone from denial, thinking the letters were simply ugly stupid threats, to accepting that someone really wanted to hurt her. It had been a painful transition. Now she was back to thinking that there was a chance that it had been much ado about nothing.
“In the meantime, I think you’re going to want to be careful, Ms. Cambridge,” Detective Mannis said.
Royce would probably want to put her in bubble wrap. She’d be lucky if she could stub her toe. “Of course,” she said. She stood up. Both men did, as well.
The detective shook hands with both of them and then Royce walked him to the door. When he came back into the room, he looked tired. She suspected she looked the same. It had been quite a day. At eight o’clock this morning, neither of them had realized the other was in Vegas. Late morning, it had been the altercation at Charity’s apartment. Midafternoon had them ducking bullets. And now, with dinner on the horizon, confusion was the theme of the moment.
“What do you think?” she asked.
“I don’t know. About all I’m certain of is that the shooter was a bad shot. Regardless of whether he was aiming for Ramone or for you, he missed you both.” He looked up from his folded hands. “Not that I’m sorry about that,” he added, with the sleepy smile that she’d always loved.
She felt her heart lurch in her chest. For the moment, she’d felt as if the last eight years had slipped away. That smile was the one she would often see early mornings, after she and Royce had awakened from
the night and made love as the sun had risen.
“What?” he asked.
She felt the heat all the way up to her ears. She sure as hell wasn’t telling him the truth. “I was thinking that I should put a couple dollars into one of the machines. I think this might be my lucky day.”
He didn’t answer because both of them heard the door of the suite opening. In walked Charity, wearing shorts and a bikini top with a beach towel draped over her shoulders. She was really way too thin. She carried a book.
“Hi,” Charity said, looking at them. “What’s going on?”
“We were discussing dinner,” JC said easily. She willed Royce to go along. “What’s your pleasure?”
“Can we go out?” Charity said.
“We’re eating in,” Royce said immediately. He leaned forward, toward the coffee table, and pushed the hotel restaurant menu in her direction. “Here’s your choices.”
She looked for a few minutes and then tossed the menu down. “I’ll take the shrimp scampi,” she said. “I’m going to shower first.”
JC waited until she heard the bedroom door open and shut before she spoke. “Thank you. I’ll let her get cleaned up and then tell her. I’m going to give her just enough that if she sees something, she’s not totally surprised but not so much that she gets nervous.”
“I hope you’re nervous,” Royce said. “It might give you the edge you need.” He handed her the menu. “What would you like?”
Her appetite had been lost somewhere between getting shot at and getting stitches at the urgent care center. But she knew that she needed to eat. “Crab cakes,” she said after quickly glancing.
He picked up the phone and rattled off Charity’s order, then JC’s, and finally ordered a steak for himself. After he finished, he hung up. Then, seeming a little ill at ease, he picked up the wine list.
“They’ve got a nice pinot noir,” he said. “Maybe I should have gotten you a glass of that.”
Had he remembered that was her favorite wine? She reached for the drink menu. He was right. It was a small Oregon vineyard with a great reputation for their pinots. Not everyone would know that. “You didn’t used to drink wine,” she said.
