Lucky Score

by Deborah Coonts

  DEBORAH COONTS

  LUCKY SCORE

  LUCKY O’TOOLE VEGAS ADVENTURE: BOOK 9

  CHAPTER ONE

  T HE BARREL of a gun pressed to my temple stopped me mid-stride.

  “Put your hands up.” A female voice forced to a deeper timbre echoed in my ear, her breath hot on my cheek.

  Adrenaline surged through me. My anger spiked.

  Saturday night. Vegas. My hotel. A crowd packed in.

  Over my dead body.

  I grabbed the gunman’s forearm, pushing upward. Then I reached up twisting the pistol out of her hand. She yelped in pain as I wrenched her arm behind her, dropping her to her knees.

  My knee was poised to pop her elbow should she even look at me cross-eyed. I stared down at my newly discovered cousin who was more like a half-sister.

  Bethany.

  Only seventeen, she was all arms and legs, big eyes, and bad judgment. “The gun’s a fake. I was just…” she stammered then stopped as the error of her joke washed over her a moment too late—I could see it in the widening of her eyes, the flush of her flawless skin. Her youth mocked me. Yesterday, I’d been just like her—well, not quite as stupid I hoped, but a teenager without a home, without a father—her mother was in an asylum and mine should’ve been.

  I’d been the Big Boss’s problem and Bethany was mine.

  Life had spun full-circle.

  At twice her age, common thought said I’d traded time for wisdom, though most days, nobody could prove it by me. The kids had it lucky—with time they could mitigate stupidity. But, for the rest of us with so much time behind us and the past being the only immutable, our stupidity plagued us with the hope for a cure dwindling.

  I cranked her arm a little harder, forcing home my displeasure and maybe a bit of a lesson.

  “Ow!”

  The crowd milling in the lobby had moved back, giving us a wide berth. Thankfully, nobody had panicked at the sight of the gun. We all were a bit twitchy about that sort of thing right now, all things considered. When I tucked the pistol in my waistband, securing it at the small of my back, the crowd clapped. “Party’s over. False alarm.”

  A few folks snapped photos. Should one of them show up in the Review-Journal, it would teach my cousin a lesson, but I shut down the shutterbugs with a glare. “Don’t even think about it. Privacy concerns trump your right to gain followers.”

  A weak threat in this viral-crazy world.

  Pay-per-follower—the latest get-rich scheme. Thank God I had aged-out of the digital marketing department. If the millennials took over, would they kill us all on our thirtieth birthdays? Fiction becomes reality, thereby consuming the old adage? The way my life normally went, anything was possible. Great, something else to worry about. As if a hotel full of NFL players and their fans, newly-found relatives without enough sense to know firearms in public spaces were rather incendiary, a mother who still hadn’t named her months-old twins, a father who was taking his sweet time recovering from a bullet to the chest, a fiancé who personified perfection, and a former love who didn’t, but who still had a place in my heart—not to mention the scabbed-over bullet wound to my calf that was making me slightly less than my normal impatient self.

  A month after New Year’s and a birthday that sank me further into my fourth decade, and I was hardwired to pissed-off. And I wasn’t sure why. All of the foregoing was nothing more than a whine, none of it anything more than business-as-usual. But something had kidnapped my smile—not that that was all that unusual either since I’m doing all this soul-baring and all.

  My job was Vice President of Customer Relations keeping the Babylon, Vegas’s primo Strip resort casino hotel, in a non-viral space, at least that’s the job they paid me for. Family was a cross we all bore, some of us better than others. Given that my mother, Mona, would try a saint’s soul, and I would never be considered for canonization, I probably fell at the apex of the bell curve on handling familial relations. I could live with that. When it came to my family, resisting homicide was a huge victory. The men? I don’t know. It’s like the adage writers followed me around. Grass is greener? Check. Love is blind? Check. Any port in a storm? Well, not exactly, but close enough considering the green grass analogy. I hadn’t taken the plunge, but the fact that it was tempting was so out of character for this serial monogamist. When it comes to love…women are clueless? Okay, not an adage, but, if it were, I’d prove it, too. And that part about telling myself that fermented fruit juice is the same as eating the fruit when it came to keeping the doctor away? That was getting to be a problem—one I admitted only to myself—but I felt it dogging my heels, waiting to take a chunk out of my butt.

  Do I need to say I’m not handling the vicissitudes of life well?

  Didn’t think so.

  People drifted back into what they had been doing: ogling, drinking, chatting, looking for the next Vegas conquest—normal activities on a Saturday night.

  Don’t let them forget.

  Immobilized by her arm at a painful angle and my hands applying the leverage, Bethany hadn’t moved. Her long hair hung across her face. She wore fatigues and boots, with a hint of face paint still lingering behind her ear.

  I didn’t ease up on the pressure. “That was about the dumbest stunt in the history of mankind.” Only a few months ago, a boil on the ass of humanity had opened fire from the Mandalay Bay Hotel, a horror that tore the fabric of humankind. And no matter how carefully we stitched life back together, the cloth would never be whole again, never be as it once was.

  None of us would be.

  Bethany angled a wide-eyed look up at me. “I just wanted to get your attention.”

  “That was the most insensitive, asinine, juvenile…” The inadequacy of words stopped me cold. “Do you know how many people died?” The horror of that night, the outdoor concert, the bullets flying, people dropping, screaming.

  “You’re right, seriously stupid. I wasn’t thinking. As a joke it—”

  “A joke! A gun is never a joke. Nor are they toys! What the hell is everyone thinking these days?” Treading the line between protecting the right to own a gun and keeping guns out of the hands of psychopaths and idiots required a balance the country had yet to find. “Where the hell did you get a gun?” I growled, my anger spilling over, dousing rational thought.

  “It’s not real. Ow!”

  “Not real?” Sure looks like it.” I gave her arm another tweak, less than I wanted but probably more than I should have. The reciprocal pain of her stinger raced up my arm. “There are consequences to every stupidity. You put a gun to my head; you’re lucky to be alive. Had a security guy been close by…” A security guard with a twitchy trigger finger and a crowded lobby—dear God!

  After releasing her arm, I helped her to her feet.

  “Do you need assistance, ma’am? We’ve been monitoring,” a voice sang out from the phone in the holder at my hip.

  “Speaking of security.” A voice I didn’t recognize and a breach of protocol. He should’ve scrambled a team the minute he saw a gun, fake or not.

  “O’Toole here.” Yes, my name is O’Toole—which doesn’t match either of my parents’. My mother had yet to explain, but, to be honest, an explanation would border on a confession, a confession I didn’t need to hear. That’s how it was with Mona—she hid secrets with obfuscation. She had, however, provided an explanation as to my first name, Lucky. My given name had been her sister’s, Bethany’s mother’s, nickname. I still fully processed that as Mona carried a load of guilt over her sister and what had happened. “Stand down. I got this. False alarm.”

  “Roger that.” He sounded bored.

  “Who is this?”

  “Fox, ma’am.”

  Fox. The guy Jerry, our Security Head, had
been grousing about. “I’m writing you up, Fox. First sign of a gun, you should’ve sent a team.”

  “It’s my first night on the desk, ma’am.”

  I rolled my eyes and let out a heavy sigh. Where the hell was Jerry? A rookie was the same as no one minding the store—and with the hotel full and the NFL in town! “It’ll be Jerry’s call.” Jerry’s toes were safe from me stepping on them, but he’d sure as hell hear about it.

  “Security?” Bethany looked at me wide-eyed as I holstered the phone. Only a few weeks into being a Vegas resident, Bethany had yet to learn that, in a hotel like mine, with cameras everywhere, no movement went unwatched.

  “Somebody walks into a casino with a gun, people get their knickers in a serious twist.” I pointed to some of the cameras hidden among the hummingbirds and butterflies taking wing across the lobby ceiling—millions of dollars in Chihuly glass. “Somebody’s always watching. We can never be too careful.” Had I ever been stupid enough to put a gun to somebody’s head and not meant to pull the trigger?

  After the recent shootings, we’d started x-raying every bag that went up to a room—not one guest, no matter their rung on the food chain, could carry a bag to their room. All of them went through our bell staff. Stuff a couple of rifles in a golf bag and hoist it on your shoulder like you just enjoyed a quick eighteen holes. Nobody would’ve thought anything of it. Now, we lived in a new reality where crazies killed for their fifteen minutes and the news outlets gave it to them.

  Amazing how after one shot of adrenaline I was right back to that night. I rubbed my hands together to keep them from shaking. Of course, putting them around my cousin’s neck would also do the trick. Instead, I pulled the pistol from my waistband. Its heft was slightly lighter than the average handgun with a full magazine “What’s with the commando gear?”

  She brushed down her fatigues. Her Timberlands still had sand on them. “School doesn’t start until the fall, so I got a job.” Shoulders back, she tried to reclaim some dignity. Folks wandering past gave her some serious side-eye and a wide berth, which she tried to ignore.

  “As a mercenary?” I glanced up from my examination of her gun. Nicely balanced, it felt good in my hand. “Before you start at Cornell, I suggest you grow a brain.”

  Lacking even a gossamer-thin comeback, she wisely conceded.

  The end of the barrel had an orange ring around it. “What is this?”

  “Indicates it’s an air gun. I’m working the field at War Vegas.”

  “The new place west of town where everyone dresses up like a Marine or something and pretends they’re retaking Fallujah?”

  “Yeah.” The girl looked proud, so I kept my derogatory thoughts to myself.

  Maybe I was getting old, but I couldn’t see how running around shooting people would advance society. Silly me, but I thought that was the sort of thing we were working to put a kibosh on.

  “It’s so realistic,” she said, her enthusiasm growing. “The guns look real but only shoot plastic pellets—they sting when they hit, but no lasting damage—just enough to know you’re dead.”

  “You do know this conversation is super-alarming, right?”

  I tucked the gun back in my waistband.

  “I need that back. I wasn’t supposed to take it. With it strapped into my leg holster, I didn’t realize I had.”

  “Pretty pricey, I bet, to get all that looks-like-the-real-thing. Don’t they check their inventory in and out?”

  “With the players, yes. The workers are assigned their own pieces.”

  “All handguns?”

  “No, we get to choose. Why are you asking?”

  “Oh, no real reason.” I grabbed her shoulder and dug in my fingers until she looked at me. “Other than a bunch of lightly-trained loonies running around town with weapons that look so much like the real things, it’d be hard for a Marine…or a cop to tell the difference at first glance. And a fraction of a second is more than you normally get when you point a gun at somebody who has a weapon of their own.” I shrugged and readopted a light but scathing tone. “I mean, think about it: What possibly could go wrong?”

  As she opened her mouth to answer, a scream echoed over the crowd in the lobby.

  People stopped, glasses half-raised, their mouths open, their posture frozen as if The Ruler of the Universe had hit “pause.”

  The scream came from the direction of the front entrance. I couldn’t see anything through the crowd, so I started pushing my way in that direction. Bethany dogged my heels.

  One scream fell short of sufficient inducement to run. Through the years, I’d learned women have this weird habit of screaming when they see people they know, or, better yet, people they recognize.

  To be honest, running would have been a bit optimistic. Limping along like Igor, I was a far cry from fluid form. My leg didn’t exactly scream, but the muscle grabbed, demanding attention. Nothing like having a balky body part that still wanted to whine at being perforated by a bullet. Pain brought me to a momentary halt, and I danced around on one leg while I massaged the offended extremity. A month should have been plenty of time for healing, or at least enough to run out of whine. But I couldn’t be so lucky, could I? A weak play on words, but, simple as I am, it made me smile.

  “Are you okay?” Bethany asked from right behind my left shoulder.

  “Never better.” With my ego on the line, I launched off again with renewed vigor. Foregoing my Ferragamo heels for matching flats had been a wise choice. Hemmed for heels, my brown tweed lightweight wool slacks were a tad long, but the fashion police were the least of my worries tonight. The pants were new, along with the harvest-gold cashmere sweater set. The fire had consumed everything to the point that I almost believed it had reduced me to cinders as well.

  Taking my weight only on my toe, I could hobble without whimpering. Still, I nearly took out two children who had no business being in the lobby of a Vegas hotel at this time of night—not that it was terribly late, but kids and a Saturday night in Vegas just screamed wrong. I will admit to often being in the minority on that, though, which made me wonder, if you started life in a casino, where would you finish up?

  Rhetorical question—I was the walking, talking answer. Well, actually, I started life in a whorehouse in Pahrump, but only geography separated the two experiences.

  Bethany, showing a curious flash of wisdom, stayed behind me and didn’t try to rush ahead.

  I hoped the screamer was nothing more than a drama queen low on attention. We had those in spades in Vegas…and it was Saturday night. Probably a full moon, too—the crowd had that kind of vibe. I’d maxed my Fitbit running from one crisis to another. I glanced at my phone. Four minutes to handle the screamer before I was needed elsewhere, not even a challenge for my superpowers.

  Right.

  The NFL memorabilia signing event would end in five minutes, and I’d been on my way to help the former greats of the game make their way to the after-party when I’d been waylaid by a stupid teenager, to the extent that is not redundant.

  A quick dodge around the future wards of the state, I grimaced as my leg let me know what it thought of that, then I bounced off a wall of solid human flesh. Two men, sausages in suits. They didn’t even register my blow.

  “Sorry.”

  Part of the NFL contingent in town to celebrate the San Antonio Marauders becoming the Las Vegas Marauders, or whatever name some marketing firm chose in the future. Given the over-blown morality of the NFL, a big win for Sin City.

  But one that came with a whole new set of problems.

  Completely unaware of my presence, the men stared over my head.

  Bethany tugged on my arm, “Do you know who that is?” Breathless, she stared, big-eyed, at one of the players. I was half-surprised she refrained from drooling.

  “Yeah, I do. Beau Boudreaux.”

  At the sound of his name, Mr. Boudreaux, a mountain of muscles and arrogance, glanced first at Bethany, then leveled a gaze that held a just-try-to
-protect-her in his small dark eyes.

  I might not be able to take him by myself, but I could recruit an army to help if I needed to.

  A bruise bloomed across one cheek. Trouble had already found him. And, judging from the sand that clung to his shoes and the hem of his pants, the trouble hadn’t found him here.

  One small blessing in a night completely devoid.

  But, even though he probably wasn’t on property when he’d gotten crosswise with someone fool enough to take a swing at him, I hoped the trouble didn’t involve the Babylon. The hotel that had released tapes of him laying out his girlfriend with a left jab had just filed for bankruptcy to avoid the litigation costs of going public with the tapes. “No hero-worship here, kid. He’s just another future has-been who can’t refrain from hitting women. NFL is all over him.”

  Boudreaux shrugged as if to say there were lots of stupid women in the world willing to go to the mat for him. He wasn’t the denying type.

  Several months from her eighteenth birthday, Bethany was still jailbait, so I had a little time to figure out how to make her listen to all I’d learned the hard way. “Can we get through, please?”

  Boudreaux didn’t budge. Instead, he turned back toward the front doorway and widened his stance and held his arms out, blocking our path.

  While I considered a swift kick to the back of his knee, another scream echoed over the crowd.

  Okay, not a normal screamer. One scream could mean anything. Two screams narrowed the scope of possibilities to serious.

  I tugged on the sleeve of the NFL guy closest to me, the one who wasn’t Boudreaux. “Can you see anything?”

  “Nah. A bunch of looky-loos in the way. Probably some female all bent out of shape.”

  Ya’ think? That much was obvious, but pointing that out would probably not be in my best interest. I ducked around the two players. The time for measured calm over, this time I picked up the pace.

  She screamed a third time.

  I fought the urge to run.

  The humans teeming in the lobby, their heads on swivels, moved toward the sound.