Lucky Score

by Deborah Coonts

  “Long enough the guy was gone.”

  “Not Brandy?” With her black belt, she would more likely kill him than knock him out.

  “She would never.”

  “Agreed.” I savored a sip of 101, letting the fumes work their way into my sinuses. “Don’t you think it’s a bit pat that the knife had been wiped before Ponder grabbed it?”

  “Only if Ponder wasn’t planning on getting away with it, which would be beyond stupid. The M.E. also said the handprint matched Ponder’s. He’ll test the blood, but it’s looking bad for Mr. Ponder.”

  “Looking bad is hardly an airtight case.” I wrapped my hands around my glass—one ice cube to avoid bruising the bourbon. Bourbon was one of those lovers your mother warned you about. The kind you sought solace from after a particularly odious day. The kind who warmed you up but left you feeling worse. The kind who stole a key to your place and kept showing up until one day you came home and everything was gone. I took a sip, flirting with disaster. I was okay. But a voice deep in the recesses of my soul whispered, “I was fine until one day I woke up in a gutter and couldn’t remember how I got there or where I belonged, or even who I was. That person I was had moved on without leaving a forwarding address. A long road back, Lucky; start now.” I took another sip and ignored the whisper of truth. “Did the M.E. have a time of death?”

  “You know those guys won’t swear to anything other than a several-hour-window unless they have a stopped watch or the whole thing on video.”

  “An hour before Ponder showed up in my lobby? Less?”

  “That fits the window of opportunity.”

  Not exactly what I wanted, not that that was unusual or anything. “Did you get any more out of Ponder?”

  “Same song; he doesn’t remember much but swears he was at some private game.” Romeo’s disbelief was evident. “The guy was stoned out of his mind. But he had the murder weapon and half the world has heard him swear to kill Lake.”

  “But why? Where’s his motive?” I took a sip of my firewater and relished the burn all the way to the warm explosion in my stomach. Closing my eyes, I could feel the warmth spread through me, banishing the chill of reality. “He had the murder weapon, but he didn’t have a gun. When were you going to tell me Lake had been shot before someone finished him off with the knife? Or were you hoping I’d just skim over that part?”

  “I don’t like your tone.”

  “Ah, that’s a page out of my playbook—offense is the best defense. It’s the only tack when you don’t have one.”

  “I figured you saw it.”

  I wanted to believe him, but this wasn’t how we normally did things. In fact, nothing about this was normal in any way. “And the Secret Suite? Did you think you didn’t have to tell me about that either? Why, because I’d find out about it eventually? What the hell have you gotten yourself into?” My voice splintered like tempered glass taking a blow. As I said, I don’t deal well with disappointment, and I deal even less well with being intentionally cut out of the loop.

  Romeo motioned to the bartender. “One just like that,” the detective said as he pointed to my drink. “But make it a double.”

  “That is a double.” The bartender wiped out a glass with a bar towel and set it in front of Romeo.

  “Then make it a double-double.” He darted a look in my direction. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  I counted to ten. That didn’t even begin to put a dent in my anger, but it was all I had so I counted again, this time to thirty, then I gave up.

  “How far’d you get?” I knew he was chasing something or someone, even if he wouldn’t tell me.

  “Not nearly far enough.”

  Curiously though, I had gotten pretty far. Romeo wasn’t doing an end run. That was not who he was, not what we were. And the endgame of that line of thinking had me even more worried—the kid was in way over his head, and he was trying to handle it on his own.

  But I’d have to be clever to get the truth out of him. He was still a guy and suffered from the Curse of the Y-chromosome. “Sergio says you asked him to comp the suite for a party—a very special, private party. What’s going on?” I also wanted to ask him why he hadn’t asked me for the suite, but I knew the answer. He didn’t want me to know. “Did you ask Sergio to do that?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Why?”

  “To see what happens and who shows up.”

  “That’s not an answer.”

  “It’s all I’ve got.”

  “You mean it’s all I need to know.”

  “No. Unfortunately, it’s all I’ve got—a few loose ends that, when I tug on them, they lead me here and to this party. All I can do is stir the pot and hope something jumps out.”

  “Terrific. Will you be there?”

  “I’m not sure. I can’t figure a way to work it. Cops aren’t exactly welcome at the hippest parties.”

  “Ah, Grasshopper. No man is an island.” He did me the courtesy of smiling. “You must rely on your friends.” I pulled the chip out of my pocket. “I have an invitation.”

  “No way are you going by yourself. Lake was killed. This isn’t a game.”

  “Sure it is, just with higher stakes. But I’d never go by myself. I’m smarter than that. I’m bringing reinforcements.”

  “Jean-Charles?”

  Both eyebrows shot toward my hairline. “I don’t know what this party’s about, but I have a feeling it wouldn’t be his crowd.”

  “True.” Romeo kept his expression passive.

  Even still, I was getting a glimmer as to what I might be in for.

  “Who’s going with you?” he asked casually as he took a long draw on his drink.

  “Teddie and Jordan.”

  Romeo threw back the rest of his double-double, then signaled the bartender. “More, please.”

  “How much more, sir?”

  “Enough.”

  The bartender started to comply, then retreated at my scowl. “You’ve already had enough, Grasshopper.”

  The fight left him, his shoulders slumped, and he looked like the kid he’d been a week ago. “Lucky, I gotta play this out. It may all end up taking me out, but I have no choice. I’m not going to take you down with me.”

  I was a bit player in a B movie. I knew it!

  Being at the party put me in the crosshairs more than him, but I didn’t point that out. And arguing him off his lofty perch of martyrdom would be impossible, so I switched gears. “What about the Fentanyl? Just like Jerry, Ponder could’ve gotten into that and not known it.”

  “And it should’ve killed him, but by some weird quirk of fate, it didn’t.”

  I didn’t believe in quirks. Instead, I accepted them as a challenge.

  “Jerry’s only alive because we were there to intervene.” Romeo stared down into his empty glass as if divining wisdom.

  “That’s not where you’ll find what you’re looking for.”

  “You should know.”

  I winced at the sting of the truth.

  His face crumpled. “Sorry.”

  I laid a hand on his arm. “Don’t be. Friends are good for the truth. I’m still confused as to what the drug thing was about.” I wanted another hit of joy juice, but Romeo’s words stopped me, for a moment. Tonight wasn’t the night to draw my line in the sand. I took another hit.

  “It’s a way to kill somebody that might look self-inflicted and accidental.” Romeo trotted out his flair for the obvious.

  Or at least, I considered it obvious, though I wasn’t one to rub salt in wounds. “True, but it doesn’t feel right. Ponder had won. Lake lost. Why kill him now?”

  “Ego.”

  I swiveled my stool so I could face the young detective. I thought about calling him out on his drink choice, but I didn’t live in that pulpit, even though he apparently did. “Ego? You’re shitting me, right? Men are really that…” At a loss for the perfect adjective, I let it hang.

  “Some are.”

&n
bsp; A reality two-by-four to the forehead I could’ve done without. “How does one live in a world where half the population is still struggling to overcome Neanderthal tendencies?”

  “Not half. I said some were. Not sure of the percentage, but alcohol, drug use, and women dramatically derail a male’s thought processes; and no, before you ask, that is not oxymoronic.” Romeo motioned the bartender over.

  At his questioning look, I shrugged. Maybe a liquored-up Romeo would tell me what I wanted to know.

  “Moronic, for sure,” I groused. Men as a whole were at the top of my shit list.

  When the bartender filled Romeo’s glass to within a hair of the lip, he stared at it in rapture; then he shook his head. “Why do I get the feeling we’re self-medicating and that can’t be good?”

  “Because we are, and it isn’t. But it keeps my head from exploding.”

  “There is that. But, for the record, something’s got to give or it’s going to get ugly.”

  I didn’t have a rejoinder. He was right, not that I would admit it, not out loud anyway—that would make it real. I had more than enough real right now.

  He rooted in his inside coat pocket and retrieved a plastic bag, which he set in front of me. “Recognize this?”

  I didn’t touch it. Touching it would make it mine. Stupid I know, but I really wanted to get stupid drunk tonight so another kind of stupid didn’t slow me down. I stared at the disk in the plastic bag. A chip. One of ours. A thousand-dollar denomination.

  Ponder had one just like it, or at least I thought they were the same. “Is that the one Mr. Ponder had?”

  “No.” He pulled out another bag labeled with Mr. Ponder’s name.

  I added the one I’d found to the mix. “Found this second one in the Secret Suite.” At his quizzical look, I filled him in, and then put my chip back in my pocket. I pointed to his new one. “Where did you get this?”

  “One of the techs found it at War Vegas.” Romeo took greedy gulps of his Wild Turkey.

  “Ponder could be right about being at a private table.”

  “Or somebody is spending a bunch of money to make us think so.”

  I couldn’t argue. “Go easy. That’s 101; it has a bite.” I should know.

  “Shut up” was easy to read in his look. “It makes it all seem like a bad episode of CSI or something.”

  “That party is getting more and more interesting. You really are taking a stick to a nest of snakes, aren’t you?” My maternal instincts stirred. He’d been my protégé. Now he was my equal…more or less…but I still felt protective. And I felt like giving him a good spanking. I saved us both the embarrassment by following his lead and draining my glass. The bartender was ready with the bottle for a refill.

  Part of me wanted to say no, the part with no voice. I watched as he filled my glass as he had Romeo’s. A serious amount of booze. I stared into the amber liquid in my glass, divining the wisdom it offered—precious little. I should take that as a warning. Instead, my phone dinged, saving me from a fleeting prod of virtue.

  A text.

  When will you be coming home? Should I pick you up?

  Jean-Charles. A man most women would kill for. I looked at the rock on the ring finger of my left hand. Why did it feel like a ball and chain rather than a ticket to a happy life?

  What was wrong with me?

  Not sure when. Up to my ass in alligators.

  Be safe. Love you.

  So simple, yet so hard. I pocketed my phone.

  Romeo shook his head.

  “What?”

  “Nothing.”

  I knew that inflection of nothing and its subtext. “Don’t go there.”

  “What?”

  “Beating someone senseless with advice about their love life is usually a minefield best avoided.”

  “Never stopped you.” He took another greedy gulp. “Mixed metaphor, by the way.”

  “Now look who’s the critic. Do as I say, Grasshopper, not as I do.”

  “Convenient.”

  Witty repartee eluded me at the moment, so I sidestepped.

  I wanted to assure him that we all had choices, but, to be honest, that wasn’t always true. And the kid was smart enough to know the angles, the options. And I wasn’t even in the game, so it was hard to give advice that would mean anything. “What can you tell me about Senator Lake?”

  “He’s dead.”

  “Cute.” I fixed the kid with a stare, which he avoided. “You going to tell me what’s eating you? What game you’re playing?”

  He shook away my question. “I can’t. Not now anyway.”

  I could tell he wanted to, that he needed help in the worst way. If I managed my pushiness correctly, I could get it out of him. Problem was, I wasn’t sure I had any finesse left. “Lake was wearing Fox’s jersey from high school.” I filled him in on Boudreaux’s story.

  “The fact that you make those weird connections before the ink is dry on my notes has stopped bothering me,” Romeo said, his tone saying the opposite.

  “That’s why you’re here. You need me. We need each other.”

  He shrugged in unwilling acceptance. Experience had taught me how to read his non-verbal signals.

  “So, who killed Lake?”

  “I’m just digging into all this, Lucky. Why don’t you just consult your magic crystal ball?”

  I knew better than to grab that fight-bait—we were both having a bad night, so it would get ugly. I didn’t do ugly anymore.

  Drama. I was so over it.

  Ely was cropping up too often to be ignored—and, trust me, Ely was so far from anywhere it was easily ignored. Was this all about something that happened in Ely a long time ago? Or did someone want us to think it was? If it was, then what was the Ponders’s connection to Ely, Nevada, a place neither of them would be caught dead, I felt sure.

  I needed boots on the ground. Who did I know in Ely?

  Daisy Bell. My aunt’s illegitimate daughter who’d gained some cache, couldn’t remember what. An expert at laying low, she’d be impossible to find without my aunt’s help. Last I’d heard, Daisy Bell was turning tricks in the local watering hole. Her mother had paid off the constabulary, saying Daisy needed to wake up in the morning with a purpose. From my interaction with her, I was pretty sure she started each day with a hangover. Probably not the purpose her mother intended.

  Romeo gave me a half-grin. “Don’t take the trip to Doomsville with me. You wouldn’t like a place where life is gloomy and the future uncertain.”

  “True that. Lake could’ve set it all up.”

  “Except for one small fact.” He sounded pretty pleased with himself. And it was just like him to hold the best for last.

  “Yeah?” I used my feigned disinterest as a goad in case he had visions of milking this.

  “Ponder called Lake from his cell about an hour before the beginning of the M.E.’s time-of-death window.”

  The case against Ponder was stacking up like a bunch of form-fitting bricks. A bit too pat for my taste. “But, if he knew Ponder was gunning for him, why would he meet him in the dark where everyone was carrying a weapon?”

  “Maybe Ponder gave another reason for the meet? Questions with no answers, right in your wheelhouse.”

  “If I could get Jerry back in-house, I know he could sniff out a private table, even if they worked hard to hide it.”

  “Whose job is it to monitor that kind of stuff? I’m sure the Gaming Commission is totally anal when it comes to outside gaming.”

  “Security. Then it’s supposed to be passed up to me.”

  His eyes met mine. “I can see why you’re concerned. Is Jerry a suspect?”

  Every fiber in my soul wanted to scream “no,” but there were rules and I’d have to play the game to exclude anyone. “I can’t rule him out right now.”

  “Man. Sucks, you know?”

  Everyone I counted on was under suspicion or outright attack. “More than you know.”

  “A thousand buc
ks. A lot to lay on the table.” Romeo pushed at the chips through their plastic covering.

  “For you and me, maybe. But you’d be surprised how many people toss this down without thinking about it.”

  “Win big or go home.”

  Or jump from a tall building. I didn’t say that, of course. He probably knew better than I the exact count of the gamblers who lost everything, then sacrificed the rest. Gambling addiction—as bad as all the others. Maybe worse as it sort of flew under the media-attention radar, so nobody knew the extent except those of us who lived with it.

  “What do you know about Mrs. Ponder?” Romeo’s question sounded casual, but I knew it was anything but.

  “Mrs. Ponder.” I gave him a long look. “Seems she has the most to lose in this game.”

  He squirmed and chafed. “She wasn’t even here. I checked McCarran. No record of her plane taking a landing slot. Not at North Town either.”

  “Really? Okay.” That wasn’t okay. She was here. I saw her. But how and when did she arrive? “She’s got your nuts in a vise.”

  He flicked a look at me, then looked away as color rose in his cheeks. “Harsh.”

  “Am I wrong?”

  He shifted, looking uncomfortable at my analogy.

  Men and their parts.

  In my younger days, I thought it would be interesting to spend a day as a guy with balls the size of oranges and a penis of equal magnitude. When I noticed there seemed to be an inverse relationship between penis size and IQ, I thought the price would be too high for the experience. Apparently, the ancient Romans agreed—that’s why all their statues of great men have relatively unassuming junk. There was a lesson there for all the swordsmen. “Would you rather have a twelve-inch dick or a 160 IQ?”

  Romeo gagged as a sip of mash went down the wrong way.

  His face turned red as I pounded him on the back. “Sorry, my timing sucks.”

  Finally, he was able to pull in some air as he glared at me.

  “What?” I said, working to hide the self-consciousness I felt. Not wanting to give him a glimpse of the gutter I’d been mentally traversing, I didn’t look at him. Although my avoiding it was stupid—I’d sorta let the cat out with my question.

  “Where did that come from?” His words were a tad choked as he dabbed at his eyes with a cocktail napkin. “Where’d you go?” he pressed.