by B. V. Larson
“McKesson?” she asked.
“Yeah, that was his name.”
She walked over to the dresser drawers and picked up a card. She handed it to me. It was Detective Jay McKesson’s card. Las Vegas Metro.
I stared at it. “Same guy.”
“He knows more than he’s letting on. It can’t be a coincidence.”
“I’m not sure what his game is,” I said, “but I do think he’s trying to figure out what is going on here, just as we are.”
“You told me you had information on my husband. What have you got?”
“I said it might be related. Now, I think it is. We have two strange events in different places. The same detective was investigating both, and he sent me here, to you, connecting the two.”
“That’s not much,” she complained.
“I know,” I said. Then I told her about Tony. I told her how he’d died in the car with me, and how I’d ended up in the hospital.
She stared, and I realized there were tears welling up in her eyes.
“Robert’s dead,” she said with certainty. “I know it now, with all these horrible things happening. I’d hoped he would just turn up somewhere, wandering the streets or the desert highways. I don’t think it’s going to happen that way.”
“We really can’t know for sure,” I said. I wanted to tell her not to give up hope, but I didn’t think I should. I’d calculated the odds and figured she was probably right.
Her head went down, her hands came up. She was racked with quiet sobs. I wanted to comfort her, but I didn’t really know her. I didn’t want to touch her and have her get the wrong idea. So I stood there awkwardly and muttered soothing things.
Jenna surprised me by stepping close and putting her cheek against my chest. I waited until her hands touched my sides before I gently reached up and patted her back. I stroked her hair once, then stopped myself. The scent of her perfumed body was in my face, and I felt myself attracted to her, and I began to feel protective.
“We’ll figure this out,” I said. “I promise.”
And I meant it.
Jenna pulled herself together after a few minutes. She went back to the small table and chairs and sat down. I called room service and ordered cola, coffee, and beer. I wasn’t sure which one she would want, but I figured I would drink whatever she rejected.
She was a tough young woman. Instead of falling apart, she’d taken action and tried to get back at the casino and find out what she could about her husband’s odd disappearance. I just had one question left: how had she won over and over again at cards?
Normally, I would have just assumed it was all luck. But she’d gone down to that casino on a mission, full of rage. That indicated she knew she was going to win. I had a suspicion how that could be true, but I sat in the chair next to her waiting for her to compose herself. Jenna’s blonde hair circled her face, which was red with emotion.
“What are you thinking?” she demanded suddenly. “Do I look silly to you?”
“Not at all.”
“Do you do this kind of thing often? Comfort grieving widows after they watch the bridal suite swallow their husbands? Does it help your blogging somehow, is that it?”
I almost laughed, but I knew it was the wrong move. “You are the first,” I said.
“Where do we go from here then?”
I frowned slightly, trying to figure an easy way to ask her about her luck at cards without seeming greedy and crass. I was saved by a knock on the door. I got up to let the bellhop in.
He looked surprised, and eyed me with a wide stare that lingered about a second too long. Maybe he thought I was the amazing Mr. Robert Townsend returned from the void. Then he noticed the tears still streaking Jenna’s face and hurried to put a silver tray loaded with drinks on the dresser. I gave him a few bucks and let the door slam behind him.
“That’s just great,” Jenna said after he’d left.
“What?”
“I’m sure he’s hurrying off to tell someone there is some guy in the crazy lady’s room.”
I shrugged. “They don’t matter. They aren’t going to find him in the lobby.”
Jenna winced at my words. I realized instantly that saying anything about not finding Robert wasn’t going to improve her mood.
“If he does turn up as suddenly and mysteriously as he vanished,” I said, “he’ll find his way back to you.”
“How can you be so sure?”
“Well, if you were my wife, I’d find my way home.”
She frowned and took the coffee. I took the cue and drank the Pepsi.
“Look, there’s something I’d like to ask you about—if you are willing.”
“No promises—but name it.”
“How did you get so lucky at cards?”
Her expression changed. Her eyes closed halfway. It was a guarded look. She didn’t answer right away. “I’ll tell you, if you tell me first.”
“Tell you what?”
“Come on. Tell me again, how did you wreck that big slot machine?”
“Oh, that,” I said. “I turned the metal gears inside to rubber, then I twisted up its guts when I pulled the handle all the way down.”
She stared at me. “What did you use?”
Right then, I knew she had an object. She would have asked how I’d done it otherwise. She knew these effects were managed with the help of a focusing object.
“I played this game as a kid,” I said. “You show me yours first.”
She smiled despite herself. In a flash of my true memory, I recalled a girlfriend once telling me I was so funny I could make a corpse laugh. I wasn’t sure at this point whether that was a compliment or not. I couldn’t recall the girlfriend’s face, but I could hear her voice.
“What’s wrong?” she said.
“I was just remembering something,” I said. She was leaning on the table with her elbows now. The tears were gone, but her face was a little puffy and her makeup had run. I saw she was looking down at her hands, toying with her wedding ring.
“It’s the ring, isn’t it?” I asked quietly.
“Dammit,” she said, slipping her hand under the table.
“Don’t worry, I’m not going to take it or tell anyone.”
“Robert told me never to let anyone know about it. No one. And he told me never to abuse it the way I did at the casino. I’m an idiot. These places have lists, you know. They won’t let me walk in the door if I get on those lists.”
I nodded slowly. They did have lists. Once you were marked as a card-counter or some other kind of cheat, they hustled you back out the second you walked in—whether they knew how you did it or not.
“How does it work?” I asked.
“He told me not to tell anyone anything.”
“I understand, but I already know most of it, and we’re supposed to be exchanging information.”
She chewed her lip. Her hand and the ring were under the table. “You know what I’ve got. You show me yours now.”
I held back the funny responses that bubbled into my mind. I slowly reached into my pocket and took out Tony Montoro’s sunglasses. I laid them on the table.
Jenna scoffed, looking at them. “They’re plastic,” she said. “That can’t be one of the objects.”
“Why not?”
She leaned back and crossed her arms under her breasts. She frowned at me. “You’ve been full of crap this entire time, haven’t you? You don’t really know anything, do you? You had me going.”
“Look,” I said. “These are Tony’s glasses, the guy I told you about. His object.”
Her head tilted suspiciously. Her eyes were narrow, calculating. “You are supposed to run that blog—but you don’t know crap about what you’re writing about, do you?”
“I suppose not. Now, clue me in.”
She shook her head and lifted the ring back into my sight. “See this?” she said, showing me the thin gold loop with a single marquis-cut diamond in the setting. “You can’t break
this. You can’t break any of the objects.”
I blinked at her, then looked down toward my pathetic plastic sunglasses. “Can you mark them up?” I asked.
“No. Not according to Robert.”
“Hmm,” I said. I got up and went into her bathroom.
“What are you doing?” she called after me.
I came back in a moment with a pair of gold-plated nail clippers.
“Those are mine,” she snapped.
“I’m not selling them online,” I said. “I’m going to conduct an experiment.”
“Oh,” she said, catching on.
I sat at the table, took the sunglasses, and tried to snip the tip off one of the arms. I clipped at the final hockey-stick-shaped hook that went over the ear. I couldn’t do it, however. It was as if I were trying to cut into a sheet of steel. After a bit of grunting and squeezing, I gave up.
“Not a mark,” I said.
“Let me try,” she said. After I handed over the sunglasses and the clippers, I felt a twinge of worry as she went at them. She couldn’t mark them either. Not even a crease.
“I didn’t think plastic could be unbreakable,” she said, staring at them in defeat.
“Talk to me about the process. Why do these things exist?”
Jenna shook her head. “I don’t know much—just what Robert told me. At some point—back in the sixties, I think, these objects were made. Some say they are still being made today, but less often. This one looks newer than most. Once they become objects, they can’t be damaged.”
“What if you put them into acid or a volcano?”
“According to Robert,” she said, shaking her head, “nothing happens.”
I retrieved my sunglasses and tucked them away. She slid her hand back off the table, hiding her ring again. So much for building trust.
“OK,” I said, “how does yours work?”
“I don’t know that. I only know what the ring does.”
“Can you give me a hint, then?”
“Well, it just makes you lucky. Whatever you want tends to happen.”
My eyebrows shot up. Right away, I was wondering why Robert had vanished. Was that what she wanted to happen? I didn’t voice the thought, but she caught the look in my eye.
“No!” she said. “It wasn’t like that! It only works with things that are very close—it has a short range. And you have to be thinking about what you want—and most importantly, it only changes small, physical things. Like dice or cards.”
I nodded. “Sounds useful in Vegas.”
“Right. But not if you overdo it. There’s one other critical thing. The bad side. The ring makes others around you have bad luck.”
“Ah, I see. That’s why I was losing so badly, hand after hand.”
“Sorry,” she said.
“No problem. I started betting on you and made all the money back.”
“You also alerted security. Now, tell me the story of these sunglasses.”
I did so, as best I understood them.
“What’s the downside?” she asked when I was finished.
I shrugged. “As far as I know, there isn’t one.”
She stared at me and shook her head slowly. “There’s always a downside. Robert told me that in no uncertain terms.”
Frowning, I took out the sunglasses and rotated them slowly with my fingers. I wondered what evil these were doing without my knowledge. I supposed it couldn’t be too bad, like giving me cancer or something. Tony had seemed to live life fully enough—at least up until its abrupt ending.
I decided to try not to overuse them, all the same.
I’d gotten as much out of Jenna as I could, and it didn’t make sense for me to stay, not with her stretching out semi-provocatively on the king-sized bed while she drank coffee. Besides, I had things to do, and she was devoted to that hotel room, still convinced Robert might come back or call her—if he wasn’t dead.
“Thanks for helping out, and for being a gentleman about it,” she said as I left, and that made me feel good. She’d promised to stay put and I’d promised I would report back if I found out anything.
I called a cab, shelled out a twenty from my thick roll of bills, and got a ride to an all-night convenience store. It took me three stops, but I finally found one with disposable phones. I felt eyes on me as I entered the store, but put it down to nerves.
The convenience store was typical of its breed, but, typical of Las Vegas, had lottery tickets in unusual abundance and variety. There was a slot machine in the store, an old one that let you play draw poker for a quarter. I smiled at that. People would pay money to play a repetitive card game against a computer—as long as they thought they had a chance of winning money. Gambling was a powerful incentive.
I located the phones, called “dealer phones” on the street, near the poker machine and pulled one off the rack. No point in trying to get a real cell phone. I had the feeling I wasn’t going to impress anyone with my burned-down house and lack of identification at a cell phone store.
That’s when a casual glance toward the cloudy front window sent a chill through me. A shadow, quickly moving away. I was definitely being followed. The question was, who was doing the following? Cops? Rostok’s goons? Bill collectors? I had no idea, but despite the fact the streets were nearly empty at dawn, I’d been seeing that same blue Buick at every store I went to.
Rather than heading back out to the street, I asked the kid behind the counter if he had a bathroom.
“It’s only for employees,” he said. He was a tall kid with the triple whammy of braces, glasses, and acne.
“I’m gonna puke. Long night.”
He looked at me unhappily. I still had some healing cuts on my face and I had been up all night long. I looked the part of a sick tourist who’d overdone it in Sin City.
“All right,” he said, sighing. “There’s a key hanging behind that little sign beside the door.”
I walked toward the back without thanking him. I’d heard a door crumping closed outside. Apparently, my stalker felt I’d taken too long in here. I ignored the bathroom and the key, and instead put on Tony’s shades. I twisted the stockroom’s locked door handle. The door rattled, groaned, and then opened. I walked inside and let it click shut behind me. One bad thing, I realized, was I couldn’t lock the door again behind me. The shades got me through locked doors, but they opened them for everyone else too. Not ideal when being pursued.
I found the exit that led into the alley behind the place, threw the door open, and stood to one side of it. I snapped off the lights, stepped behind the open door, and froze. I waited there, barely breathing.
It took a full minute. This guy wasn’t too bright, I surmised. Eventually, he found his way into the stockroom. I peeped around the edge of the door with one eye. The glare from outside hid me from the intruder’s point of view. I didn’t recognize the face, because I didn’t see one. He had a mask on. My heart thudded when I saw his hands. There was blood on them, and they held a dark object. A gun? Was he really here to rob this place, or to get rid of me?
I stared at his hands and the object in them. Yes, it was a gun. But that wasn’t why I kept staring for an extra second or so. It was that hand. It was gray, and it had ridges on the back of it. No—they were more like spurs. Curved, bladelike hooks that resembled tiny shark fins.
I stayed behind the door while he trotted past and out into the alley. I imagined him out there—whatever he was—looking around in confusion. He didn’t say anything, not even muttered curses. I pushed the door quietly shut behind him. The door clicked and he was locked out, as I hadn’t used the sunglasses on this one. Like most alley doors at the back of convenience stores, it locked automatically when you closed it.
He didn’t make a sound. He didn’t say a word. I’d expected cursing, but I didn’t get any. The door handle rattled vigorously, however. When he gave up on that, an odd, spitting sound erupted. He must have had a silencer. I’d been ready for him to shoot through the
door and hadn’t stood in front of it. Bullets punched holes through the steel, leaving three white circles of light.
I ran back out into the store. I found the kid who’d been nice enough to let me into his bathroom. He was lying in a bloody pool. I sighed and frowned. I hadn’t meant for that to happen. I touched his neck and felt a thready pulse. He might make it. I called emergency as I left, dropping the phone I’d bought into a trashcan after I reported the shooting. I took a fresh phone off the rack. The cops would be hunting for the one I used to call in the shooting, and I’d already answered enough of McKesson’s questions.
The alley didn’t open up anywhere close to this store, which left the gunman outside a long run around half the block to get back here. Deciding I had a bit of time, I grabbed a box cutter from the counter and sank the right front tire on the blue Buick. Then I got back into the cab, which had been patiently waiting for me out front. I’d been feeding the driver twenties as we drove around town, and cabbies were like stray cats when you fed them twenties.
The driver wasn’t happy with me when I climbed back into his cab, however. “No way, man,” he told me. “I saw what you did in my mirror. That tire is going all the way down. Get out and walk.”
I thought about pulling my gun on him, but he’d never done me any harm. If it came to that, I would rather shoot it out with the asshole in the alley. So I tried cash instead.
“Two hundred bucks, two miles,” I said, “but decide fast.”
“Crazy mother,” he muttered, then gunned the cab.
I gave the driver Holly’s address and we were flying down the street in seconds. I figured if I’d been followed from the casino hotel, Holly’s place was safer. As we left, I sank down in the backseat, looking this way and that for the gunman, who had to be truly pissed by now after his little jog around the block. But I didn’t see him.
A few minutes later, I stood on Holly’s doorstep in the pink glow of dawn, the cab hauling ass away behind me. I’d asked the cabby to wait, but I couldn’t blame him. He knew trouble when he saw it.
I tapped on the door and waited. After half a minute, I did it again. Still nothing.
