Wilde Child 7

by Jenn Stark

  “Brody always has a problem. It’s how he gets himself through the day.” Nikki pointed the limo at the exit. I saw a small group of workers standing around a luggage trolley, and one of them was watching me. He was too young, I thought idly—barely more than a boy. Then again, everyone younger than me looked like they were twelve these days.

  “But in this case, it’s also our problem,” Nikki continued. “And more of what we were worried about the last time you tripped the Strip.”

  I looked away from the workers, back toward Nikki. “The Connecteds who’d disappeared. There are more?”

  “A whole pile of them, apparently.” Nikki threaded the limo through the various gates, her keen eyes noting when each of the other limos slid off on their trajectories. “At least now we have a line on where they might be getting shipped off to.”

  “That’s new.” Ma-Singh hadn’t told me that.

  “What can I say? Detective Delish is good at his job. He was glad to hear you were coming home too.” She lifted her gaze to me. “Between you, me, and the whipping post, he and Dixie are on the outs.”

  “Not my concern anymore, Nikki.” And it truly wasn’t. Dixie was a local astrologer of some renown, and if she and Brody wanted to read their charts together, that was perfectly fine with me. I’d been fourteen when I’d first started working with Officer Brody, and he’d been in his early twenties. I’d nursed the world’s most embarrassing crush on the man—one that only worsened as we’d continued to work together. Then, when I was seventeen, I’d disappeared on him in the wake of a job gone terribly wrong…and had stayed disappeared for ten years. It was only in the past few months that our paths had crossed again, and while the zing was still there, it was more a zing of nostalgia than attraction.

  Besides, I currently had my hands full with the Magician, not to mention my full-time gig with the House of Swords. I needed another interpersonal entanglement like a hole in the head.

  In the front seat, Nikki nodded emphatically, clearly following along with my thoughts. Once she had worked with someone long enough, she could do that—no touching required to employ her Connected abilities.

  “But the good detective is the cutest, can’t deny that,” she cracked.

  I rolled my eyes. “You know, you should ask before you read people’s minds.”

  “Not nearly as much fun that way.”

  Nikki turned the wheel hard and leapt forward into traffic, managing to intimidate even the hardened cabbies and tour buses hauling the newest delivery of Vegas tourists toward the Strip. I could see the gleaming line of casino hotels in the distance, bright against the midday sun—so bright that the shadows of the soaring residences of the Council that loomed above them were virtually invisible.

  No, right now it was enough to see the mortal anchors of the Strip—the Mandalay Bay and Stratosphere—and draw my eye along the gleaming skyline visible at this distance. The Luxor and Paris, New York New York, and MGM, the flying ramparts of Excalibur and the stately elegance of the Bellagio.

  Newer casinos had been built in the past several years, gradually becoming part of the Vegas firmament: Aria, The Cosmopolitan—even SLS, perched as it was on the sacred ground of the former Sahara Hotel. There were precious few of the early era hotels left on the Strip, but those that were seemed to still be going strong—the Tropicana, Flamingo, Caesars Palace, even Circus Circus.

  A lot of magic ran beneath the Strip, the kind of magic that drew the desperate and the hopeful, the lucky and the careworn. Every time I left, I was glad to leave, but every time I came back, I felt home. Home.

  I smiled a little wearily. Only I would find a city of flash and sizzle to be homey.

  “So what’s the short version of what we’re walking into?” I asked.

  “Pretty much the payoff of what we thought was happening when Dixie worried that MedTech was being used as a cover operation meant to lure in Connecteds and snatch them. She was close. We simply didn’t look hard enough. There’s another medical testing center east of the strip, looks totally legit, even sounds good: Better Health Services. They advertise free day care during your office visit, regular doc-in-a-box urgent care services, as well as medical testing and—wait for it—drug research studies.”

  I studied her reflection in the mirror, and slipped the barriers in place in my mind. Nikki didn’t seem to notice, but I’d had a while to perfect the move. As close as she and I were, I remained a very private person. A very private and occasionally twisted person. She didn’t need to be witness to that all the time.

  “What kind of research studies?” I asked.

  “Everything from pouring lotions and shaving cream on your skin, to testing mouthwash, to getting you tripping on antidepressants, to the always popular sleep studies. The latter, just like at MedTech, went over particularly well with the young families desperate for both sleep and babysitting services. BHS was more than happy to help. But you can’t just take a momma and spirit her off. You want that kind of demographic, you gotta take the whole lot.”

  I frowned at her. “A Connected family?”

  “Family might be putting too fine a point on it,” she said, shaking her head. “These were warehousers, living over in the Tanker.” At my blank look, she flapped her hand. “Warehouse converted into what they call ‘studio space’ but is really more like squatter housing that’s well below code. Owners look the other way, residents keep a low profile and don’t catch anything on fire, everyone’s happy. This particular mommy read cards in an off-Strip hair salon, then cleaned up after the stylists. Her husband, not a Connected, watched the kids during the day, then he worked at night. But while the Tanker is open-air during the day, at night they lock it up tight. It’s a veritable oven in the summer, way too hot to sleep in there, and stuffy besides, so Mom needed to find someplace to stash the kids and catch some shut-eye. Overnight studies were exactly the ticket, and the kids got to bunk down in air-conditioning. Win-win. Until one morning, hubby comes home and she’s nowhere to be found. Takes him a while to figure out what had happened—she hadn’t told him she was doing this—but he goes straight to the cops. We figure Better Health Services didn’t even know the woman was married. Brody caught the case, and here we are.”

  “She someone Dixie knows?”

  “Peripherally. She’s Hispanic, doesn’t speak a lot of English, her documents were shit—something else the husband didn’t know. One of the children is his, the youngest. The older boy came with the package. He’s closer to eleven.”

  I got a bad stirring in my stomach as she continued the explanation. “The older son is Connected?”

  “Give the lady a prize.”

  My third eye fluttered open. I shifted my gaze to Nikki and away again as quickly, my pupils dilating dramatically in the moment I fixed on her. She glowed nearly as white as Chichiro did, the edges of her aura sparking and snapping with other colors, all of them rich and vibrant—green, yellow, purple. I didn’t know what aura colors meant, but I knew the sense I got from them. In Nikki, the bright white screamed protector to me, while the other colors conveyed her place in the world—open and engaged. All of which I already knew, of course. I could tell the value of my third eye would matter more so with new contacts than with my tried-and-true friends. Maybe if they were sick or acting funny, but otherwise, no.

  “How long has the family been missing?”

  “Husband came in this morning, but he hadn’t seen his wife yesterday—she wasn’t there in the morning, and he fell asleep, grateful for the reprieve. He knew she’d been back at some point because she’d cleaned their studio and left him food, but she was gone again when he left for work. He tried to reach her by phone throughout the night, and by morning, he finally freaked.”

  “So possibly two days, if we believe him.”

  “Yep.” Nikki nodded. “I haven’t seen him, so I can’t speak to his mind—but Brody seemed to think he was legit.”

  We pulled onto the street that housed the police
station, and Nikki parked in the bus slot. I blinked at her. “I don’t think this is a good location.”

  “Sure it is. You head on in and get love buns. I’ll wave at all the nice boys in blue going by.” Nikki checked her lipstick again in the rearview mirror and lowered her shades to give me a wink. “Don’t tell Brody what I’m wearing, okay? I do so enjoy his outrage.”

  I was still chuckling as I entered the police station, marveling at how similar it felt to the police station back in Memphis that I’d last entered all those years ago, before I knew enough about my life to understand how truly twisted my path would be.

  Brody stood at the far end of the lobby, talking with another officer, which afforded me a second to look at him—really look at him. I blinked open my third eye and scanned the room, shocked at the muddy grit I encountered. These were not healthy men and women—they were tired, anxious, and unhappy.

  Then I got to Brody, and my heart squeezed tight. His aura—or light or glow, whatever it was—couldn’t be right. It was dark—too dark, a black ooze threading through what once had probably been a vibrant blue. That mixture was encased in a second layer of color, a viscous, putrid brown. I was shocked the man could still stand, that he wasn’t somewhere in a hospital room, hooked up to an oxygen tank. Or morphine drip.

  He chose that moment to look up, and a smile flashed across his face, so bright that it shuttered my third eye completely. Just like that, his aura winked out.

  “Sara!” he called, waving as if we hadn’t already made eye contact. I waved back, but I couldn’t quell my concern for him. Why was his aura or whatever so depressed? Was he sick?

  He didn’t look sick. He finished his conversation with his fellow officer and strode over to me, his grin still in place. This was a pleasant surprise at least. I was used to Brody being irritated every time I showed up—either mad at me for leaving Vegas or mad that I came back. But he walked right up to me and gave me a quick, professional handshake-hug, never mind that I wasn’t the hug type. I wasn’t even the handshake type, come to think of it.

  One bonus, though, touching Brody reinforced the sick, cloying sense I had about his aura, as well as the fact that he was still hitting on a few Connected cylinders. Most cops did have a flare of Connectedness about them, even if they’d never admit it, but Brody’s intuition had gotten unintentionally amped when he’d been trapped with me a little too close for comfort earlier that summer. While many of the other folk affected by that magical pulse had eventually lost their Connected edge, Brody clearly retained his. Which was good, given what we had ahead of us.

  “Nikki said she’d be bringing you…” He looked toward the door as if surprised that I was alone. “Um, where is she?”

  “Causing a traffic disturbance. You ready to go?”

  “A traffic…” A more familiar scowl creased his features, and he narrowed his eyes. “What’s she wearing?”

  “Let’s just say she’s in uniform.”

  He trailed behind me, cursing as we reemerged into the sunshine, his gaze immediately fixing on Nikki. It was kind of hard not to, admittedly, with her leaning against the hood of the limo, one hip resting on its smooth surface. She was chatting on a cell phone, waving to everyone who went by, while studiously ignoring the bus idling behind her, tooting its horn. Loudly.

  “Oh, for the love of—Nikki!” Brody strode forward, pulling an unresisting Nikki away from the car and hauling open the limo’s front door, while she flailed helplessly in his arms, coming into contact with as much of him as one person could without being an Olympic wrestler. Brody finally managed to get her mostly stuffed in the front seat, then glared at me.

  “Get in the damned car, Sara,” he growled.

  That was the grumpy Brody I knew and lo—ah, liked. Instantly, my mood lightened further, and I nearly tripped over myself hustling to the side door. I slid in as Nikki gunned the engine. With one last honk and wave to the steaming bus driver behind us, Nikki pulled away.

  “Took you long enough, love cricket,” she said, eyeing Brody through her sunglasses. “I was about to get heat stroke out here.”

  “Then you should have stayed in the car. Preferably in an authorized parking lot. I should have called someone to give you a ticket.”

  “And I would have paid cold hard cash for you to find that ticket in the same place I stow all the rest of them,” Nikki replied, her grin going wider as Brody cursed.

  “How is it you were in the force and you have absolutely no regard for—anything?”

  Nikki sighed lustily. “Oh, how I’ve missed you, Detective. Now what do we have on the crime in progress? Any word from the medical facility on their surveillance tapes?”

  He frowned at her. “You mean the Connected MP case, the Deguanzos? Why are you asking about that?”

  She lifted her brows so far that they were visible over the rim of her glasses. “Why on earth do you think we’re here?”

  “I’d assumed…” He glanced from Nikki to me and back to Nikki, his brow furrowing further. “Your, uh, warehouse, Sara, over on the east side of town. It was vandalized. I assumed that’s what you wanted me to see.”

  Now it was my turn to scowl. “My… That’s empty, I thought. Isn’t that empty?” I directed the last question to Nikki, my brain scrambling. Annika Soo had been something of a real estate junkie, and she owned several properties in the city, not the least of which was the enormous house on the edge of town where Nikki now lived. But the warehouse? “There’s nothing in there.”

  “Not last we looked,” Nikki agreed.

  “It’s not what’s inside it that was damaged,” Brody said, shaking his head. “And damaged isn’t even the right word. You’ll…” He paused. “You’ll know what I mean when you see it.”

  Chapter Seventeen

  With that cryptic announcement, Brody clammed up, not even complaining when Nikki pulled over at the next side street and slid the privacy partition up to allow her a quick clothes change. The front of the limo was apparently more spacious than I gave it credit for, because we were back on the road within five minutes, the partition coming down shortly thereafter.

  I’d been racking my brain for an opening into Brody’s health, but nothing was coming to me. As Nikki sped along backstreets toward the warehouse district, I shot him another discreet look, glad to see his eyes were closed as he sagged against the overstuffed seat. He even looked tired, now that I saw him up close. How long had it been since he’d slept?

  Apparently, not long enough. “I know you’re staring at me, Sara,” he grumbled, his voice half gravel, half sigh. But he didn’t bother opening his eyes. “What do you need?”

  “Nothing,” I said. “You look like crap.”

  “On a cracker,” Nikki chimed in from the front, her eyes still shaded by the cat-eye sunglasses. Everything else about her was different, though. Gone was the Lady Godiva wig and chauffeur outfit. In its place was a shoulder-length fall of auburn hair, secured by a camo-patterned bandana, and a tight black tank top paired with thick black leather cuffs. From what I could see of her arms as she hauled on the wheel to turn the limo down another street, Nikki had been working it hard in the great outdoors.

  By comparison, Brody looked like he hadn’t seen the sun since God was a child. “You, uh, sick?” I prodded him. I didn’t know enough about auras to diagnose that definitively, but I didn’t need special eyesight in this case.

  “Haven’t been sleeping well,” he said, still not opening his eyes. “Comes with the job.”

  I shot Nikki a look, and she shrugged. Apparently, it did come with the job. Nikki’s time on the Chicago PD might have been years in the past, but some things, I was sure, you didn’t forget.

  Of course, I could help him heal, couldn’t I? I settled back in my seat, turning my attention out the window. I’d helped Nigel when his internal organs had been chicken fried, and I’d helped Ma-Singh when he’d been shot full of holes protecting me. But both of those cases had been situations of dire eme
rgencies. I didn’t know whether or not my abilities worked to cure the common cold. Or insomnia. Or whatever the hell was eating at Brody.

  We continued another twenty minutes through the city, until gradually the houses fell away to be replaced by big-box industrial buildings of varying heights. Annika’s warehouse here had served as a way station for both legal and illegal shipments into Paradise Valley, but to my knowledge, it’d sat empty for going on a year now. Why would someone mess with it? And why was Brody being so cagey about it?

  In any event, he was sleeping now, and Nikki and I exchanged another glance. Clearly, she didn’t want to wake the baby, but we couldn’t take all day here. She made a rotation with her finger, and I nodded. A full loop around the district wouldn’t be a bad idea.

  I turned in my seat, suddenly remembering that we weren’t on this sojourn alone. I couldn’t see Ma-Singh, but I was sure he was there. It would be difficult staying hidden with so few cars in the area, but it wasn’t as if he didn’t recognize the warehouse district or guess at our destination. In fact, he probably would go right to the building and check it—

  My cell phone buzzed.

  “What?” Brody jerked awake, rubbing his hands over his face while I fished the phone out of my pocket. “Where are you going? The warehouse is half a mile in the other direction.”

  “My mistake,” Nikki said cheerfully. She navigated the next turn, swinging us back around. I glanced down at the phone and swiped Ma-Singh’s message open.

  When were you here last? he’d texted.

  I frowned—that was…an oddly useless question. “Ma-Singh’s already at the warehouse site, and he’s asking when I was there last,” I said. “What’s up with that? What’s there?”

  Brody’s jaw tightened, but he gave up the ghost. “There’s a—mural, I guess, is the best way you could describe it. Twenty feet tall, covering the back side of the building.”