Destiny: The Girl in the Box #9 (11 page)

“What’s next?” Scott glanced back at me. I snapped my eyes to meet his, but probably a few seconds too late. He smiled, and my face felt like it might burst into flames, Gavrikov-style.

“Uhmm, well,” I said, full of wit and charm. And blushing. Lots of blushing. “I don’t, ah … know.”

“Are you checking me out?” he asked, a little coy. Not pouty, but … I don’t know. Adjectives failed me. His chest was … really muscled. And shiny. Because of the water.

“I’m trying to keep my eyes above your collarbone,” I said. Honestly I was.

“You’re failing.” Leave it to him to notice that. What a spectacular ass. Also, he was a jerk for pointing that out.

I pulled my gaze back to his face. “It’s not my fault you’re standing there all well-toned and … uh … wearing nothing but a towel.” I took a breath. “Is this Caesar’s Palace? Because I don’t remember walking into a toga party.”

He took a couple slow steps toward the bed. “I thought you were wrapped in barbed wire and coated in lemon juice?”

I cleared my throat. “You know I am. Which is why you should keep your distance.”

He took a step closer, coming to the end of the bed. “Oh?”

Part of me wanted to remind him that he’d said we didn’t have to discuss this until after Sovereign was dealt with. A very faint, fleeting part of me that I was trying desperately to find a metal box for, somewhere in my head. Too bad it didn’t work that way for my own personality. “Yeah. My touch kills, remember? You wouldn’t want to lose your soul.”

He came up to the side of the bed where I lay and sat down on the edge. I went completely still, not even daring to breathe. His fingers went to my shoulder and slid down my sleeve to my good arm. It felt … um … “I’m not going to lose my soul doing that, am I?”

“Ah, no, but …”

He leaned over and kissed me, just for a second. His breath was fresh and minty and I knew for damned sure that mine was not. He broke after just a second. “Am I going to lose my soul by doing that?”

“Do enough of it and you might.”

He leaned over me, his weight pressing me slowly to the bed. I could have thrown him off, easily, but I liked the feel of his bare chest against me. All the moisture was suddenly gone from his skin, and all I could feel was his warmth on top of me, bearing me down. He kissed me again, and I lost count of the seconds around three. He broke from me again and smiled.

“Your hand is on my ass,” I said. It was. I could feel the gentle pressure he was applying through my clothes.

“I’m not going to lose my soul doing that, am I?”

Your hand, maybe, but not your soul,
Zack threw up from somewhere within me. To Scott I said, “No,” but I’m pretty sure my face betrayed me.

“What’s wrong?” Scott asked.

“Nothing,” I said. “We just … you know, there’s a time limit on these sort of things, and you’ve already spent quite a few seconds of it.” I didn’t want to be too self-conscious because, honestly, I was enjoying myself. But at the same time, the specter of possible death hung over my every physical interaction, and it was always—ALWAYS—acutely on my mind.

He kissed me again, and I lost track of time again. When we broke he was still smiling. “What’s the count?”

I blinked. “Hell if I know.”

His smile grew wider. “Feeling like living dangerously?”

“It’s your soul in peril, not mine.”

“Yeah, but you’d have to deal with me in your head from now on.” Why was he still grinning?

“After Wolfe and Bjorn, I think you’d be a picnic. On a summer’s day. With ham salad.”

His face creased. “Ham salad?”

I shrugged. “I like ham salad.”

He started to lean in for another kiss but a buzzing filled the air. He froze, and we stayed like that for a moment, staring into each other’s eyes until the realization hit me. I fumbled for my cell phone and looked at the faceplate. J.J. That little shit had a great sense of timing, that was for sure.

“Hello—”

I didn’t even get to finish my sentence before he interrupted. “Hey, I got something on this search history that I think might be useful. Did you know there are a series of storm tunnels under the Las Vegas strip?”

I stared at Scott, whose face was still only inches from mine. Conscious of my bad breath, I tried to speak without expelling any air. The result was a very low, hushed answer. “No, J.J., I did not know that. Outside of the unlikely possibility that Weissman challenges me to a Loser-commits-suicide game of Trivial Pursuit, why should I care?”

“Because this guy—Antonio Morales? He was doing some hardcore research on those tunnels. Lots of searches, lots of page hits. Some YouTube videos, that sort of stuff. Everything else in his history was pretty generic, but this—I’m telling you, I think he’s in the tunnels.”

I pursed my lips and tried to speak without exhaling again. “You think he’s in storm tunnels? Underneath us? Because … of his Google search history?”

There was a pause on the other end of the line. “Yep.” The answer was self-assured. More self-assured than I would have been in his shoes, but my hushed voice was probably masking my irritation. “You should check it out.”

I’m pretty sure I felt my eye twitch. “You think I should go crawling through sewer tunnels?”

“Storm tunnels,” J.J. said. “Not sewer. There are a lot of homeless people living down there, apparently. You should see this YouTube video—”

“Thanks, J.J.” I hung up the phone without saying anything else. Scott was still there, inches from my face, leaning toward me. I just stared at him, not really sure what I was thinking. “We should go check out the tunnels,” I said and then promptly kicked my own mental ass for saying that.

Scott’s face fell. “You want to go crawling through the sewers looking for this Antonio guy?”

I stared into his eyes. They were awfully pretty. “Want is a strong word. I think we need to do it. Then we can get on a plane and head home with a clear conscience.”

He pulled up off me, back to the edge of the bed. He had been pressed up against me just a second ago, and the removal of his weight didn’t leave me feeling any better. It felt worse, actually. “I’ll get dressed,” he said, and he was back to a neutral tone of voice.

He picked up his clothes and retreated to the bathroom. Part of me wanted to say something—anything. But instead I watched his towel-covered backside as he went into the bathroom and closed the door. And then I beat the hell out of myself for all the clever, exciting, sexy things that came to mind now that he was gone.

It was hot. Sauna hot. Oven hot. Standing-next-to-a-bonfire-with-a-winter-jacket-and-flannel-pants-on hot. I sweated as I stared down the dark tunnel ahead. Pieces of garbage that had probably been washed out during the last rain were strewn all over the dusty ground. When was the last rain in this town? My money was on two decades ago.

We headed into the dark, a couple of flashlights we’d bought at a tourist shop our only guides. My current plan was to find a transient and offer him money in exchange for information. Insensitive? Probably. But I was hiking through a series of storm tunnels in the middle of the horrendous desert heat—and the shade? It didn’t help as much as you might think, not today.

The place had a smell about it that made me wonder if I had wandered into the sewers by mistake. The air was a little more moist than it was outside, but still fairly dry, like a sub-zero day in Minnesota. My nose felt completely parched, like the skin inside was cracking the way my lips were. I was sweating as we continued down the concrete tunnel. Scott was at my side. I could tell by his flashlight beam and the occasional brush of his arm against mine.

“Quiet down here,” he said. Our footsteps echoed softly as we walked.

“It was until you spoke,” I said, hushed. My eyes were in constant motion. My dealings with Century had me expecting someone was going to come leaping out at us at any moment.

We hiked for a little while, dirt, grit and gravel all along the floors of the tunnel system. I could hear what sounded like dripping water every now and again, and we would occasionally find a puddle unexpectedly.

“I would have thought we’d see someone by now,” Scott said.

“Probably avoiding us because they think we’re cops,” I said. The darkness, the slightly confined nature of the space—it was coming together to make me feel like I wanted to run. “You can see these lights a long way off in the tunnels, after all.”

“How do you suppose someone ends up here?” Scott asked. “You know, living beneath the most extravagant resorts and casinos, where money flows like the water that comes through these drains. It’s like a paradise of cash up there.”

I tilted my light to look toward a dripping sound at my right. There was a damp spot and a small puddle on the ground. “The usual ways, I suppose. Bad luck. Economic setbacks. Maybe some of them have addictions to feed. I don’t really know.” The whole discussion gave me a feeling of deep discomfort. I really didn’t know, and even speculating made me feel awkward and out of place.

“My dad always used to say mental illness, drugs, alcohol and bad choices,” Scott said, never breaking his pace as he walked along. “Not the most empathetic guy.” Scott paused. “Hey, did you hear that?”

I did. We both halted, waiting in the dark. I thought about turning off my flashlight, but instead I slowly scanned around us in a three-hundred-and-sixty-degree degree pattern until something moved, scaring the hell out of me.

“Gambling,” came a rough, gravelly voice. I kept the light on the speaker, and he held up a hand to shade his eyes. “It’s how I ended up down here.”

“Jesus,” Scott said. “You’re a quiet one.”

“I tapped my fingers so you’d know I was here,” the guy said. I moved my light slightly to the side so it wasn’t shining in his face anymore. “Didn’t mean to startle ya. Awfully jumpy for a couple of well-dressed youths scouring through the tunnels. Who are you? Charity workers? College kids on a project?” His voice was rough, like sandpaper running over concrete.

“Looking for someone,” I said.

“Found someone you have,” he said, changing the pitch of his voice to sound like Yoda. “You guys cops?” he asked, with amusement.

I shined the light in my own face and held it there. “I look like a cop to you?”

“You look like a young girl,” he said. I moved the light back over to him and saw he was wearing a plain wife-beater shirt that was a little grey from repeated washings. He had a beard yellowed from tobacco use and eyes that were squinted from years of looking at the sun, I suspected. He didn’t look pale, at least not as pale as I did, which was interesting considering he lived underground. “But that doesn’t mean you’re not a cop. I used to watch those shows about the twenty-somethings they’d stick undercover in schools to catch the—”

“Whatever,” I said with a sigh.

“Okay, you’re a kid,” he said. “What are you here for?”

“I told you, I’m looking for someone. A friend,” I said. “Antonio Morales.”

His squint got deeper. “Uh huh. You’re a ‘friend’ who’s looking for someone in the tunnels. Out of the goodness of your heart. Dressed in a suit jacket.”

I glanced down. “I’m also wearing jeans.”

“How grateful do you think your friend Antonio is going to be when you find him?” the guy asked. “Do you think he’d be grateful enough to pay me for showing you to where he may—or may not—be staying?”

“Probably not,” Scott said after we exchanged a look. “Antonio … he’s fallen on some hard times.”

“Well, isn’t that a familiar refrain.” The guy didn’t seem impressed. “All right, I might—or might not—know where he could be. I could show you the way, but you’ll pay the cop rate.”

“There’s a cop rate?” Scott asked. “How much?”

“Five hundred,” the guy said, his tanned face surrounded by the darkness. He grinned, a toothy grin.

“What’s the non-cop rate?” Scott asked.

“Twenty bucks.”

“Whatever,” I said again, and pulled out my wallet. I counted out three crisp hundreds that I’d drawn from the cashier at the campus before I left. “You get the rest when we get there.”

“I’m feeling like my rates should go up,” the guy said as I put my wallet away.

“I’m feeling a bit of police brutality could be in your future,” I replied, dour.

“You said you weren’t cops!”

“And I thought you saw through my bullshit,” I said and gestured with my flashlight. “Let’s go.”

“Wait,” Scott said, “what’s your name?”

“You can call me Grinder,” the guy said. He stroked his yellowed beard as he spoke.

“If your mother named you that, someone should really give her a stern talking to,” I said.

“Well, she’s long dead, so I expect it’ll sail right over her head,” Grinder said, deadpan, “but you’re welcome to try.”

I could tell after about ten minutes that Grinder was the kind of guy who liked to fill every pause in a conversation. The funny thing was, he didn’t really do it in the way I was used to. Most people who were like that tended to talk about themselves. Grinder, he went about it a different way.

“We’re under the new City Center development right now,” Grinder said. “Aria Casino, the Mandarin Oriental—”

“That’s kind of a racist name nowadays, isn’t it?” Scott asked.

“I think you’re thinking of the Mandarin who’s the Iron Man villain,” Grinder said. “And that’s more because he’s a caricature of Asian stereotypes, you know?”

“He mixes things up a lot,” I said. “Just earlier, he switched up Barry Allen with Barry Manilow.”

“How can you not know the Flash?” Grinder said, shaking his head sadly. “It’s like confusing Hal Jordan with Hal Holbrook.”

Scott stayed quiet for a second. “I have no idea who either of those people are.”

“We’re almost there,” Grinder said, his first bit of actual pertinent dialogue since he’d offered to show us to Antonio.

“Oh, yeah?” Scott asked. “Where’s ‘there’?”

“Here,” Grinder said as he slid toward a side tunnel that had a curtain hanging by a rod that had been somehow nailed into the concrete. “Down this tunnel you’ll find a few people sleeping on the floor.”

“Sleeping?” Scott asked. “It’s the middle of the day.”