Stripped (6 page)

He saw a newspaper folded on the nightstand next to MJ’s unmade bed and picked it up. The pages were already yellowing, and he saw when he checked the date that it was more than three months old. He read the headline:

IMPLOSION TO MAKE WAY FOR “ORIENT”

There were photographs covering most of the front page. Boni Fisso shaking hands with Governor Mike Durand over an architectural model of the lavish new resort. The showroom of the old casino in its heyday, forty years ago, with near-nude dancing girls onstage. A billowing dust cloud from one of the earlier casinos that had been leveled in a few seconds with the efficiency of a bomb.

“Have you ever seen an implosion?” Stride asked Amanda.

“Yeah, I worked security when they brought down the last tower of the Desert Inn,” she said. “It’s awesome. An implosion always means a party around here.”

Stride nodded. He saw a back issue of
LV
, the city’s monthly magazine, lying under the newspaper. There was a corner photo of the same old casino on its cover and a teaser headline beside it:

ONE CASINO’S DIRTY SECRET

Amanda spied over his shoulder. “He lives upstairs, you know, if you want to say hi.”

“Who?”

“Boni Fisso. He owns this whole complex, like the hotel across the street. I’m pretty sure his penthouse is in this tower.”

Stride knew Boni Fisso’s reputation. He was one of a dying breed of Las Vegas entrepreneurs, a holdover from the mobbed-up days before the city went corporate. Fisso had to be over eighty, but he still looked suave and sharp in the newspaper photos, an old man who hadn’t slowed down. He was short, barely five-foot-six, but built like a fire hydrant that you could kick and kick and never dent.

“What’s your take on Boni?” Stride asked. “Is his money clean?”

“That’s hard to believe, but no one’s ever proved otherwise,” Amanda said. “Gaming Control has had him in their sights for years, but they never had the goods to put him in the Black Book. Either that, or Boni has juice with some politician on the inside. Either way, he’s been able to play the game. Pretend he’s like Steve Wynn, just an honest developer and philanthropist.”

“Does Boni have a connection to MJ?”

Amanda shrugged. “Not that I know of. Why?”

Stride gestured at the magazine and newspaper. “It looks like MJ was very interested in the new resort.”

“Well, his balcony looks right out on the implosion site. He was going to watch the Orient rise from the ashes for the next couple of years if someone hadn’t ventilated his skull.”

Stride nodded. He knew Amanda was right. It was nothing significant. Even so, something niggled at him. Little things did that to him—colorless pieces of the puzzle that didn’t fit. MJ had too many fish to fry in this city. Drugs. Parties. Women. Why keep a months-old magazine by his bed?

What was it about the Orient project that was so important to him? A two-billion-dollar development, underwritten by a man whom everyone suspected of mob ties. That was certainly worth killing over, if someone got in your way—but Stride didn’t see how a playboy like MJ could be a threat to a man like Boni Fisso.

Stride wandered across the bedroom to the double-width glass doors that led to the balcony. He unlocked them and stepped outside. A breeze made the vertical blinds slap and twist. There was no furniture outside, just a long stretch of iron railing and a view toward the north end of the Strip. He grabbed the railing. His heart fluttered a little in his chest at the height. He imagined MJ standing here, high on cocaine, wondering if he could sprout wings and fly.
The young are stupid
, Stride thought. He realized that MJ probably never came out here, probably never even opened the door. He had Karyn Westermark naked in his bed, and probably countless other women, and that was a better view than all the lights of the Strip combined.

Stride stayed outside anyway. He wondered, just for the briefest moment, if
he
could fly. It was cool and beautiful up here, late September weather, when the worst of the heat was over and the nights had a taste of fall. To the east, there was a ruddy glow where the sun inched up to dawn above the mountains, but the valley was still wrapped in night.

Although night never really had a firm grip here. It was the land of the neon sun.

He stared down at Boni’s old casino, across the street, its roof about ten stories below him. The building itself was black, stripped of life. On street level, a hurricane fence and a makeshift plywood wall gated off the property; no more hotel guests, no more high rollers. In the weeks since the property closed, the demolition teams had already moved inside, ripped out the guts, drilled holes in the walls to plant cylinders of dynamite. In another couple of weeks, with a push of a button, a simple electrical charge, the whole house of cards would come tumbling down.

Stride thought of the photo in the newspaper. Girls onstage. Men in tuxedos. Martinis. Money. All ghosts now.

He let his eyes travel across floor after floor, all of them quiet and dark.

Except for the roof. The roof was aglow.

It was such a Vegas thing to do, Stride thought, to leave the light on after the party was over.

He could see scalloped Middle Eastern icons stretching across the parapet like tiny onion domes. Where the roof notched downward in the very center of the hotel, he saw faintly the tiles and trees of what must have once been the garden of the casino’s penthouse suite. All of it was reflected in the glow of the casino’s sign, which still blazed out of the darkness in flashes of red and green neon that gave the ghosts inside a reason to believe they were still flesh and blood. No one had told them it was time to go.

Every few seconds, the sign would fade to black, and then each letter would illuminate again, one by one, as if nothing had changed, as if the floors below still pulsed with life.

One by one, letter by letter, until the entire name blinked on top of the roof.

Serena could see that Cordy was down. When she picked him up at his apartment in North Las Vegas, he wore a hangdog expression, like a kid who had been forced to stand in the corner. As they drove back south through the city streets, he stared sourly out the window without saying a word. Even his hair was having a bad day. Normally, it was greased back on his skull like a jet-black lion’s mane, but this morning there were tufts sprouting out in odd places like grass growing through the sidewalk. Not like Cordy at all.

“What’s up with you?” Serena asked, while they waited at a red light. There was almost no traffic at Cheyenne and Jones. They were in the short stretch of dead hours when the midnight crowd was finally in bed, and everyone else was drowsily starting to come awake.

Cordy gave a long, dramatic sigh. “Me and Lav,” he said. “We’re history.”

Lavender was a gorgeous black stripper who towered over Cordy by at least six inches. During the time Serena and Cordy had been partners, he had used up girlfriends like tissues, going from one to the next, each one tiny, blond, and young. Lavender was different, and when they had started dating, Serena thought Cordy might finally have met his match.

“What happened?” Serena said.

Cordy rolled down the window of Serena’s Mustang and spit. He cursed in Spanish, “What do you think, mama? I fucked up. I screwed one of her friends. Lav found out.”

“Shit, you are a stupid man.”

“I blame it on this goddamned city,” Cordy told her irritably. “All this fucking flesh. I mean, put a guy like me in a room full of sweet chilies, sooner or later I’m going to take a bite.”

“Only this time, the bite came out of your ass.”

She let Cordy stew silently as she turned onto Jones. She wanted to tell him that the real problem was that Cordy listened to his cock, not his brain. He wasn’t entirely wrong about Las Vegas, though. She knew that. You couldn’t put so much sin in one place and not tempt people across the line.

Serena had spent more than two decades in Las Vegas, including ten years on the job as part of Metro. There were plenty of ex-showgirls on the force, and most people assumed Serena was one of them because of her tall, lean physique. But Serena had lived through a much less glamorous side of the city in her early days, arriving in the dead of night from Phoenix with her girlfriend Deidre when she was sixteen.

There were about a thousand roads to ruin for young girls coming to Vegas. Stripping, hooking, gambling, drinking, stealing, fighting, doing drugs, filming porno, or just winding up in the wrong man’s bed. All of them led to the same end, turning pretty young flowers into garbage floating amid the green algae of a swamp.

Like Deidre. Her best friend, her savior, the girl she owed her life to, the girl who said she needed Serena more than anything in the world. Dead.

Sometimes it amazed Serena that she hadn’t died, too. She had chosen a back-office job in one of the casinos when she could have made ten times that in the strip clubs, looking the way she did. She had stayed in school, first studying to get her GED, then working nights and weekends to get a degree in criminal justice at UNLV. It took her ten years to make it that far. When Deidre died, the guilt sent Serena spinning into an alcoholic stupor that cost her two years of her life and almost everything she had worked for.

Eventually, she climbed back, dried out, and went back to college.

She wasn’t sure where the determination came from. Maybe it was because, when she escaped from Phoenix with Deidre, she had made a promise to herself that what she had gone through at home would not destroy the rest of her life.

But Cordy was right. Las Vegas didn’t make it easy.

“I can make you laugh,” Serena told him.

“No way. I’m in mourning. I’m wearing black.”

Serena glanced at him. Cordy wore a black silk shirt with two buttons undone, tapered black dress pants, and buffed leather shoes—but that had nothing to do with Lavender. Cordy was a creature of style, a small but slick package. Serena herself liked to be casual, not fancy, wearing jeans, T-shirts, and weathered cowboy boots on most days.

When she dressed up, she knew, she could pop men’s eyes out. She remembered meeting Stride for the first time at the airport in Duluth, when she flew in as part of the investigation of a girl’s murder in Vegas. On a whim, she had worn one of her hot outfits, baby blue leather pants, silver belt, midriff-baring T-shirt, black leather raincoat. That was the only time she had seen Jonny at a loss for words.

“Twenty bucks,” Serena said.

“You’re on. I ain’t laughing today.”

“Sawhill put Jonny on the street with Amanda,” she told him.

Cordy laughed despite himself. “Oh, mama! Amanda? You know, her breasts are even bigger than yours.”

“News flash, Cordy. She’s got equipment bigger than yours, too. Or so I hear.”

“It gives me the creeps just thinking about it.” He added, “Hey, how do you know that Amanda’s boyfriend is a couch potato?”

“I’m afraid to ask.”

“ ’Cause he likes to turn on the TV!” Cordy laughed until he snorted.

Serena shook her head. “Just keep that kind of crap between us,
muchacho
. “Jonny seems to like her. And hand over twenty bucks.”

“Uh-huh. Speaking of which, there’s a pool going on Stride. Most people think he’ll crash and burn in a couple of months.”

“Jonny’s as tough as they come,” Serena said.

“Yeah, but this is Vegas.”

Serena didn’t want to argue. Not because she thought Cordy was right, but because she could think of a lot of reasons why Stride might walk away that had nothing to do with the job.

“I suppose there’s a pool on me, too,” she said. “On whether Jonny and I will make it.”

“The odds on you are about as long as keno,” Cordy said. “Most of the guys, they still think you’re Barbed Wire.”

Serena winced, but only because Cordy’s words struck a nerve. Her reputation on the force—well deserved—was as the cool beauty, smart and unapproachable. Barbed Wire. She was the girl who cut men off at the knees, skewering egos with a sharp joke and building a tall fence around her emotions. A sexy package that no one could seem to unwrap.

As far as Serena was concerned, that was okay. She had never trusted men. In Phoenix, as her mother sank into a cocaine addiction, her father had skipped town, leaving Serena to fall through the ground along with her mother. They wound up living in an apartment near the airport with a half-Indian drug dealer named Blue Dog. Most of the time, her mother owed him money for her drugs. Serena became the currency.

She didn’t like to think about those days. The best defense was pretending they didn’t exist. Like Pandora’s box. Better to keep the lid closed and not see what was inside, because there was no going back. So she became a closed book to anyone who wanted to get near her. At thirty-six, she had never had a serious relationship, never really missed it, never really wanted it.

Until Jonny.

She didn’t know how Stride had broken down her walls so easily. Maybe because he was so unlike the men in Vegas, not slick, not a game-player who wore the face he thought you wanted to see. He was a cloudy pool of emotions himself, just like her, where you couldn’t see the bottom. That depth attracted her immediately. When he let her inside his own walls, told her about losing his first wife to cancer, her heart cracked into pieces. They barely knew each other, and yet she knew he had fallen for her, the real way, the hard way. And she had fallen for him.

But it was one thing to make love on the beach at midnight in Minnesota. That was a fantasy. Back here, this was life. This was day to day.

Pandora’s box was open. She didn’t like what she saw. Goblins from her past, flying out, following her in the dark. She prided herself on being tough as nails, but lately, she sometimes felt like a frightened teenager again. Frightened about love, about sex, about the future. She was more confused than she had been in years.