Wilde Card: Immortal Vegas, Book 2 (27 page)

Nikki snorted. “I don’t think any warm-blooded woman in Vegas doesn’t know Detective McHottiedom.” Dixie sashayed around the corner, and Nikki glanced up, casting a lazy glance over her bourbon. “There’s Dixie now, if you want to give her the news yourself.”

“Oh! Yes—” The woman turned and dashed off, and Nikki removed her hand from mine.

“What the hell was that about?”

“Which part?”

“Was she trying to provoke a reaction or is Brody really hurt?”

“If he was, you really think
that
child would have picked up on it? No. She’s purely an aura girl.” She eyeballed me. “She was trying for yours, big-time. Dixie isn’t known for being subtle, so ordinarily she’d ask you straight out. But this Brody thing has her tied up. She knows there’s still something between you two beyond the whole Sariah Pelter business, and she doesn’t understand what.”

“There’s nothing between Brody and me. She can have him whenever she’d like.”

“Yeah, we’re all believing that.” Nikki drained her glass. “But, we can let that bucket of crazy simmer for a while. Instead, let’s go see what Roxie has cooking. Stop off first at the hotel, so I can spruce up, ’kay?”

“I think you look great.”

“Well, that’s certainly true.” She cocked a hip. “But I have the perfect thing for skulking through expensive houses, and I’d hate to pass up the opportunity.”

We stood, and Dixie strolled up to us, happier than I’d seen her in a while, if still harried. The aura-reading elf had skipped merrily on her way, and I felt a small pang in my chest. If Dixie was super into Brody, who was I to horn in on that? I had my hands full with Armaeus anyway. And about six jobs lined up in the queue. I needed a romantic entanglement like a hole in the head.

“Nikki!” Dixie fairly bounced, her smile including both of us. “I’m glad I caught you.” She was straight-up Stepford wife today, in a sundress and tennis bracelet, her pedicured toes peeking out of strappy sandals and her hair bigger than Texas. “Tell me you’ve got a plan for the parade up to the Bellagio?”

“You mean the
best party ever
? Why yes, yes, I do. Starts at dusk, rocks till dawn.”

My phone jangled in my pocket, which startled me. I didn’t know I was carrying a phone. “Sorry,” I said, taking the opportunity for what it was worth. I held the phone to my ear and stepped away, toward the main exit of the SLS.

“Miss Wilde! I’m so glad you picked up. This is the front desk at the Palazzo. We’ve left several messages on your room phone.”

I frowned. “Um, I’ve been out of town for a few days. Is there a problem with the room—the bill or anything?” Armaeus had been putting me up at the Palazzo for long enough, I supposed. Probably time for me to check into more economy digs.

“No, not exactly,” the clerk said, recalling me. “You’ve had a package left for you at the front desk, and it’s… Well, we think it’d be best if you retrieved it.”

“A package?” Had Nikki been ordering from QVC again? “I’m sorry. I hope it isn’t spoiling or anything.”

“No, no, nothing like that. It would be best if you could fetch it, though.” The man’s voice was strained, and I shrugged. I scowled over at Nikki.

“You didn’t order anything into the hotel, did you?”

She thought about it. “If the Thunder from Down Under has shown up, they’re definitely mine.”

I rolled my eyes. “Meet you there.”

She waved me on, she and Dixie head to head, and I made my way through the sun worshipers to the front of the SLS. The walk to the Palazzo wasn’t far, even in the blistering heat. By the time I reached the front lobby of my palatial hotel, however, I was wringing with sweat. Forget Nikki’s change of clothes. I needed one.

I made a beeline for the front desk. “Hi, I’m Sara Wilde in room—”

“Miss Wilde, thank you.” The clerk beamed at me. “I’m so glad you picked up my call.”

“How’d you get that number, anyway? It’s, ah, a new phone.”

“Mr. Bertrand provided it to us. I do hope that’s all right?”

Armaeus’s telepathy of an hour earlier filtered through my memory. A “development,” he’d said. “How long have you had this package?”

“A day or so. But it—well, you’ll see. Please come with me.”

I moved into the space behind the counter, through the door into what appeared to be an extended coat closet. At the end of the narrow passage, the corridor branched off in two directions. The desk attendant turned right. “We ordinarily keep residents’ packages under lock and key until they request them. We scan everything, of course, for electronic or other explosive devices.”

I stared at him in horror. “Do
not
tell me someone sent me a bomb here.”

“Oh no!” He blinked at me. “But it’s, well…odd.”

We rounded the corner, and I could understand what he meant, immediately.

The package was a metal box, a padded envelope sealed with packing tape at its top. And it was humming.

“Ahhh…” I bit my lip. “You’ve had it scanned for a bomb?”

“There are no electronics inside it whatsoever. We were going to call someone from Techzilla if we couldn’t get hold of you today. It’s not causing any harm, but it’s…a little unnerving.

“Yeah, I can see that.” As I approached the box, the humming grew softer, stopping when I stood right in front of it. Beside me, the man’s eyes goggled.

I smiled brightly at him. “Well, hey! Looks like it’s happy to see me. I’ll take it upstairs.”

“Will you—would you mind letting us know what’s inside?”

I blinked. “I thought you scanned it. Don’t you already know?”

He shrugged, his cheeks reddening. “That’s the thing…nothing. There’s nothing inside it at all. It’s, well, an empty box.”

As it turned out…not exactly.

I was still considering the thing—definitely not touching it—when Nikki sailed into my room thirty minutes later, double-checking herself at the door.

“Doll, what in God’s creation is that? And where has it been all my life?”

I grimaced, leaning back on the sofa seat as she strode farther into the room. “That,” I said, “is a crown originally worn by Genghis Khan, which I acquired for a client who was most insistent that it was going to be the answer to all his dreams. Unfortunately, said client is not answering his phone, or his text, or his e-mail, and there was nothing in the box besides this thing, in all its Mongolian glory.” Nikki stepped forward. “Don’t touch it,” I held up my hand. “At least not directly. The last time I did, I woke up an entire army of bad guys.”

“And it’s here because…”

I sighed. “Apparently, there’s been a development.”

Chapter Twenty-Five

The Magician wasn’t answering his phone either, and after another full hour of trying to raise my client in Ulaanbaatar, we gave up. Stowing the helmet in the hotel room safe proved a nonstarter, since it instantly started humming again. Loudly. In fact, anytime I got more than fifteen feet away from the thing, the humming kicked up.

After much discussion, we ended up stowing it in a messenger bag, which Nikki refused to carry since it didn’t go with her outfit. Besides, she reasoned, she was already packing a gun. She didn’t want to weigh herself down.

We had barely enough time to visit Roxie before the Connected parade was due to hit the Strip. At that point, we’d need to be back at Ground Zero, with every Council member reporting for duty along with Armaeus and his scroll case of doom, just to be safe. And again, maybe the crowd of revelers would work to our advantage. Maybe SANCTUS would decide that solstice night wasn’t the best time for Armageddon, given how many un-Connecteds would be caught in the crossfire.

Maybe.

As we tooled up the curving drive toward Roxie’s, however, something was definitely off. There was no one in the guardhouse, no sprightly valet to come out to greet us. The place was deserted. As in deserted, deserted. Shouldering my messenger bag, I stepped out of the car with Nikki, and we moved up the palatial steps with increasing speed.

“This isn’t good.” Nikki stopped me with an outstretched hand, then proceeded up the last several steps without me, the gun that had been tucked into her waistband now out and up. I had my own gun hidden in my hoodie, but my fingers were already tingling.

The front door stood ajar, and there were signs of forced entry. Based on the blank screen of the security system inside the door, the electronics in the house were disabled. Nikki shot me a glance. “You going to call Brody?”

“Hmmm.” I weighed my options. “Prolly should.” He’d wanted me as his informant. It was probably to my advantage to play along. And yet…

“It’d be bad if he was in a meeting, though. Or on a date.” Nikki edged the door open a little more, her eyes glinting with excitement. “Maybe you should text. Or Facebook him, maybe.”

“Text.” I nodded. “I bet he keeps that on silent unless he’s getting pinged by official channels.” I keyed in the address and my suspicion of a break-in, downplaying the latter to a “possible.” Then I glanced back to Nikki with wide eyes. “Gosh, in the absence of official instruction, I wonder what we should do?”

Nikki laid a hand on her chest, her inky-black T-shirt and jeans perfectly offsetting her army boots, her auburn hair pulled back in a ponytail below her SWAT ball cap. “Roxie is our friend. We’re very close.”

“It’s only to be expected that we would check on her.”

“She could be hurt. Or drunk. No one should drink alone.”

Despite the banter, our voices were tight, our movements precise. We entered the house without touching anything with our hands and edged the door nearly shut again behind us, both of us tense and alert. The place had the same feel as before—creepy mausoleum of the strange—but it screamed abandonment, too.

“Staff?” I murmured.

“Nothing feels dead here.” Nikki shook her head. “Place is a ghost land.” We moved into the theatre, passing the sign advertising five-dollar card readings. Nothing remained on the stage. Not the table, not the crystal ball. The rest of the tour of the house proved equally perplexing, until we stopped in the front room again. I scanned Roxie’s scrapbook pile. Something made me look twice at the overstuffed volumes, and I paused, frowning down.

“I wonder…”

The Connecteds of this world were a sketchy lot in many ways. As a fringe group living on the edge of society, they sometimes had very good reasons to make friends in high places. And sometimes even better reasons to make friends in low places. “Roxie became a Council member in the seventies, right?”

“Yup.”

I pawed through the stack of scrapbooks to get toward the bottom. The further back they went, the thicker but less glamorous they were. By the time I reached the 1970s, the book was heavy with old tape and bristling with news clippings, playbills, and fading photographs. Roxie hadn’t been a member of the Arcana Council then. She’d been a grifter searching for a score, and she wasn’t too choosy about who she made it with, if these pictures were any indication. Most of her photos had been taken on the arms of guys who looked like they were little more than thugs.

How much had she gotten in return sharing her gifts? So much profound magic in the world was seemingly granted by objects or conferred by spells, and people were always willing to believe something.

I paged through at a rapid clip. Roxie had made the rounds with starlets, musicians, politicians, and mobsters, each account more breathless than the last. Her face changed too, over the course of one year in particular—fuller, richer, more beautiful. Something had shifted in her, something important. I paged back further. And then I found it.

“Son of a bitch,” I breathed. I pointed at the picture, and Nikki squinted down.

“Is that Jerry Fitz—no, way too young. Then again, that family tree has gotta be crooked all the way down to the roots. Fitz’s dad?” She shrugged. “Well, she wouldn’t be the first to rub shoulders with a bad guy. He’s about as ugly as his kid was.”

“Not him. The guy next to him.”

Nikki frowned and leaned in. “Dude in the suit? Never seen him before.”

“I have.” I rocked back on my heels. “He’s a lot older now, and he’s upgraded to robes. That’s the future Cardinal Rene Ventre. I don’t know what he was doing in nineteen seventy six, but currently he’s the head of SANCTUS.” I stared at the picture again, memorizing it. “He was probably a foot soldier back then. He had to be somebody to be in that picture with her, considering where she ended up, and given that Fitz the younger was in bed with SANCTUS for at least a little while.”

“That’s not Fitz, though, that’s his dad.” Nikki shook her head. “She might not have known this Ventre guy at all.”

I took in Roxie’s wide, hard smile. “She might not have known what he was going to become, but she’d already had a lot of hard years in the grift logged by the mid-seventies. She knew how to spot someone important. Someone powerful. And some alliances, once formed, might be hard to back out on. No matter where your life took you later.” I focused again on the elder Fitz, thinking about all the pills his son had been hyped on, all these years later. Had the technoceutical market already been in full swing all the way back then?

“Speculation.” Nikki pushed out her lower lip. “All we know is that Roxie went to a party where she was schmoozing it up with Fitz’s dad, and a very young, very green future cardinal was in attendance too. Doesn’t mean she
wasn’t
cutting deals with bad guys, doesn’t mean she was.”

“And if she did…and she subsequently was elevated to the Council…” I grimaced. “I don’t know how that works. The Council is about balance, dark to light. But if everyone knows you’re working with the bad guys? That’s not going to make you super popular at the dinner table.”

“Then again, she lived up here, not down on the Strip. So maybe she knew she wasn’t welcome.”

“But if you’re the Council, and you know you’ve got a traitor in your midst, wouldn’t you want to keep a closer eye on her? Pushing her away seems kind of dumb.”

“Dumb—or playing the long game. And let’s face it…their long game is a lot longer than most.”

At that moment an ear-splitting shriek sounded through the house, like the whine of a laser cutting through solid metal. My inner ears revolted, but Nikki responded far worse, the sound driving her to her knees in full collapse.