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She straightened slowly, a funny look on her face.
He held out his hand for the phone.
But she didn’t return it. Instead, she shifted closer, so close he could see that her eyes were brown. A rich, warm color, like melting caramel. He inhaled a slow breath, caught her scent. Fresh and soapy, as though she’d just stepped out of a shower. Surprising. These girls usually poured on the perfume.
“I’m getting a pulsation,” she whispered.
Took him a moment to realize it was an incoming call. “I don’t like ringtones,” he said. “Keep it on vibrate. Give it to me.”
“It’s not a call. It’s a pulsation...” She waggled her fingers in the air. “From out there.”
“Through my phone.”
She nodded. “I’m getting a message.”
Message. He glanced at her outfit. Was she a stripper from Brax’s club? Someone sent over to deliver a message to him?
“From Braxton?”
“Who?”
“Yuri?”
“I...don’t know a Yuri.”
This was starting to feel like another damn twenty questions and no answers from one of Brax’s employees.
“Are you going to tell me?” he snapped.
“I think it’s from...your father.”
Drake felt numb, frozen. Couldn’t move, couldn’t think. Finally, something inside thawed enough for him to speak.
“Impossible.” His heart banged so hard and fast, his chest ached.
But she was off someplace else. She swiveled slowly on her stool, her head tipped as though listening to a faraway tune.
“He says he loves you very much.” She smiled at Drake.
Enough! As though jolted to life by an electric prod, he bolted upright and blew out a lungful of air.
“Give me the damn phone.” He snatched it from her hand. He didn’t need this. Not from some whacked, high-woo-woo messenger. Was this Yuri’s idea of a sick joke?
Those big brown eyes implored him. “I didn’t mean to—”
“How much?”
“How much what?”
“How much money did they give you to play this game?”
For a girl who liked to talk, her silence was a message in itself. She was holding something back, but what? He no longer thought she worked as a stripper at Topaz—Brax liked his girls to wear sleek outfits, not castoffs from a Yankee Doodle Dandy parade. Plus, Brax liked to do his own talking. He would never send someone, especially this someone, to do it for him.
Yuri, on the other hand, was crafty, pathologically so, but immature. Maybe the Russian got the itch to dig at Drake, throw him off, so he’d hired this girl, maybe minutes before she walked in here, with hasty instructions to play on his father’s death. Maybe she was hard up for money, feared the thug or both.
“Why don’t you stick to what you’re good at.” He gave her a scathing once-over. “Although anybody who has to advertise to that extent probably isn’t all that good. Who hired your sorry ass?”
She opened her slick red lips to say something, but nothing came out.
Sally appeared, pushed a coaster toward his neighbor. “What can I get ya?”
Miss Who Dat swerved her stricken gaze to the bartender. “I, uh...”
He set down his bottle, hard, on the bar. “Order something. We have some talking to do.”
“Cherry cola?” she asked in a wispy voice.
Sally gave him a what’s-up look. He flashed her a mind-your-business one back.
“Maraschino juice in a cola okay?” Sally asked.
“F’sure. Thank you, ma’am.”
“Sally. And you’re?”
“Uh...” Her gaze darted across the bar. “Remy.”
“Nice to meet you, Remy.” She pointed to Drake’s bottle. “Another?”
He shook his head as an old Sinatra tune, “Luck Be a Lady,” started playing in the background.
Remy tapped her fingers on the bar. “I like this song.”
“Fine. Who put you up to this?”
She gave him a blank look. “Nobody.”
“Sticking to that story, eh?”
The way she lowered her thick black lashes, then raised them slowly, made him think of a theater curtain. He wondered what show he would see next.
“Like I told you,” she said, oozing earnestness, “I don’t know a Brassell or Yuri.”
“Braxton.”
“What?”
“You heard me.” He’d pulled that same stunt a hundred times. Mispronouncing a name to pretend he didn’t know the person. Playing dumb when you actually knew everything about the person, from the city where they were born to their cat’s name.
She acted like some kind of psychic nut, but he got the sense she was a lot sharper than she let on. No way was he going to get information from her. Not the truthful variety anyway.
“What you claim to have heard could not have been my father because...” He paused, swallowed an ache he’d been fighting all day. “He’s dead.”
There was a stupefied look on her face. Then she keeled forward and hugged him. “Oh, mercy!” she murmured, her voice breaking. “I had no idea.”
He set down the phone, trying to ignore the curious looks of others at the bar. Placing his hands on her trembling shoulders, he peeled her off him.
Her eyes glistened with emotion. Her chin quivered. What an actress.
“You knew.”
She sucked in a loud, indignant breath. “That he’s de— passed? No, of course, I didn’t know—how would I have? Even if I did know, I wouldn’t have shared what I heard...or sensed maybe is more like it, because to tell you the truth, I’m not all that sure I have the gift...but even if I was sure, I would never have said something like that without believing it offered some comfort.”
He frowned. “What?”
She waved her hands in the air. “Never mind.” She paused. “What are you pointing at?”
“That photo over the register. My dad was the original owner’s best friend, and a lifetime member of the Blottos who still hang out here most afternoons. If somebody wanted to learn facts about my father, all they’d have to do was buy one of those regulars a drink.”
“I don’t know any facts.” She looked at the photo. “He must be the gentleman on the right. The other one is too old.”
He said nothing.
After several beats, she said quietly, “You’re right. Those pulsations likely were your phone on vibrate. Sometimes I think I’m picking up on vibes, but...” She gave a one-shouldered shrug. “My nanny, though, she had the gift.”
“I don’t care if there’s a radio frequency scanner embedded in your skull, you have no right pretending to know Benedict Morgan.”
His brother had his issues, but Brax would never stoop so low as to fabricate a story involving their father. This evening was getting weirder by the minute. Time to go home, grab some shut-eye before his three a.m. return to Topaz.
He stood, retrieved his wallet from his pocket.
“Please, sir,” she whispered, “it was just a...funny coincidence.”
He turned away as he leafed through the money in his billfold. At least with his back to her, she’d get the hint their exchange was over.
“You got me wrong,” she continued.
So much for that theory.
“I sat next to you because I liked you. I walked in here and I thought, ‘Wow, that’s one good-looking guy. Sharp dresser, too.’ Maybe we could talk, get to know each other, but then your phone dropped...”
He turned so abruptly she jumped. “Let’s end this nonsense now,” he said in a low rumble. “You claim nobody sent you, fine. You call that...other part...a funny coincidence, okay. I halfway believe you because nobody in their right mind would hire a flake to put some mental muscle on me. But you can’t fool me about the rest of your performance. I’m not buying, sister, so sell it elsewhere.”
“Sell?” She actually looked affronted. “You think I’m...a hooker?”
“I’m giving you two pieces of advice. That ingénue act might work on out-of-towners who’ve never been to the big city, but don’t test-drive it on the locals, baby. And the next time somebody asks your name, don’t pick one off a bottle, Remy.” He snorted a laugh. “I suppose your last name’s Martin.”
Another guilty look. “F’true, you got me there. But you’re wrong about the rest. I’m not selling anything.”
“Right,” he muttered, “and I’m Mickey Mouse.”
Sally appeared, set the cola in front of the girl.
He tugged loose a five and handed it to Sally. “Keep the change.”
“Going home?” She slipped the bill into the tip jar.
He nodded. “Time to take my dog for a walk.”
“Don’t be a stranger.” She pulled out her cell phone and headed down the bar.
He didn’t look at “Remy” as he plucked his jacket off the high back of the stool. Folding it over his arm, he headed to the door as the music swelled and Frank warbled a long, long note that faded to nothing.
Drake stepped outside, and the heat hit him like a blast furnace. He wondered when he’d last taken a breath that didn’t smell like exhaust and warm asphalt.
Looking up at the night sky, he picked out the Big Dipper. When he was a kid, the skies had been cleaner, the stars brighter. But like everything else in life, things changed.
He was tired of change. It demanded too much and left too little. Never understood why people liked to say “embrace change,” as though it was fun, like wrapping your arms around the waist of some hot babe on a Harley, the two of you streaking toward some exhilarating destination. Change was more like sitting in the back of a taxi with some hard-nosed cabbie who drove recklessly, padded the fare and dumped you at the wrong address.
That was the problem with being a practical man. You knew life was no easy ride.
Sometimes, though, he envied the dreamers of the world, wondered what it was like to hope. To believe without the benefit of physical evidence. Staring at the stars again, he wished he could trust that something lay beyond life’s closed door, because he sure as hell couldn’t find the answers here.
He walked across the parking lot to the darkened kiosk, brushed off the seat of an abandoned stool and laid his jacket neatly over it. Rolling up a shirt sleeve, he watched the traffic along Las Vegas Boulevard. Cars, trucks and those life-changing taxis streamed past, filling the night with scraps of laughter, music and the occasional horn blast.
He scanned Topaz’s parking lot. No yellow Porsche parked in its regular spot. No black Mercedes, either, but it could be parked in a section not visible from here. He’d walk through the lot on his way to his truck, see what was there.
Fighting a yawn, he rolled up his other sleeve. He felt drained. Time to close the lid on today’s troubles, go home, walk his dog, then get some rest.
Click click click.
“Hello, sir?” called out a too-familiar female voice.
So much for closing that lid.
CHAPTER THREE
VAL SLOWED HER steps as she approached the darkened kiosk. The overhang cast a deep shadow around the building, making it difficult to see what or who was there, but from Dino’s window she had seen Drake stop somewhere around here.
“Hello, you there?” She squinted into the gloom.
“If I told you I wasn’t, would you go away?”
She huffed a breath. “Good thing that bad mood of yours isn’t luggage or it’d be too heavy to carry.”
“You came out here to tell me that?”
“No. You forgot your phone.” She thrust out her hand, more than ready to give it up. Whatever pulsations she had felt, or thought she felt, were gone.
