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Page 18

 

  But a walk along the Strip showed him that neither the Sun nor the Big Easy currently had its latest-model white super-stretch out front. A few casual questions to the right people elicited the information that both limos were at a garage for maintenance. Interesting coincidence, that.

  A few more questions gave him the name of the garage each casino used. The same name both times. Another interesting coincidence.

  The garage wasn’t open when he swung by, not that he had expected it to be. It was surrounded by a high fence with a barbed-wire coil along the top, but it wasn’t electrified.

  Two Dobermans guarded the premises instead.

  After a quick stop at a nearby supermarket, he headed back to the garage. He opted to park on the road that ran behind the property, then dodged the traffic and crossed the median to reach the rear of the establishment. There, he waited for the dogs to appear. It wasn’t a long wait. He spoke to them as they approached, concentrating on the tone of his voice as he lured them over for the meat he’d purchased. He hadn’t drugged it; he was counting on his ability to befriend the dogs. He was patient, feeding them, talking to them. He slipped his hand through the wire, touching them, still reassuring them. Finally, he climbed the fence, crossing carefully over the barbed wire. One of the dogs started to snarl, but he spoke to it firmly, and the snarl became a whine. He patted both dogs as he walked slowly through the lot toward the garage itself, encouraging the animals to accompany him.

  There was no alarm on the door to the garage itself, and the lock was easy to pick. The owners apparently had a lot of faith in their dogs. Then again, a garage wasn’t usually a prime target for thieves.

  It took a while for his eyes to adjust to the dim light, but after that it was easy to find the two super-stretches. He was dismayed to see that both had just received new paint jobs. It was easy enough to identify which limo went to which casino, though, thanks to the vanity plates. Sun 1 and Big E were pretty damn obvious.

  He wore thin plastic gloves, to keep his own prints out of the equation, just in case the limos become part of an investigation.

  Neither one appeared to have been involved in the kind of accident that would have killed someone. The paint was fresh, but neither vehicle appeared to have had any bodywork done, not that he thought the murderer would have been sloppy enough to use the same vehicle twice.

  A thorough inspection of the Sun’s limo yielded nothing. He was sure no obvious blood spill would have been left behind for the cops or anyone else to find, but he’d come prepared. A spray of Luminol and a small black light showed no signs of bloodshed, either.

  It was possible, though, that the knife itself would have temporarily sealed the wound, but he searched thoroughly anyway. In the end, he found nothing, not only no blood, but no sign of bleaching to remove blood, either.

  Lots of semen, though.

  He moved on to the limo from the Big Easy.

  Once again, both his first inspection and then a spray of Luminol showed nothing. Not a speck of blood, and no hint of bleaching. But as he ran his fingers along the upholstery next to the right-hand passenger door, he found something else, maybe something just as good.

  It looked like a button from a designer shirt. He studied it in the narrow beam of his small flashlight and wondered if Tanner Green had been missing a button when he died. That would be easy enough to ascertain. He pulled out his phone and took a quick picture of the button, then returned it to where he had found it.

  One of the Dobermans was starting to whine.

  Dillon quickly flicked off his light, then quietly stepped out of the limo and closed the door softly behind himself, as both dogs raced toward the door, which he had left slightly ajar.

  Someone was coming in. He cursed himself for not having heard signs of movement earlier, but it seemed that whoever was arriving had come in as stealthily as he had himself.

  He rolled under the BMW parked beside the limo, and did his best to look and sound like a slab of cement floor.

  “Idiots left the door open,” a man noted irritably. “Fat lot of good you friggin’ dogs were doing, sleeping in here. ”

  Hugo Blythe, Emil Landon’s surviving bodyguard.

  Dillon rolled again, moving from car to car, making his way toward the door—which, luckily, Blythe had also left open—as the other man made his way straight to the limo Dillon had just exited.

  The dogs, thankfully, were following Blythe, tails tucked as they whined nervously. Apparently they knew the man. Maybe Emil Landon did business with the garage that went beyond having his vehicles serviced here. The dogs knew Hugo Blythe. And they didn’t love him, they feared him.

  Mulling over the possible meanings of that knowledge, Dillon slipped under the car parked closest to the rear door and watched as Blythe entered the limo.

  Then he made his escape.

  He raced for the fence, scaled it quickly and had just leaped free of the barbed wire and landed hard, rolling to mitigate the impact, when he heard the first shot.

  It was followed quickly by a second.

  Blythe was running in his direction as he fired again.

  Dillon sprang to a crouch and ran.

  Luckily Blythe was lumbering and slow. Dillon made it to the road and crossed the flow of traffic. He was in his own car and rejoining the stream of traffic before Blythe ever made it to the fence.

  Jessy became aware that she was dreaming somewhere in the middle of her dream.

  She was back at the Sun, which was as crowded as always, and she was being chased. She was weaving through the crowd and between the tables, craps tables, poker tables, roulette tables. She was inside, but there was a low ground fog, which she knew was ridiculous. Fog didn’t rise inside. Fog was for outside.

  Suddenly she—and the fog—were outside. Now she was being chased around a cemetery. But it wasn’t an ordinary cemetery. It was like Boot Hill. Old West cemeteries didn’t have fine marble markers. The crosses were wooden and primitively made, the graves surrounded by stones.

  Sagebrush danced by in a breeze she couldn’t feel. The dust of the desert seemed to choke her, then die away in a fog that couldn’t—shouldn’t—be in such a dry place.

  And from the distance, she could hear the buzzers and bells of the casino. She could see a poker table….

  There were men around it, but something wasn’t right about them. They weren’t real. They were part of the fog. And they were dressed in old railway frock coats and dusty old hats. She could hear the faint sound of a tinkly old-time piano.

  She needed to stay away from the poker players; somehow she knew that. So she veered away, and then, though she was still in a cemetery, it wasn’t the one she had just run through but a Native American burial ground, where the dead had been placed high above the ground on wooden platforms, wrapped in their best furs, with their spears, arrows, quivers and buffalo-skin shields left to hang at their sides. The rows of scaffolds that marked the graves seemed to stretch on forever, but she was sure it was better to run between them than toward the poker players.

  The mist rose around her, but it was thin enough that she could peer through it and see Dillon Wolf standing there, wearing a long black frock coat and somehow seeming to be one with the burial ground, the dead and the past.

  She shook her head, because she didn’t want to be part of that world.

  But she did want to touch him. She wanted to reach out and touch him, see the heated gaze of his eyes and feel the slow stroke of his hands on her skin. Despite the situation, the location, he wasn’t afraid, and she sensed that if she could find the courage to run to him, she wouldn’t be afraid, either. She would find security and more, because the light in his eyes was like a promise. Even then, even in a dream and surrounded by mist, she wanted to join him, to know his touch. She almost literally burned to move closer.

  Yet something in her was still afraid. She di
dn’t quite have the courage to breach the chasm—of age, experience, power—that lay between them.

  He was one with the mist, knew the souls that rested there.

  And she was still being pursued.

  She could hear men behind her, their voices growing louder as they drew closer, and though she didn’t know what they were saying, she knew that they represented a real and imminent danger.

  They wanted her dead.

  She turned away, too afraid to go forward, and angled to the west. She had to escape both the promise and the fear.

  She heard a jingling, like spurs….

  But when she looked back, the men coming after her were wearing suits and could have stepped off the floor of any of the casinos, except that their faces were shrouded by the eerie fog that continued to rise and thickened strangely to hide their features….

  She turned in absolute terror to run again.

  And then Timothy was standing right in front of her. “Trust in the ghost dancers!” he cried. His arms were open, as if to catch her in his safe embrace, and he looked as young and strong as he had been for so much of her life. He was a bastion of safety against the danger that was nipping at her heels. “The ghost dancers speak with the dead, and the dead will give them the answers they need. They see what was, and they can help stop what must never come to pass. ”

  “Timothy, there are no ghost dancers anymore,” she told him. “They failed. The words they heard weren’t true, and they died as they tried to restore tribal control to their former lands. ”

  “You must listen, and listen well,” he went on, ignoring her outburst. “You must let yourself hear the truth. We must all hear what they are saying, not drown them out because of what we want to hear. ”

  She woke up abruptly.

  Or did she?

  Was she really awake? Or was she still trapped in her nightmare?

  For there, sitting at the end of her bed, was a man.

  A dead man.

  Tanner Green.

  She drew a gasping breath…and screamed.

  7

  “It’s all right; I got rid of him. ”

  Startled awake, Dillon blinked into the first pink stages of early-morning sunlight to see Ringo standing over him.

  Dillon jerked to a sitting position. “Where the hell have you been? And…got rid of whom? What happened?”