Diva Las Vegas (Book 1 in Raven McShane Series) (21 page)

Her eyes narrowed a bit, and she shifted her weight from leg to leg.  It seemed she was comprehending what I was saying, but her body began trembling slightly and her arms began weakening under the gun’s weight.  No one moved.  I kept talking.

“But you couldn’t just get rid of Cody, could you? Another dead body would look a little suspicious, so another murder was out of the question.  But once it was clear no one suspected you of George’s murder, you decided to frame Cody for the murder you committed and have Cody sent off to prison for life.  That way you could divorce him, reap the benefits of your crime, and Cody wouldn’t get a dime.”

“You can’t prove any of that,” she hissed.  Her face still looked defiant.

“You did it perfectly,” I continued, working it out on the fly.  “I have to compliment you.  By testifying for Cody—even though it was a weak alibi—you made him dependent on you.  Until this moment I couldn’t figure out why you would stay married to each other, but that was the key.  You were bound together by that lie.  He couldn’t divorce you and get your money because you could always retract your alibi testimony.”

She continued sneering at me.  “You don’t know what you’re talking about,” she said.  Her voice was barely a whisper.

“No, actually it’s very simple.  As long as you remained married to Cody, you could prevent him from testifying against you in court.  It’s called the marital privilege.”  I pulled that one out of my ass.  “If the cops ever got around to pointing the finger at you for the crime, the only way to keep Cody off the stand was to stay married to him.”

“Shit,” Carlos muttered under his breath.  Tears began running down Amy’s face.

“Stop!” she yelled at me.  Her big mouth was twisted into a sickening snarl.

“You probably never dreamed the jury would let him off, did you?” I pressed.  She looked pathetic, but she hadn’t quite admitted anything yet.  I wanted her to say more while Carlos and Cody were listening.  I hoped Cody’s cell phone was recording everything.  “It was easy for you to testify when it looked like he was guilty, but by then you were so jaded you forgot the effect Cody’s face could have on people.”  It didn’t hurt that Cody bribed one of the jurors, but I kept that little tidbit to myself.

“You bitch!” she screamed finally.  Wait,
I
was the bitch?  She inhaled audibly.  Her whole body was shaking, and I was worried I’d gone too far to set her off.

Her eyes had been locked in on me, but suddenly she seemed distracted by something above my head.  I turned to see Cody looking down at us from the second floor.  He looked like some kind of angel, outlined in a halo of the reflected glow of the Escalade’s headlamps.

Amy turned the gun on Cody, and for an instant I felt a pang of relief.  Amy’s face showed a kind of baffled rage.  “You’re supposed to be dead,” she said matter-of-factly.  It was the first thing she’d said that could be incriminating.  I guessed she’d told Holman to ram Cody’s car with a truck earlier.

Cody seemed unsure of what to say, but he looked as angry as she was.

“You killed your own brother?” he asked finally.  He slurred his words, probably an effect of the codeine.  “You were going to let me rot in prison just so you could have the whole casino to yourself?”

She sneered.  “Actually,” she said with unsettling calmness, “I was hoping you’d get the death penalty.”  With that she fired off a round at Cody, and the blast threw him back against the wall.  His scream echoed through the lobby long after the sharp report from the gun stopped ringing.

I shouldn’t have been shocked by the gunshot, but I was.  As Amy turned the gun back to me my mind searched for any means of escape.  I saw Carlos inching closer along the wall, but she saw him too and waved him off.  He froze.  I began slowly walking backwards as she took aim at me, and the last thing I remembered before the shot rang out was a strange crunching sound coming from my left.

My ears rang from the gunshot, which seemed louder than the last.  A moment passed before I knew I was still alive.  I felt myself for blood, and relief mixed with confusion swept over me as I realized I was okay.  Amy was on the floor, somehow, rocking back and forth.  Blood poured sickeningly from the stump where her right arm used to be.

“Nobody move!” boomed a voice on my left.  It was Lieutenant Sean Whelan.  If I hadn’t phoned him earlier, I might not have recognized him.  The last time I’d seen him, he’d been plastered and his face was buried between
Shayla
the stripper’s massive breasts.  Now he had an all-business expression, and he was wearing a bullet-proof vest.

Whelan nodded at me gruffly and pointed his weapon at Carlos.

“He’s okay,” I said.  “The other guy is trouble,” I said, pointing at Holman.  “There’s another guy upstairs.  He’s been shot.  Can you call in an ambulance?”

“You do it,” Whelan said.  “Just dial 911.”

I did.  They said it would be five to ten minutes.

Whelan moved towards the crumpled figure of Amy Masterson and picked her handgun off the floor, the whole time keeping his gun pointed at Holman.  Holman instinctively held his hands in the air, and he eased himself backwards to lean against the wall.  I discreetly felt the front of my shorts to see if my bladder had emptied.  Somehow, I was dry.

“What the hell is that thing?”  I asked, nodding at Whelan’s gun.

“Shotgun,” he said, reporting the obvious.  “Beretta M4, if you’re keeping score.  When I saw the Escalade had driven right through the front doors, I figured I better not come in here with a pop gun.”

Whelan looked Amy over and nudged her onto her back with his right foot.  It might have otherwise been a crass gesture, but Whelan had to keep one eye on Holman.  Amy’s right arm now ended just below her elbow, and there was no sign anywhere of the remains of her hand and wrist.  She seemed to be going into shock, and I wondered if the ambulance would have room for both her and Cody.  That would be a scene.

“She’ll survive, but she’ll have to become left-handed,” Whelan said.

With the building’s front doors and windows smashed in, we were now standing in an open-air lobby.  A faint desert breeze wheezed in from outside, and it carried with it the sound of sirens approaching from a distance.  I began breathing a little easier.  Whelan walked around to survey the damage, his heavy black shoes crunching the broken glass underfoot.  He stuck his finger in the hole in the wall that Carlos had made with his Glock and then turned around to size up the hood of the Escalade, which was sprayed with a mixture of buckshot and blood.

Whelan looked at me quizzically, the faintest hint of a smile detectable on his face.  He checked his watch.  “I thought you said to come at two o’clock.  It seems you guys started the party a little early.”

“Sorry,” I said.  “The things I was planning to do might not have worked if an official police presence was here.  So I gave ourselves a half-hour head start.”

 “Good plan,” he said sarcastically.  “Seems like you pretty much had everything under control.  What were you planning to do, anyway?”

“Well, I thought there was a good chance we’d have to beat the crap out of somebody to get a confession.”

“I see.”

I laughed nervously.  “Beyond that, I didn’t know what to expect.  Thanks for coming, though.  Next time, I’ll let the pros handle something like this.”  That was an understatement.

It seemed like Whelan had things under control, so I ran up the stairs two at a time.  Cody was lying on his back and moaning.  It looked like Amy had clipped his other arm.  There was a hole in the shoulder of his shirt, but I couldn’t see any blood soaking through.

“Are you okay?” I asked.

More moaning.  I knelt down and checked his torso.  It was his shoulder, all right, but there wasn’t much blood at all.  It looked like he would be okay, but he’d be dependent on someone for a long time.  I lifted up his head and rested it on my thigh.  He didn’t seem to mind.  I ran my hand through his hair and touched his face.  It wasn’t exactly how I had planned it, but what the hell.

I was stroking Cody’s head softly when he opened his eyes and smiled at me.  It made me all warm inside.

Carlos appeared at the top of the steps, shaking his head in disgust.  “You’re pathetic.”

“
What
?” I asked innocently.

“Whoa, slow down,” Mike said at dinner the next night.  He was wearing his usual uniform of a white short-sleeved oxford shirt, and I wondered if the other diners thought I was having dinner with my termite exterminator.  I would have to do something about Mike’s fashion sense, and fast.  On the other hand, if he dressed any better there would be a lot more competition from women like me.

“Okay.  I was saying my mistake was in focusing the whole time on who killed George Hannity, when I should have been looking for who tried to frame Cody for killing George.  Once I guessed Cody was innocent, the real question was who would try to make it look like Cody was guilty.  The most logical person was always Amy.”

“But they were all up to no good, so how were you supposed to know?”  He was being kind, trying to reassure me that I hadn’t completely made a mess of things.  “That was the confusing part,” he continued. “Three of them were ripping the casino off, so nobody wanted to cooperate with you because that would end the good thing they had going.  The newspaper made you into a hero,” he added.

My last phone call the previous night had been to Leslie Trondheim, the
Review-Journal
reporter I’d taken to dinner a few weeks earlier.  Les was wide awake when I reached her at 2:10 a.m., just as the ambulances arrived to take Amy and Cody to the hospital.  I gave her the gist of the story and told her to rush a photographer to the hospital.  She had managed to get the presses stopped for a late edition, and front page color images of a bloodied Cody and Amy Masterson greeted a stunned city the next morning. 

Mike and I were sitting at a corner table at
Lucello’s
, and it was very late.  I had polished off a martini and he was politely sipping at a glass of red wine.  I think it was evaporating faster than he was drinking it.

“Right,” I continued.  “Amy was calling the shots the whole time.  And apparently Holman thought he was going to swoop in and become a multi-millionaire by marrying Amy when the time came.”

“Really?” he laughed.

“That’s what Lieutenant Whelan told me.  That’s why he was doing all her dirty work.  She had him wrapped around her little finger.”

Mike seemed impressed.  In retrospect, I probably should have called him for additional backup the night before, but for some pigheaded reason I’d wanted to do it without Mike’s help.

It was getting to be the awkward part of the night.  Dinner was over, and after the week’s events I didn’t feel like sleeping alone.

“Mike, I need a favor.  After all that’s happened, I don’t feel safe going back to the hotel by myself.”  That was a whopper—the bad guys were all locked up, but that was a minor detail.

“I’ll be happy to come with,” he said.  That was easy, I thought.  Now how was I going to get him to stay?  I doubted there was any tequila in the mini bar.

My car was still at the Flamingo.  We paid the check and Mike drove us the five blocks back to the hotel.  He had gotten quieter as the minutes ticked by.  I wasn’t doing us any favors either.  Ninety percent of my job was asking questions.  I couldn’t think of a single one to keep the conversation going.

As we arrived at the door to my room, I fished through my purse for my key card.            

“Nice place,” Mike murmured.  I was worried Mike was going to bolt before I could come up with another pretext to keep him.  There was nothing that needed fixing, no pickle jars to open, no storm door in need of mending.  Not even any termites that needed exterminating.  As he inspected the view, my eyes drifted to the glasses on the bar.  This is the part where I would ask him if he wanted something to drink.  Where I get him drunk and see if he even remembers what we did in the pool in San Diego.  Where he tells me he hasn’t stopped thinking about me.  Where he picks me off my feet and throws me onto the bed.

But I just stood there.

Mike returned from the window and made a show of checking the locks on the door.  “I think you’ll be just fine.”

“Good,” I said.  We stood facing each other.  His back was to the door now.  He stood across from me, unsure what to do with his hands.  He shoved them into his pockets.

“Well… thanks for tonight,” I said, and before I even knew what I was doing, I brushed past him and found myself opening the door.  I stood in the threshold, cuing his exit.  “I’m sure I’ll see you soon.”

 His eyebrows went up a touch, but other than that, he was his usual self—a blank slate.  “Yeah.  Good night,” he said, almost in a whisper.  He moved past me into the hall.

“See
ya
,” I whispered back, but Mike had already disappeared around the corner.  Talk about awkward.  I stood in the doorway until I heard the elevator chime and the doors close.  He wasn’t coming back.

I sat on my bed pouting for a few minutes.  For some reason I had just given the boot to the man I’d been lusting after.  There’d be other chances, I told myself, but that night I just didn’t feel like playing the role of the desperate pursuer, the woman who relied on gimmicks and booze to get what she wanted.  I got up and started filling the hot tub.  I shed my clothes and donned one of the extra-comfy bathrobes.  It was time for a final raid of the minibar.

I chuckled to myself when I found two mini bottles of Cuervo tequila in the fridge hiding behind a half-bottle of wine. 
Damn,
I thought.  I sat back down on the bed and thought wistfully about Mike and our margaritas that night in San Diego.  I was already having second thoughts about getting rid of him.

As I was getting up to turn off the water, a hesitant knock came at the door.  My heart raced as I scurried to the door to check the peephole.  It wasn’t Mike.

Oh my God. 
I wasn’t expecting this.

I flung the door open.  “
Cody.
”

He smiled.  “Your phone must be off.  I’ve been calling all day.”  He still had his arm in a cast, but he was all cleaned up.  It was incredible how good this man looked, just a day after being hit by a truck and shot in the shoulder.

“Come in, come in,” I stammered.

“I brought you this.”  He held out a shimmering diamond necklace.  “To say thanks.  Thanks for believing in me.  Sort of.”

I reached out and took it, moving each diamond through the tips of my fingers.  He took it back and fastened it around my neck.

“Wow,” he said.

I checked it in the mirror, opening my robe half-way to see how it lay on my skin.  It was a
wow,
that was for sure.  I still hadn’t said anything.

“You like it?”

“I
love
it, are you crazy?  You didn’t have to do this, though.”

“I know.  I just felt bad about how everything happened.”

“Did you buy this with, uh . . .”

He chuckled.  “With money I stole from the casino?”

I nodded sheepishly.  It was a stupid question.

“Maybe.  But we were stealing from a murderer, so I don’t feel too bad.”

His logic was impeccable.  With diamonds like this, I could pretty much rationalize anything.

I thought for a second after an idea popped into my mind.  I told myself
no,
that’s not going to work.  But some other part of my brain had seized control of my mouth.

“Say, Cody, do you like tequila?”

“I
love
tequila.  Why?”

“Sit down.  I’ll show you.”
 

I fixed him some tequila on the rocks and found some acceptable music on the clock radio.
 
I moved towards him and began one of my most popular lap dance routines.

Before long, my robe came off.
 
He was on the edge of his chair, and I pulled his head to my chest, enveloping it, as we moved together with the music.
 
When the song ended, Cody seemed like he was trying to say something, so I let him up for air.

“You know,” he whispered, “I’m . . .”
 
He let it hang there.

I played dumb.
 
“You’re what?”
 

“I’m
gay
,” he whispered, almost apologetically.
 

I pulled his head back to me and whispered in his ear.
 
“Not tonight you’re not.”