Driven to Ink (26 page)

They do, but this place was a maze of walkways and stairs and escalators and elevators. Dan Franklin could be across the street at the Mirage by now.

I jogged along my route and ended up at an ornate railing. As I was looking down at the rather spectacular crystal sculpture in the Palazzo hotel lobby, I saw Dan Franklin power walking past.

“Hey!” I shouted.

He glanced up and gave me a little finger waggle.

“How do we get down there?” Tim had come up next to me.

We had to go back to the escalators by the waterfall and then down to the first floor.

Dan Franklin disappeared.

Tim tugged my arm and said, “Come on.” We made our way back around the maze of shops until we got to the escalators. We took the escalator two stairs at a time—at one point I thought I’d somersault forward all the way down—and landed at the bottom with a thud, running straight ahead, through the Palazzo casino and then coming to the statue. We rounded it to the front entrance.

We pushed our way through heavy doors and stood outside, breathing heavily from our workout. Remarkably, I saw Dan Franklin in the distance, on the sidewalk, heading south. But I was tired. I leaned over, my hands on my knees, trying to catch my breath, and the little piece of paper that bartender made me pick up fell out of my pocket and onto the ground.

Something about it caught my eye. I reached down, picked it up, and uncrumpled it.

It was a Las Vegas Monorail ticket.

I shoved it at Tim. “This fell out of Franklin’s pocket. He might be going there,” I said.

Tim nodded as he studied it.

“Where on earth do we find this Monorail?” I asked. “I know it exists. I see it every now and then, but I’ve never actually been on it.”

“You and most of the city,” Tim said. “I think we can get to it at Harrah’s.”

“You think? You don’t know? You’re one of Las Vegas’ finest. You’re supposed to know where everything is.”

Las Vegas’ finest had started toward the Strip. Harrah’s was a little ways down from here. In the direction Dan Franklin had been headed. Sounded like a plan.

“So tell me about this ten grand,” Tim said.

Uh-oh. I knew that was coming, but I hadn’t quite figured out yet how to skip around it. It did, however, get Tim to help me chase Dan Franklin, so I had to think fast.

“Jeff found out about it.” That wasn’t a lie. Exactly.

“Coleman?”

I nodded.

“How did he find out?”

“How does Jeff find out about anything?” I asked.

Tim mulled that a second, then asked, “So Jeff found out Dan Franklin withdrew ten grand from his bank account?”

“That’s right.” And because I needed to get off the subject, as we passed the façade of the Venetian, I added that I thought Dan Franklin might have actually been in my shop, that it might not have been Ray Lucci after all.

“We have Dan Franklin’s information, not Ray Lucci’s. Why would Lucci pose as Franklin? That never made sense,” I said. There was something about the tattoo that tickled my memory, something that was a little off, but I couldn’t remember what it was.

We circled around a gaggle of Japanese tourists holding cameras up to get a shot of the Eiffel Tower in the distance. There was a lot of pedestrian congestion here: heavyset guys holding beer bottles—open container laws don’t exist in Vegas—as they jostled each other, laughing; twentysomething women showing off bellies and tattoos; middle-aged couples wearing fanny packs and trying to sidestep all of the above. Three Hispanic men were slapping small cardboard cards against the palms of their hands before holding them out to passersby. Rejected cards sporting pictures of women with large bare breasts and phone numbers where they could be contacted lay scattered on the sidewalk.

I ignored them and craned my neck to see Franklin up ahead. He hadn’t moved as quickly as I’d feared. Maybe he’d stopped for one of those cards.

“So Lucci had the same tattoo Franklin has,” Tim mused. He was trying to figure out if that meant anything.

“So does Sylvia,” I said, although the instant I said it, I regretted it because of the way Tim looked at me.

“What do you mean,
so does Sylvia
?”

“She’s got a ‘That’s Amore,’ too,” I said. “She told me she got it in Sedona to commemorate her wedding. It looked new, so I’m sure she wasn’t lying.”

“What about Dan Franklin’s?”

“What about it?”

“Did that look new, too?”

I saw where he was going with this. If Franklin was the one who got the tattoo at my shop last week, then it would still be healing with that bubblegum pink hue. I thought about the tattoo, but I wasn’t sure.

“It was so quick,” I said. “He took off his jacket, I saw the tattoo, and then, when I pointed it out, he swung around so I didn’t have a chance to really look at it.”

“But this is your job,” Tim protested as we went through the doors at Harrah’s.

“Okay, so I had an off day,” I said bitterly.

The lights were flashing like a strobe; bells were ringing; music was playing. People were crowded around the slot machines, methodically hitting those little PLAY AGAIN buttons and hoping for the best. I refrained from shouting, “You’ll never win,” and stuck close to Tim as we maneuvered our way across the casino floor toward the back, where Dan Franklin’s head bobbed up and down in the crowd. He didn’t seem to know we were behind him, and he didn’t look back. Maybe he figured he’d lost us back at the Palazzo.

It felt as if we were walking forever. Around slot machines, gaming tables, people, cocktail waitresses balancing trays of glasses. Like those rats in a maze.

Finally we left the casino and stepped into a small area with a couple of kiosks. A sign pointed us in the direction of the Monorail. We went outside along a concrete path between Harrah’s and the Imperial Palace.

It dawned on me right about then that Tim was helping me track down Dan Franklin. Exactly the kind of thing he was supposed to prevent. But I certainly wasn’t going to say anything. He was on autopilot; being a cop and chasing the bad guys was ingrained in his DNA. Although it could be argued we didn’t quite know which side of the law Dan Franklin was on. The tattoo made him suspect, as did the facts that he’d been hiding out for days now, eluding any sort of questioning, and had withdrawn ten thousand dollars from his bank account.

As we approached the Monorail station, after walking what felt like miles, I realized there was one more thing that cast doubt on the man’s innocence.

He had a blue Ford Taurus. So what would cause him to get around town on the Monorail instead of driving? An accident, perhaps?

S
ure, I was casting a wide net. It wasn’t exactly that I wanted Dan Franklin to be guilty, but all the signs were there. Because I still wanted to distract Tim from Dan Franklin’s banking activity, I filled him in on the blue Taurus as we went up the steps to the Monorail station.

“You’re wondering why he’d take the Monorail,” Tim said when I was done. No one could ever accuse him of not being with the program.

As he spoke, the sleek bullet-shaped Monorail slid along its track and came to a smooth stop at the station, which we were approaching. I didn’t see Dan Franklin anywhere up there, but we didn’t have the greatest view.

We had to buy tickets from a machine. Tim stuffed a ten-dollar bill into its slot, and it spit out a couple of tickets. He handed me one.

“Too bad there wasn’t a person here,” I said. “You could’ve just showed your badge.”

He ignored me, and we slipped the tickets into the turnstile. The doors flipped open, and we took the stairs two at a time.

At the top, the Monorail’s doors were closing, and as it started to move past us, going north toward the Sahara, I spotted Dan Franklin inside one of the cars, smiling and waving at us as the train picked up speed.

“We just wasted ten bucks,” I said. “Because even if we get on the next train, we don’t know where he’s getting off.”

Tim still hadn’t said anything. He stood with his hands on his hips, surveying the tracks.

“This only goes to the Convention Center, the Hilton, and the Sahara from here,” he mused. “The Convention Center doesn’t make any sense; it leaves you off in the middle of nowhere, not close to the Convention Center or to the Strip. And the Hilton—it’s too far off the main drag. No real reason to go there, either. The Sahara is the logical destination.”

“For what?” I asked.

Tim turned and stared at me. “What do you mean,
for what
?”

“Why would he go to the Sahara?”

He sighed. “Think about it, Brett. If you want to be some sort of Nancy Drew, I think you’ll have to do better than that.”

And then the lightbulb over my head went on.

The wedding chapel wasn’t far from the Sahara.

“You think he’s going to That’s Amore, don’t you?” I asked.

Tim grinned. “So you’re a little slow.”

I started for the escalator but heard Tim say, “Where are you going?”

I turned back to see him staring at the track, as if willing a train to come by.

“What? We’re going to take this?” I asked, walking back over to him.

“By the time we get the car, he could be long gone.”

“And by the time a train comes, he’ll be halfway to Mexico.”

“But not if he doesn’t have a car, like you suspect.”

Okay, so he had a point. “But won’t we need a car once we get there?”

“Maybe you can ask your friend Jeff Coleman to meet us.”

Had aliens come and taken my brother away? Was he one of those pod people from
Invasion of the Body Snatchers
?

And then I knew. He wanted to ask Jeff how he knew about the ten thousand dollars. I’d painted myself into a corner on that one.

“Call him, okay?” Tim said.

I had to try to turn it around a little. “Why don’t you call Flanigan instead?”

“Because if I tell him I’ve got a gut instinct based on your gut instinct, he’ll tell me to stay out of it.”

I grinned. “And that doesn’t appeal to you, does it?”

“Just call Coleman, okay?”

I didn’t see any way out of it. As I reached into my bag, I saw another Monorail approaching. That didn’t take too long.

I flipped my phone open and punched in Jeff’s number.

“Kavanaugh?”

“Hey there, what are you doing right now?”

“Wouldn’t you like to know?”

“I’m not kidding. Are you free now?”

“For what? Phone sex?”

I snorted. “No. Not phone sex.”

Tim shot me a look, and I waved him off as the Monorail came to a stop in front of us. The doors slid open, and we stepped inside. It was like the monorail in Disney World. Clean and bright. Except that no one else was in this car, and as I remembered, the monorail at Disney was usually full of screaming kids and at least one balloon.

Jeff was talking. “Okay, so no phone sex. Maybe next time.”

I ignored him. “Can you meet Tim and me over at That’s Amore? We need a ride.”

“Where’s your car?”

“It’s in the parking garage at the Venetian.”

“So how are you getting to the wedding chapel? Are you taking a cab?”

“We’re on the Monorail.”

“The what? Kavanaugh, you do know that no one but tourists use that thing.”

He was right. Although, looking around me, I didn’t think even the tourists were taking advantage of it.

“So can you meet us?”

“What do I get if I do?”

I closed my eyes and counted to ten before I spoke again. “You get the satisfaction of possibly catching a killer.”

“I told you I didn’t care if the cops ever caught the guy who killed Rosalie’s husband.”

“But what about Ray Lucci?”

He was quiet a second, then said, “That’s a little complicated right now.” His voice was unusually soft.

“Sylvia told you, didn’t she?” I asked.

I heard a short inhale, then, “Yeah. She told me you knew, too. Why didn’t you tell me?”

“Not my place. Are you okay?”

“It’s not the kind of news I was expecting.”

I wanted to talk to him more about it, how he was handling knowing he had a half brother whom he’d never get to know, but sitting here on the Monorail with Tim watching me didn’t seem like the right time. Jeff was the first to change the subject, though.

“So why are you heading to the wedding chapel?”

“I think you were right when you said you thought Dan Franklin was the killer. I ran into him a little while ago, and he ended up taking off. We’re following him. We think he’s heading to the chapel.”

“You think?”

While the Monorail glided along its track, I managed to put the story in a nutshell by the time we reached the Convention Center station.

I was so immersed in my conversation that when Tim yanked me by the arm and pulled me up, I shrugged him off at first. But then I saw the look on his face and where he was looking. Outside the Monorail window.

Dan Franklin was striding across the parking lot at the Convention Center.

“C
hange of plans,” I said quickly to Jeff as Tim and I got off the Monorail. “He got off at the Convention Center. We’re following him now.”

We went through the automatic glass doors and spotted the escalators that would take us down to the first level and the parking lot.

“I’m just about there,” Jeff said.

“What?”

“While we’ve been talking, I’ve been driving. I wasn’t too far away. I was heading to my mother’s; she’s staying over at Rosalie’s, and she needs a change of clothes.”

I didn’t much care about Sylvia’s wardrobe at the moment.

“I’ll see you in a minute.” And Jeff ended the call.

Tim and I were running now. Dan Franklin was over near the Courtyard by Marriott, on East Desert Inn Road. So far I didn’t think he’d seen us. I shoved my phone in my bag, which was slapping against my hip as I ran.