Kitty and the Dead Man's Hand

  “You wouldn’t believe me if I told you,” he said.

  Exasperated, I flung my arms and shouted, “I’m a freaking werewolf! Try me!”

  He was already turning away to leave.

  He was trying to raise more questions about the performers in Balthasar’s show. Where did they come from? Why no wolves? If I wanted to be smug I’d say wolves were too smart to put up with that sort of thing. But wolves were more pack driven than cats and should have been naturals for a group like this. They were also wilder. I’d never heard of a trained wolf in a circus. There are no wolves in Vegas, Dom said, because it wasn’t wild enough.

  What I really needed to do about all this was a bunch of research: dig up biographies, figure out where Grant learned his trade, trace Balthasar back and try to learn when he’d been infected with lycanthropy, when he started his show, and if anyone had ever guessed his secret. All that would require a stack of old newspapers, a few hours with a microfiche machine, an Internet connection, and all that good old-fashioned detective work. I was supposed to be on vacation. I was supposed to be getting married.

  I decided to let it go. Whatever was going on here, whatever animosity existed between Grant and Balthasar, had started long before I got here and would most likely continue after, no matter what I did about it. Which meant it could all wait until I got back home, and I needed material for the show during a slow week.

  Just this once, curiosity was not going to get this Kitty.

  I had a sudden urge to see Ben. I wanted his smell in my lungs.

  With only a couple of hours left before our appointment at the chapel, I went back to the room to shower and change. I had my dress, a kicky, sexy number with a short skirt and high heels. A dress that screamed I’m getting married in Vegas. How often would I get to wear a dress like that?

  The rest of the night would be mine. Mine and Ben’s. I could relax. I could get married. Forget about all the weirdness. I could just be a normal person, at least for a few hours. Be a giddy newlywed.

  Six was fast approaching. I’d changed into my spiffy new dress, and I looked good. But still no Ben. I tried not to pace, or tap my feet, or bite my fingernails off. Instead, I turned on the TV and compulsively flipped channels. When my phone rang, I nearly fell off the bed. Pouncing on it like it was a rabbit, I checked the display.

  “Hello?” I said, and my voice squeaked.

  “Is this Kitty Norville?” said an unfamiliar male voice.

  “Yes. Who is this?”

  “I’m Detective Mike Gladden. I’m with the Las Vegas Police Department. Do you know Ben O’Farrell?”

  My stomach dropped, my spine froze, and a million nightmare scenarios played out in my mind. What had happened to him? I shouldn’t have let him go, I should have pitched a fit, I should have—

  “What’s happened?” I said. I hoped my voice sounded steady and not terrified. It seemed to take forever for Gladden to answer. All I could hear was my breathing until he spoke.

  “Ma’am, Mr. O’Farrell has disappeared.”

  Chapter 12

  I arrived at the Olympus casino’s security offices in ten minutes. Less. Time had gone a bit wonky, moving both too fast and too slow. The elevator dragged. But part of me didn’t want to get there at all. I didn’t want to find out what had happened.

  When I came through the door, a G-man-looking guy in a suit intercepted me and stared at me like I’d turned green.

  I had to catch my breath before I could speak. “Hi, I’m Kitty Norville, I just spoke on the phone with Detective Gladden about Ben O’Farrell.”

  He was good-looking, in the way of a polished twenty-something on the way up in his chosen profession. He also seemed to be practicing his intimidating stare. I tried to read in his expression what had happened, what he knew about Ben, but the glare revealed nothing. I braced myself and didn’t wilt.

  “Detective Gladden asked me to come answer some questions,” I insisted.

  Finally, he spoke. “I’ll let him know you’re here. Wait just a minute.”

  Like an anxious wolf, I paced the office’s tiny waiting room, with its thin carpet, plastic chairs, and a couple of Las Vegas tourism posters on the wall. What happens in Vegas. . .

  I didn’t want to go there.

  Ben had disappeared. I couldn’t wrap my brain around it. My mind kept slinking away from the thought. He’d been playing poker. That tournament. Disappeared—what did that even mean? Did he poof out of existence? Which made me think of Grant. Did Ben walk out when no one was looking? Vegas was full of crowds—didn’t anyone see anything?

  At least one answer was obvious: we were in a hotel hosting a gun exhibition, with a mini-convention of supernatural bounty hunters meeting in the bar. Evan, Brenda, Sylvia, Boris. Any one of them might have had a hand in this. I crossed my arms tighter and paced faster.

  G-man kept me waiting for fifteen minutes. This was driving me crazy. Ben could take care of himself, I kept telling myself. Surely he could. This was all a misunderstanding.

  “Ms. Norville? I’m Detective Gladden.” A man who looked much like the G-man probably would in twenty years appeared at the door and offered his hand, which I shook. On top of that, he seemed exhausted, harried. Shadows marked his eyes, and he had a faint, ripe, well-lived-in smell to him, like he’d been wearing the same suit for a couple of days now. I recognized his voice from when we’d talked on the phone.

  “Hi,” I said. “What’s happened to Ben? What’s going on?”

  “If you’ll come this way, we can have a seat and I’ll answer your questions. Coffee?”

  “Yeah. Thanks.” He nodded at the G-man, who scowled at the chore but went to get the coffee anyway.

  I didn’t get to see the darkened room with the banks and banks of closed-circuit televisions examining the casino floor from any and every angle, the one that featured in every TV special about security in Vegas casinos. Instead, I was taken through a set of cubicles, desks, computers, and filing cabinets, like any other office. This might have been a private security outfit, but it smelled and felt similar to every police station I’d ever been in: worn-out furniture and decor, frayed nerves, bad coffee that had been heating too long. All of it vaguely intimidating. The room Gladden brought me to was the same as any number of police conference—interrogation—rooms I’d sat in. It had a couple of video monitors. In Vegas, most of the evidence came on video.

  The G-man brought me my coffee, and I took it gratefully. It was more to have something to do with my hands than to actually drink.

  Gladden offered me a seat, and another man came in, tall and broad, brown skinned, with close-shaven hair and a trimmed beard. Heavy, searching stare. Nothing got past this guy, I bet.

  “This is Allen Matthews, director of security here at the casino.” We shook hands, and I managed to get even more nervous. This did have something to do with the poker tournament, I bet.

  “Thanks for coming to talk to us, Ms. Norville,” Matthews said. “We hope to have this cleared up quickly.”

  And what did he mean by “cleared up”? Carefully, trying not to sound hysterical, I said, “Can you tell me what you mean when you say that Ben disappeared?”

  Neither of them would look at me. Gladden straightened some papers on the table as he said, “Ms. Norville, what’s your relationship to Ben O’Farrell?”

  That was such a complicated question. They really only needed one answer, though. I held up my left hand with its engagement ring. “We’re supposed to be getting married in half an hour. This is supposed to be my wedding dress.” I glared.

  They glanced at each other with a pained look, like they hadn’t wanted to hear that.

  Matthews asked the next questions. “Do you know if he’s in any trouble, if he has any enemies who might want to harm him?”

  So much for not getting hysterical. “What happened? Is he hurt? What’s going on? I can’t tell you anything until I know what’s happened.”

  Again they looked at e
ach other, like they were tossing a mental coin between them. Matthews must have lost this time. “You know Mr. O’Farrell was playing in the Olympus Casino’s weekend Texas Hold ’Em tourney? It’s one of our most popular events—a lot of players look at it as a stepping stone to the big World Poker Tour tournaments—”

  I held up a hand. “I know. Go on.”

  “About an hour into this afternoon’s play, Mr. O’Farrell came to us with some suspicions of cheating going on. I don’t know how he picked up on it when none of our dealers or pit bosses spotted it.” Because he’s a werewolf, I didn’t say. He smelled it. “But he was right. A couple of the security cameras taped it, but we’d never have seen it if we didn’t know what to look for.”

  “And then?” I prompted.

  Gladden picked up the story. “Then things get odd. The tournament was supposed to continue—officials decided there hadn’t been enough damage to cancel it. But when the tables seated again after the break—no Ben O’Farrell. The dealers were definitely keeping an eye out for him after the ruckus.”

  “We got this from a security camera,” Matthews said, pushing the play button on one of the monitors.

  The black-and-white video showed a scene outside, looking down on a sidewalk and street—empty of people, so probably somewhere in the back or side of the building. A creepy black sedan with tinted windows was parked on the curb. Three men moved toward it. One of them, wearing dark glasses and gloves, seemed to be standing watch, with his back to the driver’s-side door, looking up and down the street. The other one walked toward the back door. The third was Ben. The second man opened the car and urged Ben inside, then climbed in after him. The lookout went around to the passenger side in front. Then the car drove away.

  I couldn’t see Ben’s face in the image. But I recognized him, his clothes, the shaggy wave of his hair, the way he moved. I tried to guess what was going through his mind, to judge what was happening by his actions: his hands were in fists, his back seemed stiff. He wasn’t looking at either of the men. Was he being kidnapped? This looked like a kidnapping.

  “He was kidnapped?” I said.

  Gladden sighed. “Hard to say. Here’s what we think happened. We know one of these guys.” He pointed to the one at Ben’s side. “He’s muscle for a local midlevel organized-crime boss, a guy named Faber who runs some drug and prostitution rings and a little bit of unregulated gambling. Guys like him try to run under the radar by keeping operations small enough not to get noticed. We think he may have set up the cheating ring in the tournament. Which means he probably didn’t think much of Ben sticking his nose in it.”

  The scenario sounded like something out of a bad gangster movie. Did things like that even happen in the real world?

  “We have another idea,” Matthews said. “Nobody has a gun on him, he doesn’t look like he’s being coerced. We have no idea what they said to him. Mr. O’Farrell might be with them voluntarily.”

  “No,” I said. “Look at him, does he look happy to be there?”

  “You’d know better than we would,” Matthews continued. “That’s another question we had for you: Do you have any reason to suspect that your fiancé might ever have had contact with someone like Faber?”

  I didn’t want to answer that, because I’d have to say yes, and that would give them all sorts of ideas that Ben’s involvement with this ran a lot deeper than just being a good citizen reporting someone cheating at poker.

  “He’s a criminal defense lawyer,” I said, rubbing my face. “He’s had contact with all sorts of people, when you put it like that.”

  A tense pause, then Gladden said, “Have you and your fiancé been getting along? Have you had any arguments? Anything to make you think he was making plans?”

  “No,” I said, a purely instinctive exclamation. I couldn’t tell them any more about our relationship without saying we were werewolves in charge of a pack. Ben couldn’t leave that behind. Could he? “Everything’s fine. He didn’t just leave—he’s been kidnapped. You should be out there looking for him!”

  “Most women wouldn’t let their boyfriends play in a poker tournament the day they’re supposed to get married,” Matthews said.

  “Well, Ben and I aren’t the kind of people who tell each other what to do,” I said.

  “We also found this,” Matthews said, producing a plastic bag containing a cell phone. Ben’s cell phone. “It looks like it was dropped sometime between him leaving the poker room and getting into that car.”

  “Dropped? Like he just dropped it? You don’t think maybe those guys dumped it so he couldn’t call for help?”

  Gladden’s gaze was flat. “We’re looking into every possibility.”

  “You think Ben did something,” I said, looking hard at both of them. I couldn’t even process what they were telling me. My skin tingled, and I felt a howl growing in my lungs. This wasn’t happening. “He was just trying to help you catch a cheater, and now he’s in trouble. And you think he’s up to something? Yeah, he’s got some pretty shady contacts in his line of work. Did you know there’s a gun show in the hotel this weekend? You want to see some shady characters? And yeah, some of those people know Ben, too. Maybe you should check them out, see if any of them have it in for him and are using this as an excuse. Because I don’t have any reason to think he would ditch our wedding voluntarily.”

  I took a deep breath and flattened my hands on the table. I had curled my fingers stiffly, like claws.

  “Ms. Norville,” Gladden said. “I promise you, we’re doing everything we can to find him. If you know anything else that might help us, or if he contacts you—”

  Matthews had paused the video at the moment when the car pulled from the curb. I could still imagine Ben, his muscles stiff, climbing into that car. Maybe the guy next to him didn’t have a gun. But maybe he did, and the camera just didn’t catch it.

  “Can you show me that spot?” I said. “Where that was taped?”

  The pair escorted me out of the office, and it took another ten minutes of walking down carpeted hallways, into the pandemonium of the casino and into another wing, before we reached the side doorway. People stared at us as we passed—I must have looked terribly guilty, or important, or something, with the detective and security chief flanking me.

  The double metal doors and sidewalk outside were ordinary. We were at the side of the casino. One block up, traffic of the Strip passed by, but here, nothing. Calming myself, I closed my eyes and took a deep breath.

  Concrete. Spilled oil. Burned gas. City smells. People had passed by here, and maybe I smelled a hint of Ben, and a trace of steel and gun oil. But I couldn’t be sure. The scent of Vegas itself masked the details.

  “You see what you needed to see?” Gladden said.

  “Yeah,” I said, studying the alley one more time. “I thought I might sense something.”

  “Ms. Norville,” he said. “I promise, I’ll call you the minute I learn something.” The pity in his voice was plain. He thought Ben had dumped me. My arguments to the contrary didn’t mean anything, because he’d seen this story play out before. Sure, a hundred thousand couples a year got married in Vegas. But how many people got dumped in Vegas? The tourist bureau didn’t have those statistics.

  I managed to mumble a thanks after Gladden and Matthews escorted me back inside. They continued to assure me that they were doing everything they could to find Ben. The words sounded hollow.

  I sure as hell wasn’t going to spend the day sitting next to the phone, waiting.

  My first thought was to talk to Dom. Vampire Masters in any town made it their business to know what was going on in their city, who the movers and shakers were, supernatural and otherwise. I needed to know more about the people who had taken Ben, where they might be holding them, how strong they were, and who might help me get him back. Dom might know. The problem: the desert sun still blazed, and Dom wouldn’t be out until nightfall.

  I had some other ideas, but before I could do anything,
I had to tell my parents: the wedding was off. At least until we found Ben.

  Chapter 13

  I called Mom on my way to the Olympus’s casino bar.

  She was nonplussed by the news about Ben. I wasn’t sure my explanation made any sense. It still sounded like the plot of a bad movie. “Kitty, are you sure you’re all right? You sound a little panicked. Where are you? Your father and I can meet you—”

  “No, Mom, that’s okay. I’m fine—I mean I’m not fine, but I’m functioning. I’m going to find some people who might be able to help. You and Dad should just—I don’t know. Just don’t worry. I’m going to figure out what’s going on.”

  She sighed. “But Ben wouldn’t just up and leave without telling you.”

  “That’s what I told the cops,” I said. “But that only means something terrible has happened.”

  “I’m sure the police are doing everything they can. Kitty, you really shouldn’t be by yourself. Let us take you out to dinner.”

  As if I could think about eating at a time like this. I’d reached the bar and started searching. The place was packed with a Saturday evening crowd. Unfortunately, every single one of them looked like they belonged at a gun show. Half of them seemed to be eyeing me suspiciously. I so didn’t want to be here. I parked with my back to the wall, between the bar and the front entrance, and kept a watch out.

  “Kitty, are you still there? I can hardly hear you. Where are you?” I had no idea what she could be thinking. She’d always been supportive, even when she didn’t entirely understand what she was supporting. But I wondered: did she sometimes wish I could just be normal?

  “Yeah, Mom. It’s okay. Really.”

  I heard rustling through the mouthpiece, and she said, “Your father wants to talk to you.”

  Crap. I knew he was only worried. But I wouldn’t be able to tell him no.

  “Hi, Kitty?” he said. The father-knows-best worried voice.

  “Hi, Dad.”

  “Are you sure you’re okay?”

  Deep breath now. “I’ll be fine. It’s all going to turn out, trust me.”