“Nah, that was my bowling night.” Tucking his hands into his jeans pockets, he rocked back on his heels, and smiled cruelly through his lie.
Slumping, Kit swayed. “That’s awful.”
“Only if it happens to you,” he replied coldly, because they both knew it would never happen to him. “Now shut up and take your piss. And make it fast, weirdo. You’re up next.”
Kit entered the small bathroom, dull glaze moving over the dingy linoleum and dirty sink. No lock on the door, of course. No other exit but the…
It was tiny, glazed, but also half-open. Problem was, Kit could practically hear Hitchens breathing on the door’s other side. She looked around, gaze dropping to the sink’s press-and-hold faucet. Then she looked at the cheap shoes in her hand.
Hell if these were going on her feet, she thought, and pressed the heel against the faucet, pushing down, and wedging the toe against the wall, forcing a steady stream. If she were quiet, this just might work.
She thanked God for the winter chill, which had forced her into cigarette pants instead of a pencil skirt. The argyle sweater would also keep her warm once outside, provided she could get out of the tiny, rusted window.
“Hurry up in there!” Hitchens yelled, as she climbed onto the toilet.
“My tummy hurts,” she said, raising her voice to hide the window’s squeak. She only got halfway. “And I’m being careful not to put a run in the hose.”
There. But only her arms and torso were through the window when Hitchens’s voice rang out again. “I didn’t give you any hose.”
Kit pushed, the sharp steel scraping her hips as the door rocketed open. She squealed, pushed harder, and was falling before she could right herself. Hitchens’s face appeared above her, brows drawn down hard over his eyes. “Fuck!” He disappeared.
Kit fought to sit up, and against the stabbing in her chest. No time to relearn to breathe, she thought, wobbling to her feet. There was barely even enough time to run.
Running had left Grif breathless, nerves had him shaky, and if he didn’t already know where the Marquis had stood, he’d have bypassed it altogether. It was enclosed by a temporary construction wall hemmed in by a chain-linked fence so that no one on the outside could see in.
Apparently, no one could get in, either.
“I told you to wait for me.” Courtney appeared so soundlessly he jumped.
“Which way?” Grif said, not sparing her a glance. He felt like a lion pacing a cage, caught on the outside of the long, linked fence.
Courtney pointed the opposite way. “You passed the entrance. It’s the section that’s boarded, with a rendering of the new casino. It swings open to allow passage from the side street.”
Of course. Chambers and his band of merry child-rapists wouldn’t want to attract the attention of some annoyingly curious tourist. Yet he was still unprepared for the sight of a fleet of mostly foreign luxury cars once he’d passed to the other side. It looked, he thought, like the parking garage at the Ritz.
“Wow,” muttered Courtney. “Vegas is filled with rich sickos.”
The world was filled with them, Grif thought, wishing Nicole Rockwell were here to document it with her camera. “They could drive away in Pintos and it’d still be sick.”
“Yeah, but this is just salt in the wound.”
It was. You had to be birthed with a sense of entitlement to think you could get away with this. How many of these men were considered upstanding? They paid their taxes, went to church, built their companies… and raped someone else’s child in their off-time. And they
“I can’t, Grif.” She pushed some of the hair from her face when he turned, and sighed. “You know I can’t.”
Grif swallowed against the lump that rose in his throat. “She’s in there, isn’t she?”
Her answer was silence, a returned blank stare, and he knew that Katherine Craig-the woman who grounded him and moved him and was more chatty and energetic and deliberately blissful than anyone he’d ever met-was already surrounded by death-telling plasma.
Ignoring Courtney’s heavy stare on his back, he broke into a jog. It wasn’t going to be Kit, he thought, slipping into the building’s shadows. Even if it had to be him.
From the outside, it looked as if jumbo construction trailers had been welded together to create a giant, enclosed octagon. It wasn’t something that would go unnoticed-why would someone create a makeshift space in what was already a makeshift space?-yet the construction crews were long gone, and the abandoned hotel project was as dark and forbidding as an underground cave.
And of course, there was nothing left of the Marquis, where Grif had died. He didn’t even try to picture the old resort. His was an old death, and had nothing to do with tonight. Besides, there was plasma purling in the sky, and the soft, effervescent waves were quickly narrowing into threads above the makeshift dwelling, and slowly sinking inside. He had to hurry.
Grif spotted, and ignored, the prominent and single steel door. No point in announcing his presence to the muscle undoubtedly stationed there. Toeing the shadows, Grif spotted windows on the conjoined trailers, all dark but for a small one that gaped wide. Too small and high for him, he thought, and looked instead for some sort of construction defect. A simple corner that hadn’t been sealed tight, or a place of escape that only someone like Chambers would know about. He’d already proven he had backup plans for his backup plans.
Yet the walls were welded tight, not even a proper peephole to establish the layout inside, so Grif turned his back to the clustered trailers, and spotted the crane. It loomed near the rusting scaffolding of the abandoned hotel, and he might have considered it neglected, too, were it not for the shiny black Mercedes parked, nose-out, right behind it.
“Damned foreign cars,” Grif muttered, but he was already connecting the dots-car to crane to ladder to trailers. Crouching low, he rushed the vehicle.
But there was no driver inside, only keys, which he naturally pocketed. At the very least, someone was going to have a hard time getting out of here tonight.
Leaving the car unlocked, Grif turned… and nearly threw a punch at the figure rushing him.
“What the hell are you doing here?” he asked, yanking her behind the giant crane.
Bridget Moore jerked away, and almost toppled backward. “You called me, remember? You wanted my help finding your girl.”
He’d left two messages on her voice mail before heading to the graveyard. “If you knew about this place, why didn’t you tell me before?”
“I didn’t know. I called… my mother.”
“Your long-estranged mother told you that Chambers was selling off Charlotte’s virginity tonight?” Grif didn’t believe it. Kit had claimed Mrs. Chambers was in such denial she was damn near comatose.
“No,” Bridget-not her mother’s daughter-shot back. “But she said this is where he comes for his boys’ night out. I’m the one who figured he was doing more than playing poker.”
Grif jerked his head. “Get out of here, Moore. This is no time for revenge fantasies. Kit is in there.”
Bridget grabbed his jacket as he tried to climb up into the crane, tugging him back down. “And so is a little girl who’s scared out of her mind. I was.”
“Don’t try it. I don’t trip over guilt.” He began climbing again.
“You can’t be two places at once,” she called out, her whisper hushed but harsh. Grif paused before he could stop himself. Bridget hurried on. “You save the girl, and you might lose Kit. Or vice versa. Bet you won’t be able to sidestep your guilt if one of them dies because of you.”
Jaw clenched against a curse, he dropped back down. “And what if something happens to you?”
Her hard expression unexpectedly softened, and for a moment the girl she used to be peered from beneath the tough facade. “That’s sweet, Shaw.” Her eyes glittered in the dark. “But nobody’s taking anything from me ever again.”
Which Grif would be doing if he tried to stop her. Sighing, he tilted his head up. The plasma was thickening, and now swirled like fetid clouds above the trailer. “Come on.”
Bridget followed close as they moved from machine to ladder, up and then over. Then they reversed, slipping down onto the trailer, and he was pleased when Bridget landed with no more sound than a cat burglar. She pointed to the entry hatch just in front of their toes.
