By a Thread

I closed the door and locked it again.

“Sorry I wasn’t more help. I had earplugs in, or I would have heard your elemental alarm and woken up sooner,” Bria said, moving around the room and staring at the dead men. “Who are these guys?”

“Some of Randall Dekes’s men. Remember Pete and Trent from the restaurant?”

Bria looked at the bodies, and her face tightened with recognition. “They didn’t stay in jail very long, did they? They must have come looking for us as soon as they made bail. But how did they know where to find us?”

“Callie said that Dekes has his hands in everything in Blue Marsh, remember?” I said. “Besides, Pete recognized you at the restaurant, and we checked into the hotel under your name. So it was just a matter of Dekes finding which hotel you were staying at and then sending in Pete and his boys to do their thing. The fact that we were here at the Blue Sands just made it that much easier, since Dekes owns the hotel.”

“Yeah, but why come after us?”

I shrugged again. “Any number of reasons. Maybe word got back to Dekes that you were a cop, and he didn’t want you sniffing around while he tries to take over Callie’s restaurant. More likely, though, he knew his boys got their asses handed to them earlier, and he told them to get their payback—or else. You know how it works. If you or your men show any sign of weakness or incompetence, the other sharks smell the blood in the water and start circling around. Dekes can’t afford to show any chinks in his organization, not now when he’s so close to building his new casino. And from what I heard him say before he came into the suite, Pete was exactly the kind of guy who would relish hurting two women, whether it was on Dekes’s orders or just his own sick idea.”

Bria surveyed the blood and bodies that littered the once-pristine suite. After a moment, she sighed and shook her head.

“Now what?” she asked. “Because these dead guys aren’t just going to disappear. Not with Sophia back in Ashland. And we can’t just leave them here. Like you said, the room’s in my name. Besides, we both know that you aren’t going to call the cops and explain all this to them.”

I pretended I didn’t hear the chastising tone in her voice and stood there, thinking, my eyes flicking around the room just as Bria’s had a moment before. Finally, my gaze lit on the patio doors, and an idea popped into my head.

“Uh-oh,” Bria muttered. “I know that look. You’ve thought of something. The question now is exactly how bad is it, and do I really want to know about it?”

“Don’t worry, baby sister. It’s nothing too dark or sinister—this time. We’re going to get rid of these bodies easy peesy.”

Her eyes narrowed with suspicion. “And how the hell are we going to do that?”

I smiled at her. “We’re going to dump the bastards in the pool.”

9

Bria changed into jeans, sneakers, and a T-shirt and packed up our things. My clothes were dark enough to hide the blood that had spattered onto them, so I got to work. The first thing I did was go out into the hallway, grab the luggage cart that had been left by the elevator, and roll it into the suite. Then I stripped off the linen jacket the valet was wearing and wrestled his body onto the cart. I put him on the bottom and piled Pete on top of him, to hide the valet’s wounds. As a final touch, I threw the valet’s jacket over Pete to cover up his injuries as best I could.

“Are you sure this is going to work?” Bria asked, eyeing the haphazard way I’d stacked the bodies on the cart. “They’re going to get rug burn from their hands and feet dragging off the side like that.”

“Well, they’re dead, so I doubt it will bother them,” I replied. “Now let’s roll them onto the elevator.”

Bria helped me push the cart out of the suite and down to the end of the hall. I stabbed the button for the elevator. Since we were on the third floor, we didn’t have to wait too long for it to arrive. Given the late hour, the car was empty. Even if someone had been inside, I was going to cheerfully say my friends had had too much to drink and that Bria and I were taking them to their room. Not the best excuse I’d come up with, but I didn’t have time to be more creative or clever.

For once, my luck held, and we made it down to the ground floor without seeing anyone. Given the fact that the hotel didn’t have any security cameras in the hallways, elevators, or common areas, I didn’t have to worry about a guard spotting us on a screen somewhere and coming to see what we were up to.

I stepped outside and checked to make sure no one was using the pool, but the area was deserted. Even the bonfires had burned out on the beach. I craned my neck up, looking at the many stories above me, but I didn’t see anyone else out on their patio. The night was as still, dark, and quiet as it was going to get.

“Still clear inside,” Bria murmured from her spot in the doorway, looking back into the hotel. “But are you sure you want to do this? Someone’s bound to hear the noise.”

“I doubt that, given how many folks I saw sucking down mai tais earlier. They’re either in their rooms sleeping off their buzz or holding on tight to their honeys right now. Even if they do hear something, they’ll probably just think it’s some late-night skinny-dippers out having a little fun. Besides, I don’t see how we have much of a choice,” I said. “As you pointed out, Sophia isn’t here to clean up the mess like she usually is, and we can’t exactly leave the bodies in the room with your name on the bill. So let’s go. Heave-ho. These guys aren’t getting any warmer.”

Bria sighed with either resignation or agreement. I couldn’t tell which exactly, and I wasn’t sure I wanted to know.

We pushed the cart out onto the patio and up to the edge of the pool. Thankfully, the wheels didn’t squeak. We started with Pete, since he was on top. Bria grabbed his legs while I took hold of his shoulders.

“One, two, three,” I whispered.

Together we rolled his body off the valet’s and into the deep end of the pool. Bria was right—the splash was louder than I’d thought it would be, but there was nothing I could do about that now. We quickly pushed the valet into the pool as well before shoving the cart back toward the door. Ten . . . twenty . . . thirty . . . I counted off the seconds in my head as we worked. It took us ninety seconds to dump the bodies and make it back to the door. But no lights snapped on around the pool and no one came outside to investigate, so I figured we were safe enough to do the same thing to the other two goons.

Only one giant would fit on the cart at a time, so we had to make two more trips. One by one, we hefted their bodies onto the luggage cart, took it downstairs, and dumped the giants into the pool, trying to make as little noise as possible. By the time we finished, the four bodies looked like overgrown lily pads bobbing up and down in the pool, and the shimmering blue water had turned a muddy pink from the blood still oozing out of the men’s wounds. It wasn’t the best or most discreet body dump I’d ever done, but hopefully no one would notice the dead men until morning. I planned for us to be long gone by then.

“Now,” I said, pushing the cart away from the pool for the last time. “Let’s go upstairs and tackle the room.”

The suite was equipped with everything, and the kitchen was fully stocked right down to a box of rubber gloves and a wide assortment of cleaning supplies under the sink, probably so the maids wouldn’t have to push their carts into the room and disturb the guests any more than necessary. I grabbed a pair of gloves, a bucket, some rags, and a bottle of bleach.

Since I’d killed three of the men right inside the door, most of the blood was limited to the marble floor there. The stone had already taken on a darker, more somber sound as the blood had started to dry on top of it. I splashed bleach over the whole area and wiped it down three times, while Bria straightened up the rest of the room, making sure she cleaned up all the melted traces of her elemental Ice blast. I also wiped down the luggage cart with bleach and cleaned our fingerprints off the brass rails.

It was after one in the morning when we finished. I stepped back and surveyed the suite with a critical eye. The area wasn’t as pristine and spotless as it would have been if Sophia had been here and used her Air elemental magic to sandblast the blood into nothingness, but the bleach would muddle whatever evidence it didn’t outright destroy. This wasn’t the first murder scene I’d cleaned up on my own, and it wouldn’t be the last.

Besides, nobody but Randall Dekes knew that the men had been sent to our suite in the first place. He