Back at the Luxor, she wasn’t at the pool.
I’d driven around, then walked around the UNLV campus for an hour, chewed up some time, tried to think about Danya, Shanna, Celine, Jo-X, didn’t get anywhere with that. At some point, Fairchild phoned with Jo-X’s Vegas address. Finally, I went back to the hotel.
The pool at 1:05 was bustling with tiny bikinis and speedos on hairy guys with beer bellies; lotion, kids, two hundred baking bodies, a dozen kinds of music. No Lucy.
So there you have it, Mort. Easy come, easy go. Once again, I was a gumshoe on the loose. Already I missed her, but I had a job to do, an address to check out.
I went up to the room, opened the door, and she hit me in the chest with a fistful of thousand-dollar chips.
“Don’t ever do that again,” she said with a feline snarl.
“Do what?”
“Test me like that. And don’t tell me it wasn’t a test or I’ll rip your heart out.”
Ouch.
“Sugar Plum, I—”
“Don’t. Just don’t.”
I saw tears. She turned away, went to a window, and looked out. Her body was rigid, shaking.
I stood there like a great ape, wondering what to do next to screw things up. What I came up with was, “I didn’t have a choice, Lucy.”
She whirled. “I thought we were partners.”
She was hurt, but, in fact, it was time for a reality check, even though that could cost me a gorgeous assistant. I took her by the shoulders. “Look at me.”
She tried to turn away, but I held her, kept her facing me. “You want to be my partner? Well, this is part of it. I was paid to do this. I have a client. What I tell you is up to him, not to me. So if you’re hurt, tough.”
At the word “tough,” she looked shocked.
“It’s been like a game so far,” I went on. “We’ve had fun. But I told you I didn’t have a choice, and that’s the real world. Yes, it was a test. If we’re going to work together, you’ll have to know a few things that are highly confidential, so I had to know you could be trusted. And after knowing you less than twenty-four hours, how was I supposed to do that? So—do you want to ‘stick around’ with me in the real world too, even if it isn’t always ‘fun’?”
A single tear rolled down her cheek. “Yes.”
I kissed her. I had to. Last thing I wanted was to knock her out of herself, make her stop being who she was. But the kiss missed her lips, landed on her forehead instead. My bad.
For a moment she was like a block of wood, then suddenly she was in my arms, crying. I let that run its course, didn’t try to fix it, say anything. I’d learned that much in life anyway. When women cry, just hold them. Anything you say will be wrong.
Finally, she backed away a few inches. “Just, please, don’t do anything like that again, okay?”
No fancy words, no “Sugar Plum,” no typical dumbass Mort comment. “Okay.”
And I still didn’t know what the hell I was doing with this girl. Which was par for the course. I had eleven years on her, not what I’d thought when we left Tonopah in spite of that glimpse at her driver’s license. Eleven years. Not even close to what I’d thought at first sight at McGinty’s Café. She was smart. Maybe she could be my assistant. As if a lone-wolf PI-in-training could even have an assistant.
One thing I noticed, finally, was that Lucy was wearing a real shirt, sleeveless. It wasn’t mesh, wasn’t see-through. She had on tight white pants, barefoot, no ankle chain, no hoop earrings, no belly showing. The shirt had a collar. It was robin’s-egg blue, seersucker with a kind of checkered design, something a real estate agent might wear in hundred-degree heat, showing houses.
She looked more grown-up, looked more like . . . twenty-two.
I crouched down and started to pick up chips. As I went along, I began to notice that there seemed to be too many of them. In fact, there were thirty-six.
“I kept four of them, put all the rest on red,” she said, standing over me.
I stared up at her. “Red, red, red? Sixteen chips?”
“Yep. Pit boss guy looked like he was gonna faint. One spin of the wheel. I was mad. But even mad, I’m still lucky.”
Jesus.
“They looked pretty upset when I won, but now that we’re up another sixteen thousand, they might put more upgrades on the suite,” Lucy said with a hesitant smile, already starting to turn back into herself.
I stood up. “Not sure what else they could give us, kiddo.” But we were up fifty-two thousand now, so maybe they would give us the penthouse if we asked. And a limo and a driver.
Her smile widened. She gave me a peck on the cheek. “They could send up a few guys in jock straps to dance around.”
“Yeah. That’d really brighten my day.”
As we went past the main cashier’s cage on our way out, I had Lucy put twenty-six chips in an account in her name alone. Now we each had twenty-six thousand at the casino, which seemed fair to me. It gave her the option of leaving any time she wanted. I still had four thousand in a money belt, a few hundred in my wallet. Money was not going to be an issue.
Back in the Mustang, one forty p.m., Jo-X’s address plugged into the car’s navigation system. The temperature was a hundred six and still inching upward. I had on dark gray khaki shorts and a lightweight green shirt with several buttons undone,
