Kitty and the Dead Man's Hand Read online

  Nearby, the elevator door slid open. I tried to inch toward it, and to will Ben to do likewise, so we could sneak in and make our escape. But the two remained deeply involved in their standoff. Ben wasn’t going to budge, and I wasn’t going to leave without him. The elevator door closed, shutting off our escape.

  “How you doing?” Boris said. “It’s been a while—since that job in Boise, wasn’t it?”

  “That sounds right. That was a pretty bad scene,” Ben said, clearly unhappy. But Boris smiled, like he was proud of the memory.

  That was when Boris noticed me. I was standing a little behind Ben, off to the side, trying to be unobtrusive because this was his gig. But Boris recognized me, and I could tell from the way he narrowed his gaze that he didn’t like me. He didn’t have to know me to not like me. This was a guy who didn’t like werewolves. And here I was. I bet he had a box of silver bullets somewhere.

  Ben, astute as he was, noticed the glare. “Boris, this is Kitty Norville.”

  “I know who she is. May I ask what you’re doing hanging out with a werewolf?”

  If only Boris knew. . . I was out of the so-called lycanthropic closet, but Ben wasn’t. I kept quiet so I could see how he’d play this.

  “I’m her lawyer.”

  That was exactly how I thought he’d play this. I gave what I hoped was a neutral smile.

  Boris crossed his arms. “That’s pretty funny, considering some of your other clients.”

  “Trust me, I know.”

  “Speaking of which, I heard Cormac went to prison. Maybe he should have had a different lawyer.”

  “Maybe it was his lawyer who got him four years for manslaughter instead of life for murder one.”

  The matched stares between them were challenging. I wondered how Ben’s wolf was taking this. I couldn’t tell by looking at him—his exterior was calm, his expression showing vague amusement.

  Cormac was a bounty hunter, an assassin, and his targets of choice were supernatural. Werewolves, vampires, other strangeness the mundane authorities barely knew about, much less had the ability to handle. He was also Ben’s cousin, and my friend. That Boris knew him, or at least knew of him, said something about Boris and the circles he moved in. Now I was sure he had a box of silver bullets stashed somewhere.

  Then the tension broke. I thought it was Boris who blinked. At any rate, he gave a thin smile. “Maybe you’re right,” he said.

  “It was a run of bad luck,” Ben said, which was closer to the mark of what had happened to Cormac. “Could’ve happened to anyone.”

  “You here for the show?”

  “No. I’m here for her show. How about you? You always seem to have an angle cooking at these things.”

  “I certainly do,” he said, without elaborating. But he kept giving me that look, like he was wincing at me through a gun sight. It made my skin crawl.

  “We should probably get going.” Ben turned to me, raised a questioning brow, as if I’d had any part of this conversation.

  “Probably,” I said.

  “Well, then. Maybe I’ll see you around. You take care,” Boris said.

  We watched him go, walking through the lobby and out the front entrance of the hotel. Ben let out a sigh.

  I said, “Who the heck is that and how do you know him?”

  “That’s Boris,” he said. “Same line of work as Cormac. It’s a pretty small circle, everybody knows everybody. I’ve represented half of them in court at one time or another.”

  That’s my honey, lawyer to the scary. “Have you represented him?”

  “Hell, no,” Ben said, frowning. “He’s bad news.”

  And Cormac wasn’t? Never mind. “So he does have a box of silver bullets somewhere.”

  “Several, probably.”

  “I knew it. I knew it just by looking at him.”

  “That’s just the thing, that look is kind of an act. Boris is the front of the operation. He’s got a partner who does most of the real work. It’s sleight of hand. People are so busy worrying about him, no one pays attention to the other.”

  “Who’s his partner? And do you see him lurking about?” I studied the lobby, searching for suspicious figures hiding behind neoclassical statuary.

  “Her. Sylvia. And no, I don’t see her. That’s probably the point.” He glanced around, over his shoulder, like he was suddenly worried. Paranoia was, after all, contagious.

  Someone was going to take a shot at me before the weekend was over, I just knew it.

  “One other thing: you’re my lawyer? Not my fiancé?”

  “That would have taken way too much explaining. You know that.”

  “Yeah. But you’re not even officially my lawyer anymore.” Apparently it was unethical for lawyers to sleep with their clients. This from a man who offered legal representation to assassins.

  “Your point?”

  “I’m just giving you a hard time. Mostly.”

  Finally, I steered him into an elevator.

  Our room was almost a suite. Ozzie had been generous making our reservations—he could have put us up in a flea-bitten budget dive on the edge of town—but not that generous. We had the typical hotel-room layout: a big comfy bed stood against one wall, staring down a TV and dresser set on the opposite wall. The patterns on the curtains and bedspread were vaguely Italian, floral and classical, in shades of green and blue. We also had a sofa and a couple of armchairs grouped around a coffee table, a well-stocked minibar, and a wide desk in the corner. Because I was supposed to be working. Drat.

  I had to contact the producer; set up a meeting with her; confirm the guests we’d lined up; sort out the box of Midnight Hour giveaways—the usual T-shirt and bumper sticker stash—I’d brought to butter up the audience; double-check my cue sheets; and double-check my contingencies for when something went horribly wrong, like if the phone lines went down, my guest interviews bailed, or something even worse I hadn’t thought of yet happened.

  Then there was sharing space with the gun show to worry about. . .

  Once again, coming to Vegas started to seem like a bad idea. The window in our room overlooked the pool—a fabulous grotto containing millions of gallons of chlorinated water. Completely ecologically irresponsible, but so attractively decadent. Padded lounge chairs. Palm trees. Poolside bars with handsome bartenders beckoning me with smiling eyes. The people sunning themselves, with mai tais in their hands, looked like the most relaxed beings in the universe.

  Phone in hand, I looked out the window at the pool and almost cried.

  Ben was unpacking and watching me and the pages of notes and schedules I’d spread on the desk. “Are you sure there’s nothing I can do to help?” he said.

  Rub my back, nibble my ears, drag me away from all this. . . I sighed and shook my head. “Not really. It’s all legwork, and most of the list is in my head. But thanks for asking.”

  “Maybe I could just keep you company.”

  As nice as that sounded, his presence made it less likely I’d get any work done. I smiled. “You’ve been itching to check out the casino. You should go do that now, because after tomorrow night I’m not going to give you a chance.” I raised a brow at him.

  “All right. But for the record, it’s now officially your idea that I go play poker.”

  “Or maybe you could go have a drink by the pool for me.”

  But he already had his room key and wallet in hand, clearly ready to go. “Call me if you need anything.”

  “Okay.”

  He kissed the top of my head, squeezed my hand, and left the room. Again, I sighed.

  Ozzie’s producer friend had booked a smaller theater at the Olympus. A half an hour before our meeting, I wandered down to the lobby to look for it.

  There were still too many people. I wondered if I’d ever be able to calm down in this town enough to really relax. Even from down the hall, the casino lights and noises overwhelmed my senses, and Wolf didn’t like that at all. How would we know if something was after us?
But that was silly. Nothing was after us. This was just Vegas trying to batter me into submission so I’d spend lots of money.

  I still had to slink past that damned gun show.

  Not everyone who came to Vegas for a gun show was like Boris. They couldn’t all be in Cormac’s line of work. Edging down the hallway from the elevators until the doors of the main ballroom came into sight, I watched the comings and goings of people. Know your enemy, after all. For the most part, the convention-goers were completely unremarkable. More men than women by a good factor, but there were some women. Most were casually dressed: jeans, shorts, T-shirts, tennis shoes. Of all ages—a few people even had kids along—the stream of people leaving and entering the ballroom seemed an unremarkable cross section of middle America. Firearm enthusiast. That didn’t sound so dangerous. These were hobbyists, people who went target shooting at the range and collected rare guns. Perfectly innocuous. Surely I didn’t have to worry about bounty hunters or assassins, not in the middle of a casino with its intense security. Especially not any who had a thing against werewolves and might take an opportunity—like, say, me sitting onstage under bright lights—to use me for target practice.

  But I couldn’t help but think about how many people in this hotel were carrying handguns around with them right at that moment.

  I’d started toward the casino and another hallway that led to the Jupiter Theater when my shoulders went stiff. Somebody was following me. Wolf felt it, or heard it, or smelled it, or all of them in the combination that made that side of me hypersensitive. I took a breath to keep from panicking and resisted jumping to the wrong conclusion.

  When I turned, the woman looked startled, like she hadn’t expected me to know she was there. She was shorter than me, thin, with a tanned face and short, curly brown hair. She wore sandals, faded jeans, and a white blouse. Her earrings and necklaces were silver, her makeup understated. Inconspicuous in every way.

  She recovered from her surprise quickly and offered a smile. “I’m sorry, I guess you must have seen me coming.”

  “Yeah, sort of.”

  Now she looked nervous, but the smile didn’t dim. “I don’t mean to bother you. This must seem really rude, but—you’re Kitty Norville, aren’t you?”

  Ah, there it was. I ducked my gaze. “Yeah.”

  “I recognized you from the article Time did last winter.”

  “That’s what I was afraid of,” I said, grimacing, trying to be polite. Last fall, the Senate held hearings on, of all things, vampires and lycanthropes after a secret NIH project studying paranormal phenomena was made public. I was called to testify, and for various reasons Time chose me as their poster child. I would never live it down.

  Doing the radio show, no one ever had to know what I looked like. I liked it that way. But after the hearings and publicity, not to mention being outed on live TV, it seemed silly trying to stay anonymous. Hence the possibility of my own TV show.

  “Oh, you shouldn’t be embarrassed, it was a good article,” she said. “Interesting, anyway. Good publicity for you, I’m sure.”

  Interesting in the Chinese-proverb sense. “Well, thanks. I can’t complain.” I expected her to make some more apologetic noises, then scurry away. Maybe I was secretly hoping she’d ask for an autograph. Secretly disappointed that she wasn’t asking for an autograph. But she just stood there, smiling up at me. Studying me, and it was making me nervous. “So. What brings you to Vegas?”

  “I’m here for the show,” she said, nodding over her shoulder at the ballroom and gun exhibition. I surreptitiously glanced over her to see if she had any holsters or concealed weapons. Didn’t see anything. She looked so normal. “Well, you look busy, so I won’t keep you. But it was really nice talking to you.” She turned to walk away.

  Occasionally, I was spotted in public. Not enough to ever get used to it. But having it happen here, right outside the gun show, was too much for my paranoia. Maybe it was a coincidence. Maybe it wasn’t. I glanced around for a big bald man in leather and didn’t see him. But that didn’t mean much.

  On a hunch, I called, “Sylvia?”

  She glanced back.

  We met gazes. Her look darkened for a moment, but then she smiled. This wasn’t a normal, friendly smile. It was sly, challenging. Like she’d scoped me out, learned what she needed to, and didn’t care if I knew all about her. I resisted an urge to run.

  She turned back around and merged with the crowd filing in and out of the ballroom.

  My heart was pounding. I wasn’t sure what had just happened, but it couldn’t be good. I continued on, looking over my shoulder the whole way.

  Maybe the bounty hunters weren’t really after me. But if they were, with all the sensory overload going on here, I might never hear them coming.

  Chapter 4

  I called Ben on my cell phone, but he must have still been in his poker game, because it rolled over to voice mail. I told him about meeting Sylvia and fished for some kind of reassurance that the entire hotel wasn’t out to get me.

  Meanwhile, the show, as they say, must go on.

  Following the producer’s instructions, I found an unlocked emergency door that led to the theater. Inside, a trio of people were working onstage. A couple of men were moving a table and equipment—radio broadcast gear—directed by a woman holding a clipboard. She seemed to be going over a checklist. I went straight to her. The clipboard: universal symbol of someone in charge.

  “Hi, you must be Erica Decker? I’m Kitty Norville.”

  She beamed at me as I climbed the stairs to reach the stage. She was a slim black woman with curly hair in a thick ponytail. She had the intense, manic attitude of most everyone in show business I’d ever met: everything was important, and everything had to get done right now. Strangely enough, that manner inspired confidence. She worked for one of the local network affiliates putting together half-hour news specials, and Ozzie knew her from his previous job in Los Angeles, where he’d been an assistant station manager and she’d been an intern.

  “Great, you found the place,” she said. “What do you think?”

  I’d hardly even looked at the theater. Small and intimate by Vegas standards, it usually hosted stand-up comedy or lounge acts. It was clean, functional, modern, with blue plush seats, walls painted dark blue, and unobtrusive lighting. Before I arrived we’d discussed putting a table onstage to hold my call monitor, supplying a couple of chairs for guests, and filling the seats with an audience. I hoped I had enough fans to fill the seats, or this was going to be embarrassing. According to Erica, advance ticket sales were doing well, but we hadn’t sold out yet. I was still thinking worst-case scenario—an empty house. Everyone would bail on my show to go see Mamma Mia! instead. Really, the place was great. But that didn’t change the fact that we were sharing the hotel with a ballroomful of guns.

  I gave my evilest smile. People probably thought it was cute. “It’s nice. Can you tell me why you thought it was a good idea to schedule this in the same hotel as a gun show?”

  She shrugged. “It shouldn’t be a big deal. The convention has the ballroom and a floor of conference rooms. The theater and everything around it is ours.”

  “It’s just”—how could I explain this, without sounding like a loon?—“it makes me nervous. Some people who go to. . . things like that have what you might call a prejudice against people like me.”

  Erica—the black woman—gave me a seriously ironic look, and I felt like a heel. I glanced at the ceiling for a moment and tried to sound more coherent. “Let’s just say that whole silver-bullet thing is for real, and I’m willing to bet someone in that ballroom is selling silver bullets.”

  The ironic look didn’t go away, and I had to wonder if she was one of those people who, despite the evidence, couldn’t let go of a lifetime of believing this stuff was nothing more than campfire tales. This was the strange thing about being a werewolf in modern America. I’d been outed. The whole supernatural world—vampires, lycanthropes, more unbelie
vable things—had been acknowledged as existing by the government. I’d been filmed transforming into a wolf on live television. And some people still didn’t believe. Or didn’t want to believe. They still looked at me like I was crazy when I talked about it. Though to be honest, it was probably either that or run screaming.

  But Erica wasn’t one of those. Better yet, she wasn’t freaked out. She just thought it was funny. “You’re a werewolf—how are you afraid of anything?”

  “Oh, you’d be surprised,” I said, wearing a thin smile.

  “We’ll have security on the job,” she said. “We’ll get extra security if it’ll make you feel better.”

  “Thanks,” I said, but I didn’t feel any better. I’d just have to muddle through. I’d been in way scarier situations than this, right? Surely this was one of those times when my paranoia was running away with me. Besides, I had a show to put on.

  Erica walked across the stage, gesturing as she explained how the setup would work. “We’ve got everything in place but the phones. Ozzie put me through to your sound guy, what’s his name, Matt? He says you’ve done remote work before and can walk us through getting the calls transferred. Not to mention coaching the screener. But you know, I’ve listened to your show: do you actually have screeners?”

  “Believe it or not.”

  “You have a backup plan if something goes wrong with the phones?”

  “I usually have a rant or two I can pull out. And some interviews with guests. I can probably squeeze in one or two more if I find someone good.”

  “Who do you have so far?” she said.

  “I found this Elvis impersonator who was born the same day Presley died—within the hour—and he claims to be the King reincarnated. Wild, huh?”

  She rolled her eyes. “I’ve heard of that guy. He tried to sell the network the tape of his session with a past-life-regression therapist. We weren’t buying. You can do better than that.”