Levitating Las Vegas (5 page)

Suddenly Kaylee realized she was gripping Mr. Diamond’s shoulder hard in anticipation of what Violet was about to do to him on this video. She snapped her hand away—as if she’d hurt him herself—and wrung her hands instead as she watched. She was glad the placement of the camera meant she wouldn’t be able to see into the office. She didn’t have to see. She knew. She could easily have been a part of it herself if she hadn’t escaped from the Res. There was too fine a line between herself and Violet. The only difference was that Violet was still at the Res and Kaylee was not.

The group appeared to stand quietly outside Mr. Diamond’s door, but Kaylee understood their strategy. Carter was listening to Mr. Diamond’s mind through the door. Because Mr. Diamond was so old, his power was too weak to detect danger at that distance. Carter nodded to Nate. Now Nate and April preemptively changed Mr. Diamond’s mind about defending himself or calling for help. Violet opened the door with her hand on the doorknob—she could have blown the door open with her mind, but this job was so easy, why bother?—and all four of them disappeared inside the office.

Kaylee couldn’t see them. But, staring at the video of the empty hallway, she knew Violet was crushing Mr. Diamond’s throat with her mind.

Kaylee’s heart beat faster until it burst and shattered into pieces, the shards piercing her chest. She grimaced against the pain and forced herself to watch the video of the hallway until Violet, Carter, April, and Nate walked out of the office. Violet shot the camera the bird.

Kaylee swallowed the lump in her throat. She’d
told
Mr. Diamond the casino was vulnerable. She’d
told
him they needed their powerful young people off Mentafixol to help protect the casino. “I guess I won that argument,” she said aloud. Her voice surprised her. She sounded like a child, but she felt a million years old. The casino was her sole responsibility now.

With a shaky sigh, wishing she were a levitator instead of a mind changer just this once so she wouldn’t have to disrespect Mr. Diamond’s body, she slipped her hand into his pocket and drew out a single key—his only key for which Kaylee didn’t already have a duplicate. She unlocked the bottom drawer of his desk, reached inside, and placed the binder on the desktop. He’d scrawled on the label:

For Kaylee—in case I die. LOL! : )

He’d tried to keep up with changing technology for the sake of the casino. He even texted her sometimes in his approximation of online lingo, the big dork.

She squinted against her tears once again.

But only for a moment.

Leaning forward and tossing her blond hair out of her eyes, she flipped the binder open. Here were the instructions for how to wean people off Mentafixol when they were thirty years old, too weak for the Res to want and too mature to seek that kind of life. And here was the long list of teens and twenty-somethings the casino currently drugged. Some of these people she knew about already. At Mr. Diamond’s insistence, she’d played a part in putting a few of them on Mentafixol herself. Some of them were surprises to her. Mr. Diamond had shared this information with her on a need-to-know basis.

She scanned the list for people she could wean quickly. Preferably about her age, at the height of power. Preferably a levitator and a mind reader, possessing the powers she didn’t have. Without thought she dismissed Elijah Brown and Holly. Considered the rest of the list. Came back to Elijah and Holly.

No. Anybody but Holly. She had to protect Holly.

However, the other people on the list knew Kaylee only as the aloof head of casino security. When she took them off Mentafixol and approached them about joining the casino’s protective force, they might see her as a threat and run straight for the Res. Holly at least knew Kaylee as a roommate and best friend and was more likely to stand with her.

Plus, it would be simple to wean Holly and Elijah off Mentafixol. All the young people being drugged were told they were the only ones, and they received the pills from various places, so they wouldn’t compare notes and get suspicious. But Holly and Elijah both received the drug from the casino pharmacy. Kaylee could make a phone call and stop the shipment.

Mr. Diamond’s scribbled notes indicated the strong emotion that had brought on Holly’s and Elijah’s powers in the same night had to do with each other. Elijah had asked Holly out. Holly’s parents had wisely told her she couldn’t go. If Holly and Elijah had been allowed to date, they would have talked about MAD eventually, gotten suspicious, realized their powers were real, and stopped taking Mentafixol. They might have hurt each other accidentally, just as couples at the Res hurt each other on purpose.

But if that spark between them was still there now, Holly and Elijah off Mentafixol would be fiercely loyal to each other. That could make them even more useful to the casino.

Or, if they were captured, even more useful to the Res. The Res would absorb them into its society and turn them against the casino. Kaylee would be no match for them by herself.

At that thought, Kaylee paged frantically through the binder one last time, hoping a new alternative would appear. If she drafted Holly and Elijah to help her, she would be putting Holly in so much danger. And likely ruining any chance Holly might have had at a relatively normal life with a nice guy like Rob. Kaylee thought of Holly, so book smart yet ditsy, so witty in an off-key way that some people never got her jokes. She wanted to keep Holly innocent and happy in a world where shoes still mattered.

But if Kaylee did nothing,
everyone
would be in danger from the Res. Could she really pull this off?

She fought the urge to look to Mr. Diamond for guidance. His dark suit slumped beside her.

God help her, she’d
have
to pull this off.

Decision made. She’d call Peter Starr and convince him to give up his magician act to Holly in a few weeks, after she was Mentafixol-free. She’d let Jasmine Brown know what was going on and send her out of town so Elijah couldn’t read her thoughts about the Res while he was coming off the drug. If he could, he’d likely get curious and head straight there.

But first—she looked out the window behind her and gathered strength from the beauty of the glowing and dancing fountains of the Bellagio in the distance down the Strip—she needed to hide Mr. Diamond’s body.

3

“I majored in entertainment engineering and design at UNLV,” Holly explained, “because I’ve always known I would take over the family business someday. That’s why I started working as my dad’s assistant when I was fourteen. But I thought
someday
was in the distant future. Then last week, out of the blue, my dad informs me that he’s going to teach me everything he knows!”

“Really?” Rob asked, keeping his eyes on the road as he made a turn in his cop car.

“Yes!” she exclaimed. “I’m so excited! But it’s been a week since he suggested it, and he hasn’t said another word about it.”

“I’m sorry, what?” Rob asked, easing his cop car to a stop at a red light. He blinked himself out of his reverie.

Holly bit her lip in annoyance, tasted lipstick, and immediately ran her tongue across her teeth to scrub the lipstick off, like a well-trained showgirl. What exactly did Rob mean by
what
?
What,
he hadn’t heard her last sentence over the noise of night traffic, or
what,
he hadn’t been listening to anything she’d said since he picked her up? If they’d been together awhile, she would have ribbed him about this:
You never listen to me
. But she’d known him only a week, and she couldn’t hold his attention on this, their first date. They were in trouble already.

Her vexation melted away as he glanced at her from across the seat with guileless brown eyes that sagged a bit at the corners. He’d worked all day, he’d had to wait until her parents’ show ended at 10 p.m. to take her out—and then she hit on the real problem.

“I’ll bet you worked that suicide today, didn’t you?” she asked. “That girl who jumped off the Hoover Dam?”

He turned forward. The traffic light reflected red in his eyes. For a split second, he was a handsome demon.

“Fuck this,” he grunted. He reached between them to flick a switch on the dashboard. The police siren wailed to life, startling Holly. Blue lights from his cop car leaked down the roof and spilled across the windshield. The cars in the middle of the intersection paused, then inched backward to make room for him. He stomped the gas and sped through the traffic light. Half a block down, he reached to the dashboard again to flick off the siren.

He put his hand on the knee of Holly’s jeans as if he’d done nothing unusual, which . . . maybe he hadn’t. Maybe all cops used their sirens and risked causing an accident just because they didn’t want to wait at a light.

“Sorry I stopped listening and drifted off like that,” he said. “I need to leave work at work. What were you saying?”

Holly sighed. Rob wasn’t going to share secret cop info with her. Since she’d seen the suicide reported on TV that morning, she’d replayed it over and over in her mind: how empty and awful that twenty-year-old girl must have felt to take her own life. But how cool, actually, to do it in such a dramatic way. If you were going to do it, you might as well do it right. That girl must have stood on the brink of the dam, the vast expanse of concrete below her and the Colorado River snaking darkly away like drying blood, the red canyon all around her, the blue sky above, and thought:
Now, once, I am powerful,
and let go.

Of course, that was just Holly being all mental adolescent dysfunctiony. If Rob didn’t want to talk about the state of the body, Holly shouldn’t ask. With effort she dragged her mind back to her small-scale problem and repeated a short version of her story. “My dad promised he’d clue me in on all the family secrets, but it’s been a week, with no clueage.”

“Clueage?” Rob’s dark brows knit. “I don’t think that’s a word.”

“Really?” she asked.
No shit, Sherlock,
she thought. She’d hoped that after seven years of hardly dating at all, she would be swept away by Rob, but she kept getting hints that she wouldn’t be. He didn’t understand when she was kidding—which was bad, because she was usually kidding.

“Have you bugged your dad about it?” Rob asked.

“No. He has this big stunt coming up next Tuesday. You probably saw the posters advertising it when you were at the casino last week. An impossible feat of physical stamina. He’s going to stand on a one-foot-square platform a hundred feet above the back lot of the casino for twelve hours. Not as long as David Blaine, because my dad likes his beauty sleep at night. To make up for that, the platform’s smaller than Blaine’s, and my dad won’t have ‘those pansy safety cables,’ as he calls them. Anyway, he says he wants to concentrate on training for that stunt and get it out of the way, and then he’ll teach me how he does it.”

“What’s the prob?” Rob asked. “You think he’ll splat on the pavement and take his secrets to the grave with him?”

This hadn’t occurred to her. True, her mom wasn’t as limber as she used to be, but Holly hadn’t ever thought her parents could be seriously hurt during their act full of knives and flames, because they’d never gotten hurt. She stared at Rob in distaste, talking herself down, telling herself that what he’d said wasn’t crass.
She’d
been the one to bring up her parents.

“No,” she said. “I just think it’s bullshit. I love my dad, but let’s get real. I’ve lived with him all my life. I’ve seen what goes on. He doesn’t train for stunts, unless you count sitting on the couch watching sports and eating fried pork skins as training. The way he eats, it’s a wonder he doesn’t weigh six hundred pounds. And I think next Tuesday, when his ‘training’ ”—she made finger quotes—“is over and it’s time for him to teach me what he knows, he’ll give me another excuse not to.”

“Why would he do that?”

She frowned. “I just graduated from college. They let me move into my friend Kaylee’s apartment a year ago, but gosh, she’s head of security at the casino. What could be safer? I wonder whether my parents have made me this promise of magic as a ruse to keep me close and obedient.”

“And you want to be disobedient?” Rob’s thumb moved on her knee, sending a jolt of awareness up her leg. She’d forgotten his hand was there.

She ached to explain the real problem: that she had a mental illness. But of course this would scare away a potential boyfriend. Besides, it was hard to feel close to him when he turned everything into a sex joke. Not that she didn’t want sex. She did, when she found herself in a real relationship.

Which explained why a girl made to work as a bikini-clad Las Vegas showgirl at fourteen was still a virgin at twenty-one. Many times she’d contemplated a one-night stand, just to see what it was like. The thing was, she wanted it to be with a dashingly handsome man who didn’t know who she was. Everyone knew who she was, courtesy of the billboard over Interstate 15.

Then, last week, Holly had met Rob. He was good-looking in a clean-cut, self-satisfied, frat boy way. He’d just moved to Vegas from Chicago. Now he was gainfully employed as a Clark County Sheriff’s deputy. So he was taking her on this date in his cop car because he was too cheap to buy his own civilian vehicle. So what? Nobody was perfect. She had a mental illness.

Therefore, she was able to overlook his latest sex joke. She even allowed his hand to remain on her knee as she explained, “I just want to be a magician. My dad hasn’t told me how he pulls off his impossible feats of physical stamina, but I’m brainstorming for something cool I could do for my debut. Walk a tightrope across the canyon at Hoover Dam?”

“Hoover Dam is a high national-security risk,” Rob said sternly. “That’s why they built the bypass bridge. It would be impossible for you to get a permit.”

Holly didn’t like being told her idea was impossible. Who did he think he was, the police?

Wait a minute.

Best to change the subject. “So, where are we going?” she asked brightly. Last week at the casino, he’d promised he would feed her. She didn’t forget promises about food. She’d been hoping for a late dinner at a nice restaurant—perhaps too much to ask on a rookie cop’s salary, but didn’t men spring for first dates? Broaching the subject might prove awkward, but Holly would be glad to go Dutch or to treat Rob, especially when food was involved. Her mom would die if she caught wind that Holly had ordered dessert. At least Holly could enjoy a salad and the atmosphere of the fine restaurant and feel like an adult, maybe even save this date from sliding any further downhill. They’d entered a residential neighborhood, though. Most restaurants were in the opposite direction.

“Home sweet home.” He parked behind a way-cool early 1960s muscle car in the driveway of a one-story orange stucco house, landscaped with gravel and cacti, average Vegas living. It was impressive that he’d been able to buy this at twenty-two years old. Maybe the muscle car was his, too.

“Is this all yours?” she asked.

“No, I rent it with a couple of roommates.” He got out of the car and slammed the door.

She watched him as he rounded the car. He was
so
handsome, with his dark hair short and perfectly styled. She found it a bit weird that he carried a piece while off duty, and that he kept it in a holster at his hip where everybody could see it. But that was probably an overcautious cop habit. She was being too critical. If she’d dated more, she would have seen what a catch he was. He had a logical reason for taking her back to the rented house he shared three ways without making the least effort to impress her first. She smiled brilliantly up at him as he opened the passenger door and held out his hand to her.

When she stood, he didn’t let go of her hand. He held it as they walked up the sidewalk to the house. And just as this was making her uncomfortable enough to pull away, she caught a whiff of alcohol.

Don’t panic,
she told herself. It was 10:30 p.m. He’d worked a suicide that day. It made sense for him to have had a drink before he picked her up. It also made sense for him to hold her hand. They were on a date. He had no idea he was turning her off.

She swung his hand to lighten the mood. “What will we do while we’re here?” she asked hopefully. She could picture a few dates in Rob’s rented home that wouldn’t be so bad. He might want to show her his favorite movie ever. He might cook her his mom’s famous lasagna. Holly could even
eat
it. Her stomach rumbled at the thought that they were out of the public eye and her mom would never find out what she put in her mouth.

He stopped on the threshold, brushed his thumb across her lips, and crooned, “That depends on you.”

Holly’s throat closed up—not as completely as it had in her imagination during her mental breakdown seven years before, but enough that she touched her collarbone with her fingertips. Though his words weren’t sexual, his tone dripped innuendo. He was moving so fast it made her anxious. As he opened the door and stepped inside, drawing her by the hand, she tripped over the threshold. She caught herself, but her heels clacked ungracefully on the floor inside.

At the noise, two men glanced up from opposite ends of the open room. In the living area sat Shane Sligh, whom Holly knew by sight. He played guitar for his dad’s Frank Sinatra tribute band in the Peacock Room at the casino. He usually looked the part, too, in a fitted black tux, with his hair slicked down in a retro do. She almost didn’t recognize him now that he’d washed the gel out of his hair. She hadn’t realized he was blond. From a threadbare chair, he eyed her over the neck of his electric guitar, but his fingers never stopped flying over the silent fret board.

In the kitchen stood Elijah Brown.

She blinked, thinking she must be wrong. She’d had sex on the brain, and now she’d mistaken Rob’s roommate for her first crush, to whom she’d hardly spoken since she bailed on the ninth-grade prom. He simply looked a lot like Elijah at this distance, peering at her between the top and bottom rows of kitchen cabinets—hair in messy brown waves like a movie star caught on his day off, intense green eyes, lean body in a T-shirt and jeans.

Then he shifted forward, hanging on to the knobs of the cabinets above. His red T-shirt was partly obstructed by the dish towel over his shoulder, but she thought it read
UNLV
LACROSSE
. Where his sleeves ended, his strong triceps moved underneath his taut skin. It was him all right, and hotter than ever.

“Mom, I’m home!” Rob called with a smirk. “What’s for dinner?”

“Tuna Helper,” Elijah said, looking at Holly.

On the drive over, Rob had made sex jokes and touched her knee, and none of that had elicited a reaction approaching the warm jolt she felt when Elijah Brown called her Tuna Helper. The rush of electricity was followed by a slower flow of emotions: Familiarity. Happiness at seeing a friendly face from high school. Sorrow for the missed opportunity of the ninth-grade prom. Anger at her parents for controlling her life. Curiosity about the coincidence that her ex-crush was her current date’s roommate.

“Mmmmm. Too bad we won’t join you.” Rob dragged Holly toward a hallway that she assumed led to his bedroom. She hung back while trying to look like she wasn’t. There was no way to extricate herself from this accelerating situation with Rob and simultaneously save face in front of Elijah.

Not that she had much face to save with him. She only waved to him each night when she passed him in the underground corridors for employees at the casino. He’d graduated from college with her last week. She’d spotted him when he walked across the stage with the
B
s, looking perversely sexy in his black cap and gown. She hadn’t approached him because her parents had been in the audience.

But even if she thought there was nothing between her and Elijah anymore, maybe he disagreed. He came around the counter, wiping his hands on the towel, just as Shane jumped up from the couch and said, “Rob, aren’t you going to introduce us to your girlfriend?”

Rob glared at Shane, his eyes looking as devilish as they had in the car with the red traffic light reflecting in them.

Unphased by Rob’s expression, Shane raised his eyebrows expectantly.

Holly watched this macho drama unfold. But her attention was on Elijah, who stood not a foot from her. Goose bumps rose on her skin as if her body longed to jump that gap between them.