Nightwalker (22 page)

She stopped dead in the street. No one would take a chance on attacking her with hundreds of people around, would they?

Then she remembered that Tanner Green had suddenly appeared out of nowhere, a knife in his back.

There was a large group of tourists ahead of her. She hurried to join them, looking for safety in numbers.

“Hey, Wolf,” Darrell Frye said, approaching Dillon at the table where he was sitting. He offered Dillon a broad smile and a handshake, looking as if he didn’t have a care in the world. “I heard you’re working on Tanner Green’s murder. Horrible business.”

“It was. And since you were there that night, I was hoping you might have noticed something that could help me.”

“I doubt I can help you. Martin was running the table when Green actually died.”

“I know,” Dillon told him. “Can I get you a cup of coffee?”

“I’ll grab some—it’s a freebie for me. No alcohol on the job—but we get all the coffee we can drink. Do you want a refill?” he asked, indicating the cup Dillon had in front of him.

“I’m good,” Dillon said. “Thanks.”

“Be right back.”

When Darrell returned with his coffee he sat down across from Dillon, glanced at his watch and said, “I’m good for nine more minutes.”

“That should do,” Dillon told him.

“You were there, too, so you would have seen everything I did. Although…” Darrell said, frowning with the memory. “Who left first, you or me? Me, I think. I remember the night pretty well. Coot, he’s a regular. There was a skinny woman there who looked like she was on her last legs. There was the drunk who didn’t know if he wanted his chips on or off the table. And…Jessy, of course. Jessy Sparhawk. You must know her—I saw a tape of the two of you leaving the casino together on TV.”

“I just met her that night,” Dillon said. “But you know her fairly well, I gather.”

Darrell shrugged, shaking his head. “Wish I did. She’s not a gambler. I did talk to her once after I’d seen her show. I want off the floor and into entertainment—everyone who knows me knows that—and I’d heard some of the brass talking about the pirate show at the Big Easy. They liked Jessy, so I figured if I could get her over here…well, that would look good for me.”

“Where did you go when you left the floor that night?” Dillon asked him.

“The employee cafeteria,” Darrell replied.

That would be easy enough to check out, Dillon thought.

“Why?” Darrell asked

“I was hoping maybe you’d stepped outside, maybe
seen something you didn’t even know you’d seen. Something important,” Dillon said.

“I wish I could help you.”

“Me too. I did talk to some of the guys outside, at the door and at valet parking,” Dillon told him.

“Oh?”

Darrell Frye suddenly looked wary. His smile wavered for a moment, or at least it looked that way to Dillon. No matter how willing to help the man seemed to be, there was still something about him that seemed wrong. As if he was being
too
willing.

“Yeah,” Dillon said. “Anyway, one of the guys
thought
maybe he’d seen Tanner Green stumble out of a white super-stretch limo.”

“Really? Who?” Darrell Frye demanded. “Did you tell the cops?”

“Yeah, the cops know. But it won’t help them much.”

“Why not?”

“Because the guy I talked to is dead. It was Rudy Yorba.”

Frye let out a whistle. “Imagine that. The one person who actually sees something winds up dead in a hit-and-run.”

“Yeah, imagine.”

Frye glanced at his watch. “I gotta get back. But if I think of anything, I’ll call you. I promise.”

“Darrell, one more quick question. Does anyone at this casino have access to the security tapes? Other than security, obviously.”

“I thought the tapes went to the cops,” Frye said, frowning.

“Those were copies, right?”

“You’d have to ask security. I gotta go,” Darrell said. “But I’ll be happy to talk to you again, though. Anytime.”

“Thanks, Darrell. I appreciate that,” Dillon said.

“Sure.”

As soon as Frye left, Dillon got up to leave himself, wondering what the other man had been lying about. Because he
had
been lying. A thin sheen of nervous sweat had appeared on his upper lip, and his eyes had kept shifting toward the left.

The tourists turned en masse, heading down a wide one-way alley alongside one of the casinos to the parking area where buses dropped off and picked up their passengers.

But Jessy was so sure that she was being followed, she turned along with them.

Great, she thought. What the hell was she going to do? Board the bus?

She decided—too late—that she was probably making a big mistake. If she really was being followed by someone who meant to harm her, she should have stayed on the Strip and caught up with some other group to hide in.

Unable to think of anything else to do, she tried to board the bus, but the tour guide stopped her. “Miss, I’m sorry, you must be lost. This is a chartered bus.”

“I know. But I think I’m being followed.”

The young man looked around. There was no one around except the rest of the tour group—who were all wearing name tags, explaining how he had known she didn’t belong.

“Can I call someone for you?” he asked, looking at her as if she were an escapee from a lunatic asylum.

She had a phone, she realized. She could call someone herself. Like Dillon. Where the hell was he? Why hadn’t she heard from him yet?

“Miss, you’ll have to step aside. The people behind you need to get on.”

She stepped aside, hoping they boarded slowly, and dialed Dillon’s cell, praying that he would pick up.

He did.

“Jessy?”

The concern in his voice made her take a deep breath. She told herself she was being ridiculous.

“Where are you?” he asked her.

“About a block from the Rainbow. I’m walking over to meet Sandra. Where are you?”

“At the Sun. I never got any farther. I’ll come find you. Is Ringo around?”

“He was at the show, but I haven’t seen him since,” she said, amazed that she was talking so casually about seeing a ghost.

“Are you all right?” he asked.

“Yes. I’m sorry, I was a little nervous before, but…I’m okay now.” She had panicked, and she didn’t want him knowing just how afraid she had been. She absolutely couldn’t allow herself to become paralyzed by paranoia.

“Okay,” he said slowly. “How was the show?”

“It went fine, no problems.”

“Good. Okay, I’m on my way. Where are you?”

“About three blocks from the Big Easy.”

“I’m on foot,” he told her, “but I’m already on my way.”

She hung up. The last tourist was about to board the bus, and she needed to get moving.

She turned and started walking briskly. She heard the driver rev the engine and realized that the last tourist had gotten on and the door had closed.

The broad alley looked empty. All she had to do was walk quickly and she would be back on the Strip, surrounded by the crowd. It was insane to think that whoever had been following her—if anyone even had—was still out there.

She neared a clump of bushes the casino must have worked hard to maintain in this desert climate. She hadn’t even noticed it when she had passed it with the group.

She kept to the far side of the alley as she went by, thinking she was going crazy.

But she wasn’t.

As she walked by, she saw that the bushes started moving.

She swore and started walking more quickly.

She turned back and saw two men emerging from the cover of the bushes. Two men she would never recognize, because even in the warmth of a Vegas spring, they were wearing dark ski masks and were clad in black from head to toe.

She started to run.

She had to make it to the Strip before they caught up to her. Had to. If she could just get there, there was no way they could attack her without people noticing.

She heard footsteps coming up behind her.

They were moving like lightning, and she was wearing pumps. The heels weren’t high, but they were hardly running shoes.

She could feel the energy behind her, the force. A hot wind seemed to be reaching out for her as the footsteps drew closer.

“Help!” she screamed.

She could see the crowds just ahead, where the shadows of the alley ended.

“Help!” she screamed again.

And that was when she felt someone grab her arm. She screamed again, tearing at the gloved fingers that held her.

“Help!”

The second man reached her then, but she barely saw him because she realized that the first man had something in his hand and was pressing it to her face. A cloth. And it had a sickening-sweet smell. She felt dizziness rising and realized that the cloth was drugged.

“Help!” This time her scream was weaker.

There were people on the sidewalk just ahead.

Couldn’t they see her?

She started to fall….

And that was when something happened. When someone seemed to plow into the man holding her and wrench him from her.

“Run, Jessy, run!” someone yelled.

It was Dillon’s voice.

Run. She had to run.

But she could barely stumble.

She tried to move, but she had no strength and the night seemed so black.

The second man was reaching for her and she…

She was falling.

D
illon moved without thinking as he tackled the first man, ripping him away from Jessy. With the element of surprise in his favor, it was an easy feat to bring the man down hard enough to keep him there, fighting for breath. A right hook to the jaw bought him more time.

Dillon had been a punk as a kid. He’d gotten his eyes blackened a dozen times in idiotic fights he’d started himself, but in the end he’d learned how to take care of himself.

But though the first man had gone down without much effort, the other now had Jessy, who’d fallen limp to the ground, and was tossing her over his shoulder as easily as if she were a bag of feathers.

Where would could he be planning on taking her?

He couldn’t dwell on the question. He disentangled himself from the man on the ground and went straight for
the second assailant, using all the force he could muster to chop the edge of his hand against the man’s nape.

The guy was a gorilla; a smaller man might have gone straight down, but the giant shuddered, then finally started to stumble to his knees, but at least he dropped Jessy, who landed directly between his feet. She roused, blinking rapidly as she tried to escape, but her movements were erratic, her limbs unable to obey the commands her brain was sending. Then her knee jerked hard and high as she flailed in her struggle to rise, and her assailant let out a bellow, rolling to his side and clutching his groin. Dillon dived after him.

“Jessy, get to the street!” Dillon ordered.

There was a moment when her eyes met his and he was afraid that she wouldn’t obey, would try to stay and help him.

But apparently she knew she was too weak to be any good in a fight. She staggered to her feet and moved toward the street, screaming for help. Her voice was weak, but she was getting away.

She reached the sidewalk at last, and that changed everything. People heard her, saw her, and someone called 911. In seconds police-car sirens filled the air. Dillon turned to rejoin the fight. The first man had turned to run, heading for the other end of the alley. But the big man remained, glaring at Dillon, before running in the opposite direction. Toward Jessy.

Dillon raced after him, but the man ignored Jessy, who was sinking toward the pavement once again, and just tore past her, shoving people out of the way, and disappeared into the traffic. Dillon tried to follow, but it was
impossible to break through the crowd of people surrounding Jessy. Frustrated, he gave up and cursed the fact that the attacker was no doubt even now doing a chameleon change, discarding the ski mask as easily as he’d donned it earlier, blending in with everyone around him.

Dillon dropped down to the sidewalk next to Jessy and put his hands on her shoulders. “Can you breathe?”

“What did he dose me with?” Jessy asked him, inhaling deeply.

He could smell a hint of the drug. “Ether, I think,” he told her. “Are you all right? Did they hurt you?” he asked anxiously.

She shook her head. “No, no…I’m fine. But I might have been….” She trailed off with a shudder. Neither of them knew what might have happened. Had the men been out to kidnap her—or kill her?

A police car wailed as it came to a halt. A uniformed officer made his way through the crowd. “Move back, folks. Let me get to the victim.”

“I’m not a victim,” Jessy protested.

“Yeah, you are,” Dillon corrected her.

An officer was speaking into his radio, ordering an ambulance for Jessy.

“I don’t need an ambulance,” she protested. Using Dillon’s shoulder for support, she rose. “I don’t need an ambulance,” she repeated

“Jessy, you might have been hurt,” Dillon told her.

Her blue eyes narrowed mutinously. “I’m not hurt.” She turned to the cops. “Thank you. You came along just in time. But I’m an adult and in my right mind, and I’m not going to the hospital.”

“Your knee is bleeding,” Dillon pointed out.

“And I have Band-Aids in my purse,” she snapped.

“Excuse me, but we need to find out what happened here,” one of the officers said. He turned to face the crowd that was milling closer. “Folks, back off. I need everyone to just move on, unless you saw what happened here.”

A young man stepped forward. “Lisa and I heard her scream, and I called 911.”

“Did you see anything?” the officer asked.

“Someone must have seen something. One of the men ran right through the crowd,” Dillon said.

A dozen people started speaking at once.

“One at a time,” the officer said politely. “Where did he go?”

A girl pointed toward the street. “There.”

“There” meant six lanes of traffic.

“Officer, I had the sense that someone was following me as I was walking down the street,” Jessy said.

The cop’s brows hiked. “On the Strip?” he asked.

“Yes.”

“So you ran down an alley?”

Jessy flushed. Dillon looked at her, because that was certainly a question in his mind, too.

“I was with a bunch of tourists.”

“What?” the officer said.

“There were about twenty-five tourists ahead of me when I felt I was being followed, so I tried to blend in with them. But they wouldn’t let me on their bus, so I hoped maybe I had shaken whoever it was, and I headed back to the street. And then they…they came at me out
of the bushes,” she explained. “They were dressed in black, and they were wearing ski masks.”

“Do you know who they were?” the officer asked.

“She was attacked, and you’re grilling
her
like that?” an older woman demanded.

“We have to try to catch the perps,” the officer said. “And that means getting all the information we can.” He looked at Dillon. “And you?”

“I had just talked to Miss Sparhawk on the phone and I was on my way to meet her. I’m pretty sure it was a kidnap attempt. They tried to drug her,” Dillon explained.

The crowd in the street was growing. The ambulance, which had been called whether Jessy wanted it or not, was pulling up. A second set of officers arrived and began cordoning off the scene.

“Get in the ambulance—please,” Dillon whispered to Jessy. “We can get out of here, the crowd will clear, and the crime-scene team will be able to get to work.”

Jessy looked at him and then, unwillingly, agreed.

Her phone rang, and Dillon took it out of her hand and answered it. Sandra was on the other end, and she quickly became hysterical when Dillon explained what had happened and where they were going. He told her to meet them at the hospital and hung up.

In the ambulance, stretched out on the gurney with a med tech asking her questions and taking her vitals, Jessy complained about how ridiculous it was to send her to the hospital for a scraped knee.

Ridiculous or not, Dillon still thought it was the right call. As they headed to the hospital with the siren blaring, he called Jerry Cheever. The call went straight
to voice mail, but Cheever must have gotten the message right away, because he called back just as the ambulance pulled up to the E.R.

Dillon tersely told him what had happened. “I’m homicide,” Cheever reminded Dillon. “This was a mugging, Wolf.”

“That’s bullshit and you know it. They didn’t want her purse—they wanted
her
.”

“All right, I’ll be down,” Cheever agreed.

Sandra arrived while Jessy was in with a doctor. Sandra had tears streaming down her cheeks, and Dillon tried to calm her down, assuring her that none of it was her fault. She finally calmed down when the doctor came out to say that Jessy had suffered no lasting effects from the attack and was free to leave. As soon as Jessy herself arrived, Sandra hugged her and started apologizing all over again.

“Sandra, stop it. It’s not your fault, and if you don’t stop, I’m going to have to beg someone to give
you
a sedative,” Jessy told her firmly.

Just as they started to leave, the news came on the waiting-room television with a report on the attack. There were no pictures from the scene; everything had happened too fast.

But a picture of Jessy did go up on-screen, her promo shot, which Dillon couldn’t help thinking was absolutely stunning. The reporter went on to say that Jessy’s condition was unknown, then added that Miss Sparhawk was certainly having a rough time lately and went on to remind people of her unintentional role in Tanner Green’s death.

Jerry Cheever came through the emergency doors
just as they were preparing to walk out. He looked at Jessy with what seemed to be genuine concern and asked if she was all right.

“A scrape on one knee, and that’s it,” Jessy told him.

Cheever stared at Dillon. “I’m still not sure—”

“Get serious, Cheever. She was followed down an alley and attacked. Not robbed. Attacked. I’m assuming they had some way of spiriting her off. They wanted something from her, or they wanted her….”

“Dead,” Jessy said flatly.

“Oh, God,” Sandra moaned.

“Let’s take this to the station,” Cheever suggested.

“Better idea. Let’s take it to my house,” Dillon said. “That will be a lot easier on Jessy than dragging her down to the station.”

“Get in the car,” Cheever agreed with a sigh. “We’ll do it.”

At Dillon’s house, they heard Clancy the minute they reached the house. She might be big and furry and lovable, but she was a guard dog all the way. As he opened the door, Dillon spoke to her, and she wagged her tail, certain not just from his presence and his voice but from his manner that everything was all right.

“I can make coffee, if you want,” Sandra suggested. “So you guys can talk.”

“Thanks. That would be great,” Dillon told her.

Just as Cheever sat down in the living room with Dillon and Jessy, his phone rang. When he got off, he said, “That was the crime-scene sergeant. They found two separate blood types, so one of you must have nicked one of the guys. If the DNA is in the system, we
can find the guy. Otherwise, broken branches and scuff marks, that’s it.”

Dillon nodded. “Here’s the thing, Cheever. It was a planned attack. I think that whoever killed Tanner Green thinks he said something to Jessy before he died, and that whatever he said is worth…silencing her. Rudy Yorba talked to me, and Rudy wound up dead. You need to get subpoenas on both of those limos. We’ve got to find the killer before people wind up dead.”

Cheever frowned, looking at Jessy. “If these events
are
related, then Wolf is right and you’re in danger. And here’s the thing—I saw the tape. I know Green said something to you, and I’m willing to bet other people know it, too. Care to tell me what it was?”

Jessy glanced at Dillon, who shrugged.

“Indigo,” Jessy said.

“Indigo?” Cheever echoed, confused and disappointed.

“Indigo,” she repeated.

Cheever stared at her blankly. “Like the color?”

“Yes. I forgot it at first, because there was so much going on. And then, even after I remembered, it didn’t seem to mean anything,” Jessy explained. “And then…I didn’t know it was a town.”

“It’s a town?” Cheever asked, looking at Dillon.

“I’m surprised you haven’t heard about it. It’s kind of a faded legend in these parts, a bump in the timeline of history. There was a shoot-out there, and soon after, the town went down. It’s on Indian land, but it’s just a pit out in the desert now. A movie outfit rented it from the tribe a few years back, and they filmed a few scenes and got out—it was too creepy for them,” Dillon explained.

“You’re sure he meant the town?” Cheever asked, perplexed.

“I’m not sure of
any
thing,” Jessy told him.

“Same here, unfortunately,” Dillon added.

“Coffee,” Sandra announced from the doorway. She came in with a tray holding four steaming cups of coffee and all the necessaries.

It took a minute for them to fix their cups, and then they sat back down and started talking again, with Sandra sitting on the sidelines trying to look invisible.

“I’ll be damned if I know what it means, either,” Cheever said, and looked at Dillon. “Why would anyone commit murder because of a ghost town?”

“I don’t know,” Dillon said. He certainly wasn’t about to tell Cheever that ghosts—including one with ties to Indigo—were real, or that he and Jessy both had ancestors who’d lived—and presumably died—in Indigo, since what that meant was still a mystery, as well.

Cheever sighed. “All right, both of you need to think. Do you remember anything about these guys that might help us find them? Tell us where to look for them?”

“Green,” Jessy said.

Cheever looked at her. “First Indigo, now green? I need something more than colors here,” he said wearily.

“The big one had green eyes,” Jessy said.

Dillon looked at her, surprised and pleased. He hadn’t noticed either man’s eye color, but then again, he’d been busy pulling them off Jessy, more concerned with how well they fought than what they looked like.

“The other guy, I don’t know…”

“There’s someone out there running all this, and I don’t think he’s as scary as he’d like to be. This is the second time he’s used drugs. LSD on Green, and ether just now with Jessy. He hires guys with real muscle, but he goes one better and drugs his victims. He doesn’t want to meet with resistance,” Dillon said.

“Great. I need to look for a rich guy with a drug problem in Vegas. That narrows it down,” Cheever said sarcastically.

“Bring in those limos,” Dillon said. “And do it soon.”

“What the hell would I find in one of the limos at this point? Even if Tanner Green
was
in one of them, any evidence would have been sanitized away by now,” Cheever said.

“People miss things,” Dillon reminded him.

Cheever stared at him. “You’ve been in at least one of those limos, haven’t you?”

Dillon started to answer, but Cheever lifted a hand and cut him off. “Never mind. If you did something illegal, I don’t want to know. Which limo am I tearing apart first? And what should I expect to find? In your
educated opinion
, of course.”

“A button,” Dillon said. “You know how easily buttons fall off.”

Cheever rose, setting his coffee cup down. “Thank you,” he said to Sandra, and offered her his hand. “We haven’t been introduced. I’m Jerry Cheever.”