Her 24-Hour Protector (17 page)

“You still there, Perez?”

“Are you okay, Duncan? You haven’t lost it on me have you?”

“Jenna will fill you in.” He hung up, felt for his weapon, chambered a round and held it ready, under his jacket, knowing the eye-in-the-sky would be on them the instant they
exited the door. He took Jenna’s arm, ushered her out the door and they started moving swiftly along soft carpet to the elevators.

Two suits appeared at the other end of the passage. Security. The men started to move toward them.

Lex had to force a smooth, casual pace. He pressed the elevator button, watching the men nearing in his peripheral vision. The elevator bell pinged, doors opening painfully slowly. He ushered Jenna in, jabbed the lobby button, pulse accelerating.

The elevator doors closed just as the security men passed by.

Two floors down, another security employee got into the car, but so did a middle-aged couple. Lex positioned Jenna behind the couple, using them as cover. Tense, they stood in silence as the car hummed slowly down. The doors opened. Lex put his arm around Jenna, sticking very close to the middle-aged couple, keeping them between the security employee and Jenna.

They exited the massive hotel doors and were hit by a wall of dark, damp heat. Perez was there, in her SUV, engine running. She leaned over and flung open the passenger door.

“Do you think any of this has anything to do with The Tears of the Quetzal, or Candace’s death?” Jenna asked quietly as Lex held the door open for her.

“All I know is that ring led me down this road, Jenna.” In more ways than one. Lex glanced at his partner, his eyes saying it all:
Be careful. Candace Rothchild’s killer is still out there and someone still wants to hurt Jenna.

“Lex—” Jenna’s eyes were big, dark. A man could lose himself in those eyes “—be careful, okay? I…I have plans for us.”

“Hey, I’m not going anywhere,” he bent down to kiss her quickly. “I’ve got some plans of my own.”

“Agent Duncan forgets—” Frank Epstein said quietly, observing Lex and Jenna exit his hotel “—that everyone watches
everyone in Vegas, all the time. And,” he added, “some men even watch their wives.”

Roman Markowitz studied his boss in silence, his posture rigid.

Frank pinched the bridge of his nose, replaying in his mind what he’d witnessed on the monitor through the private feed into his own living room. None of what had transpired between Mercedes and Lex Duncan was news to him. Frank knew his wife was dying—he was in touch with Mercedes’s doctor and paid him very well to keep him informed. He’d also known from day one that Tony Ciccone had been screwing his wife, that she’d tried to hide the pregnancy from him. He’d have whacked the little Italian bastard himself if Mercedes hadn’t done it for him. And he loved her for it.

Besides, it had solved a very thorny little problem for him. Ciccone’s mysterious vanishing act had kept the FBI off his back.

He’d always wanted Mercedes to have an illusion of freedom, but in effect, he controlled every aspect of her life. His sleight-of-hand, his trickery, had always been for her own good. He’d always protected her. Yet to the world she was independent, proud, regal—his Vegas queen. And he wanted her to die proud. On her terms. Under her own illusions. He loved her that much, that fiercely.

She’d become much more deeply religious and spiritual since she’d learned of her terminal illness. And in doing so, she’d become even more poignantly beautiful to him. So fragile in so many ways.

But now Lex Duncan knew her truth.

He knew Mercedes had shot and killed a man.

And the look Frank had glimpsed in the agent’s eyes when Mercedes had confessed this—he’d seen that intent look before in another man. In the eyes of mob enforcer Tony Ciccone.

A bit of the father in the son, he thought to himself. You can’t get away from that, Lexington.

A man like Lex Duncan, Frank could use on his side. On the wrong side…“He’s dangerous now,” he whispered.

Markowitz held his hand toward the monitor. “He still doesn’t know who whacked his mother,” he rasped. “You saw him on camera, and I saw him in that elevator. He doesn’t know who I am. He has no idea.”

Frank whipped to him, fury expressing violently through his blood. “It’s not you I’m worried about, Roman,” he said calmly. He looked at his nails, trying to defuse the pressure fizzing inside him. “You might have been working for Ciccone as my spy into his inner machinations at a time I really needed to know the extent of his operations, and what he might use against me. But—” he looked up “—you never should have killed that woman when he chose to send you to kidnap the boy.”

“The bitch shot me.”

“And your temper remains too short for your own good. No, Roman, it’s not you I’m concerned about, it’s my wife. It’s
me—
I don’t want this ancient Ciccone crap coming back to sit on me now. And I simply cannot allow my wife to suffer at the hands of the FBI, be taken in, interrogated, possibly charged for murder in her last days.”

She needed to go in peace. And Frank was prepared to kill to ensure this.

Markowitz cleared his throat. “You want me to take him out, sir?”

“It’s imperative.” He breathed his words out softly, like he so often did when he was about to blow. “My regret is that we did not have them put into one of our rooms wired with camera and sound. We have no idea what Duncan told the Rothchild woman while he was screwing her.”

He inhaled deeply, trying to ease the hammering in his skull, his skin heating at the thought of them fornicating in his own elevator, under sight of his cameras. And Duncan doing it with
a daughter of Harold Rothchild of all women. It was the ultimate slap in his face, in the face of his wife and his entire establishment. If he wasn’t going to have the man killed, Frank would have his badge. He’d release the sexual footage to the mainstream media—a federal agent screwing the sister of a homicide victim, a case on which he was the lead investigator. Duncan had to know he was being watched. The bastard. It was like he no longer cared…which worried Frank. A little.

“So we do her, too,” said Markowitz in his scratchy voice. “Just in case.”

Frank tilted his chin slightly toward the monitor. “That’s an FBI vehicle he’s putting her into.”

“I can have someone on that SUV in seconds. Just say it, boss, and I give the order.”

“Do it.”

Markowitz reached for a special cell, one he used only for very discreet jobs. Like the contract killing of a casino heiress and her FBI bodyguard. Like the elimination of a psychic with too much knowledge.

“It’s me,” he rasped into the phone. “This one must look like an accident. Affirmative—all occupants of the vehicle. Same payment structure.”

He looked up, flipping his phone shut. “Done.”

“Good. Now come with me. We’re taking a little drive into the Mojave to remove Ciccone’s remains. This time, the ghost of Ciccone will vanish for good.”

“What about Duncan?”

“Trust me, he’ll go straight out there to look for Ciccone’s body. We’ll be there waiting for him, take care of him ourselves.”

“I can send someone—”

“No. We do it. You and me. No more loose ends.”

Roman eyed his boss. Warily. A cold fist of tension curling in his abdomen.

Lex closed the door, stood back, banged the roof of the vehicle. “Go!”

The SUV moved on. Lex exhaled, dragging his hand over his hair as he watched the vehicle disappearing into the soaking hot, airless night, sweat already forming on his skin.

Geez, was he being overly paranoid? But he couldn’t bear the idea off losing her. Not now.

Not ever.

Jenna had just given him a glimpse into a future, shown him what he really wanted, what they could have together. But that meant he now had everything to lose.

He told himself she’d be safe with Perez until he got back. Perez was a top agent, experienced. Sharp. He breathed out a hot sigh, allowing tension to ease just a little as he made for his own vehicle.

When Lex left the rambling city perimeter, taking the road that would lead to the old ghost town, the desert night grew thick and dark. Stars spattered the black dome of sky. And tension torqued inside him. He felt under the dash for his flashlight and an extra clip for his weapon.

R
ita Perez drew her SUV up to the security booth at the Rothchild mansion. She depressed the brakes, scrolling her window down as she reached for her badge.

But before either Jenna or Rita could even register what was happening, a man dressed completely in black with a balaclava pulled over his head stepped in front of Rita’s passenger window. He aimed a gun fitted with a suppressor into the car. Behind him, lying on the driveway, dark blood glistening in her car headlights, Jenna saw the limp body of her dad’s security guard.

She screamed.

As she did, Rita reached for her weapon, ducking and pushing Jenna below the dash in the same motion. But as Rita moved, the man fired.

The shot was quiet, like in an assassin movie.

Jenna felt Rita’s body jerk hard, and then shudder. The agent slumped limply on top of her. Hot blood came gushing from a
wound on her head. Terror dumped through Jenna’s nerves. She pushed Rita’s body off her and stared in sheer horror at the ragged wound in the agent’s skull, the way her mouth hung slack and open. The man with the black balaclava was moving quickly round to Jenna’s door. He yanked it open, his gun now aimed at her. “You! Get in the back!” he hissed, grabbing her upper arm.

A small squeak came from somewhere low in Jenna’s throat as she tried to scream and jerk free of his grasp. But the man raised his pistol and struck a glancing blow off her temple.

Her world went black.

When she came round, she felt nauseous. It took a few sickening, dizzying moments to realize she was bound tightly with rope and lying in the back of Rita’s SUV. Rita’s body lay limp and bloody beside her.

And the car was moving, somewhere dark. In the desert, no lights anywhere around them.

Headlights cut through blackness along a faraway ridge. The beams were then swallowed as the vehicle emitting them dipped into a canyon. There was only one road up ahead as far as Lex knew, and it led to the ghost town.

A sense of foreboding rustled through him.

Could be teens, out for a party, he thought. Or something more sinister.

He pulled abruptly over to the side of the road and examined his map with his flashlight. There was a much older disused track that led around the back of the abandoned town. It was several miles longer, but if he used that track, he could approach the town from the rear unanticipated. He could park his SUV below a ridge to the west, cut his lights, climb up and over the ridge, advancing in silence. If there was anyone in that old ghost town, he’d have the advantage of being able to see who they were, where they were and what they were up to.

He quickly removed his white shirt, reached back into the passenger seat and extracted a dark long-sleeved T-shirt from his gym bag. He pulled it over his head, checked his weapon and restarted the ignition.

Lex crept up the back of the ridge. The night was cloaked thick with heat, dead silent. The uncanny quietness set him on edge, heightened his senses. He could smell sand, stone, feel residual heat radiating up from sand that had blistered under the desert sun. He crested the ridge.

Below him silver moonlight glowed eerily over ruined buildings that squatted in a valley of dry scrub. A knotted ball of tumbleweed lodged at the facade of a crumbling structure, shades of gray and black playing tricks with his eyes. Lex could make out the shape of an old oil drum, a rusted old truck—remains of a life, an industry. Long gone. A mine headframe loomed above the abandoned structures, throwing long distorted shadows over the landscape.

There’s a main headframe, easy to spot. Next to it is an old metal-sided building. If you go about two hundred yards east of that, you’ll find another shaft opening covered with metal grate. He’s down there…

Lex shifted his gaze eastward, and suddenly he saw it—an SUV parked at the far end of the buildings, moonlight glinting off chrome.

Sliding his pistol from its holster, he scrambled sideways down the steep drop, dislodging a shower of small pebbles that went skittering down the bank ahead of him, sound disproportionately loud. Lex stilled at the bottom, pulse quickening. He waited. Silence descended back on the ghost town, and he crept stealthily toward the hulking buildings.

The sudden creak and groan of metal grating cut through the stillness, and again Lex froze. He edged further along the front
of the metal-sided building, gun held down and in front of his body, making his way two hundred yards east of the rusting headframe as per Mercedes’s directions. He stopped. He could hear voices now. Males. Two.

He crept closer, ducked down behind a rusted drum, listened.

And he heard the sound that had haunted his boyhood dreams—the distinct sandpapery voice of Roman Markowitz. Lex peered cautiously around the wall. And he saw Frank Epstein in the pale moonlight.

They’d come ahead of him.

But how had they known? This was supposed to be Mercedes’s dark secret from her husband. The thought struck him suddenly…could Epstein have had a camera in his own penthouse, been watching her whole confession? Was Mercedes in trouble now—or worse? Lex’s heart began to slam as an even more chilling thought scrambled goose bumps over his skin—what if Epstein had a camera planted in his and Jenna’s hotel room? If so, Epstein would know that Jenna knew everything.

Had Lex put
her
life in danger?

His head began to swim.
Focus.
Jenna was with Perez. If he made a rash move now, he could end up dead. And dead wasn’t going to help Jenna. He couldn’t phone her now, either. The men would hear. Nor could he call for back-up.

Lex inched farther forward, lowering himself behind the cover of a rusting boxcar. From there he watched Markowitz descend into the mine shaft using rungs grafted against the wall.

Markowitz’s granular voice carried eerily up the mine shaft, which seemed to function as a large bullhorn. “He’s down here, all right, boss, I see bones.” Markowitz swore. “He’s like a freaking mummy. D’you want to throw that bag, and I’ll package him, bring him up?”

Lex peered farther around the boxcar, saw the dark shape of
Frank Epstein directing a powerful flashlight down the shaft. The heavy grate that had covered it lay to one side. Pulling back that grate must have been what caused the sound Lex had heard earlier.

“You sure it’s him?” Epstein called down the shaft.

“Yeah, yeah the ring…it’s Ciccone’s ring, the one with the gold seal.” He swore. “Geez, his finger bones just fell off when I touched him.”

“I want to see for myself. Wait there—I’m coming down.”

Another wave of goose bumps chased over Lex’s skin as he saw Epstein draw a handgun from a holster at his ankle, check it, chamber a round and replace his weapon. Damn, the bastard was going to kill Markowitz? When? Once they got the bones bagged and back up into the SUV?

Lex’s brain raced.

He needed the evidence to remain where it was. And he couldn’t call for backup now. They’d hear. He needed to find a way to incapacitate these two, maybe trap them down in the shaft with the remains of Ciccone. Hold them until help arrived.

Epstein began to lower himself carefully into the shaft, the beam of his flashlight catching dust that floated up from the disturbed tomb below.

“Careful, Mr. Epstein. It’s steep and not very secure. Are you sure?”

“Of course I’m sure.”

“What about Duncan—what if he arrives while we’re down here?”

“We’d already have seen him coming miles away on that road. We can set an ambush for him once we’ve got Ciccone bagged.”

Lex waited for Epstein’s head to sink below ground level. The minute he was down there, Lex would make for the heavy grate, seal them in from the top.

But just before Epstein was swallowed by the earth, Lex’s phone buzzed loudly in his pocket. He swore to himself, jerked
back, fumbled quickly in his pocket. He was about to click it off but saw the number in the green glow. Lex put the phone to his ear. “Yes,” he whispered, quiet as he could.

“Special Agent Duncan, it’s Agent Savalas. We’ve got a situation—”

Lex tensed.

“There’s a security guard down at the Rothchild mansion, and security footage shows a man in a black balaclava firing a weapon into Agent Perez’s vehicle. He then got into the vehicle and left the scene.”

His heart twisted violently. “Jenna? Perez?”

“He’s got them.”

“Are they injured?” Lex whispered, hoarse. In the back of his mind he heard the men in the mineshaft go quiet—God, they’d heard him!

“We don’t know. And we have no fix on the vehicle—”

“Perez’s vehicle is fitted with GPS. Track it. Call me as soon as you have a location. I’m coming in.”

He killed the call.

Silence rung loud in his ears. Just the thud of his heart.

Lex swore to himself, panic whispering seductively at the edges of his consciousness. Was it the same man who’d fired at her during the car chase?

Footfalls crunched in dirt, advancing.
The two men were coming for him.
They must have scrambled back out of the shaft when they’d heard him, and he’d been distracted.

Lex heard the rack of a rifle.

Fire boiled into his blood. He refused to lose. If he did, Jenna would die.

A gunshot pinged suddenly off the side of the boxcar, near his head.

Lex ducked down. They definitely knew he was here. Alone
in the desert. Two against one. Lex scurried along the base of the boxcar, dashed in a crouch across a gap and tucked in behind a shed, staying low and quiet. Those two men were a good deal older than him. And he was now fired with raw determination like nothing he’d known, a passion that was consuming him whole. All those men were to Lex now was an obstacle in his way to saving Jenna.

She was his priority.

Not Epstein.

Not the man who’d killed his mother—not any longer.

Lex had reached a tipping point, and he’d gone over the edge, seen what lay on the other side. A future. With a woman who’d bewitched him within three minutes flat—the duration of the song that had played on the dance floor only four nights ago, before the big clock in the Ruby Room had struck twelve. Lex had known it back then, deep down, that he was toast.

Blame it on The Tears of the Quetzal curse. Blame it on Vegas fate, chance, luck, magic. Whatever it was, he wasn’t going to let Jenna go now. He was going to be her protector 24/7. For the rest of his life. And these bastards were simply in his way.

Another shot pinged off the boxcar where Lex had been just seconds ago. It gave the gunman’s position away. Lex peered round the shed, squeezed off two shots. Immediately gunfire returned. Lex ducked, aimed again, this time the shooter went down with a grunt and thud in the dirt. It was Markowitz.

Lex now aimed for Epstein, who was running for his vehicle. He fired into dirt at this feet. Dust kicked up in a small explosion. Epstein kept running. Lex stepped out from his cover, weapon aimed at Epstein. “Halt! FBI!”

But Epstein kept moving. Lex squeezed off another round, aiming for the sand at his feet.

Panting, Epstein stopped. He raised both hands, turned slowly round. “Don’t. Shoot.”

Lex didn’t waste time even acknowledging the bastard. His weapon trained on Epstein, he moved quickly toward the bag and length of rope they’d been going to use to raise Ciccone up from the shaft. He snagged the rope, approached Epstein, grabbed the old man, and shoved him brusquely onto his stomach in the sand.

“Wait…think this through, Duncan. I’ve got enough cash to—”

“You bastard,” Lex snapped as he wrenched the grizzled old lion king’s hands behind his back with the rope and hauled him to his feet. “When are you going to learn you can’t buy everything, Epstein?” He shoved the stumbling, heavily-breathing man towards the SUV as he spoke.

“I can give you what you want—”

“I already got what I want. I’m going to see your entire empire go down into the dirt. Where are the keys?”

“I swear, you’re going to regret this, Duncan. I have connections in places that—”

“Get in!” Lex barked as he yanked open the back hatch. “On your stomach.”

“Duncan—”

He pressed the muzzle of his gun into the old mobster’s back. “Do it! Now!”

Once the old man was humiliatingly bundled into his own trunk, Lex hogtied him, looping the rope so that Epstein’s feet were bound to his hands. This desert king wasn’t going anywhere but down.

Lex climbed into the driver’s seat, dialing dispatch as he started the ignition. “Connect me with someone who can give me a fix on the GPS in Agent Perez’s vehicle!” he barked. “And I need backup as soon as we get a reading on where she is.” He hit the gas as he spoke, giving dispatch a rundown of the situation. And with Epstein swearing in the back, he raced back toward the city of Las Vegas, toward the gold halo of light
in the desert, dust boiling in a dark cone behind him. Lex had no idea which direction to go, but this was a start until he had a fix on Perez’s location. There was no way he could just sit and do nothing while he waited.

He called both Jenna’s and Perez’s phones as he drove. Both kept flipping to voice mail. Tension torqued like a vise in him.

His phone buzzed. Lex snapped it to his ear. “Yes!”

“We have a location. Perez’s vehicle is stationary at a place called Bucktooth Ranch, an old property that was sold and slated for demolition two years ago, but redevelopment permits have been on hold because of legal issues—”

“I know it!” Lex hit the brakes, wheeling sharply as he pulled a 180 degree turn off-road. The car fishtailed into sand, dust billowing in a cloud around him as he bounced wildly over rugged terrain, dry scrub scraping the undercarriage of the SUV as he aimed for an intersecting road about a mile ahead. “I’m not far out. I can be there in a few minutes,” he yelled into his phone. “Get that tactical team out there stat!”

The SUV tires bit suddenly into harder packed dirt as his vehicle hit the intersecting road. He punched down on the gas, increasing speed. “I’m about eight miles out now. Can you give me the ranch specs? How many buildings?”