Running Scared (5 page)

Las Vegas

Halloween night

T
he lobby of the
Wildest Dream hotel/shopping/theater/gambling complex was decked out like a Halloween tart in black velvet and neon orange. The most photogenic of the Strip’s gambling glitterati milled around the champagne fountain and dipped black crystal glasses into the fizzy orange wine. Gail Silverado, sole owner of Wildest Dream Inc., was famous for her yearly Halloween bash. It started loud and just got better. By 3:00 a.m. the party had developed a really shrill edge that would just get worse every half hour until dawn, when the bubbly fountain would finally run dry.

But that was several hours away. With a smile brighter than the shimmering faux pearl beads that outlined her figure in loving detail, Gail held her tenth glass of champagne—one sip from each, no more, no less—and looked at her watch without appearing to. She still had a few more minutes before she would be called away on business.

Even if a meeting hadn’t been arranged, she would have wanted to get away. The high, sexy heels she was wearing had been designed for a younger woman, one who hadn’t spent too many of her fifty-odd years strutting her well-kept butt in front of whichever man could afford it. Her feet were screaming.

Her smile never wavered beneath the exotic, pearlescent feathers that framed her face like loving fingers. There was too much young ass in Las Vegas for a woman over thirty ever to let down her guard. But even if she had been playing against a field of dogs, Gail would have gone through the same arduous workout and surgical schedule that she did now. She needed to look fifteen years younger than she was. Twenty would be better.

“Shane!” she called. Her smile tipped into the megawatt category. “I was afraid you wouldn’t come.”

With a wave, Shane slipped through a costumed throng of devils, some Hell’s Angels—who may or may not have been in costume—more “showgirls” than had ever pranced down the Lido’s runway, and some truly reptilian aliens with heads that would have made Medusa turn and run.

“I should have Carl throw you out,” Gail said to Shane when he came to stand beside her, but her approving look said otherwise.

“Why sic your head of security on me?” Shane wasn’t quite shouting, but it was a near thing. The volume of the party had reached frenetic. A lot of people relished it. He wasn’t one of them. He was here for business, not pleasure, and all that noise got in the way. Almost shouting just to have a conversation wasn’t his idea of fun.

“Because, honeylove,” Gail said, hands on her narrow waist, “you’re not in costume.”

Shane looked down as though surprised to find himself in the same leather jacket, open-collar cream shirt, and black slacks he had worn to the meeting at Rarities. “I’m in costume.”

“As what?”

“Normal twenty-first-century male of the species
Homo sapiens sapiens
.”

Gail laughed. “Point to you. The last thing anyone would accuse you of being is normal.”

He looked over the crowd with a practiced eye. No matter how unlikely their costumes, he easily spotted the security guards. They were the only ones not drinking. It was the same upstairs, on the catwalks hidden behind ceiling grilles and one-way mirrors surrounding light fixtures. Security people walked overhead and manned each Eye in the Sky while the cameras worked. At the Wildest Dream, as at other big casinos, every bit of the action was captured and put into digital storage. Though the records were accessed as bytes on minidrives more often than on videotape, everyone still referred to the records as “tapes.”

“Great crowd. Who’s on God duty tonight?” Shane asked idly, referring to the security people upstairs.

“Whoever lost the toss.”

Gail must have signaled a server, because one left a hole in the crowd getting to Shane to offer him whatever his heart desired. He waved off the leggy girl whose breasts bobbed like waterlogged coconuts above her low-cut neckline. Other than an eyeful, Shane couldn’t decide what her costume was supposed to represent. Chartreuse and silver kitty-cat, maybe.

And maybe not.

“You’re not going to stay long enough to eat or drink anything, is that it?” Gail asked when he waved off the server.

“I just got in from L.A. I’m way too tired for your crowd.”

She didn’t believe it for a second. She knew just how much energy and stamina the man had. What she wanted to know was how to get him back in her bed again. It had been too many years.

At first she had thought it was the age difference that made Shane stop calling her. Gradually she had realized it was worse than that. He simply didn’t want any more from her than the enjoyable affair they had already had.

If there was no other choice, she could live without him in her bed. There were plenty of energetic males in Vegas. But it really chapped her ass that Shane couldn’t see what a perfect business match they were. He was the only man she had ever met who could crunch numbers as fast as she could, whether or not the computer was up and running. He could speed-read a balance sheet and know instantly if things were kosher or in the toilet. So could she.

Together they could rule Vegas.

And whoever ruled Vegas controlled the biggest little money laundry in the world. When you controlled that laundry, all kinds of delicious opportunities came knocking on your back door.

The broad, powerful figure of a Celtic warrior in full—and quite imaginary—regalia appeared out of the crowd behind Shane. As though he had eyes in the back of his head, Shane turned and took in the full effect of helmet, leather shirt, gilded metal armbands, earrings, sword, and the hairiest thighs this side of a sheep pen.

“Hi, Carl.” Shane held out his hand. “Nice helmet. You swipe those horns off a Texas Cadillac?”

Carl Firenze grinned as he shook Shane’s hand. “Gail picked it out for me. Said she wanted to be able to find me in a crowd.”

“Crowd, hell. She could find you in a stampede.”

With a bark of laughter Gail’s head of security released Shane’s hand and looked toward his boss. “Call waiting for you, Ms. Gail.” He checked the window of the small computer unit that kept him in touch with the most important things that were happening in the Wildest Dream. “Berlin.”

It was the signal Gail had been waiting for, but suddenly she was reluctant. Even when she was positive she wouldn’t ever take a certain road again, she hated burning bridges behind her.

On the plus side, she was used to it. She had set fire to more than her share of bridges on the way to her present multimillionaire status.

“Thanks, Carl.” She turned to Shane. “Still no chance of becoming business partners?”

Shane took one of her perfectly manicured hands in his. He liked Gail and respected her razor-edged business mind. Yet his instincts whispered that it would be a bad match. He had learned the hard way never to go against the voice that spoke so silently somewhere inside himself.

He brushed a kiss over her scented cheek. “You know we’re better as friends and competitors than we would be as partners.”

She almost closed her striking hazel eyes for a moment. It could have been a lazy reassessment. It could have been regret. Either way, both ways, nothing changed. “Yeah, I suppose. It’s just . . . ah, hell. Can’t fight karma, can you?”

He squeezed her hand and released it. “How about selling your gold collection to me?” he asked. “It doesn’t really fit in with the Wildest Dream’s fantasy theme.”

“Not a chance.” Gail knew her gold was the only thing that really interested Shane, but she didn’t admit even to herself that was the reason she competed with him whenever a choice gold object came on the market. She wanted his attention, pure and simple. And bitter as hell.

She kissed him soundly on the lips. “Catch you later, honeylove,” she said. “Gotta fix my face for an international video conference.”

It was only half a lie. She definitely was going to repair her makeup before she confronted the business waiting for her.

With a bit of nostalgic regret, Shane watched Gail glide into the colorful, blaring crowd. She was a hell of a woman, but she wanted more than he had to give, and he wanted more than sex and business from his woman, which was all she had to give him. He didn’t know exactly what he wanted, but he knew there had been something missing when he was with Gail.

When he heard his own thoughts, his mouth curled at one corner in a sardonic smile at his own expense. He knew just what was missing. Something in him. In her, too, he supposed.

Maybe they were a good match after all.

The voice inside him whispered that he knew better. He didn’t bother to argue.

Snagging some cold shrimp from a passing server, Shane munched as he walked toward the main casino, which surrounded the lobby the way a wheel surrounds its hub. When people called out to him, he greeted them whether he recognized them or not. He didn’t like the public part of being the wunderkind of Las Vegas, “Prince Midas,” the “Man with the Twenty-four Karat Luck,” “Golden Boy,” or whatever else the chic media tagged him whenever they needed another splashy article to separate their ads. Nor did he appreciate the endless gossipy speculation that had him sleeping with every good-looking female east of the Pacific Ocean, but he knew that the prurient interest came with the territory of being the bachelor owner of the biggest, most successful resort casino in Las Vegas.

Besides, the constant speculation about his private life was free advertising for the Golden Fleece.

The electronic unit that had descended from the old personal data assistants vibrated discreetly at his waist. Since he had turned off his normal paging number, he knew this call was urgent.

He pulled out the hand-size unit and automatically decoded the message as it scrolled across the window. It was from the pit boss who oversaw the baccarat tables. One of the Japanese “whales”—someone who could and did drop a million dollars gambling—was riding a winning streak. Six hundred thousand and counting. Did Shane want to change dealers before the shift ended in hope of breaking the whale’s luck?

Shane sent back a negative reply. It had been a while since the Golden Fleece had had a big winner from Japan. In the long run, the free publicity more than paid for the losses.

Letting the party shriek and gyrate around him, he continued scanning his call log. Risa had tried to reach him several times. She wanted to talk to him, but not enough to put in the override code.

Smart lady. But then he already knew that.

He opened his e-mail and saw that the Portuguese chef was having a fit over the shellfish that the Golden Fleece’s suppliers flew in daily from various seaports around the world. Too many of the Penn Cove mussels had cracked shells. The New Zealand green mussels looked gray. The Boston clams were too big. The scallops were too small. The raw oysters tasted like snot.

Shane snickered. He had always felt that way himself about uncooked oysters. In his opinion the only thing worse than a raw oyster was a cooked one.

A flick of his thumb brought up the next message. This time it was the wine steward who was complaining. The French supplier was gouging. The Italian supplier was sending inferior labels. Napa Valley wines were too expensive for the quality. Would he consider substituting some of the fine wines from the Southern Hemisphere?

Shane bit back an impatient curse. Part of the trouble with running something like Tannahill Inc. in general and the Golden Fleece in particular was that employees worked round the clock and expected him to do the same. But unlike his employees, Shane didn’t put in only one eight-hour shift per day. He put in two and then some.

He should delegate more. He knew it. He just hadn’t gotten around to it.

The third message made him smile. The new firewall he had recently set up around the computer nerve center of Tannahill Inc. had not only stopped four probes cold, it had sent a lovely little virus he had designed back along the same path the hackers had used to break in. Right now at least four hackers were looking at piles of trash that had once been expensive computers.

Rot in hell
, he thought cheerfully. He should have put the redesigned firewall in place months ago, but he hadn’t had time. He hoped nothing important had slipped through the old firewall.

The programming/hacking skills he had learned from his father—and pursued later to get even with the bastard—often came in handy. If Shane hadn’t been more interested in people than electronics, he would have dived into a computer long ago and never surfaced. There was a Zen state about creating new ways to interface human and computer that fascinated him. The only things that appealed more to his restless intelligence were the quirks and pangs of humanity as revealed in timeless, eternal golden artifacts.

“Shane!”

Automatically he put away his hand unit as he turned in answer to Risa’s call. She was pushing through the crowd toward him, wearing the same clothes she had in L.A., which meant she had been as busy since they landed as he had. With the humorous recognition of one Type A+ for another, he made a mental note to tell her to delegate more.

“What are you doing here?” he asked.

“My job. You’re not answering your pager.”

She had also been curious as to why her boss had gone to his former lover’s Halloween party. Not that she would have admitted her curiosity aloud.

Especially to him.

“I turned it off,” Shane said. “In case you haven’t noticed, it’s past working hours, even mine. What’s wrong?”

“I’ve been checking the provenance on that elegant gold torc you bid on.”

In disbelief Shane looked at his watch. Quarter past three in the morning on Halloween, and she was checking provenance.

“It must be bad news,” he said. “You never hurry with any other kind.”

Impatiently Risa ran a hand through her short, tousled hair. She knew she must look as rumpled and shopworn as she felt. Unlike the maddening Mr. Tannahill, she needed more than five or six hours of sleep a night. Seven was her minimum.

“Look,” she said, pitching her voice over the irritating howl of the crowd, “you hired me to check on—”