Kicking It(73)

I found a gambling club in serious need of a miracle makeover. The chandeliers hanging from the high ceilings looked like jellyfish, with little lights swimming among the tentacles, providing enough illumination for patrons to avoid tripping over their own feet but not enough to notice the stains or wear marks on the really gnarly carpet, patterned like a clown had scattered Technicolor confetti and it had stuck. Of Gareth there was no sign. He’d disappeared like a six-pack at the Super Bowl.

I haunted the restrooms for a while, waiting for my mythical boyfriend to finish his business and watching the ebb and flow, getting a feel for the club. The Parlor wasn’t the kind of place a man went for an illicit liaison—not unless he was courting one of the cocktail waitresses. From what I could see, it was much more about making time with Lady Luck. It didn’t have the flash and pop of a Vegas casino with shows and dancing fountains or the Old World glitz and glamour of a Monte Carlo establishment. The Parlor was for the hard-core gamblers. There was eye candy in the form of the waitstaff, even a few men who looked like Rocky from The Rocky Horror Picture Show in their tiny silver shorts. But mostly there was a club full of chain-smoking, chain-drinking patrons looking for another kind of score. My precognition sat up and took notice, sending a little jolt through my system, letting me know there was danger about. But what kind? If I weren’t working, would it warn me off a bad bet? Help me at the tables? Or was the temptation to try for a quick score exactly the kind of trouble I faced?

It was in poking around for the off-limits and VIP areas, trying to find my wayward quarry, that I’d met Red. Or rather, he’d gone out of his way to meet me. “Meet” being a euphemism, of course, for intercept and potentially subdue. I debated giving him the gorgon glare, freezing him in his tracks, but I couldn’t be sure I’d get into the VIP section and out before he would unfreeze, and then I’d be in for it. I’d save that as a last resort and see where bluffing got me.

“Can I help you, miss?” he asked, stepping right into my path.

He was a mountain of a man, and it would have been hard to miss him even if I hadn’t been on the lookout for security. He was dressed much more subtly than the rest of the employees, in jeans and a short-sleeved black button-down shirt, which must have been specially made, because there was no frickin’ way a standard size could have covered those biceps. That didn’t stop him from leaving several buttons open to deal with his oversized pecs. He didn’t fill in the gaps with any gaudy chains. They would only have ruined the view.

But I’d seen Detective Nick Armani in full flagrante delicto, and while I couldn’t say that made me immune to Red’s charms, it did leave me able to form complete sentences.

“Miss? Well, thank God for that. I think if you’d ma’amed me, you’d have finished me off.”

He gave me a look of great confusion. I got that a lot. “The back room is by invitation only.” He forged on, standing between me and the curtained-off area I’d been about to explore. “Were you looking for something? Maybe I can help.”

“What does it take to get invited?” I asked, batting the one gift the gods had given me—my thick, dark lashes that looked like falsies and weren’t.

He grinned like he appreciated the effort, but not like it was having the desired effect. “You ain’t got it.”

He hadn’t given me the once-over, hadn’t consulted any sort of list, mental or otherwise. I’d looked for the telltale eye movement.

“How do you know?” I asked.

“Look, you seem like a nice girl—”

I dove in before he could give me the speech. “Oh, please! I’m desperate! My no-good, lousy, cheating, thieving ex cleaned out our bank account, and we were already behind on the rent. If I can’t leverage my coffee-can money into enough to get caught up, I’m going to be out on my ass. I need higher stakes than the rinky-dink tables out here.”

He looked at said ass—or tried to, anyway. Since it was behind me, he had other real estate in the way, but he didn’t seem to mind. “You a gambler?” he asked.

“I am tonight.”

“Uh-huh. Those guys back there’d eat you alive. You ever waited tables?”

I eyed him back. “Why?”

“Just answer the question.”

“That’s how I put my stupid ex through school, and now—”

“One of our girls just quit,” he cut in. I let the sexism of “our girls” slide right by, but it cost me. “You want to earn some extra money, we could use you. Tips are pretty good, I hear, especially if someone gets lucky. A hundred, two hundred a night sometimes.”