Kitty and the Dead Man's Hand
Page 17

Like the foyer, the living room was rich without being decadent: a pair of brown leather sofas around a mahogany coffee table formed the room’s centerpiece. In the corner was a fully stocked bar. Dom probably held parties here. Windows along one wall looked out over the Strip. The view was incredible. Ma, I can see Paris from here ... Well, fake Vegas Paris.
Dom, as it turned out, made a pretty good martini. We enjoyed the drinks, admired the view, then settled back on the sofas.
“This your first time in Vegas?” Dom asked. I said yes, Ben said no but didn’t elaborate. Dom said, “There’s no other town like it in the world. I just love it.”
That made me warm to him. I’d met only a couple of Masters in my time. The good ones loved their cities. They had to want to protect their cities, if they were going to be anything but tyrants.
I took the note out of my purse. “Rick wanted me to give this to you.”
Dom waved me off. “No-no-no, do it official. ‘I carry greetings from Ricardo, Master of Denver,’ et cetera.”
“Ah. You’re old-school.”
He chuckled. “I have to admit, there are things I miss about the old days.”
“You’ll have to forgive me, then. I’m kinda punk about the whole thing.”
“Not even a little ceremony? Didn’t Ricky say anything besides, ‘Here, give him this’?”
Ricky? “I’m not his lackey.”
“You sure about that?”
I handed him the note. “Here.”
Glancing at me as he opened the envelope, he still looked like he was chuckling to himself at my expense. It didn’t take him long to read the letter.
He tossed it on the coffee table when he’d finished. “I’d never have guessed that Rick would finally settle down with his own city. And you helped him, I take it? That’s why he wanted me to meet you, look you over?”
Ben and I perched at the edge of our sofa, side by side, tense and ready to run. I didn’t know how to read Dom at all. The only thing I could do was trust that Rick knew this guy, and he wouldn’t have asked me to come here if he was dangerous.
“He seemed to think it would be good for me to have a contact here. But I’m sure you’ve got much better things to do with your time, and we really ought to be—”
“No, this is no trouble. I’ve got all the time in the world.”
Vampires. Huh.
He looked away, leaning back against the sofa, changing his posture from eager and forward to back and relaxed. It was wolf body language, a gesture of peace rather than aggression. It made me—my wolfish instincts—feel a little better.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “We don’t have werewolves in Vegas. I sometimes forget how to deal with them. I didn’t mean to make you nervous.”
I wasn’t going to admit that I was nervous at all, so I didn’t say anything.
He continued. “This, Rick sending you here, it’s all about gossip. Rumor. We all talk to each other. Maybe not very often, but it doesn’t have to be very often. If I can make noise on Rick’s behalf, tell the others that yes, he’s in charge, and a couple of strong alphas are in charge of the wolves there, other elements will be less likely to make a move on Denver.”
“I had a feeling it was something like that.”
“Maybe our boy’s finally growing up, settling down,” he said.
“Growing up? He’s five hundred years old.”
“He tell you that?”
“Yeah. Sort of.”
“Well. Being old and growing up are two different things.”
“Where’d you meet him?” I asked. “How long have you known him?” I’d had a hard time getting stories about Rick’s past from Rick himself. Dom made it sound like they’d known each other for a long time. Since Rick claimed to have known Coronado, that might have been a really long time.
“That’s always a tricky question with people like us.”
“I know. But one of these days I’m going to get a straight answer out of one of you guys.”
“San Francisco, 1850,” he said. Well then. Straight answer. Unfortunately, that opened a whole new set of questions, and I doubted he was going to give me anything else.
But I had to try. “There for the gold rush? You want to tell me about that?”
“Maybe some other time.”
I had a feeling it wasn’t that he didn’t want to answer. He just liked messing with me. Not that I ever let that stop me with anyone else. “You feel like coming on my show for an interview?”
“As a vampire? As Master of Vegas?” He chuckled. “This may be the one place in the world I can never go out in daylight and no one notices. I’m not ready to tell the world what I am, and I think you’ve got serious balls for doing it yourself.”
That was sort of a compliment. At least, I was going to take it as one. “It never hurts to ask. You’ll let me know if you change your mind?” I said hopefully.
Dom shifted his attention to Ben, who had been sitting quietly, watching us like we were on TV. “So, Ben. You always let her do all the talking?”
He gave a wolfish smile. “Always. She’s a professional.”
Dom laughed, and I was less nervous. Still wasn’t sure I trusted him, but I did believe that he and Rick were friends, and that was something.
“Dom, Rick says you’ve been here since the start, back when all the Mob money started pouring in.”
“You got one straight answer, you expect me to give you more now?”
I scooted forward, to the edge of my seat. “What’s the dirt on Frank Sinatra? What about Elvis? Did you ever meet JFK?”
“What makes you think I have any more dirt on those guys than has come out in the dozens of books and all that have been written on them?”
“Because all those books were written before anybody was willing to publicly acknowledge the existence of vampires.”
He chuckled. “What? You think any of those people were associated with our world? You want me to maybe tell you that Lee Harvey Oswald’s bullets were silver?”
I almost chuckled along with him, then I stopped. My jaw dropped. “What? Holy shit—”
“Just kidding,” he said, making a calming gesture. Then he winked. “Maybe.”