Carrie Vaughn - 05 Kitty and the Dead Man's Hand by Carrie Vaughn

Author:Carrie Vaughn
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2015-07-17T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter 12

I arrived at the Olympus casino’s security offices in ten minutes. Less. Time had gone a bit wonky, moving both too fast and too slow. The elevator dragged. But part of me didn’t want to get there at all. I didn’t want to find out what had happened.

When I came through the door, a G-man-looking guy in a suit intercepted me and stared at me like I’d turned green.

I had to catch my breath before I could speak. “Hi, I’m Kitty Norville, I just spoke on the phone with Detective Gladden about Ben O’Farrell.”

He was good-looking, in the way of a polished twenty-something on the way up in his chosen profession. He also seemed to be practicing his intimidating stare. I tried to read in his expression what had happened, what he knew about Ben, but the glare revealed nothing. I braced myself and didn’t wilt.

“Detective Gladden asked me to come answer some questions,” I insisted.

Finally, he spoke. “I’ll let him know you’re here. Wait just a minute.”

Like an anxious wolf, I paced the office’s tiny waiting room, with its thin carpet, plastic chairs, and a couple of Las Vegas tourism posters on the wall. What happens in Vegas. . .

I didn’t want to go there.

Ben had disappeared. I couldn’t wrap my brain around it. My mind kept slinking away from the thought. He’d been playing poker. That tournament. Disappeared—what did that even mean? Did he poof out of existence? Which made me think of Grant. Did Ben walk out when no one was looking? Vegas was full of crowds—didn’t anyone see anything?

At least one answer was obvious: we were in a hotel hosting a gun exhibition, with a mini-convention of supernatural bounty hunters meeting in the bar. Evan, Brenda, Sylvia, Boris. Any one of them might have had a hand in this. I crossed my arms tighter and paced faster.

G-man kept me waiting for fifteen minutes. This was driving me crazy. Ben could take care of himself, I kept telling myself. Surely he could. This was all a misunderstanding.

“Ms. Norville? I’m Detective Gladden.” A man who looked much like the G-man probably would in twenty years appeared at the door and offered his hand, which I shook. On top of that, he seemed exhausted, harried. Shadows marked his eyes, and he had a faint, ripe, well-lived-in smell to him, like he’d been wearing the same suit for a couple of days now. I recognized his voice from when we’d talked on the phone.

“Hi,” I said. “What’s happened to Ben? What’s going on?”

“If you’ll come this way, we can have a seat and I’ll answer your questions. Coffee?”

“Yeah. Thanks.” He nodded at the G-man, who scowled at the chore but went to get the coffee anyway.

I didn’t get to see the darkened room with the banks and banks of closed-circuit televisions examining the casino floor from any and every angle, the one that featured in every TV special about security in Vegas casinos. Instead, I was taken through a set of cubicles, desks, computers, and filing cabinets, like any other office.

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