“I didn’t see you with Kaylee,” he yelled back, too loud, too close to her ear. “I saw Dangermouse ramming his tongue down your throat.”
“It’s none of your business,” Holly said. “I don’t want to go out with you anymore. Stop hanging around my apartment. Don’t follow me. And don’t take this out on Elijah when you get home. You have no reason to be mad at him, or at me either.” She tried to step around Rob.
As she passed, he grabbed her forearm. “Why don’t we call it a night?” he growled, wilting her curls with a cloud of alcoholic breath. “You can make it up to me.”
“Ask Marilyn to call you a taxi.” Holly nodded toward the superstar at the door, who winked at her. “I didn’t come with you, Rob, and I’m not leaving.” She flounced away, half expecting him to grab her again.
But he didn’t. Miraculously she made it all the way into the center of the throbbing melee, where Kaylee was doing the Cupid Shuffle with a Celine Dion the size of a linebacker. Holly nearly hopped up and down on her high heels with glee at the prospect of dancing the night away with Kaylee. Every night onstage at the casino, she twirled and circled and presented. She toned her muscles with exercises in ballet and yoga classes. She didn’t do enough dancing.
First things first, though. She boogied up to Kaylee and stepped to the left with her, then to the right. “Where were you?” she shouted. “Rob tried to kill Elijah!”
“I wouldn’t have let you get in any trouble,” Kaylee yelled back calmly.
Holly knew this was true. Kaylee had her reasons for doing what she did. As Holly had surmised earlier, Kaylee’s phone call must have been official casino business.
Holly danced, concerned about nothing but her own body. Rob hung around, lurking at the edge of the crowd, but he never tried to approach her. He watched them dance from the periphery of their circling arms and legs.
Late that night, the crowd still hadn’t thinned. Kaylee took a turn in the rest room, and Holly was left doing the electric slide with a group of ladies from a librarians’ convention who were way too old for this club. As the whole double line of them leaned to the front and turned to the right, facing the corridor where Holly’s encounter with Elijah had taken place, she noticed Rob staggering toward the back door.
She leaped out of line, glancing around for Kaylee’s white-blond head or any transvestite bouncer to help her. All she saw was the tangle of dancers in shifting colors. Rob might have shoved his keys into the ignition of his sheriff’s car by now. Angry as she was at him, she couldn’t let him drive drunk. He might cause a wreck and kill someone, all because he’d tied one on, upset over her.
She skittered out the back door and into the parking lot. The brake lights of his car glowed already. She dashed the last twenty yards across the asphalt and knocked on the trunk to keep him from backing over her. Rounding the car, she conjured up her lecture. It should be persuasive but not patronizing, which would only make him madder. She opened the passenger door.
He looked up at her with too-bright eyes, watery at the edges, and turned off the engine. Good.
And then he yanked her into the car.
The passenger door sagged behind her but didn’t shut completely. She poised to spring right back out of the car again. But he held her with a hard grip on her forearm.
“Rob!” she roared.
“I couldn’t get close to you all night,” he complained. “I wanted to ask you to go with me to meet my brothers.”
He’d told her during their week of acquaintance that he and his brothers spent a lot of time together out in his sheriff’s jurisdiction, near Hoover Dam. At the time, she’d puzzled over why he didn’t live with his brothers, which would be more convenient for getting to work than living inside the city limits with Elijah and Shane. Now she wondered why a meeting with his brothers, of all things, was his proposed second date. He was really drunk.
“No.” She tried to jerk her arm out of his grasp. His fingers tightened around her. “Rob. I don’t want to go out with you anymore, okay? Let me go.”
In answer, he reached around and caught her other arm too, pulling her closer. His breath reeked of alcohol, but he looked straight into her eyes and sounded startlingly sober as he said, “Try it. You might like it.” He slipped one hand inside her top.
She had to get out the half-open door of this car and away from him. But intending to run didn’t count for anything. Though her muscles stretched taut, ready to bolt, Rob held her as firmly as before. His thumb rubbed her nipple.
“Rob!” she gasped. “Okay. Enough. I’ll call a taxi to take you home.” She moved her hand toward her pocket to take out her phone.
She managed to move only a millimeter before Rob’s grip stiffened further. “You’d love that,” he growled. “Go home with me. Do it in the same house with Elijah.”
The alarm Holly had felt the day she came down with MAD was nothing compared with her terror at this bizarre conversation. “Rob!” she shouted. “That’s crazy. I am not doing it with you at all. Let me call you a—”
“When you meet my brothers, you’ll find out what crazy means.” He laid her flat on the seat and pinned her wrists above her head with one big hand. His other hand worked on the buttons of her jeans. “And when you feel powerful in a few days, remember how powerless you felt right now. Remember how much you enjoyed this, because that’s how my brothers will make you feel.”
“Rob!” Holly squealed. She took a breath to scream, doubting anyone inside the club would hear her.
Abruptly he slid off her and sat back on the driver’s side of the car, against the door, still watching her with his hard brown eyes.
Holly didn’t waste time puzzling out his terrifying behavior or his equally terrifying one-eighty. She scooted away from him across the seat and hit the passenger door. Tumbling out onto the asphalt, she came face-to-face with wicked high-heeled sandals and a killer pedicure.
“Did he hurt you?” Kaylee cried, hauling Holly up by her sore arm. Her eyes stopped on Holly’s open fly. “That fuck!”
Holly stood, resting against Kaylee for a moment. Then she slammed the passenger door shut and pulled Kaylee a pace farther away from the car to put more distance between them and Rob. She took a deep breath to relax her nerves and clear her head after every horrible thing that had happened in the last five minutes. She buttoned her fly and gathered her very small sweater closer around her to ward off the chill that had come over her. It was no use. She assured Kaylee, “He hurt me, but not like you mean.”
Without a word, Kaylee reared back and kicked the bottom panel of the car with the heel of her sandal, leaving a small round dent.
Holly watched silently, unsure she was seeing what she thought she was seeing. Despite the fact that Kaylee was head of security at an institution rumored to be full of Mafia, Holly had never seen her do anything remotely violent before, and she had just dented a cop car with her shoe.
“You would have loved it, Holly,” Rob shouted through the back window with surprising clarity for a mostly passed-out drunk. “That bitch Kaylee wants to keep you a virgin until you’re thirty. You don’t know what you’re missing.”
Kaylee snapped open her purse, moved her handgun aside, and pulled out her phone.
“Who are you calling?” Holly asked worriedly.
“The cops,” Kaylee said without looking up from the keypad.
“They’ll want me to make a statement,” Holly protested. “I don’t want to make a statement.”
Kaylee looked up at Holly and cocked her head to one side. “Noooo, we don’t want you to make a statement.” The timbre of her voice changed from that of Holly’s angry friend to the calculating security officer at the casino, concerned about publicity if one of the scantily clad assistants for the casino’s popular magician were attacked.
“But we can’t just walk away from this,” Kaylee said. “He needs to be punished and then taken home and put to bed where he can’t hurt anybody else. Besides, if you don’
t do something, he’ll just come after you again. Remember this morning at the apartment? He’s got stalker written all over him.” She moved her thumbs on her keypad.
“Now who are you calling?” Holly asked.
“My goons.”
Those Mafia rumors resurfaced in Holly’s brain. “Wait, no. Can you ask them not to beat him up?”
Kaylee shrugged. “It’s what they do. One or the other. Cops or thugs. Make a decision.”
No decision to make. “Beat him up. He deserves it.” Holly put her hand over her mouth, shocked at herself.
“Excellent choice.” Kaylee put the phone to her ear. Waiting for the call to go through, she said, “Holly, I’m really sorry. I told you I wouldn’t let you get in any trouble, but I lost sight of you for a minute. Even goddesses have to pee. I’m dropping the ball lately.”
“How can you say that?” Holly asked in astonishment. She was grateful for Kaylee’s protection, but she understood the limits of that protection. Kaylee couldn’t be everywhere. “You had no idea what he was going to do. You can’t read minds.”
“No,” Kaylee whispered, glowing like an angel in the night as the hot breeze rippled her gold lamé top and fingered her white-blond hair. “I can’t do that.”
A quarter hour later, safe in her apartment, Holly was surprised by the finger-shaped bruises on her hips. She stared into the bathroom mirror at the dark stains on her white skin. They didn’t jive with what she’d been through with Rob. He’d ripped open her fly against her will, yes, but when she thought back on what had happened, she framed it as sexual politics gone wrong, rather than a—
Rape.
Not a rape, she corrected herself, pressing her clammy fingertips to her temples, willing away the nausea. It looked so bad only because of the bruises. He’d read her wrong because he’d been drunk. She’d read him wrong because she was inexperienced with men.
Undoubtedly she was the only twenty-one-year-old virgin in Las Vegas. Surely to God she could have found a way to hook up with somebody by now. Of course, all the girls she’d known who’d had one-night stands had been aided by alcohol. On Mentafixol, Holly would have fallen asleep after half a beer, just like Elijah. She could have done it, but the escapade would have had a roofie-like flavor.
She leaned forward with her elbows on the counter and examined herself more closely at what had to be the lowest point of her life. Her careful brunette half updo had survived more or less intact through a night of dancing and abuse, as had her false lashes and makeup. A beautiful girl even to her own eyes, with glossy tendrils of her hair curling around her bare shoulders in her glittering brassiere, blaming herself for her own sexual battery. She’d assumed her low point was seven years ago when she’d lost her marbles. But at least that night she’d relished those exquisite tingles. At least she’d been powerful in her own mind. Now, at this moment, she was nothing. Her parents might have lied to her about her potential career, and she had abysmal taste in boyfriends. The one quasi boyfriend she had lingering feelings for after all these years was just as sick as she was. There was no future in this.
Well. There was no future in staring at herself in the mirror, either. She changed into pj’s, not feeling any better, but thinking she might feel better if she could talk to Kaylee about it. As a twenty-two-year-old responsible for the security of millions of dollars every day, and a calm twenty-two-year-old at that, Kaylee was always helpful putting Holly’s problems in perspective. And though it was incredibly late, Kaylee would still be up. She was awake when Holly went to bed and gone to work by the time Holly woke some mornings.
Holly padded down the hall in her bare feet and knocked gently on Kaylee’s door. When there was no response, she figured Kaylee was listening in on a conference call with her underlings at the casino. Holly eased the door open.
Bathed in the gentle light of the lamp on her nightstand, Kaylee was sprawled on top of her bedcovers, fully clothed in her clubbing pants and gold lamé top, her platinum-blond hair likewise sprawled on the pillow. She was asleep, not assassinated by rivals at Caesars Palace, which was Holly’s first thought. To make sure, Holly watched Kaylee’s petite chest expand with one, two, three slow breaths. The news squawked quietly on the TV mounted on the wall, and sections of the newspaper spooned next to her like a lover. One arm was flung over her head, and her limp hand rested dangerously close to the grip of her ubiquitous pistol glinting underneath the pillow.
Holly took a step into the clutter of a normal twenty-two-year-old woman’s room: girl rock-band posters; an open closet with a pair of dirty tennis shoes next to a pair of deep-discount designer heels; a huge teddy bear sent by Kaylee’s mom, whom Kaylee did not like to talk about (she was supposed to hug the teddy bear when she wanted to hug her mom); Chinese paper lanterns hanging from the ceiling. With perfect features and a porcelain complexion, the unconscious Kaylee looked too delicate to be part of this saucy materialism, like some slender-necked white waterfowl blown from typhoon to Santa Ana to desert wind and dropped into an apartment complex in Vegas. Holly wondered what had tired Kaylee to the point that she actually succumbed to sleep.
Out of the corner of her eye, Holly caught a movement.
Not in the apartment—she sucked in a long, quiet breath and let it out slowly as she realized this. In the parking lot. She stepped to the window for a better view.
Her heart beat faster as the movement fluttered toward Kaylee’s black BMW. Two figures, a young man and woman dressed in black, squeezed on either side of the car in its parking space in the full lot. They looked through the back windows, then the front. The woman said something, and both figures looked up at the apartment building. Their eyes slid over it from Holly’s right to left, skipping over the window from which Holly gazed. They stopped. Came back to her window. Stared straight at her. Pointed.
This was not happening to Holly. This was a flare-up of MAD brought on by the distress of seeing Elijah pass out earlier, and the threat of running out of medicine. After all, she’d been dead sure when she was fourteen that she could float up to the level of her parents’ chandelier. But she could have sworn these two strangers knew who she was, and where she lived, and had a particular interest in her. From Kaylee’s car they crossed the parking lot without even looking both ways—it was three in the morning with no traffic, but if Holly had been them she would have looked up and down the parking lot before crossing anyway—and they stepped up onto the crushed rock around the apartment building.
As they drew closer, she could see their black clothes weren’t for prowling and skulking around strangers’ apartments in the wee hours. They were Goths. The man—more of a boy, really, not much older than her—wore a black trench coat, ridiculously hot in the Vegas night, and black jeans. The woman—a girl, also around her age—had dyed her hair a vibrant unnatural red, but otherwise wore a black dress, black leggings, and clunky black shoes. She should have worn heels, which would have made her legs look longer.
The boy’s shoulders shook with laughter as Holly thought this.
They kept walking toward Holly’s window. She could have written it off as curious when they looked in Kaylee’s car, it could have been a coincidence as they eyeballed her apartment, but now they walked up to the window and looked at her on the second story. They could see her in the lamplight. They stared right at her.
Holly was near panic. She wasn’t sure what she expected them to do—throw gravel at her window? uproot a cactus and heave that toward her too?—but their very presence was so threatening, their stare, their knowledge that she was there and she was linked with Kaylee’s car. They did know who she was.
She opened her mouth to wake Kaylee. She wanted Kaylee to see this too, Kaylee who was head of security, Kaylee who was sane. She took a breath to call to Kaylee and—
Suddenly that did not seem like a good idea.
The Goths still stared at her. They still made her decidedly uneasy. But she didn’t need to call to Kaylee. That was not a good idea.
She simply stared back at them, watching them watch her. Her heart descended from panic mode and maintained a rapid beat of only mild alarm.
The man said something.
The woman held up one finger where he could see it: wait.
They stared at Holly, and Holly stood still, for another two minutes. Finally the man spoke again. The woman blew Holly a kiss. The two of them turned their backs on her, crossed the gravel, and disappeared around the corner of the building.
Holly’s alarm remained but didn’t grow. It hadn’t been a good idea to tell Kaylee about the Goths. So it wasn’t as big a deal as she’d first thought. She retreated from Kaylee’s room and went to her own. As she lay down, her hips hurt where Rob’s fingers had been. She curled into the fetal position and stared at the wall.
Elijah woke the next morning in his own bed, fully clothed, cognizant of everything that had happened the night before, but terribly groggy with his one-beer hangover. His habit since graduation had been to take his breakfast onto his front porch, where he could watch the traffic zoom by as people hurried to work. This morning was no different, or so he thought at first. He was so groggy that he hardly noticed how groggy he was. He wasn’t sure how long he’d sat at the patio table with his cereal turning soggy in milk when Shane poked his head outside. “Good morning.”
“Good morning,” Elijah replied. Barely aware that he should be embarrassed at staring into space like an imbecile, he finally ate a mushy spoonful.
“And good morning to you,” Shane said to the doormat.
Elijah half rose and peered over the table to see what Shane was really looking at. Rob lay on the threshold, unconscious, face bloody and swollen.
“Oh!” Elijah exclaimed with his mouth full.
“Did you even notice this?” Shane asked Elijah. He knelt to put a hand on Rob’s wrist, checking his pulse.