He gave himself a mental shake. “Zoom in on Green’s face for me, will you?”
She pushed a button, and in seconds Tanner Green’s bulging eyes filled the screen.
Hell, the man was dying.
But his expression was surprised, as if he couldn’t believe it. Believe he was dying? Or how he was dying? Dillon wondered.
Green’s lips moved slightly. Dillon replayed the moment and leaned in, trying to discern what the man had been saying. Nothing, maybe. Or maybe he had been begging for help. Maybe he had found God at the moment of death and was praying.
Dillon had Sarah widen the view and surveyed the immediate area. The air had been filled with a cloud of smoke, despite the casino’s expensive air filters. Sometimes it seemed as if even people who didn’t smoke decided they needed to in Vegas.
He stared intently at the screen for a minute longer.
Then he sat back. “Thanks very much, Sarah.”
She might have been aggravated at the time she’d been asked to give him, but she smiled. She probably didn’t often get thanked for what was, after all, just her job.
“Sure. Anytime,” she told him.
“I mean it.” She reached into her shirt pocket and produced a card. Her name and rank were on it, along with a phone number and an e-mail address. “I’ve heard about you, about what you do, what you…see. They say you’re the real deal. I meant what I said. Whatever you need—whatever—you can call me.”
He took her card, nodding gravely. “Now that, I really appreciate.” He left her feeling very grateful indeed.
She had pretty much just told him that she would work for him on the q.t. That was priceless.
But right now he had to find Jessy Sparhawk. She was the only one who might know what Tanner Green had said right before he died.
There had been a recent period in Vegas’s history when—the tourist board had decided to turn Sin City into a family-friendly resort. The plan hadn’t worked, and the city had soon reverted to its old image, but the aftereffects lingered, and some parents still brought their children along when they came to gamble. As a result, a lot of the casinos provided diversions aimed toward the kiddie set, because the problem with Vegas was that parents could be distracted—maybe only momentarily, but still with frightening repercussions—by bright, blinking lights and a sudden insistence that the next dollar shoved into a beckoning slot machine would be the one that hit the jackpot.
At the Big Easy the problem had been solved by offering an afternoon of pirate-themed entertainment, food and drink for the younger crowd.
It was glorified babysitting.
But Jessy had never minded that. She liked kids. Sure, every once in a while they wound up with an obnoxious little twerp who wouldn’t stop tugging on beards, dumping the treasure chest or trying to look up the skirts of the pirate “queens” or the servers. But all in all, it wasn’t a bad gig. It was actually a lot better than performing at a bachelor party for a bunch of drunks who seemed to think that anyone under thirty and wearing a skimpy costume was for sale.
In contrast, working the babysitting detail was usually fun, and that day it was going very well.
They had almost three hundred kids, some of them there gratis for guests of the casino, others had been enrolled at a steep price tag by parents staying elsewhere, though compared to the hundreds—even thousands—that could be dropped at one of the gaming tables or in slot machines in a matter of minutes, it was still small change.
The audience ranged from age two up to twenty-one. The older kids were usually there because they had younger siblings—and because eighteen- to twenty-one-year-olds still couldn’t legally step out onto on the casino floor or drink.
The show itself was mostly improvisational banter punctuated by carefully choreographed dance numbers. The cast played pirates who had somehow wound up stuck on Lake Mead, and they sang traditional pirate songs as they searched for treasure.
It was when the kids were shouting, trying to point out to her rather ditsy pirate queen that the treasure chest was right beneath her nose, and she was spinning around searching, that she saw him.
He was standing just outside the room, leaning against a wall painted with a mural of the high seas and pirate ships flying the Jolly Roger, and he was staring through the glass wall that surrounded the theater space, watching her. He was wearing a suit, and he somehow managed to look both real and not real…
He wasn’t even a foot away from Grant Willow, one of the four security men—all of them highly skilled but able to relate to the kids without intimidating them—who took turns standing watch in the vestibule, and he seemed totally oblivious to the other man.
She knew the watcher’s face. She had stared at that face in the most uncomfortable circumstances imaginable. He couldn’t possibly be there—and yet he was.
She blinked.
And then he wasn’t.
She must have come to a dead halt, stunned, because Aaron Beaton, playing the role of Captain Gray-specked Blackbeard, started prompting her. “Bonny Anne, Bonny Anne, have ye found it? Have ye found me treasure?”
She stared at him without any idea how to respond as her blood grew cold.
He hadn’t been real.
She had simply conjured him up in her mind’s eye.
Or he had been real, just someone else. Someone who only looked like a dead man.
After all, a man had died on top of her last night; she had a right to be traumatized. To be seeing things. There was nothing odd about it at all.
“Bonny Anne?” Aaron said sharply.
“Your treasure? My treasure!” she insisted, dragging herself back into character.
Her declaration started a mock battle that was really a carefully choreographed dance piece. She battled gamely, whirled and jumped, then looked back to the doorway and almost missed a beat.
He was back.
And he was watching her with huge eyes and an expression filled with both tragedy and remorse.
Since the promo poster Dillon had seen the night before pictured Jessy Sparhawk, it was a reasonable assumption that if he headed to the Big Easy she was likely to be working.
She was.
The pirate party was scheduled daily from one to six, giving the parents a full afternoon of worry-free gambling. Dillon wondered how many of them forgot to come back at closing time, but he assumed the casino had a plan for dealing with that.
The theater was surrounded by glass walls, and the outer vestibule was decorated with pirate paraphernalia and wall paintings. Inside the room, the stage held an impressive pirate ship that seemed to float above shimmering blue water, an effect caused by lighting
