One-Eyed Royals Read online

  Then, inevitably, something would happen to smack Levi in the face with the harsh truth—Dominic was a compulsive gambler in a full-blown relapse, refusing any and all offers of help. That hadn’t changed, and until it did, they couldn’t be together in any meaningful way.

  “You know,” Martine said, “when a couple breaks up, they usually stop having sex with each other.”

  “What the hell do you know about it?” Levi retorted. Martine had only been in one relationship her entire life. She and her husband, Antoine, had been childhood sweethearts who’d grown up in the same Flatbush neighborhood of Haitian immigrant families, and they’d gotten married during college.

  “Hey, don’t take your angst out on her,” Leila said. “She’s not the one who keeps jumping on Russo’s dick.”

  Martine made an exasperated noise. “It makes sense that you and Dominic are drawn to each other. You’re still in love; breaking up didn’t change that. But this is not a healthy way to deal with your separation.”

  “And this is not the time or the place to have this discussion.” Levi gestured to the corpse fifteen feet away. “A city official was murdered in a government building in broad daylight. The mayor is going to have a nuclear meltdown.”

  “Like things weren’t already bad enough,” Martine said glumly.

  Tourism in Las Vegas had plummeted ever since the Seven of Spades had become a nationwide phenomenon, even though they’d never actually killed a tourist. Utopia’s explosive growth had only made matters worse, and the combined pressures had ignited a political firestorm in which the mayor, the city council, and the sheriff were more interested in slinging blame at each other than solving the problems.

  Martine and Leila fell into a debate about damage control, and Levi breathed a quiet sigh of relief. As far as he was concerned, there was no right time or place to discuss his relationship with Dominic. He could barely stand thinking about it.

  Dominic was his bashert, his soul mate. Without him, Levi felt like he’d been gut-shot and it was taking months to bleed out.

  “Detective Abrams?” one of the CSIs said as she approached him from behind. “There’s something you should look at over here.”

  He and Martine followed her across the office. Leila, who hadn’t signed into the scene, stayed behind the tape.

  “This seemed out of place, so we took a closer look. And . . . well, you’ll see.” The CSI gestured to a greeting card set on a sideboard decorated with framed photographs of Harding’s family. “It’s already been tagged and photographed.”

  Levi picked the card up carefully with the tips of his gloved fingers. The front was a shimmery ombré design with the words Sorry I missed it in silver foil. Inside, Happy Belated Birthday! was printed above a typed message.

  Dear Detective Abrams,

  I know your birthday was in January, but the perfect gift takes time to prepare. Rest assured I haven’t forgotten. I’ll have something special for you soon.

  An imprint of a seven of spades card had been left with a rubber stamp at the bottom of the page.

  Goose bumps prickled across Levi’s skin, and he was gripped with the sudden irrational urge to tear the card to shreds. Instead, he looked to Martine, who was eyeing the card the way she would a tarantula.

  “What the hell does that mean?” she said.

  “I have no idea,” said Levi. “But I’m pretty sure I’m not going to like it.”

  Dominic walked into the Double Down Saloon, a raucous dive bar whose official motto was Shut Up and Drink!, and had to immediately dodge a stumbling drunk puking his way out the door. He rolled his eyes and squinted through the chaos, spotting his client in less than five seconds.

  The Double D attracted a rowdy punk-rock crowd, and Nathan Royce stood out like the sole diamond in a hand full of spades. He was a preppy white silver fox wearing a nice suit and fancy watch that screamed upper middle class, not exactly the bar’s usual clientele. It didn’t help that he was twitchy as hell, glancing around nervously, tapping his foot against the floor, drumming his fingers on the high-top table he was standing beside.

  Dominic bulldozed his way through the mob—not a difficult proposition for a man of his towering height and muscular build—until he reached Royce. “We could have met somewhere else,” he said, leaning close to be heard over the incoherent yet wildly enthusiastic band.

  Royce shook his head. “No risk of seeing someone I know here.”

  “You’re the client,” Dominic said with a shrug. He hefted his messenger bag onto the table; in this environment, it was less likely to attract attention than a briefcase.

  “Have you found anything?”

  “You know, I could do my job a lot faster if you’d be more specific about what I’m looking for.”

  “I’ve told you enough,” Royce said impatiently. “Highly valuable proprietary information has been compromised in a way that’s caused my company severe financial losses in a suspiciously short period of time. It’s either a conspiracy to commit insurance fraud, or corporate sabotage by a competing agency. What more do you need to know?”

  “The nature of the compromised information, for starters.”

  “I can’t tell you that.”

  Dominic stifled a sigh. Royce was the director of Management Liability Insurance at Kensington Insurance Group, a national firm catering to high-net-worth individuals and Fortune 500 companies. He’d hired McBride Investigations three weeks ago, and while it was a juicy contract, his refusal to disclose the full extent of the problem meant it was also unnecessarily frustrating.

  Tilting his head, Dominic put Royce under closer scrutiny. It was hot in the Double D, like any other bar packed to capacity with drunk horny idiots, but Royce was sweating far more profusely than was warranted. There was a fine tremor in his hands as well.

  “Something else went wrong,” Dominic said. “Today. That’s why you wanted to meet last-minute.”

  “I . . .” Royce gave him a startled look. “Yes. There have been, ah . . . concerning new developments. But that’s all I can say.”

  “All right.” Dominic withdrew a thick stack of bound folders from his messenger bag and pushed them across the table. “I’ve been conducting exhaustive background checks on all the names you gave me. I’m still working my way down the list, but so far everyone is clean.”

  “You haven’t gone through everyone yet?”

  “It’s a long list, Mr. Royce.”

  The pool of potential suspects Royce had provided was divided into two camps: KIG clients who could be involved in insurance fraud, and executives at competing agencies who might be working a corporate sabotage angle. Judging by the sheer number of names, Royce was either extremely paranoid or in deep shit.

  When he was sure Royce was done interrupting, Dominic continued. “I haven’t found any of the red flags you’d expect to see in cases of fraud or sabotage. No connections to criminal elements. No sudden financial windfalls or unusual excessive spending. No evidence of recent erratic behavior like unexplained absences from work or uncharacteristic anxiety. There was only one thing even slightly out of the ordinary. You had me check out Ethan Deering, the CFO of Aphelion Innovations?”

  Royce nodded, his eyes round.

  “Two weeks ago, their CEO Rose Nguyen went on an unexpected medical leave for a few days. Deering had to scramble to cover for her at some important client meetings. But she’s back at work now, and it’s business as usual, so it doesn’t seem suspicious.”

  Royce licked his lips and looked away, avoiding Dominic’s gaze. He was gripping the stack of folders so tightly Dominic could see his knuckles whitening even through the gloom of the dark bar.

  Now it seemed suspicious.

  “What about the local KIG employees?” Royce asked.

  Erring on the side of discretion, Dominic pretended he didn’t know Royce was changing the subject on purpose. “There haven’t been any alerts from the spyware you had us install on their computers—though you may wan
t to consider blocking Facebook. McBride had a technical specialist comb through your system, and he couldn’t find any backdoors or other weaknesses an average hacker could exploit. Would you like me to do another technical surveillance countermeasure sweep of your office?”

  “Not yet. I got too many questions the first time you did one.” Royce dug his phone out of his jacket pocket. “I’m going to email you another name to add to the list—she needs to be prioritized over anyone else you have left.”

  “Understood.”

  Patting the folders, Royce said, “I can keep these?”

  “Sure. They’re just copies of my original research.”

  “Great, thanks. Keep in touch.”

  “Mr. Royce—”

  Too late. Royce had already scooped up the folders and was hightailing it out of the bar, shouldering his way through the boisterous crowd.

  His skin crawling with irritation, Dominic briefly considered following Royce and putting him under surveillance for a while, just to get some straight answers for once. The only thing that decided him against it was his concern that his boss would find out. Ever since his gambling had critically endangered an investigation several months ago, he’d been skating on thin ice with her.

  He had the gambling compartmentalized now, and he never allowed it to interfere with his work as a PI. But McBride was not renowned for her forgiving nature, so he couldn’t risk another slipup.

  Heaving a sigh, he slung his messenger bag over his shoulder. He’d had enough of Royce’s case for one day; he’d start looking into the new name tomorrow morning. In the meantime, he’d go home and get some dinner, maybe take Rebel out for a run, and play a little online poker.

  The blackjack tables at the Railroad Pass had been hot tonight, though. He’d had to tear himself away from a winning streak to make it to this meeting. If he went back, he could keep riding that wave and clean house—

  No. No way. He’d just come from spending hours at the casino; he wasn’t going to drive all the way back out to Henderson at this time of night. It would be too ridiculous.

  He wouldn’t.

  Dominic’s blaring alarm dragged him out of sleep at six the next morning. He moaned in protest and flailed one arm out, slapping blindly at his phone until it stopped.

  He was so groggy his head felt stuffed with cotton. He hadn’t gotten home from the Railroad Pass until . . . two a.m.? Three? Most of the night was a blur.

  The only thing that stopped him from immediately falling back to sleep was a quiet whine beside the bed. He opened his eyes to find Rebel, his German Shepherd–Rottweiler mix, staring at him from inches away with a sad, soulful gaze.

  Guilt crashed through him and twisted his guts into knots. He reached out with one hand to scruff Rebel’s ears, leaning forward so she could lick his face.

  When he’d supported himself through bounty hunting, he’d brought her on almost every job. She’d been by his side practically twenty-four hours a day for years. But he’d started leaving her home for longer periods of time once he’d gotten an internship at McBride, and these days she spent more time alone or with his next-door neighbors than she did with him.

  He had taken her out a few hours ago when he got home, so he knew she didn’t have to relieve herself. She was probably just lonely.

  God, could he be a more worthless piece of shit?

  “You want to go for a run?” he asked. Rebel’s enthusiastic tail wag shook her entire body, and he laughed before throwing back the covers. “Okay, let’s go.”

  They drove out to the University of Nevada, Las Vegas to run their usual five-mile route through the campus. As their feet pounded the sidewalk side by side, Dominic used the opportunity to clear his head and refocus on the Royce investigation.

  One of the major stumbling blocks that prevented Dominic from working at full efficiency was that he didn’t know what kind of insurance fraud Royce’s clients might be perpetrating. Royce refused to disclose the nature of their policies.

  The clients he’d had Dominic investigate were all high-ranking executives in successful companies with local Vegas offices. The name he’d given Dominic last night, for example, was Cindy Barnes, Director of Administration at a Vegas-based investment firm.

  So Dominic could deduce that the policies were corporate in nature. But he’d looked into all those companies, and not one of them showed evidence of recent problems—no thefts, lawsuits, disgruntled employees, or anything of the kind. There was no reason for them to file claims against any corporate insurance policy.

  Then again, it might not be insurance fraud at all. Royce seemed convinced that corporate sabotage was an equally likely possibility. The fact that Royce didn’t know which problem he was facing made the whole situation even more bewildering.

  By the time Dominic and Rebel returned to their apartment building, both of them pleasantly worn out by the hard run, he was no closer to finding a satisfactory answer. He let Rebel off her leash when they entered the chain-link fence surrounding the property. As they walked past the pool at the center of the U-shaped building, they ran into Jasmine Anderson, one of his next-door neighbors and closest friends.

  “Hey,” he said, bending down to kiss her cheek. “Sorry, I’m all sweaty.”

  “That’s okay.” Jasmine had her dozens of multicolored braids bound in a giant bun the way she did when she meant business. She crouched to give Rebel an ear scratch. “I’m just on my way to the final meeting with the wedding DJ.”

  “Want me to come with?”

  “Nah, my mom’s meeting me. Thanks though.” She straightened back up. “Is everything set for Carlos’s bachelor party?”

  Like many couples these days, Carlos and Jasmine had decided to have their bachelor and bachelorette parties weeks in advance of the actual wedding. Dominic was determined not to drop the ball as Carlos’s best man as badly as he had earlier in their engagement, so when Carlos had confided how it important it was for him to have the quintessential American experience of a classic bachelor party—minus anything skanky—Dominic had pulled out all the stops.

  “Yep. We’ll start the night with a traditional steak dinner, then a party bike pub crawl of some of Vegas’s most outrageous bars, and we’ll hook up with you and your girlfriends at Stingray to cap things off. I told all the guys to keep the details secret from Carlos.”

  “Sounds great. So . . .” Jasmine glanced up at him through her thick eyelashes, chewing on her lip ring. “We thought we heard Levi’s voice Saturday night.”

  Oh, they’d heard Levi, all right. Dominic’s bedroom shared a wall with Carlos and Jasmine’s, and Levi screamed like a motherfucking banshee during sex.

  “He came over, yeah.”

  “Are you guys getting back together?”

  Dominic stiffened. Rebel, who had perked up at the mention of Levi’s name, sat at attention and panted happily.

  “I don’t think so,” he said tightly. It had been incredible having Levi in his arms again, watching Levi relax and light up with pleasure, hearing Levi’s gasped declarations of love while Dominic surged inside of him and returned them in kind.

  But the very next morning they’d had a knock-down, drag-out fight as bad as any that had come before it—a confrontation that ended with Levi throwing a plate at a wall and storming out. The whole thing had been very mature and classy.

  Levi would never accept that Dominic could control his gambling; he believed Dominic was too weak. Dominic had to come to terms with that reality sooner or later.

  “You know we invited Levi to the wedding,” Jasmine said. “He already RSVP’d yes. Is that okay with you?”

  “It’s fine,” said Dominic, pretending the thought of Levi at his best friends’ wedding wasn’t more painful than the bullet he’d taken in Afghanistan.

  “Great. And, um . . . you’re doing okay, right?”

  Dominic’s hackles rose further and he scowled at her. He, Jasmine, and Carlos had arrived at an unspoken understanding: he didn�
�t let his gambling affect his relationships with them, and they didn’t bring it up. Ever.

  “Is there a reason I wouldn’t be?” he said, his voice pitched low in warning.

  She backed off at once. “Nope. Look, I gotta run. See you later?”

  “Sure. Have fun.”

  He watched her walk out to the parking lot, squashing his rising remorse. Feelings of shame and guilt only intensified his urge to gamble, but he was in charge this time. He wouldn’t let it control him anymore.

  Whistling to Rebel, he headed for the stairs.

  The slam of Levi’s car door was swallowed up by the vast open space surrounding him. He’d parked along the curb in a suburban housing tract at the very northwestern edge of the Las Vegas Valley. At the end of the street a few blocks north, civilization abruptly gave way to miles of desert and mountains, with a couple of lonely roads meandering off into the distance.

  The houses here were Southwestern ranches on large square lots, but one lot on the neighborhood’s perimeter was vacant—just an empty expanse of sand and scrub, now swarming with LVMPD personnel. Though this area lay outside the Vegas city limits, the LVMPD was a police department and sheriff’s department in one, and therefore responsible for investigating homicides that occurred in unincorporated areas of Clark County as well as the city itself.

  This wasn’t necessarily a homicide, though; the responding officer had called it in as a suspicious death. That meant it couldn’t be the work of the Seven of Spades, which was a huge relief. Levi had been obsessing over the killer’s threatening promise for days, trying to anticipate what fresh horrors they had in store, flinching every time his phone rang—