**NB. This story is as it comes – straight out of my head and may contain typos**
CHAPTER 11 – BLANE
When Vee and I dealt with the buffoon in Wren’s apartment, we’d taken the cautious approach. So what had changed? Everything. We had Wren now, and she was safely tucked away in my apartment. Club Dead had twenty-four-seven security, plus any would-be intruder would have to go through Joseph and me. But if we were taking care of Wren, we couldn’t be hunting for Caria at the same time. A tricky problem with an unpalatable solution, made more difficult by the fact that Wren had vetoed police involvement.
“Why you still standing there, pretty boy?” Zion asked.
He was an industrial diamond of a man—full of flaws, but potentially still useful.
“Why? Because I have a business proposition for you.”
Joseph sighed while Minerva’s eyebrows winged up.
“Huh?” she said. “I thought you wanted a tour of the gym?”
“You’ve been the perfect hostess, my darling, but we can take it from here.”
Her mouth opened, then closed again, and she turned to Zion. He dismissed her with a flick of his wrist.
“You can go back to the front desk.”
Nero didn’t leave, and neither did the man Zion had been using as a punching bag a minute previously, even as blood dripped from his nose onto the floor. The two of them formed up as foot soldiers, one on each side of their boss and a pace behind.
“Nice place you have here,” I lied.
“What do you want?”
“Two days ago, I bumped into a fellow in a friend’s apartment, and he mentioned that you were the man to ask if there was a problem that needed solving.”
“What fellow?”
“I didn’t catch his name, but he was there to pick up Wren Gilmore.”
Ah, there it was. The slight flicker of shock as Zion found himself on the back foot. That didn’t stop him from trying to bluster his way through the conversation, though.
“Uh, yeah, Darryl. Guess he didn’t find her. You see where he went?”
“As a matter of fact, I did. I gave him a ride to the state line and strongly advised him against returning to Nevada. But we had a nice chat on the way, and then I got curious. Imagine my surprise when I began asking around and found out that Wren wasn’t the only woman to go missing this week.”
No shock this time. Either Zion had successfully regained control of his poker face, or he already knew about Caria.
“Yeah, well, it’s Vegas. Women go missing all the time.”
“That doesn’t concern you?”
“I got a business to run here. If you wanna talk about whores, go talk to someone else.”
“What if the ‘whores,’ as you so eloquently put it, are your business?”
“I don’t run whores. Too much trouble. Try the Pink Squirrel—plenty of bitches there.”
“I’m not looking for a chance to get my rocks off. I’m looking for Caria Milland. And I want to hire you to help me.”
Zion’s snort told me what he thought of that idea.
“I thought you were a man who fixed problems for money?”
“Not that kinda problem. You wanna find a woman, hire a damn PI.”
“Oh, I already have a reasonable idea where Caria is. She’s staying with Laurent. I just need you to identify which of his properties she’s at.”
The snort turned to laughter. “You want…” He sounded like a distressed donkey. “You want me to start nosing around in Laurent’s business?”
If I’d learned one thing during my tenure at Club Dead, it was that insecure men didn’t appreciate having their masculinity questioned. And Zion wasn’t as tough as he wanted others to believe. The insults, the posturing…
“You’re right; what was I thinking? I need a man with balls, not a pussy.”
“What the fuck?”
He gave a telling glance left and right. No, he didn’t want to lose face in front of his henchmen.
“Now that we’ve met, I realise you’re the wrong person for the job. Rest assured, if I ever need a guy to hook me up with tickets to the ballet, I’ll think of you.”
Although that comparison was somewhat unfair to ballet dancers. Anyone who could leap around in pointe shoes for hours at a time deserved more admiration than a man who carefully selected his sparring partners to be weaker than him. I turned to leave, motioning to Joseph to follow, keeping my wits about me because Zion struck me as the type of coward who’d shoot a man in the back. I didn’t need to ruin another suit jacket, not when my favourite tailor had a waitlist.
“Hey, wait a minute…”
“Time is money, my friend.”
“How much are you paying?”
“I thought you said you were incapable of doing the job?”
“Incapable? No, no, no, I’m very capable.”
“Then what’s the problem? You’re too friendly with Laurent? Have you told him yet that your man failed to locate Wren?”
His hesitation gave me my answer.
“I thought not.”
“It’s only a matter of time. I have the best network in Vegas.”
Doubtful. “You do? That’s terrific. Whatever Zion’s paying you, I’ll double it for you to locate Caria.”
Another snort. This jackass really needed to work on his negotiation capabilities.
“As I thought. All hat and no cattle.”
Or should that be all loincloth and no bears, seeing as we were in a second-rate replica of the Colosseum? Whatever, I’d finally hit the right button. Zion turned an alarming shade of puce, and if the building hadn’t been so stiflingly hot, I’d have seen steam coming out of his ears. He was gloriously mad. In fact, he reminded me of Ghengis when Tamerlane ate the last toasted marshmallow.
“All hat and no cattle? Fuck you, man. I’ll do your job on one condition.”
“Which is?”
The disturbing gleam in his eye told me I probably wasn’t going to like the suggestion, but I’d spent years wrangling despots and tyrants into shape. I could deal with a mere thug. As for money, I had plenty of that as well, thanks to the hordes of hidden pirate treasure that my guests in Plane Three had graciously given me directions to. They’d even held a going away party for me. On the rare occasions I visited, they invariably asked when I planned to come back, right before they began bitching about Decima and her rules, rules, rules. No stoking up the winds of Hell whenever it got a bit hot. No playing skittles with the skulls of our enemies. No encouraging Cerberus to chase his tail. And she’d disbanded the male voice choir, an overreaction to Caligula’s inability to sing in tune if there ever was one. The simple solution was to stand Caligula next to Ivan the Terrible, and Ivan’s volume drowned out the painful parts.
“You gotta fight me first,” Zion said.
I raised an eyebrow. “Fight you?”
“In the cage.”
Did he have a death wish? I began to rethink this plan—would a man this dumb truly be capable of finding Caria? Zion was all brawn and no brain.
“I’m not really dressed for a fight today.”
“We can find you a pair of sweatpants.” He turned to Nero. “Go find a pair of sweatpants.”
“I’m not wearing secondhand sweatpants.”
“Knew you were a chicken.” Zion’s grin was triumphant as he resorted to schoolyard humour, flapping his arms and clucking. “You come in here with your big mouth and your fancy suit, but you’re not man enough to throw a punch.”
Zion had backed himself so neatly into a corner that he couldn’t have escaped if his opponent was a toddler. I suppressed a smile as I gestured toward the cage.
“In that case, after you.”
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Chapter 12
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