Karen Olson - Driven to Ink

An expression that I couldn’t read crossed his face, but then he shut the door. He gave me a cautious smile. “Do you have a name, or will the media start calling you the runaway bride?”

“Brett Kavanaugh,” I said without thinking. He hadn’t answered my question.

He cocked his head, indicating the tattoo on my arm, the koi in a sea of blues and greens. “I like your tattoo.” He shrugged off his jacket and shoved the sleeve of his shirt up. A skull with daggers through its eye sockets adorned his arm. It was faded with time, but it wasn’t bad work.

“You should have that touched up,” I said, reaching into my bag and producing a business card.

He studied it a second, then grinned and put it in his pocket. “I’ll keep that in mind. Thanks.” He paused. “Want me to call you a cab?”

I thought about Jeff Coleman and how he totally would not approve of what I was doing. But did I care?

“That would be nice,” I said, “but I think by the time the cab gets here, my fiancé”-my voice caught on the word in a little cough-“will have found me out here with you.”

And speak of the devil, but didn’t Jeff Coleman bound right out of the door we’d come through. He didn’t look too upset, though, maybe even slightly amused.

“There you are, sweetheart,” he said, his arm snaking around my waist. “What’s going on?” He looked at Will. “Who is this?”

I shrugged him off and stepped back. “Will Parker. He’s one of the-um-performers here. I got locked out.” I hoped he wouldn’t press as to where I was locked out from.

“Thanks for taking care of her,” Jeff said to Will. “I wouldn’t want to lose her.”

I was going to be sick. He didn’t have to lay it on that thick. Especially since the longer I was looking at Will Parker, the longer I thought maybe I would like to take a ride in that car at some point.

“No problem, man,” Will said, nodding, then turned to me with a concerned expression. “Are you going to be okay?” Now that I had a “real” fiancé, he seemed ready to forget about my snooping.

I nodded, although the thought of being engaged to Jeff Coleman still made me woozy.

“She wanted to get married in a church. This is all my fault,” Jeff told Will before giving me a wink Will Parker couldn’t see, then added, “We can go back home and talk about this.”

“Hope to see you again,” Will said, his eyes twinkling as he nodded at me.

I had a sudden urge to tell him to definitely call me. Jeff must have sensed my hesitation because again I felt his hand on my lower back, and he steered me back around to the front of the building. He gave Will a little finger waggle as we went.

“What was that all about?” he asked as we settled into the Pontiac. “Flirting with another man on our wedding day?” he teased.

“I was trying to get some information out of him,” I said, strapping myself in with the seat belt.

“That wasn’t all you were after,” he said.

“You’re not really my fiancé, so what do you care?”

He cocked his head at me and looked at me for a couple of seconds before saying, “You’re right. Why should I care?”

And then he gunned the engine, and the tires screeched as the car slid out of the parking lot.

“So what did you find out from Mr. Studly?” Jeff asked when we stopped at a light. Neither of us had said a word to the other for the last five minutes.

“Nothing,” I admitted, kicking myself that Will Parker now knew far more about me than I knew about him. “But there was this other door that led out from the bathroom into the Dean Martin changing room. There were lockers, and I found Dan Franklin’s wallet. He looks exactly like Ray Lucci. It was a little creepy, but it explains why Lucci might tell people he’s Franklin.”

“Interesting,” Jeff said. “I’m surprised his wallet was in the locker.”

“Why?”

“DellaRocco said he hasn’t seen Franklin in two days.”

Ithought about my conversation with Dan Franklin. How he’d said he and Lucci didn’t get along.

“Franklin had an ID card in his wallet,” I said. “He’s some sort of lab-animal technician or something at UNLV.”

Jeff immediately caught on. “That rat. You think Franklin offed Lucci and stuck that rat in there for some reason?”

“Crossed my mind.”

“And now the guy’s in hiding.”

“Except that he did get Bitsy’s phone message, so he must be at home.”

“Or he has a cell phone. He could be anywhere.”

Right. Cell phone. “But why would he leave his wallet in his locker?” And then I had another thought. Maybe he killed Lucci, stuck him in my trunk, and then took off without getting his stuff. Because maybe someone saw him. Like Sylvia and Bernie. Maybe he went after them next.

My imagination was getting the better of me. This was stuff that made a bad TV movie. Except it made sense. It would explain everything.

But then again, it probably wasn’t that easy.

I could see Jeff’s brain was working overtime, too.

“Where does this Franklin live?”

I flashed back on the file folder with Franklin’s information. I remembered the address because it was only a couple of blocks away from my house in Henderson. I told Jeff as much.

“You want to go over there, don’t you?” I asked.

Jeff didn’t answer, but in seconds he was pulling into a parking lot and swerving around, putting the car in the opposite direction.

“We have no business going over there,” I said.

“The man hasn’t been to work. His wallet’s in his locker.”

“I talked to him yesterday, so he’s not dead, like Lucci,” I said.

“He wasn’t dead as of yesterday,” Jeff said. “Who knows about today?”

The Pontiac came to a stop at a light. A trail of Asian tourists following a man holding up a big orange flag moved across the intersection. A few heavyset couples wearing fanny packs got caught in the middle of the Asian group but managed to separate themselves on the other side.

Jeff shook his head sadly. “They’re like sheep, aren’t they?”

His question was rhetorical, and I merely nodded as the light changed and we started moving again.

The Strip was taking too long, so at the next block, Jeff hung a left and went down Koval. No scenery, only the backs of the resorts and casinos, but it moved faster.

“So did you get anything out of DellaRocco about Franklin?” I asked when we got onto 215 heading toward Henderson.

“I tried to find out if Lucci had any enemies, and that’s when Franklin came up. Apparently there was no love lost between them. DellaRocco was pretty vague about it, though. We didn’t get much further than that, because he got really suspicious as to why the water was running in the bathroom and you weren’t coming out.”

“So now it’s my fault?”

“Has to be someone’s,” he said.

I was regretting this little adventure more and more.

We were quiet until Jeff reached my street. “Where to from here?” he asked.

I directed him a couple of blocks up and over.

The neighborhood was similar to mine: rows of stucco houses, the occasional palm tree, banana yuccas. Some houses had lawns, real lawns that would need watering. Since Vegas was in the middle of a drought and Lake Mead was way lower than it should be, this upset me. We were in the desert, with beautiful desert flora that was perfectly fine as a yard. No need to drain the water system just because someone wanted to pretend he was living in another part of the country.

I opened my mouth to say something, but I guess I’d said it before because Jeff held up his hand and said, “I get it, Kavanaugh. Water shortage. You’re a broken record, you know?”