Michael Connelly - Murder in Vegas

“If you did,” said Tommy, “he wouldn’t be doing business with my family in the first place.”

“Good enough.” Ed glanced at the guy with the exotic piece. “Okay for me to leave?”

“Of course,” said Tommy, standing, “Enjoy your visit to our valleys.”

“My friend already has,” Ed rising and feeling he could turn his back on these guys as he walked to the door.

“Oh, God,” said Brandi Willette, nursing the worst hangover she could remember and afraid to look over the side of the car, because the road just fell away down the steep, piney slope. “I think my ears are popping again.”

“The change in altitude,” said Ed from behind the wheel. “And that bottle from the last winery you brought back to the room probably isn’t helping any.”

“Please,” Brandi holding her left hand out in a “stop” sign while her right palm went from the teddy bear in her lap to cover her closed eyes. “Don’t remind me about last night, all right?”

“Oh, I don’t know. I think we both liked what happened next.”

Well, you can’t disagree with the guy on that one, at least the parts of it you remember.

Which were: Coming back to the room around five-thirty, after hitting the last row of wineries with names like Clos du Bois, Chauteau Souverain, and Sausal. Feeling free as could be from all the great stuff she’d tasted, and, although Brandi was still hiccuping, ready for anything. Including letting Ed slip her clothes off, the guy more gentle than she could have hoped. After a quick shower together, him touching her just about everywhere, them getting into the Jacuzzi-the guy must have had it filling up while he was stripping her in the bedroom and soaping her in the stall. And then getting a real good look at that snake he had down there, the head on it big as a cobra’s. And Brandi telling him to get in first, sit down, before lowering herself onto his soldier-at-attention. She stayed balanced by resting her palms on his shoulders, her nipples just skimming the surface of the sudsy water as she rocked up and down and back and forth-him laughing, because she still had the hiccups-until she came so violently and thoroughly it was like one long shudder that wasn’t a hiccup at all. In fact, took them away.

And then him lifting her up, not even bothering to dry themselvesoff, and onto the soft mattress of the brass bed-her new teddy bear watching-for another, and another, and…

“Hey,” from the driver’s side, “you’re gonna puke, hold on till I can pull over.”

“Yeah, yeah,” said Brandi, hoping she’d have better luck controlling her gag reflex than she did with the hiccups.

“Okay,” said Ed Krause, nudging the chick on her bicep with his fist, “we’re here.”

He watched Brandi’s head try to find its full and upright position in the passenger’s seat. After three hours of complaining about everything under the sun, she’d finally fallen asleep-or passed out-a good ten miles from Tahoe City, and therefore she’d missed some of the best fucking scenery Ed had ever driven through. Snow-capped, purple mountains, sprawling vistas down to pine-green valleys. The whole nine yards of America the Beautiful.

And now Lake Tahoe itself.

Brandi said, “I’m cold.”

“Like I tried to tell you before, it’s the altitude. Walk slow, too, or you’ll start to feel sick.” Stick in the knife? Sure. “Again.”

The chick raised her hand like she had before, reminding him of a school crossing guard, but she managed to get her side door open.

After checking into the Sunnyside Lodge, Ed got them and their luggage to the suite, which had a little balcony off the living room and overlooking the waterfront, more mountains with snowy peaks kind of encircling the lake from high above. Brandi shuffled into the bedroom and flopped face down on the comforter, not even bothering to kick off her shoes. Ed heard snoring before he could secure his briefcase with the heroin behind the couch in the living room, pissed that the key fucking Tommy gave him for the handle lock didn’t fucking work, so all Ed could do was click the catch shut.

Leaving the chick to sleep it off, he went back downstairs and did a walkaround, first outside, then in. Big old lodge, darklog construction, security doors you’d need a computerized room key to open. A moose’s head was mounted on a woodenplaque over one fireplace, a bear’s over another, a buffalo’s over a third.

Ed liked the place. Rugged, with the taxidermy adding just a hint about the history of killing the lodge had seen.

But no pool, and when he asked at the lobby desk, the nice college-looking girl told him it was way too cold to swim in even the lake, because it never got warmer than sixty-eight degrees, “like, ever.”

When Ed got back to the room, Brandi was still snoring. But checking how he’d wedged his briefcase behind the bureau, it had turned a few degrees. Ed tilted the briefcase back to its original angle, then stomped his foot a couple of times, harder on the third one.

Brandi’s voice trickled out of the bedroom. “What the hell are you doing out there?”

The briefcase never budged. “Testing the floorboards. Be sure they can take us rocking that mattress.”

A different tone of voice with, “Wouldn’t we be better off doing your testing… in here?”

And that’s when Ed Krause knew in his bones that Brandi Willette-given how shitty she must still be feeling-had snuck a peek into his unlockable briefcase, just as he’d gone through her “lucky” totebag the night before at the Inn on the Plaza in Healdsburg.

“Honey,” said Brandi Willette, in the best seductive/hurt tone she knew, “I still don’t understand why I can’t come in there with you.”

“Keep your voice down.”

She watched Ed shut the driver’s side door, even almost slam it, in the yard he’d pulled into, a big Swiss-chalet style house on the lakeside in front of them.

Ed turned back to her. “It’s like the last time.”

“Confidential?”

He glanced into the next yard. “I said, keep your voice down. And stay put.”

“All right, all right,” Brandi flicking her hand like she couldn’t give a damn.

Only she did. After seeing all that “snow” in his briefcase back at the lodge, Brandi could care less about the real thing on the mountaintops and melting in the shaded clumps still on the ground under trees that must block the sun. As they drove, many of the houses-like the one next door to the chalet-looked like something out of that ancient Bonanza TV show with Michael Landon that Brandi caught on the cable sometimes, a program she figured he must have done even before that old show Little House on the Prairie, account of how much younger he looked as a son/cowboy instead of a father/farmer.

But the snow in the briefcase? Heroin or cocaine, had to be. Which meant big-time bucks, and maybe an opportunity for her luck really to change, even just riding with Ed.

Or figuring out a way to hijack him. After all, the three friends Brandi called from the pub in the city would go to the police only if she didn’t make it back.

Brandi watched Ed move slowly through the yard and toward the chalet. There’d been a wooden privacy fence between it and the road that wound around the lake. On each side of the fence’s gate were these totem poles, like Brandi remembered from a Discovery Channel thing on Eskimos-or whatever they were called when they lived more in the deep woods and not so much on icebergs.

And, sure enough, there were three guys doing landscaping in the next yard who could have been Eskimos themselves. Short, blocky guys, with square, copper-colored faces. The oldest of them seemed to be bossing the other two, one gathering up broken limbs and throwing them onto a brushpile, the other sweeping the driveway of huge pine cones from even huger trees looming overhead. Probably getting the neighbor’s place ready for the season.