Absolutely Captivated (7 page)

Travers turned on 515, and
told Kyle to watch for Las Vegas Boulevard South, which would take
them to Fremont Street. The signs were telling Travers that he was
heading toward Downtown Vegas and the Fremont Street Experience,
whatever that was. Apparently everything in Vegas was an
experience.

The women were chattering
behind him, but thanks to Charlie Pride (Wow! A station that played
Charlie Pride couldn’t be all bad), Travers couldn’t hear what they
were saying. He didn’t really want to know, anyway.

His plans were pretty simple. He would
escort them into the private detective agency, make sure this
Zanthia/Zoe Sinclair actually existed, and then walk back out,
leaving her with the most naïve group of women Travers had ever met
in his life.

Then he would find a
hotel for him and Kyle, maybe one close to this
Star Trek
thing—if it was for kids
and not for adults. (Travers had his doubts.) They would do
whatever an eleven-year-old and a grown-up could do on a weeknight
in Las Vegas, and then, in the morning, they would drive home and
return to their normal, everyday Wyrd-Sisters-free
life.

The turn onto Las Vegas Boulevard put
the sun directly in Travers’ eyes. He swerved slightly to avoid
something shiny in the road, then made the relative quick turn onto
Fremont.

At that moment, his complacency
ended.

Everything he had imagined
about Las Vegas—everything he had feared—was right here in front of
him. Women in short skirts, fishnets (how clichéd was that?), and
teased hair walked the streets, eyeing the cars. A drug deal was
clearly going down on the corner, and a group of young men walked
in a pack toward a parked car.

“Oh, Dad,” Kyle said. “This isn’t
good.”

“No kidding,” Travers said. Maybe the
neighborhood would clean up closer to the detective’s
agency.

In L.A., neighborhoods
sometimes changed quality from block to block.

“How much farther we got to go, Kyle?”
Travers asked.

“Not much,” Kyle said,
squeezing the Internet map so hard that the paper he’d printed it
on made rustly sounds of protest.

Well, this was a twist. And once he
reached the address, Travers would have to determine the best
course of action besides the one he really wanted to
take.

He really wanted to dump the Wyrd
Sisters onto the sidewalk and run.

But he wasn’t that kind of guy, as
Kyle kept reminding him. And Travers had already brought them this
far.

He might as well finish the
trip.

Zoe Sinclair took a washcloth from the
cupboard above the sink in the extremely small private bathroom
next to her office. She turned the water on cold, and listened as
it clanged through the rusty pipes.

Never again. Never again would she try
to find someone’s familiar. That damn dachshund had led her around
all of Vegas before Zoe finally figured out how to trap the
obnoxious little creature.

Sausages. She bought lots and lots of
sausages, created a trail from the dachshund’s last known site, and
baited a trap. Only she couldn’t use a real trap on a familiar
(rules, rules, rules—Zoe was nothing if not diligent about
following the Fates’ rules), so she had to catch the thing
herself.

That little dog snapped
and snarled and bit, its teeth as sharp as any real dog’s teeth—not
that a familiar wasn’t a real dog. It was a real dog with a little
something extra—the ability to enhance magic, to make it purer,
better, stronger.

Zoe ran the cloth under the ice-cold
water, letting the chill run through her fingers and up her arms.
The sensation—cold hands and sweat-covered, exhausted body—was
becoming her Vegas norm, particularly this summer with her
air-conditioning working at half-capacity.

She’d already tried to fix it
herself—she had even used a spell—but the magical fix only lasted
so long. The building’s manager had already called to complain that
the other tenants were getting upset.

Zoe was the building’s secret owner,
and the only reason she wasn’t fixing the air was a simple one: it
required redoing the entire system. She would have to put in a
modern air-conditioning unit, which meant redoing the duct work,
which meant knocking out a few walls, which meant having a mold
inspection, which meant having an inspection—and this building was
not up to any outside investigation.

Zoe had owned the place (under a
corporate name) since 1953, and while she had made upgrades, she
knew that the building itself was probably only one step above
condemned. The way Vegas property values were going, she was better
off tearing the place down and building new than going through the
hassles of inspections, repairs, and remodeling.

She wiped the cloth on her face, then
wrapped the cold wetness against the back of her neck. A shudder
ran through her. A delicious shudder, brought on by the
chill.

She shut off the tap,
staggered back into the main part of her office, and closed the
blinds against the sun, which was beginning its descent in the
western sky.

Normally, she would have a long night
ahead of her—she still needed some surveillance photographs on that
divorce case—but she deserved an evening off. Anyone would, after
cradling that smelly, rebellious little dachshund in her arms for
the better part of an hour.

The dog had been living in garbage
cans and rolling in whatever horrible smell it could find. The
dachshund had clearly reveled in just being a dog, rather than in
being a familiar. She probably would too, considering that the dog
belonged to a minor entertainer on the Strip, known for his shady
business practices and his willingness to look the other way
whenever something illegal happened nearby.

Zoe had compromised. She’d found the
dachshund, but it was clear the dog didn’t want to return to its
familiar duties. So, after the entertainer had paid her for her
time, she had sent both of them to the Fates to have the Fates
decide if the poor dog had to continue in its servitude to a
magician who wasn’t really worth anyone’s time.

Zoe took the cloth off the back of her
neck, wiped down her arms, then tossed the cloth into the bathroom.
She turned back toward the main part of her office.

It looked like every gumshoe’s office
in every bad detective movie. Walls that needed painting forty
years ago. A trenchcoat hanging off a coat tree beside the door.
Rows and rows of filing cabinets filled with long-closed cases. A
ratty couch against one wall, two ancient chairs in front of an old
oak desk that had once belonged to a successful mob
lawyer.

She even had a black rotary phone on
the desktop, although the phone wasn’t her primary source of
communication anymore. For that, she used her cell, just like
everyone else in America.

And she ruined the
good-old-fashioned detective look by having three computers in the
main room. One, a modern iMac, sat on her desktop. Another, a Dell,
sat on the shelf she had built in front of the window. She used
that Dell as her Internet computer, figuring she wanted to keep her
P.I. files separate.

Then she had a laptop in a carrying
case on the floor beside her desk. The laptop was only for travel
and reports, and she never kept her files on it, knowing how easy
it was for someone to break in, get the machine, and compromise
it.

Of course, she was old-fashioned
enough to prefer hard copy. And she had piles of that, also on her
desktop. Three stacks of half-completed cases lined the far left,
like a barrier against the light from the shuttered
window.

Sometimes she thought
Herschel and Gaylord were right; sometimes she thought she should
just live off her magic. Make a few dollars off the tourists and
retire to her home near the university. The impulse that had
brought her to this job, at this time, faded when she was doing
glamour work like leaving sausages out for on-the-lam dogs, and
hiding in her car outside cheap motels, taking pictures of two
people who should never be anywhere near an open window when
naked.

When she’d first started as a
detective eighty years ago, it hadn’t been a glamour job, but it
had been a necessary one. In those days, she had only taken female
clients, and had helped them with all the things that their
husbands got easily. Then the divorce cases had had meaning because
in those days, without proof, the judgment always favored the
man.

Women often got accused of crimes when
they hadn’t committed any, and got the shaft in court cases because
they didn’t have as many rights as men. Zoe had been on fire then,
and it had carried her through her Los Angeles days.

She had come to Vegas in the heyday of
the mob, figuring there’d be a lot of underdogs here too, and she
found them. She was one of the few private detectives who wasn’t
afraid to take on gangsters, mostly because she knew she could
win.

But gradually Vegas
changed and so did she. Not only had the mob left, but the magical
moved in, and one by one, they found her. She was doing all kinds
of jobs like finding familiars, recouping losses created by the
Faeries, and hiding magical misdemeanors so that the Fates wouldn’t
find out and imprison some poor sap for two centuries for a simple
act of kindness toward a mortal.

Zoe walked over to her
desk, opened the bottom drawer, and pulled out her purse and her
car keys. She would order take-out from P.F. Chang’s, pick it up on
the way home, and watch some trashy movie while she soaked the dog
bite on her arm.

Then she’d read the latest
Nora Roberts—the only writer she bought in hardback (and yet she
felt the urge to hide the novels, because reading about romance
hurt her own tough mental image of herself. But she felt if she
couldn’t have the real thing, then fictional form would have to
do). A book, some ice cream—and oh, yes, a long, hot
bath.

The perfect evening for the working
woman, alone with her thoughts.

She had stepped around the desk,
looking for the sneakers she had pulled off when she had returned
to the office, when someone knocked on the door.

She glanced up. Behind the frosted
glass, she saw several shapes. She also got a sense of magic—faint,
but present. Her heart pounded. Usually the magical called first.
In fact, most of her clients came by e-mail or by phone these
days.

Zoe considered not saying a word, but
even as she did, the doorknob turned. A man poked his head in and
smiled at her.

He had the most gorgeous smile she had
ever seen.

“Excuse me,” he said, “but where can I
find Zoe Sinclair?”

It took Zoe a moment to
process the words. She wasn’t usually susceptible to male beauty,
but this guy was incredible. He had wheat-blond hair—a color most
people usually lost when they left childhood. His eyes were the
deep blue of topaz neon. His tanned face had classic features—an
aquiline nose, high cheekbones, square jaw—and just to to make
things interesting, he had a smile line on his right cheek, but not
his left.

The asymmetry saved him from
perfection and made him arresting.

“I’m Zoe Sinclair,” she
said.

He shook his head.

“You may be
a
Zoe Sinclair,” he
said, “but you’re not the one we’re looking for. She’s a detective.
Has to be in her—gosh, I don’t know—eighties by
now?”

Zoe felt cold. Mages weren’t supposed
to use the same name from place to place, unless they thought they
were untraceable. She had been using Zoe Sinclair since 1900, and
no one had ever connected the Zoe Sinclair of those early days to
her.

In fact, no one in Vegas had ever
asked why her detective agency had been in business under the name
of Zoe Sinclair since the mid-1950s. Vegas was such a transient
town that no one had ever noticed before.

“Perhaps you’d better come in,
Mr.—?”

“Kinneally,” he said,
stepping inside the door. He had a long, lanky build—a basketball
player’s frame—with broad shoulders and just the right amount of
height. He accented that with a white polo shirt over khaki pants.
No shorts for this man, even though the temperature outside had to
be 115 on the concrete. His only concession to the weather were
sandals, and they revealed bony, square, sexy feet.

Zoe had never found feet sexy before
either.

She put a hand to her cheek to cool
herself off.

As Mr. Kinneally stepped
inside, four other people followed him. Three women, beautiful
enough to be actresses, and a young boy who wasn’t more than
twelve. The women looked familiar, but they didn’t give off the
hint of magic.

That came from Kinneally
himself, and from the boy. The boy’s magical vibe was a strong one
that suggested he had already come into some of his powers, even
though mages generally didn’t manifest until the hormone surges
were mostly passed—twenty-one for males and after menopause for
women.

Zoe had been lucky in that; she went
through menopause in her mid-thirties, a long, long time
ago.