Falling Awake (16 page)

She surfed into full wakefulness on the crest of an adrenaline wave.

She sat straight up in bed, trembling. Perspiration dampened her cotton nightgown. She was breathing much too quickly and she was intensely aware of her own pulse.

Sphinx loomed over her, his broad head silhouetted against the pale glow of the night-light in the hall. She could see the glitter of his eyes.

“I’m okay.” She realized he was somewhat agitated and raised her hand to stroke him reassuringly.

The phone beside the bed rang, jarring her. She recognized the sound as the alarm bell she had heard in the dream. Swallowing hard, she reached past Sphinx to grab the receiver. Without her glasses, she was forced to squint a little to read the large, glowing green numbers on the face of the clock. Twelve thirty-seven.

Her first worried thought was that the voice on the other end
of the line would likely be Leila’s reporting an emergency in the family.

“Hello?” She realized that she sounded hoarse and anxious.

“Isabel?” Her name came out slurred.
Ishabel.

Definitely not Leila. The voice was familiar but she was still disoriented from the unplanned dream. She could hear very loud rock music in the background.

“It’s me, Gavin Hardy. Your old buddy from IT at the Belvedere Center.” Gavin raised his voice to be heard above the music. “You haven’t forgotten me already, have you?”

“I don’t understand.” She pulled her disordered senses together with an effort and swung her legs over the side of the bed. “What on earth are you calling about at this hour of the night? Where are you?”

“Right here in Roxanna Beach,” Gavin said. “I’m sitting in a bar across the street from the motel where I’m staying.”

“Have you been drinking?”

“Had a few beers. I needed to do something to kill the time while I waited for you to answer your damn phone. Where’ve you been all evening?”

“I went out to dinner and turned off my phone.”

“So that was it. Tried to call you every fifteen minutes from about seven o’clock on until ten or so. I started to wonder if maybe I had the wrong number. Finally gave up and came over here to get something to eat before trying again. Man, am I glad to hear your voice.”

“Are you all right?”

“I’m swell now that I’ve finally got ahold of you.”

“You’re not driving, are you?”

He snorted. “That’s the Isabel we all knew back at the center. Just can’t help worrying about folks and handing out the good advice, can you? Relax, like I said, the bar is right across the street from the motel. I walked over. I’m not driving so I won’t run down any of the fine, upstanding citizens of Roxanna Beach on my way back to the room.”

“What are you doing here?”

“Came to see you.” This time the
see
came out
shee.
“Got a little present for you.” He lowered his voice. “But I’m afraid I gotta charge you for it. Sorry about that. If I could afford to give it to you for free, I’d do it. Believe me. You’re a real sweetheart, Isabel.”

“I’m changing my ways,” she warned.

“Nah. You couldn’t do that.”

“Gavin, try to stay on topic here. Why did you come all this way to see me and why are you calling at such a late hour?”

The music swelled into a driving crescendo, blotting out some of Gavin’s words.

“. . . on my way to Vegas. Problem is, I owe some people there some money. My new blackjack system didn’t work quite the way I thought it would last time I was in town.”

“I can hardly hear you.”

“. . . like I was saying, I’ve tweaked the program a bit and I’m
pretty sure it will fly this time. But I gotta pay off my old gambling debts before they’ll let me back into any of the big games, see?”

“No. I don’t. What do your gambling debts have to do with me?”

“I need to raise some cash,” Gavin said loudly. “That’s why I’m calling you. I’ve got something to sell that I think you might find valuable. You’re my only hope, ’cause I sure don’t know anyone else who wants this information.”

“What information?”

“Contact numbers for old man Belvedere’s three special anonymous clients.” Gavin was almost shouting now.

“Are you serious?”

“Serious as a heart attack. Figured since you were the one who did most of the work for those accounts, you might want to get in touch and tell ’em you’re, like, you know, freelance now.”

“Wait, did you say that there were
three
anonymous clients?”

“Yep.”

“I only worked for two clients. I never knew there was a third.”

“Neither did I and I thought I knew all of the old man’s secrets. What happened was, right after he tossed you out on your ear, Randolph Belvedere told me to destroy all the files on his old man’s office computer. Took me a while to get to it on account of the bastard was giving orders like crazy for the first few days after he took over. I had to, like, prioritize, you know?”

“Go on,” she said.

“Also, I was sort of busy fine-tuning my blackjack system. So I kind of put Dr. B.’s computer aside. I mean, what was the rush,
huh? The guy’s dead. Anyhow, I finally got around to taking a look at the files he had stored on his hard drive a couple of days ago. For kicks I went through them. They were all password-protected so it took me a while.”

“What did you find?”

“Most of them were just research notes about his extreme dream theories. But one of those files had a different password. A real tricky code. Made me curious, you know?”

“That’s where you found the e-mail addresses for the three clients?”

“You got it. The old man had a few secrets he kept from you and me both. I tried tracing the three but they’re all locked and scrambled a dozen different ways. Whoever they are, those three clients don’t want anyone tracking them down. Looks like real expert work. Maybe if I had time I could untangle them but maybe not. Thing is, they aren’t much good to me, anyway. What would I do with those clients? Also, I’m sort of in a hurry to try out the new version of my system in Vegas. So I decided to see if you were interested in the addresses.”

“Let me get this straight. You want to sell those e-mail addresses to me?”

“I’m real sorry about that part, Isabel. Honest. But I need the cash, see, and I just don’t know anyone else who might pay a few bucks for these addresses.” His voice vibrated with tension. “Are they worth anything at all to you?”

“I’m afraid I’m having a cash flow problem myself at the
moment, Gavin. My bank account is hovering around zero and my credit cards are maxed out.”

“Even a few hundred bucks would help,” Gavin assured her. “I could go to one of the little casinos way off the Strip where they don’t know me and turn it into a stake that I could use to get into a big game.”

“I could come up with maybe two hundred bucks cash.”

“Oh, shit. Is that all? I’m pretty desperate, Isabel.”

She tried to think. “I know one of those three clients personally. He might be interested in talking to you.”

“Hey, if he’s still big on keeping secrets, maybe I could do a deal with him, you know?”

“What kind of a deal?”

“Gotta think here. Maybe he’d like to know who the other two clients are or something. Or maybe he’d be willing to pay me not to sell his address to the other two.”

“No offense, Gavin, but that sounds a lot like blackmail.”

“Nah, it’s just business.”

It was not exactly business as usual, she thought, and Ellis probably wasn’t going to like it. But she had a hunch that he would want to discuss the situation with Gavin.

“Okay, I’ll call him and then call you back,” she said. “Where are you staying?”

“Motel out on the old highway. The Breakers. I’m in number eight. I’m heading back there now. Give me a call after you talk to your client and we’ll make arrangements. I’d better give you my cell
phone number because I doubt if the manager’s office is still open to handle calls. The place is sort of a dive, you know? Got a pen?”

“Just a sec.” She fumbled with her glasses and then picked up the pen on the bedside table. “Okay, go.”

He rattled off a number. “Call me back as soon as you can, okay?”

“I’ll try.”

“Thanks, Isabel.” Gavin’s voice almost throbbed with heartfelt relief. “You don’t know how much this means to me.”

The phone clicked in her ear.

She sat on the edge of the bed, absently petting Sphinx for a moment while she pondered developments.

Then she bent down and dug the Roxanna Beach phone book out of the drawer in the bedside table. She found the number for the Seacrest Inn and dialed it quickly.

While she waited for him to answer, she thought about why the dream she’d had earlier disturbed her so deeply.

It wasn’t the fact that Ellis was Dream Man. Heck, she already knew that. She had made the decision to install unknown Client Number Two in the role months ago. The only thing that had changed this week was that she now had a face to go with everything else that she knew about him.

No, the real problem was Midnight Man’s attire tonight. In that single glimpse she’d managed to get before Gavin’s call woke her she had realized that Dream Man had not come to her in any of the usual, rakish sartorial guises she had designed for him on previous visits.

Tonight he had been garbed, instead, in a pair of black trousers, silver gray, open-collar shirt and a well-tailored jacket woven in shades of gray and black. It was the outfit Ellis had worn that evening.

She tried to tell herself there was nothing to worry about. It was just a dream, for heaven’s sake. But she was lying to herself and she knew it.

Because the truth was that tonight’s dream had not been one she had orchestrated for herself as a pleasant, erotic interlude to be enjoyed on her terms in a safe, controlled state of extreme lucid dreaming. This evening’s show had been unplanned, unpremeditated and unpredictable. Her dreaming mind had come up with it all by itself after she had fallen sound asleep.

No need to be afraid, she assured herself, at least not yet. But she should probably be real worried.

i
t was still raining when he left the bar. He hunched deeper into his windbreaker, the one with the logo of his favorite casino on the back, yanked his billed cap lower over his eyes, stuck his hands into his pockets and tromped across the gravel parking lot.

The stretch of old highway that separated the bar from his motel was poorly lit. There were no streetlights or signals. The only illumination came from the neon signs above the bar and the one that announced the motel. There were no crosswalks or sidewalks, either, but who cared? There was hardly any traffic.

The crunch of footsteps on gravel behind him startled him out of his reverie.

“What?”
He spun around and then had to grab hold of the
fender of a pickup truck because he was a little unsteady on his feet.

His first panicked thought was that the casino had sent collectors after him. Cold sweat broke out on his forehead.

A figure moved out of the shadows.

“Hello, Gavin.”

Not a casino enforcer. The relief was so great he nearly crumpled.

“What the hell?” He pulled himself together. “What are you doing here?”

“You were assigned to wipe the files off Martin Belvedere’s hard drive.”

“So what? Just doing my job.”

“I wondered if you found anything of interest.”

This was getting a little weird. “You followed me to ask me that?”

“You can’t blame me for being curious after the way you disappeared so suddenly today.”

“I didn’t disappear,” Gavin muttered. “I just decided to take some time off.”

“You told your colleagues that you were ill.”

“So sue me. I got plenty of sick time coming.”

“One of the people in your department overheard you making some calls before you left the center. He said it sounded like you were trying to locate Isabel Wright.”

“We’re friends, me and Isabel,” he said. “Just thought I’d stop in and say hello while I’m in town, that’s all.”

“I didn’t realize you and Isabel were that close.”

“Look, I don’t know what this is about, but it’s late and I’m planning to get up early.”

“You did find something on Martin Belvedere’s computer, didn’t you? I thought so. It was the only explanation that made sense.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about. I was ordered to wipe that hard drive.” He could feel himself starting to sweat again. “I didn’t steal anything, if that’s what you’re trying to say.”

“You misunderstand. I’m not accusing you of stealing company data. I just want to know what you found and why you came here to talk to Isabel Wright. There must be some connection. Otherwise it doesn’t make sense for you to go out of your way to stop off in Roxanna Beach. It’s not exactly on the road to Las Vegas, is it?”

“My reasons for being here are none of your business. This is personal.”

“I’m willing to pay for whatever information you found, Gavin.”

Excitement swamped his growing unease. “Yeah? Well, hell, why didn’t you say that in the first place? What kind of money are we talking?”

“First tell me what you’ve got. Then I’ll tell you what it’s worth to me.”

“E-mail contact information for old man Belvedere’s three anonymous accounts.” He waited anxiously to see if that generated any interest.

“I’m impressed. I would very much like to have that
information. I’ve got a few hundred in cash on me but if we can find an ATM I could make it an even thousand. I know that’s not a lot but it’s all I can come up with tonight. Unless you want to wait until the banks open tomorrow?”

Gavin calculated quickly. The bright lights of Las Vegas were calling. No reason he couldn’t sell the information twice tonight, maybe double his profits. And no need for either client to know about the other.

This was one of those win-win situations.

“There’s an ATM down the street at that gas station on the corner,” he said. “I noticed it this afternoon when I filled up my car.”

“Fine. I’ll drive over and get the money. It would probably be best if we weren’t seen together. Why don’t you go back to your motel room? I’ll meet you there in a few minutes.”