Flirting With Disaster (3 page)

It had been, but when he tossed the phone in her lap and got out of the car, he couldn’t help feeling pleased with himself. They were here, they were alive, and he no longer had to listen to Katie talking about her plan to seduce Judah Pratt.

He checked out the club with his back to her and a smile on his lips.

Even in high school, she’d called people “Buster.” Where had she picked it up? Old movies?

Katie came up behind him. “Seriously, can you at least write me notes? Send me emails? I don’t see how this is going to work otherwise.”

She had a point. He didn’t see how it was going to work, either. How to interview Judah Pratt with Katie as a sidekick and manage not to stutter?

He’d have to improvise.

He took his phone out of his pocket and tapped out a text message.
Shall we go in?

Katie’s phone chirped. She checked out the screen. “Very funny.”

She stomped across the gravel lot toward the building’s entrance, leaving him to trail along behind her, trying to keep his eyes off her ass.

From the outside, the High Hat looked like any other seedy club that hosted college bands and past-it rock acts—just a windowless one-story stucco box with floodlights on the corners.

Not the kind of venue where Pratt belonged. The man hadn’t had a hit in years, but he was still too well-known to be playing a dive like this.

Except that when Sean followed Katie through the battered steel front door, he discovered the High Hat wasn’t a dive at all.

“Whoa,” Katie said. “This place is swanky.”

Swanky as hell. The club boasted a long, gleaming hardwood bar, high-backed velvet booths, and cherry tabletops inlaid with peacocks wearing top hats.

A fresh-faced blonde rose from one of the booths. The room was otherwise empty.

“You must be the folks from Camelot Security,” she said as they approached. “I’m Ginny Wainwright, Judah’s assistant manager.”

She stuck out her hand. Katie shook it and introduced herself, then added with a quick glance over her shoulder, “This is Sean Owens.”

Sean clasped Ginny’s fingers. She was very short and very young, with hair that didn’t match her eyebrows and a cheery smile that didn’t reach her eyes. They were bright green, a color concocted in a lab.

“Nice to meet you both,” she said. “Have a seat.”

“Where’s Judah?” Katie slid her long legs into the booth. Sean sat beside her, careful not to touch her.

“He’s not coming in until later on. He sent me ahead to meet you.”

Pratt had dragged them across two states in the middle of the winter for this meeting, and he couldn’t even be bothered to show up for it. What a dick.

An absent dick. Too bad for Katie.

“When will he be here?” she asked.

“Around seven, I think,” Ginny said. “In time for sound check. He said he can meet with you before the show, if he has a few minutes.”

Three or four hours to kill. At least he’d have time to find out what Mike wanted.

“What are we supposed to do until he gets here?” Katie asked.

“Judah had me reserve rooms for you at the Quality Inn down the street.”

“Thanks. Is he flying out?”

“I’m not at liberty to say.”

“Are you at liberty to tell me how to reach him?”

Sean glanced at Katie, impressed with how placid she sounded despite her disappointment.
Placid
wasn’t a word he normally associated with her.

“You’re welcome to ask me any questions you have.”

Katie folded her hands on the table. Her index finger found her thumbnail and poked at it.

One of her nervous habits. She usually wore a silver ring on that thumb. In the office, she would avoid his eyes and twist her ring around and around.

Ask her where Judah’s staying
, he thought.

Silence.

Ask her if she knows anything about why we’re here
.

She looked at him with an uncertain frown between her eyebrows.

Katie didn’t know what to say next because she wasn’t supposed to
have
to know. Her brother had told her repeatedly that this was Sean’s show.

But what the hell kind of show was it? Pratt had been getting threatening messages from a fan. Sean and Katie weren’t supposed to protect him from whatever danger might be associated with those threats, whatever they were. Pratt had made it clear to Caleb that his regular detail would handle his security.

All Camelot was supposed to do was get to the bottom of the problem. Somehow. For some reason.

Sean couldn’t trust any plan with such sketchy outlines, and it didn’t help that Caleb felt the same way.

Pratt’s evasive
, he’d said.
I don’t know what his game is. And I
don’t
want him sleeping with my sister—not that I have any control over that. Just keep an eye on him, okay? And keep an eye on her. Keep her out of trouble
.

Sure.

“I can show you the way over there if you like,” Ginny said, rising from the booth.

This wouldn’t do. He had to talk. He had to
cheat
.

The trick was to pretend Katie didn’t exist.

Closing his eyes for a second, Sean put himself at the head of the mahogany conference table in the Anderson Owens boardroom. He flattened his palms on the polished wood and
leaned forward. Twelve expectant faces waited to hear what he’d say. Waited to be told what to do.

Ginny’s was one of them.

A sense of purpose settled over him, of power. In the conference room, Sean was perfectly in control, steering his company in accordance with the vision that had driven him from the day he and Mike hacked into a Syntek server and Sean took command of his destiny.

He didn’t stutter in that conference room. Not ever.

Avoid hard consonants. No sibilants. Concentrate
.

When he opened his eyes, he asked, “Where will he be?”

Perfect
.

Visualization was a cheap gimmick—one of the first he’d learned in speech therapy—but it worked.

“Judah?” Ginny asked.

Sean nodded.

“He’s staying at the 21c Museum Hotel downtown.”

After a beat, Sean said, “Us, too.”

She frowned and sat back down. “Judah’s manager, Paul, asked me to put you up at the Quality Inn with the rest of his staff. I don’t think he’ll be willing to pay for—”

“Don’t worry ab-bout that,” Sean said. He fumbled a little on the b, one of his trickier sounds, but it didn’t matter. In his imagination, he could smell the furniture polish the cleaning crew used to make the conference table shine, and his throat was loosening up. Katie was gone. If he took it slow, he could say whatever he wanted.

He inhaled. Important to breathe. It had been years since he had to do this—ten years?—but it was all coming back.

“We stay where he stays. Do you have the number for the hotel?”

She did. She pulled it up on her phone, and he programmed it into his tablet.

“Now tell me, what do you know about what, ah—”

His throat seized up. Visualization or no, Sean couldn’t say her name. Anything else, but not her name. That hard
c
at the beginning had once been his least reliable sound.
K-k-k-katie C-c-c-clark
. A stutterer’s nightmare.

He’d work around it. “What do you know about what my partner and I are doing here?”

Ginny smiled, giving him the same false one she’d used on Katie, and said, “You’re here because Judah wants your help with a personal matter.”

“Which is?”

“Personal.”

“Don’t you know what it is?”

She crossed her arms, her smile souring. “Judah wouldn’t say.”

Sean leaned back in the booth. If she didn’t know why they’d been hired, it wasn’t his business to tell her. Caleb had presented Katie and Sean with a confidentiality agreement they’d had to sign before they left town. They weren’t supposed to discuss the details of the case with anyone unless Pratt okayed it.

They had no details to share.

“What about tomorrow night? Are we still going to Lexington?” They’d been told Pratt would play two shows this weekend, one in each city.

“As far as I know.”

“Where are we staying there?”

“I’m not sure.”

“Find out. If we’re not all in the same place, move us to wherever Judah’s going to be. I want rooms on the same floor.”

“He’ll be in the penthouse.”

“Then I want rooms nearby.”

“Fine.” Ginny’s tone had grown peevish. She hadn’t expected him to push her around.
Sorry, kid
.

“Why doesn’t he have a poster out front?”

“He’s not advertising these shows. All the locations are a surprise.”

“So how do fans find out about them?”

“Two hours before the show, I’ll send a message to the people who run his fan clubs, plus put a bulletin up on Twitter and on his Facebook page. Word will get around.”

You had to love the Internet. In the age of social media, a guy as famous as Judah Pratt could put on a concert with two hours’ notice and attract a crowd. “How many people does he expect to draw?”

“He’ll get capacity.”

Sean looked around the room. It would hold about four hundred people packed tight. “In two hours?”

She shrugged. “He has some pretty dedicated fans.”

One of them was sitting next to him. The thought broke Sean’s concentration, and he had to close his eyes again and force himself to go back to the boardroom. “How long will he play?”

Ginny shrugged. “Ten minutes? Four hours? As long as he wants.”

Sean ran his hand over his jawline. “I don’t get it. Why the secrecy? If he wants to do a show, why not just do a show?”

“He’s got some new songs he wants to test out. This gives him an audience, but a friendly one—small and responsive—and he likes to do some of the songs acoustic. It works better for him than trying new material for the first time on a crappy sound system in some huge amphitheater.”

Ginny made it sound like a logical move, but Sean wasn’t getting logical vibes from any aspect of this situation. From what he’d read online, Pratt’s career was in trouble. He hadn’t put out an album in three years, and there were rumors of a drinking problem. An industry website said his studio had been putting a huge amount of pressure on him to produce something. Yet he was wandering around Middle America giving impromptu concerts.

Add that up with his calling Caleb and Katie to Chicago to meet with him, then failing to show today, and Sean got error messages all over the place.

“How did he pick the High Hat?” he asked.

“Oh, I think he played here once, a long time ago. Fifteen years, he said?”

Pratt was thirty-four. Sean surveyed the room again. The guy must have been a decent musician once, to get a gig like this as a nineteen-year-old.

The whole setup was hinky. Outside consultant, vague instructions, run-down club with lavish interior, missing musician. A puzzle.

Sean liked puzzles.

Extending his hand to Ginny, he stood up. “Thanks for your help. Give us a call when he gets in.”

Maybe it wasn’t a bad thing that he and Katie had a little time to kill. He could find out a lot in a few hours.

Getting information from people who didn’t want him to have it was his specialty.

“Holy cow,” Katie said under her breath. She craned her head back for a better view of the sculptures perched above the building’s entrance. “Penguins.”

Sean brushed past her, and it dawned on her how she must look, gawping like Bessie in the Big City. She hitched her purse strap higher on her shoulder and followed him inside.

As she passed by a giant metal snail inside the lobby entrance, she schooled her face into cosmopolitan blankness.

Nobody had ever told her there was such a thing as a hotel with an art museum in it. Or was it an art museum with a hotel in it? She didn’t even know. They didn’t have places like the 21c in Camelot, Ohio. They didn’t have them in Anchorage, either.

Surely that was the point. This wasn’t a lobby where one was meant to feel at home. It was designed to be inwardly gawped at while one remained outwardly cool.

Sean knew the drill. He appeared to take the place in stride, glancing around with a nonchalance that sat easily on his broad shoulders.

But then, Sean took everything in stride. The man had the emotional range of a boulder.

He’d been impolite when he turned off her phone in the car—rude enough to make her mad—but that was nothing compared to the way he’d acted inside the High Hat. Once he’d started talking to Ginny, it was as if Katie didn’t even exist. He’d asked all kinds of questions that never would have occurred to her, and she’d ended up feeling like Baby Sister Katie at the dinner table, listening in as Caleb and Amber talked about grown-up things with her parents.

Worse, she’d deserved his scorn for once. This was supposed to be her trial run as a field-ready security agent, and one little blip had totally thrown her off her game. She’d been expecting Judah, not one of his employees, and she’d actually found herself intimidated by a tiny slip of a girl with a spray-on tan.

Go, Katie
.

She could do better. She would. It had been a momentary lapse, the consequence of her surprise and disappointment. Having psyched herself back up in the car on the way over here, she’d been feeling pretty fly again, pretty confident and in charge of the situation, right up until
she saw the penguins.

Sean approached the front desk. It was low, with a row of stools for guests to sit on as they checked in. Four naked-lady sculptures graced the wall in front of him. One of them was touching her own boobs.

He took a seat and rested both elbows on the counter, leaning in to talk to an attractive hotel employee in low, friendly tones. He’d taken off his jacket, and his posture drew her eye to the wedge shape of his back beneath his lightweight blue sweater and his tight butt in charcoal slacks.

Sean’s clothes looked expensive. She’d never noticed before, but
he
looked expensive. He fit right in.

Katie had crossed the Yukon by bicycle and come face-to-face with an Alaskan grizzly. She’d taken truck keys away from belligerent loggers who’d had too many beers, and she’d lived to tell the tale. Unfortunately, these were not experiences that helped much when a self-fondling naked-lady sculpture was giving you the stink eye.