Red Queen (11 page)

My driver didn't even look at me when I climbed in his cab.

“The Mandalay Bay,” I said.

He nodded, started the meter, still silent. He was squat, dark-skinned, foreign, with a heavy beard. I searched for an ID and a license, which were usually pinned where a passenger could see them, but I saw nothing. We pulled away from the MGM onto the Strip.

He went the wrong way. That didn't trouble me. The exit left the MGM at an angle that made it difficult to drive directly to the Mandalay Bay. I assumed he was circling the block so he could come at our destination more easily. But when he had driven three blocks away from the Strip, I began to worry.

“Hey, where are we going?” I demanded. “I told you to take me to the Mandalay Bay.”

He nodded. “Mandalay Bay.”

I tapped on the plastic window that separated us. “It's back there.”

He nodded, pointed in front of us. “Mandalay Bay.”

“No. Turn around. Go back to the Strip.”

He shook his head. “No Strip.”

“God, don't you speak English?”

Apparently my question offended him. He stopped talking but kept driving farther and farther from the Strip. He turned onto another road that appeared to lead into an industrial section. There wasn't a hotel in sight, and that was rare in Las Vegas. I continued to bang on his window but he ignored me. I was pissed I had forgotten my cell. I would have called 911.

But I was more annoyed than afraid.

All right, I thought, two can play this game. I'd wait until he had to stop at a light. Then I'd leap out the door and run like hell and he could chase me on foot if he wanted to get his fare.

The problem with my plan, though, was that it seemed to take forever until we reached a red light.

Finally, he had to stop. My door was unlocked.

I was out of the taxi in a second.

He cursed and leaped out his side of the cab but I was already running down the street. For a moment I was afraid he would jump back in his taxi and try to run me down. But out the corner of my eye I saw him drive off.

I stopped running and took stock of my surroundings. It was definitely an area of town that didn't appear in any travel brochures. Besides rows of warehouses, there were numerous factories. Dusty buildings with peeling paint—they looked as
if they had been built during World War II. It was Saturday, so unfortunately, they were all closed.

Nevertheless, it was eerie. There wasn't a single car in any of the parking lots. It was almost as if this section of town was under quarantine. The idea had no sooner occurred to me when I noticed a smell of decay. The bloated sun burned on the horizon like the mushroom cloud of an exploded nuke. It was still unbearably hot but the stench seemed immune to the dry air.

The concrete sidewalk was broken and uneven. It was easier to walk down the center of the asphalt road. But when I stepped over a sewer cover, I thought I heard faint moans. It sounded like a large group of people in horrible pain.

It was real, it wasn't my imagination. I returned to the sewer cover and went down on my hands and knees on the hot ground. The moaning grew louder. I could hear the voices of women and children mixed together. I tried to envision who could be trapped down there but I just made myself sick thinking about it.

Whoever they were, they were in pain.

A red sports car approached. It was a Porsche. The driver, a woman, had the roof down. Because she was obviously dressed for a night on the Strip, I assumed she, too, was lost. She slowed as she came near and halted when I waved for help. All around us, the shadows lengthened. It would be dark soon.

“What are you doing here, dear?” she asked, checking me
out. I did likewise. Besides wearing a rich black evening gown, she had on jewelry: an expensive pearl necklace, ruby earrings that matched her red hair, gold and diamond rings on both hands. She looked like a fifty-year-old who was trying to be forty.

“I think I'm lost,” I said.

“That makes two of us. Hop in, maybe we can figure out a way back to the Strip.”

Had it been a guy, I would have continued on foot. But I was anxious to get out of this section of town and she looked safe. I climbed in the front seat, closed the door. She put the car in gear and we rolled forward.

“I take it you're not from around here?” she asked.

“Is anyone from around here?”

She smiled. “I hear ya. How long have you been lost?”

“Not long. I caught this crazy taxi driver and told him to take me to the Mandalay Bay and he drove me out here. I don't think he was ever going to stop. He just kept driving and driving.”

“How did you get away?”

“I bolted when he stopped at a light.”

“Did you get his name?” she asked.

“No. He didn't have his license posted.”

The woman nodded. “Bad sign. It means his vehicle's not registered. He could have been anybody.”

“How did you end up out here? If you don't mind me asking.”

“Got in a fight with my boyfriend. Jumped in his car and took off. I didn't think where I was going, and before I knew it, I had no idea how to get back.” She nodded to the road in front of us as she slowed back down. “What do you think? Should we go left or right?”

I twisted both ways in the front seat, trying to peer between the buildings, hoping to get even a glimpse of one of the taller hotels. But the dirty monoliths had us surrounded. I struggled to remember how many turns the taxi driver had taken.

“I think we should go left,” I said.

The woman turned to the right. “I disagree,” she said.

“Really? You just said you had no idea where you were headed.”

“That's true. But you see, I'm not in a hurry to get back to the Strip.”

“I thought you were.”

“No.”

“Is it because of your boyfriend?”

“No.” She glanced at me, and it was only then I noticed how dark her eyes were, how cold. “It's because of you, Jessie.”

In that instant my blood turned to water, to ice; it seemed to freeze in place. I felt a pain in my heart and wondered if it had stopped beating. My fear transformed into terror. I reached for the door but the woman accelerated sharply.

“Jump out of the car now and your friends won't recognize you at the hospital,” she said.

I struggled for calm, failed. “How do you know my name?”

“I know everything about you.”

“What do you want?”

“Everything.” Suddenly she had a gun in her hand, but it was no ordinary weapon. I had seen enough cop shows. It was a Taser. She was going to knock me out.

There was nowhere to run. Our speed was more than sixty miles an hour. I could face the impact of the asphalt or her lightning. Neither choice was very appealing. As she activated the Taser and green sparks crackled between twin coils, I slashed at her right arm with my left. I hit her hard and I had a good angle but still her arm didn't budge an inch.

Steadily, she moved the Taser toward my head, the burning green light glowing in her cold green eyes. Again I tried to strike but my hand caught the sparks and an unforgiving current shot up my arm and into my brain.

For an instant, I felt as if my mind was on fire.

Then everything went black.

I AWOKE IN THE DARK AND COLD.

I was lying on the floor. I felt the ice with my fingertips and the skin on the back of my skull before I opened my eyes. After the oppressive heat of Las Vegas, cold was the last thing I expected. But this freeze went deeper than a change in the weather. I knew in an instant it could be fatal.

Opening my eyes, I saw a dull orange light shielded by a band of small steel bars. It was high up, on a metal ceiling twenty feet from the frosty floor. It was one of a series of lights; they gave off a faint glow. Nevertheless, there was enough light to see that the room was large and filled with a grisly cargo.

I was in an industrial-size meat locker. Dozens of rows of beef hung from hundreds of steel hooks. The meat slabs were red and white, thick with muscle and fat. A huge slab hung inches to my left. I touched it; the meat was hard as stone.
I knew what that meant. The beef was not being kept cool to sell in the near future. It was frozen solid, which in turn meant the room temperature was below freezing.

How far below, I didn't know. I didn't know how long I had been unconscious, but the fact that I was still alive indicated it had not been long. I was still dressed in my red silk blouse and black skirt, and losing body heat at a terrifying rate. As I briefly fingered the slab of beef, the tips of my fingers got even colder. Soon my hands and feet would be numb. I knew I had to act quickly.

Sitting up, I groaned in pain. Whoever had handled me while I had been unconscious had been rough. I felt as if my entire spine was bruised. The bastards had probably thrown me from one place to the next, until they had finally dumped me on this floor.

It made me wonder why they had chosen this place. Obviously they meant to kill me, but they could have done that while I was unconscious. I wondered—it was more of a hope, actually—if this was part of an elaborate ritual. Was it possible someone was trying to scare me into . . . what?

It didn't take long to come up with a possibility.

I stood and called out loudly, hoping someone was listening.

“Hey! I'm awake! If it's money you want, you can have it! It's in a safe at the MGM! The key's in my purse! Let me go and I'll take you to it!” Not that I knew where my purse was.

Silence. No one answered.

“I've got a hundred grand in cash!” I yelled.

Complete silence. My disappointment was crushing.

I couldn't be sure but it felt like no one was there. It was probably their plan—whoever they were—to let the cold do its work and then return later for my corpse. Then they could dump me anywhere: in a shallow grave in the desert; on the street where that bitch had picked me up. I didn't know if an autopsy would reveal if I had frozen to death, especially if they gave me time to thaw out before disposing of my remains.

It was hard to think of being a corpse.

I circled the freezer, searching for a way out. There were no windows, only one exit, located at the far end of the long building. The door was a thick steel monster. I tugged on the handle but I might as well have been yanking on a boulder. It didn't budge a fraction of an inch.

There were straps mounted on the back of the door, where I assumed an ax was supposed to be fixed in case of emergency—such as mine—but my captors had been alert enough to remove it. Bless their hearts, they had thought of everything.

But why? Why me?

The only one I knew who hated me was Kari, and she had mysteriously appeared at Lake Mead. She had tried to warn me, it was true, that I was in danger, but her warning had been vague and rambling. She'd made no sense. She had been acting like a crazy person and crazy people did crazy things.

Yet to arrange a kidnapping as elaborate as this was way
beyond her scope. She was a blond cheerleader, for God's sakes. How could she have managed to hire the taxi driver—I had no doubt he was part of the plan—and the woman in the Porsche? Kari might have been pissed I had stolen Jimmy away but she simply wasn't smart enough to have arranged such a complex scheme.

Few people on earth could have arranged such a scheme.

Yet I had met such a man the previous night. The one person in the whole world who had known I was about to run downstairs and catch a cab.

“Take a taxi, don't walk. It's a thousand degrees outside.”

If I had to create a short list of who was behind my abduction, Russ's name would be at the top. His sitting at our blackjack table couldn't have been by chance. It was all so clear now. When I had tried to leave, he had done everything in his power to keep me there. Indeed he had suckered me with the oldest bait in the world. The promise of free money. And he had delivered, he had won a hundred grand for me as casually as I had ordered room service afterward. On top of that, he had won more than six hundred grand for himself.

But had he really won any money at all?

No one in the world could beat the casinos. Was it possible the people at the Tropicana were part of this scam? It was difficult to believe. The more people I added to my list, the more complex the crime became. Yet if Russ was acting alone, with only a few hired thugs to help with the dirty work, then
I was still left with the mystery of how he had beaten the casinos.

Hell, I was left with a much more pressing mystery.

Why he wanted me dead.

My fingers were freezing, I couldn't stop shivering, and my feet were going numb. I stomped on the floor to stimulate the circulation, but it only worked as long as I kept it up. The moment I stopped, the cold returned to my toes.

The numbness in my feet scared me more than my freezing fingers. I knew if my feet failed, I wouldn't be able to stand, to move around, and that was the only thing that was keeping me warm. I would be forced to sit down, beside the dead steers, and I'd probably black out fast. I wasn't exactly a candidate for Jenny Craig. I weighed at best a hundred and ten pounds.

I jumped up and down, sang to myself, tried to keep my spirits up. Most of all, I struggled to figure out a way through that damn door. It was made of steel; I was flesh and blood. Okay, I told myself, I had to level the playing field. How did I do that? I needed tools, steel tools.

I searched the locker again, more closely this time. The only things that remotely resembled instruments were the hooks holding up the meat. Their points were extremely sharp. I wondered if I could get one free, if I could use it to rip the hinges off the door. It was worth a try. The chances someone would burst through the door in the next thirty minutes and rescue me were pretty remote.

I thought of Jimmy then. He must be looking for me by now, worried where I had disappeared to. He had probably spoken to Alex and she might have gotten spooked and told him about the man we had met the night before. Yet Alex wasn't someone who panicked. She might wait before saying a word. Her virtue might be my curse. She might wait to talk about Russ until long after I was dead.