The White Gold Score (A Daniel Faust Novella) (2 page)

The problem with hunting ghosts—be it a genuine lost soul or just a scrap of psychic residue—is that they’re not obligated to show up and perform on demand. The dead man’s specter might have been happy to terrorize tourists and housekeepers, but he wasn’t waiting behind the penthouse doors to jump out and give me a scare. For the moment, as far as I could tell, I was alone in paradise.

My entire shoebox apartment could have fit into half of the marble-floored living room. My gaze drifted from the theater-sized wall-mounted flat-screen, across a plush sofa long enough to seat twelve, over the vintage pool table, and to the opposite wall where three more televisions stood side by side. In case I had a burning desire to watch four shows at once, apparently. A wet bar bristled with curvy bottles in exotic colors, next to a thousand-dollar espresso machine imported straight from Italy.

“Honey,” I called out, my voice echoing through the cavernous suite, “I’m home.”

No response. That was all right. The ghost could hide if he wanted. I went exploring.

Tall glass doors led to the bedroom and a feather mattress bigger than a California king. And another pair of flat-screens. The bathroom brought the total to seven when I poked at a random button on the wall, looking for the lights, and one of the mirrors erupted with a cable television gunfight. I blinked at the video-mirror and poked the button again. The picture and the explosions vanished, silence flooding back to fill the empty space.

“Damn,” I said once I finally found the lights. The bathroom sported a party-sized Jacuzzi and a glass-walled shower that could fit everyone I knew—plus guests—under its chrome waterfall spigots.

Somehow, I managed to keep my clothes on. I’m a professional. Instead I drifted through the penthouse, clicking off lights, drawing shades, plunging the suite into darkness. As much darkness as I could manage with the white-hot lights of the Vegas Strip pulsing beyond the floor-to-ceiling windows. The room took on an aquamarine glow, the shadows radioactive.

I waited in silence and listened. Closing my eyes as I stood at the center of the suite, turning slowly with my arms and my mind stretching out, feeling for another occupant. For a life, for the trace of a life, for a scrap of drifting memory.

Nothing.

So I switched on a couple of lights—and three TVs, all tuned to the nightly news—and poured myself a drink from the wet bar. Cognac on ice. I had plenty of time to corner the hotel’s pesky phantom, and the job wasn’t going to stop me from having a good time on Greenbriar’s dime. I was still pleasantly full from the ramen, but the room service menu was at my fingertips.

“Hi,” I said into the phone, “this is Daniel Faust in twenty-eight-oh-four. Can I get an espresso crème brûlée?”

While I waited for dessert, I shot a round of pool. I was rusty, a long way from my hustling prime. Still, I had all night to practice.

And all night was a long time. As the minutes ticked on, and the afterglow of a top-notch crème brûlée slowly faded, my initial elation faded right along with it. What fun was paradise if you didn’t have anyone to share it with? Without my friends around, I was just under house arrest in a swank, comfortable prison cell, waiting for a ghost that might or might not bother showing up.

So let’s turn it into a party
, I thought and called Caitlin. It felt weird, in my head, calling her my girlfriend. We hadn’t been dating long, still getting to know each other. Getting some sense of what it meant to be a couple, and trying to figure out just how serious we were about making this work.

And she wasn’t human. That was a new wrinkle to deal with.

“Hey,” I said when she picked up the phone, “guess who has the best room at the Monaco tonight. I’m thinking you, me, caviar and champagne, a hot tub…”

She sighed. “And any other night I’d be there with bells on. Other garments optional. Alas, I’m working. A pair of feral cambion are causing trouble, and I’m not to rest until they’re dealt with. My prince’s orders.”

“Not to rest—literally?”

“Sleep is a luxury for me, not a necessity.” She chuckled. “Besides, I’ve got their scent. I expect to have them found and flayed by dawn. Why are you at the Monaco?”

“I’m playing ghostbuster. One of their patrons had a heart attack, and he’s not going quietly. Wait, did you say
flayed?
”

“Mm-hmm. The process is remarkably quick when you get a little practice. Or remarkably slow. It’s going to depend on how aggravated I feel when I catch them, to be honest.”

As the right hand of a demon prince, Caitlin’s mandate was enforcing hell’s laws and running down any threats to her boss’s regime. A certain cavalier cruelty came with the territory. It was her job. She did it well.

“Be safe out there,” I said. “I’m just waiting for Casper to show up. Death from natural causes usually means it’s just a psychic imprint, not a genuine lost soul. Once I pin it down, I can scrub the room clean and spend the rest of the night in a California king, compliments of the house.”

“I’ll call you if I finish up early. Shame to let a good bed go to waste.”

“My thoughts exactly. Catch you later, Cait.”

I made the rounds on my phone but came up empty. Voicemails all around except for my buddy Jennifer, who picked up in the middle of a thumping house party.

“Jen,” I said, “Greenbriar is paying me to stay in a penthouse suite overnight and do ten minutes of work. Come help me spend his money.”

“Aw, sugar,” she said, her Kentucky drawl barely audible over the booming bass, “any other night I’d be on that like Elvis on a peanut butter and banana sandwich, but I’ve got my own thing. Entertainin’ a couple of lobbyists.”

“Lobbyists? Why?”

“You see what happened to black-market pot prices in Cali once medical marijuana went legal? If medical sales come to Nevada, I need to be first in line for a dealer’s permit—and folks on my payroll need to be second, third, fourth, and fiftieth, get that whole market on lockdown—or I’m gonna lose money hand over fist. So I got these fine gentlemen some twenty-year-old scotch and some twenty-year-old ladies, and everybody’s having a grand old time.” She pitched her voice lower. “Between you and me, I’m not convinced the scotch
or
the ladies are that old, but whatever.”

“Well, good luck. I’ll give you a call tomorrow.”

“Make it tomorrow afternoon,” she said. “I’m plannin’ on being
real
hungover.”

I put away my phone and sighed at the empty penthouse.

Nothing on TV I wanted to watch, nothing to do but kill time. Greenbriar had mentioned guests being woken up by the ghost. Maybe I’d have to go to sleep to get it to show. The idea of being jolted awake at three in the morning by an apparition screaming in my face didn’t sound like much fun, but it was more annoying than dangerous. I didn’t like jump scares in movies, and I sure as hell didn’t like them in real life. But fair was fair, and I was getting paid to do a job. I killed the last of the lights.

I was too keyed up to sleep. After tossing and turning on the cloud-soft mattress, I tugged aside the covers and trudged into the bathroom, choosing between the shower and the hot tub. I didn’t feel like waiting to fill up the tub, so the shower won. It had a “color therapy” setting, and at the touch of a button, panels in the ceiling blossomed with soft, shimmering veils of color mimicking the flow from sunrise to sunset and back again. Shrouding the room in psychedelic tangerine and midnight blue. Then the water roared down, gusting from the rainfall showerheads, drenching me in a warm, misty torrent.

I stood, tranquil in the glowing colors and the swirling water. Breathing deep, losing track of time as my muscles relaxed and my tension ebbed away. Once I finally felt tired enough to sleep, I poked my head out of the downpour and rubbed a hand across my eyes, blinking away droplets and squinting through the glass cage of the shower.

A man stood in the bathroom doorway.

My jaw tensed, my knees bending as my arms curled at my sides, instinctively getting ready for a fight. He just stood there, his face and form lost in shadow, hovering at the edge of the dim raspberry glow from the panels above my head. Motionless, silently blocking the only way out.

The ghost
, I thought, steadying my nerves.
Time to earn my pay
. Still, I didn’t like it. Usually, with an apparition, you get some clue that what you’re seeing isn’t entirely on the up-and-up. A hazy glow, or translucent “skin.” The man on the threshold looked as solid, as real, as I did. Like he’d just let himself into the penthouse, watching me shower, waiting for me to notice him.

A thought occurred to me: if Greenbriar or his casino bosses had decided to get proactive, bumping off some of the more notorious members of Vegas’s occult underground before we could cause them any headaches, he couldn’t have laid a better trap.

I killed the water. The last few drizzles spattered down, running across my back in rivulets that turned ice cold. I pushed open the glass door and stepped out of the shower.

Then I looked down and saw the gun—a stout nine-millimeter with a black matte sound suppressor—in his right hand. My feet froze on the wet tile floor.

“Listen,” I started to say, “if Greenbriar sent you, you need to know—”

But those weren’t the words that came out of my mouth. I
thought
them, but they got twisted and tangled on the way to my throat and what actually burst from my lips was, “Don’t hurt her. Promise me you won’t hurt her.”

The shadow raised his gun and pulled the trigger twice. The first shot went wide. The second punched through my rib cage, splintering bone, and sent a jagged chunk of metal slicing into my heart.

I collapsed to the floor. My back to the hot tub, clutching my chest as I struggled to breathe through sudden, roaring agony. My hand came away wet and smeared a trail of crimson across the tile. The man with the gun stood over me, impassive.

My phone. My phone was on the nightstand. I tried to get up. Couldn’t. So I flopped onto my belly and pulled myself one burning inch at a time toward the bathroom door, every strained breath feeling like a serrated knife twisting in my chest. I left a slug trail of blood behind me. My vision went red, then gray. Then it went black.

The last thing I felt was my cheek against the cold, wet tile, and my final breath shuddering free of my body.

Daylight.

Daylight pushed through the heavy curtains, drifting through the silent penthouse and resting its gentle hands upon my skin.

I opened my eyes.

I lay where I had fallen, sprawled naked on the bathroom floor, and I pushed myself to my knees with a groan. No blood. No bullet, though I poked at my chest with questioning fingers to make sure. I ached all over—ached about as much as I’d expect after falling on a porcelain floor and sleeping there—but the wounds I’d suffered only lingered in my mind.

No
, I thought, stalking into the bedroom and reaching for my pants,
not just in my mind
.

I’d heard two shots. Felt one. I pulled on my clothes and dug a penknife from my pocket, turned around and marched right back into the bathroom. I paused on the threshold, where the shooter had stood, raising my hand with my fingers pointed like a gun. Squinting at the far wall behind the hot tub.

I climbed into the empty tub, crouched down, and ran my fingers along the wall. There. A fresh square of plaster and paint, the color a near-perfect match. I dug in with my knife, scraping away chunks of plaster to get at the ugly truth under the penthouse’s skin.

A crumpled slug nestled in the wall, the tiny chunk of metal standing as a mute witness to the murder that had been committed in room 2804. A crime, I was damn sure, that Greenbriar hadn’t bothered reporting to the police. Bad press was worse than homicide.

“Died of a heart attack, huh?” I muttered as I dug out the slug and pocketed it. “You son of a bitch.”

Out in the lobby, a new receptionist was working at the check-in desk. She gave me a smile as I walked over.

“Good morning, Mr. Faust. Mr. Greenbriar said I should be expecting you, and that I should call him as soon as you, um”—she nodded up the hallway—“finish taking care of things.”

“We’re not quite there yet. The night the occupant in twenty-eight-oh-four died, who was working the front desk?”

“I was,” she said with a furtive glance over my shoulder. “But please, can we keep it down?”

I rested my fingertips on the desk, leaning in.

“Do you remember anything at all about that night, anything that struck you as unusual? Any unexplainable sounds, or people who shouldn’t have been on this floor?”

“No, not really.” Then she frowned. “Now that you mention it, there was something. Around eleven o’clock I heard two quick, loud slams, like someone having trouble getting their door shut. I poked my head up the hall, but I didn’t see anything so I just forgot about it.”

Two slamming doors. Like the sound of two bullets from a nine-millimeter with a cheap silencer.

“And when was the body found?”

“The next morning. One of the housekeepers found him. We called in Mr. Greenbriar right away, and he took care of…the arrangements.”

“Can I talk to this housekeeper?”

She shook her head. “She was transferred to another casino the next day. I’m not sure which one.”

Sure
, I thought,
with a bundle of money to keep her mouth shut. Greenbriar tidied everything up, nice and neat, no cops and no press
.

“You know what?” I said. “Give Mr. Greenbriar a call. I’d like to have a word with him.”

I was waiting inside the penthouse when the doorknob rattled and he let himself in. I was polite enough to let him shut the door, right before I slammed him up against it.

“What the fuck were you thinking?” I snapped. Keeping my arm barred across his chest and standing almost nose-to-nose with him.

“What do you mean? H-hey, buddy, you seem upset.”

I grabbed him, one hand on his shoulder and one on the scruff of his neck, and marched him into the bathroom. Bent him up against the hot tub and gave him a real close look at the hole in the plaster.

“Recognize this? It’s the patch job where you covered up the second bullet. Know how I know that, asshole? Because I
felt
the other one. Your long-term guest made me relive his goddamn
death
last night.”

“Hey, hey.” His open hands fluttered and he forced a smile. “Now, I can imagine that’s got you a little upset, but c’mon, buddy. Pal. Friend. I hired you to clear out a ghost. What difference does it make how he died?”

I let go of him. He straightened up, shook out his sleeves, and dusted the lapel of his jacket.

“What difference does it make?” I asked, barely able to believe he’d said that. “It’s the difference between a psychic imprint and a lost soul that’s out for justice. See, not only was the vic gunned down in his penthouse, you went ahead and covered up the murder. That makes for one very,
very
angry dead guy.”

Greenbriar shrugged. “So? Can you get rid of it?”

“Not easily. Entities like this, they stick around until they’re satisfied. Which means your best bet is to call Metro, fess up, and let them investigate.”

“Ha ha—ooh, you’re not joking. No. No. Dan, c’mon. This isn’t the eighties. Vegas is a shiny happy family destination now, where everything is safe and fun and nobody gets shot in our penthouse suites, okay? Getting the cops involved is just not happening.”

I threw up my hands. “Well, then enjoy your brand-new ghost. He’s gonna be here a while.”

Greenbriar followed me to the door. He tugged an envelope from his inside breast pocket, opening it up and riffling his thumb across a stack of crisp green fifties.

“Look, Dan, hold up. This is the two grand I promised you—”

“Keep it.”

I reached for the door handle, and he jumped in front of me.

“What if,” he said, “what if we call this a retainer? Maybe, you know, you could investigate and find out who killed the guy, and figure out what it’s gonna take to make this little problem go away.”

“Me?”

“Sure! You’re a sorcerer, you know the streets, and I know you’ve been taking on contract work ever since you and Nicky Agnelli parted ways. So why not? You got something better to do today?”

“I don’t think you get what I do,” I told him. “I sell vengeance for hire. I’m not some kind of…magic detective.”

He arched a pencil-thin eyebrow at me.

“When you do jobs for people, do you use magic?”

“Well, yeah, but—”

“And these jobs. Do they require investigation? Research? Perhaps looking for clues and assembling those clues in the correct order?”

I shrugged. “Yeah, but that’s not the—”

He shoved the envelope at me.

“You’re a magic detective. Take my money.”

He had me there. I snatched the envelope from his spindly fingers and shook my head.

“Two hundred a day, plus expenses.
All
expenses.”

Greenbriar gestured to the bathroom. “Just make this go away. Soon, please? My bosses are already breathing down my neck.”

“I’ll get right on that, because your comfort is so very important to me. I need everything you’ve got on the victim: who he was, where he came from, autopsy report if you can get your hands on it.”

“Hey, not to worry. I can get anything.”

“Anything?”

He put his hand on my arm, all buddy-buddy.

“Sure. I got
you
, didn’t I?”

*     *     *

As expected, the vic was an out-of-towner. Not too far out of town, though. The name on his platinum AmEx was Monty Spears, and my first look at him came courtesy of his autopsy-slab photo. He’d been a big guy with a beer gut and a receding hairline, pushing fifty. His cholesterol count would have killed him if the bullet hadn’t. Greenbriar had bribed the coroner into delivering a bogus heart-attack verdict, but the original autopsy told the true story just like I’d lived it: one nine-millimeter slug to the chest, one explosively ruptured aorta.

I paged through the file in Greenbriar’s private office, a walk-in closet with a colonial cherry oak desk. His furniture was too big and too expensive for the room they’d squeezed it into, fitting about as well as his cheap suit. He hovered at my shoulder and tried not to act like he was hovering. A damp, moldy smell clung to the air, and a gluey congestion built up in the back of my sinuses.

“You’re sure he checked in alone?” I asked him.

“Sure as we can be. There aren’t any cameras up on twenty-eight, but here, look.”

A fat little monitor sat on the edge of his desk. He turned it on a swivel and leaned in to rattle his keyboard.

“This is the camera footage from his arrival. We send a courtesy limo for penthouse guests.”

I watched a black stretch Lincoln roll around to the front of the casino. A chauffeur hopped out and opened the door—for Monty alone—and grabbed his overnight bag from the trunk.

“Why?” Greenbriar asked. “You think the killer was somebody traveling with him?”

I thought back to the hallucination. The way my words came out as his when I tried to speak: “
Don’t hurt her. Promise me you won’t hurt her
.” I shook my head.

“He might not have been alone up there. He was worried about somebody. More worried about her than he was about his own life. Do we have any more footage of him from the casino floor? Maybe he met somebody after he arrived.”

“Yeah, I already pulled everything I could find, but there’s nothing to see. Here, I’ll show you.”

He walked me through about an hour of stale video. Monty walking the casino floor, alone. Playing craps and winning. Playing blackjack and losing. Hanging out at the bar and nursing a piña colada. My interest piqued when a working girl in a little black dress sauntered his way, but he wasn’t buying. They shared a couple minutes of conversation, and she went looking for another prospect.

Still, something was bugging me about the footage. “Back it up,” I told Greenbriar. “Back to the craps table.”

He had a good angle in that shot, tight on Monty as he rolled the dice for the cheering crowd. I squinted at the shot, told Greenbriar to rewind it one more time, and said, “Hold up. Freeze it, right there.”

Greenbriar clicked a key and Monty stood suspended in time, a pair of cherry-red dice arcing from his outstretched hand. I scooped up the autopsy report.

“What? Whatcha got?”

“Personal effects,” I said. “The M.E. lists clothes, wallet, keys, everything you’d expect to see.”

I tapped the screen. A watch clung to Monty’s left wrist. Not a cheap one, either: it had the sheen of white gold and the curves of a Rolex. I’d lifted enough watches to cultivate an eye for the good stuff. I couldn’t place the exact model, but I pegged his as retailing for seven, eight grand, easy.

“But not his watch,” I said. “A few hours before he ate a bullet, he’s wearing it. On the slab, he’s not. Was it found in his room?”

Greenbriar’s brows furrowed. “No. You think somebody killed him for his watch?”

“No. It’s a nice piece, but resale values are crap unless you’ve got a private buyer lined up. A pawnshop might give you two hundred for that one, if the owner’s in a generous mood. I
do
think the killer snatched it off his body. It’s worth keeping an eye out for. And we might need it to calm his spirit down.”

“The watch? Why?”

I nodded up toward the ceiling. “Monty’s haunting your penthouse because he can’t rest. Which is understandable, considering somebody murdered him, and then some other asshole—who will remain nameless—came along and covered it up. Stealing his watch is adding insult to injury. Sometimes angry spirits develop a connection to earthly goods. Like a fetish. If I can find the watch and put it on his corpse’s wrist, it might calm him down enough to move on.”

“You better move fast, then,” Greenbriar said. “His brother just flew the body back to LA for burial.”

I shrugged. “I’ll do my best. Just to be safe, though? Go buy a couple of shovels.”