An Honest Lie(71)

“Oh,” Rainy said.

Susan was looking at her differently now, eyeing her almost regretfully. She was sad Susan again. Rainy was disappointing her.

“I’m not a cop or anything,” Rainy added.

“Yeah, like I haven’t heard that one before.” Susan looked put off, so Rainy slid over the fifty dollars she’d been palming, the bill she’d marked. It was like the movies, but with no promise of the outcome: Susan could spit in her face. To her relief, the money disappeared beneath Susan’s palm.

“There’s, like, four restaurants in there. Don’t know which one he’s at. He never stops talking. Told me he’s using the stuff in some of the drinks he makes. The other one doesn’t say much, just buys a couple things—the syrup, energy drinks and candy bars—and is on his way. Happy?”

“Not yet.” Rainy stepped aside to let a family carrying chips and sodas check out. “What does the other guy—the one who’s not the bartender—look like?”

The father of the chip-and-soda family side-eyed her as he swiped his card and his wife said something to him in a language Rainy thought might be Russian. She glanced at Rainy before ushering her children out the doors to wait for their father.

Susan waited for the man to leave before her head snapped toward Rainy. She wasn’t in friendly mode anymore.

“You’re going to get me in trouble.”

“Then answer fast and I’ll be on my way.”

She shrugged. “He’s, like, a few inches taller than you. White like a vampire. Black hair, light eyes. He’s just a guy.” The look on her face said, Get the fuck outta here.

But Rainy couldn’t do that just yet. This was an information-gathering mission. If she didn’t get enough of it, or get it right, she’d die.

“Anything special about him?”

Susan blew air out of her mouth with a pffft sound.

“Yeah,” she said. “He drinks that coffee syrup.”

Rainy smirked. “What about any tattoos?”

That got a little pause. “No,” she said finally. “No tattoos. But his roots were showing like he hadn’t dyed his hair in a bit...and they were light.”

“Hey, thanks,” Rainy said. She ducked out of the store. That would have to be enough.

Her duffel slung across her back, Rainy lit a cigarette and walked along the shrubbery-lined walk that led to the back alley of the Bellum. She hadn’t smoked since New York—she’d given it up for Grant—but the rush of acrid smoke filling her lungs had a dangerous welcome home quality. Slipping through the gap in the fence that divided the gas station from the hotel, she noticed a couple strands of blond hair clinging to one of the fence prongs. She wasn’t the only one who’d noticed the shortcut advantage. She wondered if Paul went to work this way, buying his coffee syrup and slinking off to stalk women. She choked down smoke as she surveyed the back end of the grand Bellum Hotel; like everything in Vegas, it was garish, hideous in the daylight. Without the night and the oozing neons to disguise the ugly, the sun revealed it for everything it was—loading docks, the stench of trash rotting in the heat, and construction. Rainy smoked two cigarettes before she kicked off from the wall, spitting down a grate as she walked over it. That was the part she hated: the trash-mouth aftertaste. Slowing down, she realized that people were coming and going from the docks; she caught a glimpse of a long hallway as a woman slipped outside through a service door and pulled a pack of Marlboroughs from her apron pocket.

“Here...” Rainy offered her a light before she could find one of her own. The woman eyed her suspiciously but took it, anyway, never taking her eyes off Rainy as she rolled the wheel and the flame licked her cigarette to life.

“Thanks, I always forget mine in my bag,” she said, frowning. “You looking for a job? Because there’s a right way and a wrong way to do things and you can’t go sneaking around the back—”

“I’m looking for a person actually.”

The woman sucked twice on her cigarette, and then paused to flick something off her lips. She didn’t look at Rainy when she said, “Who is it, then?”

“Just a guy.” She shrugged. “I need to find him.”

She rolled her eyes. “You’re going to have to give me more than that. Hundreds of people work here.”

Rainy shrugged. “His first name is Paul, I don’t know the rest.”

“Oh God,” she sighed. “We got a lotta Pauls at the Bellum. Is he, like, a server, a manager or what?”

Rainy shook her head. “I’m not sure.”

“We have a Paul who’s a line cook, and another four of them front of house that I know personally. Oh, and I drink with some of the housekeepers after work and they call the maintenance guy Vucifer—Vegas Lucifer, get it?—but I think his real name’s Paul.” She dropped her cigarette butt and started walking for the door marked with a big number twelve.

“Wait! Are any of them from the east coast? Or does he, like...drink coffee syrup?”

The woman’s hand froze on the door handle. Rainy thought she looked a little nervous when her head swiveled around to look at her. “Yeah,” she said quickly. “And he’s a mean man.”

She was about to lose the woman, and she still had items on her fucked-up shopping list.