Velocity (Karen Vail #3)(127)

She had to get to the pursuing assassins before they could get to Robby—or risk firing off a few rounds into the lake. The gunshots would hopefully cause a stir and be reported to Vegas Metro Police, which she figured maintained a respectable presence on the strip. Problem was, she didn’t see any cops where and when she needed them: here. And now.

The water jets blasted and the music boomed, sounding like a twenty-one-gun salute.

And up ahead, a glimpse of Robby’s head. So close—and yet unreachable.

She yelled—knowing he couldn’t hear her—but she didn’t know what else to do. She grabbed her radio. “This is Vail. Anyone on Las Vegas Boulevard, near the Bellagio entrance?”

She brought the radio to her ear, uncertain she would be able to even hear the response above the noise.

“Negative.” DeSantos’s voice? Clar’s? Mann’s? Vail couldn’t tell.

“I’ve got eyes on Robby,” Vail said. “Being pursued through the crowd by two armed mercenaries. Need assistance.”

“In pursuit—”

Dixon’s voice. But she couldn’t make out the rest of her transmission.

Vail looked skyward. Where the hell’s the Huey?

As Robby approached the boulevard—amid the intense glare of Planet Hollywood’s turquoise lights and Paris’s neon-striped hot air balloon—she saw Robby’s head and shoulders stop abruptly.

He turned back in her direction, took a step, stopped again, then looked around.

Other armed men must’ve appeared ahead of him, blocking his way. Shit— Robby was now moving. Climbing. Standing on something.

Facing the expansive lake, his body was silhouetted against the pluming, brightly lit white wall of water.

She pushed forward. “No!”

But her voice was swallowed by the spouting jets, the booming horns, and masses of people in front of her.

Vail figured she was the only one who saw the two men raise handguns. Not even she heard them fire their suppressed rounds. But the buck of the barrel was unmistakable.



AS ROBBY NEARED the strip ahead, the high-def billboards and neon glow of Las Vegas excess reflecting off glass everywhere, his mind sifted through various scenarios. A substantial obstacle remained: the two men assigned to kill him, held at bay by a natural barrier of hedges.

And coming up ahead, from the boulevard, another two sicarios, fighting their way toward him.

He turned and looked in the direction from which he had just come. Go back? He took a step, then stopped. No—even if he could fight his way through the crowd, the men on the other side of the hedges would arrive ahead of him.

He had mere seconds to figure a way out.

There was only one unblocked path: the water. He pushed a man and two women aside, then hoisted himself to the top of the cement wall—and felt the hot sting of a bullet slam into his left arm.

With no further thought required, he jumped.

It was a ten foot drop, and he hit the lake’s surface sharply, feet first. That wasn’t the problem—it was the cold water and the spray of the jets raining down on him as the show built in intensity. He no longer felt the sting of the gunshot wound. The chilled water had numbed it, and his urgent need to avoid any more lead spinning through his flesh pushed him to move forward.

He paddled his right arm and legs through the water, slamming into something rock hard and immobile. Pipes. When he’d jumped, he had apparently come dangerously close to landing on a portion of the extensive network of plumbing that spidered off into the distance, as far as he could see.

He hadn’t appreciated how expansive this body of water was until he was in it, enveloped in its cold grasp, no reachable land in sight. Swimming ahead would only take him into the middle of the lake, and make him an easy target for another gunshot—one that might find center mass. He pulled his body around and faced a series of arched aqueducts, which appeared to lead under the roadway he’d just traversed.

Wherever they led didn’t matter—it meant he would be out of the line of sight of the hunters who were determined to notch him onto their bloody cartel belts. He thrust his legs and right arm outward and pushed on, beneath the nearest stone archway, into the pitch darkness.



VAIL SHOVED AND PUSHED her way to the edge of the lake’s retaining wall. The rockets’ red glare was booming from the speakers. The nozzles were blowing tight streams of water fifteen stories into the air, and smaller walls of synchronized spray cascaded across her field of sight. And— what the hell?—a fog began spreading rapidly across the lake. You’ve gotta be kidding me. Fog?

She stood there, looking for Robby—for any sign of life.

She saw nothing. No blood. No floating body. No flailing arms. And the dense cloud enveloping the lake was making it nearly impossible to see.

What to do. How—where— Along the lower end of the right side wall of the lake, arched aqueducts. The water flowed into them. But where did they lead? Had Robby swum through one of them?

Vail pulled out the tracking device, hoping it was Robby who’d been carrying the phone. A black screen stared back at her. If Robby had the cell, it would be underwater now, shorted out, no longer transmitting a digital or electronic signal.

It was clear the device would bring her no closer to locating him. She shoved LOWIS into her pocket and headed back the way she had come, into the hotel.