Hold ’Em Hostage Read Online Free PDF Page B

to social situations, which caused excessive sweating, heart palpitations and occasional stuttering, which ironically never struck him when on camera.
    â€œWhere were you and what did you hear?”
    â€œI don’t want to t-tell you over the phone. You know Vegas, b-baby. I’ll come to your room.”
    â€œSee you soon. It’s 1717,” I said in tacit agreement on the possibility of a bug. It had happened before. I hung up.
    â€œWhat did he say?”
    I considered telling Frank what Jack had said, but I didn’t want him to overreact and order me to don a flak jacket, close the drapes and hide under furniture, so I just smiled. “He apologized for not meeting us at the airport, and is on his way up.”
    Frank searched my face, apparently seeing the lie by omission there. Truly I don’t know how I get away with winning bluffs because I can’t lie very well. It must be the sunglasses. Frank continued to wait for me to spill it. I resisted. Sometimes he challenged my independence and sometimes he didn’t. Tonight, he didn’t want to miss his date with Abel, so he didn’t push it.
    â€œOkay, Honey Bee, but don’t open the door to anyone else.” Frank raised his eyebrows, waiting for a promise. I nodded. He snatched the key card Ben had left on the bar and pocketed it on his way out the door.
    â€œBee Bee, you still haven’t told me what the cops asked you,” Ben said, pouring himself a Johnnie Walker Red. I was impressed at yet another sign that my brother might be growing a sensitive side at the ripe old age of forty-one; he’d waited until Frank left to open the alcohol. Not that Frank would have cared, but I would have. Frank’s infrequent, temporary denials of his alcoholism had been serious obstacles in our relationship. (The dead bodies that seemed to crop up when we were together might be counted as others. Although Frank, I’m certain, would argue that it wasn’t the murders, but my involvement in trying to solve them that was the problem.)
    But that’s another story.
    Or was it?
    â€œAnd, you never told me why you look like you took a shower fully clothed,” Ben persisted.
    I sighed, accepted the proffered glass of chardonnay and eased onto the couch to tell the short version of what happened after we’d been separated. “You lost your Angels?” Shana asked, distracted out of her worry by my fashion horror.
    I stopped in mid nod. “I know where they are, just retrieving them may be a bit difficult.”
    Shana wagged a finger at me. “Those are one of a kind originals. And besides, they are the sexiest shoes I’ve ever seen and I want to borrow them. We’re going after those silver suckers.”
    Ben looked from Shana to me and back again, but apparently wanted to stay in her good graces badly enough to withhold comment. “So, the cops think you sliced the guy’s throat, slipped him into the lagoon, passed off the knife, sat down to play a small time sit and go, got caught, then tried to ditch them by swimming around with the corpse?”
    I shrugged. “I don’t know what they think, but that scenario alone is ridiculous. I suppose that’s why they had to let me go.”
    â€œWho was the guy who tried to sneak off with you?”
    â€œI wish I knew.”
    â€œOr maybe you better wish you don’t ever find out,” Ben said.
    â€œYou’re probably right,” I admitted, suppressing a shiver at the memory of the cold fury in his eyes when he realized he’d lost me. “He had a really weird tattoo that looked like a combination of a dragon, snake and shark on his neck.”
    â€œA dragsnashark—sure, you see those everywhere.”
    My head snapped up. “Really?”
    â€œNo, Bee Bee, I’m joking. It sounds like some kind of gangland mark.”
    â€œI don’t know what a gang would want with hassling me. Plus, the guy