A Thin Disguise by Catherine Bybee

CHAPTER THREE

One minute she was growling at him, the next she was grabbing his arm, and they were both down on the dirty sidewalk of the Las Vegas Strip.

He heard a horn blaring and tires screeching.

Leo rolled over to see the taillights of a car speeding off and around the corner.

“What the hell?”

Then someone screamed, pulling Leo’s attention to the woman at his side.

She was still.

Too still.

The small jacket she was wearing had moved enough for him to see blood coming from the left side of her chest.

Adrenaline surged and he pushed himself up to hover over her.

“Hey,” he said, gently touching to see if she would open her eyes.

Nothing.

He leaned down, put his ear to her lips.

The air on his face said she was alive.

Leo reached for his phone and dialed 911 as the crowd surrounded them.

He took the liberty of lifting her jacket to see if there were any other holes in her and then did a scan of her body with his eyes and fingertips as the phone rang and rang.

“Come on, damn it. Answer the phone.”

Not finding more, he moved to her shoulder. He wanted to turn her over, see if there was an exit wound, but she was out cold, and moving her wasn’t an option.

“911, what’s your emergency?”

“Special Agent Leo Grant. I need an ambulance. Single gunshot wound to the chest, female, approximately thirty years old.” He looked up. “We’re in front of the Venetian on the sidewalk.”

“Is the victim breathing?”

“Yes, but unconscious. Hurry.”

His breath came in short, fast pants. What the hell had happened?

A drive-by, of course, but who? She must have seen the gun and reacted. If she hadn’t, he’d likely be the one on the ground and not her.

Security guards from the Venetian showed up first. Then a local black-and-white.

Between them, the crowd was pushed back to keep Leo and the woman from being stepped on.

Leo disconnected from the 911 operator and stared down at the woman who’d taken a bullet aimed at him. All because he found her attractive and intriguing and wanted to know who she was.

He’d hung around the Wynn for more than two hours, watching those coming and going in an attempt to find who it was that had generated the call from Claire.

“You’re following Navi at the hotel,” she’d told him once he’d picked up the phone the second he left the restaurant.

“Do you have a bug on me?”

“No. We have one on him. And you’re messing up our intel.”

“You know that’s not your job here.”

Claire worked for a security detail that had been essential in flushing out Mykonos and all the sordid details of Marie Nickerson’s case. And while they weren’t the ones protecting the woman at the moment, he knew Claire’s team was just as invested in seeing Mykonos locked away. So having Claire call him wasn’t as much of a surprise as it would have been in any other case.

“I’m a private investigator, licensed in the state of Nevada,” she reminded him. “Navi knows who you are, but not who we have on him. So get out of there.”

“I liked it better when you were the student and I was the teacher telling you what to do.” When he met Claire, he was undercover as a high school teacher and she was in his class.

“Ha! Even as my teacher you didn’t stand a chance of telling me what to do. Now leave the casino.”

Even though he knew she was right, he grumbled and bitched before hanging up.

He left the inside of the hotel, but that didn’t mean Leo was gone.

And when the blonde in shorts walked out and headed toward the Strip, Leo abandoned his post and followed her.

Yeah, maybe it was creepy, but something told him to keep his pace.

It was the first time a woman turned his head this much since . . . well, in a long time.

And now his flirting had resulted in her unconscious with a gunshot wound.

Her breathing was steady and fast, and although there wasn’t an excessive amount of blood on the pavement, it didn’t mean she wasn’t bleeding on the inside.

When the paramedics arrived, Leo finally stood back.

It took only a few minutes for the team to expose her chest and find the hole the bullet had put in her.

The older medic on the team found a small wallet in her pocket and a cell phone.

Once they put a collar on her neck and had her on a gurney, they were rushing toward the ambulance.

Leo followed and climbed inside after them.

“Has she been drinking? Drugs?”

“I don’t know. I don’t think so.”

He needed to call this in. Let his boss know what was going on. The person who did this was likely long gone by now. Or waiting for another shot.

The medic spread his fingers and pushed around on her head.

That’s when they noticed a wig.

Leo looked closer as they attempted to remove the blonde and reveal the brunette. Because some of the blonde strands were trapped inside the cervical collar, the medic found a pair of scissors and started cutting at the thing.

He pulled bits of the wig away, and with it, a significant amount of blood flowed.

A moment of panic struck Leo. “Was she shot in the head?”

The medic looked closer as the driver wove through traffic.

“I don’t think so. I don’t see a hole. Probably happened when she went down.”

Minutes later they backed into an ambulance bay at the hospital.

Leo jumped out first, and the medics rushed past him to the waiting staff members, who hurried the woman out of sight.

He walked in and stopped at the trauma bay doors while the emergency room staff did their jobs.

“Damn it!” He pulled out his phone to call his boss.

Blood stained the tips of his fingers.

Gunshot victims always generated a lot of activity in emergency rooms. But bullets put into people while in the presence of the police or, in Leo’s case, a federal agent generated a small army.

Las Vegas police had a good showing of force, and a few agents from Leo’s team joined him. Leo’s boss was en route to an airport along with that small army.

“Who’s the girl?” Kelsey Fitzpatrick, or Fitz, as everyone called her, had partnered up with him as soon as he finished his undercover assignment six months ago. They both lived in Southern California and were in Vegas for the trial.

Fitz was eight years older than him and had celebrated her fortieth birthday a few years back by divorcing her husband of ten years.

They were both in transition, and so far, the partnering was working out.

But the way Fitz was looking at him, with her sharp eyes and hair pulled back to the nape of her neck, Leo felt as if her words were more of an accusation than a question.

“Just a girl.”

Fitz looked down the length of her nose with a practiced stare.

“I swear.”

“She come to you, or you go to her?”

Leo sat back in the waiting room chair. The staff had designated a small space for the officers and agents to come and go. Isolated and out of the way.

The woman they were talking about had been rushed from the ER to the OR where they were working on her.

“I approached her.”

“Why?”

He’d be asking the same questions if it were Fitz who’d nearly gotten shot.

“She’s attractive.”

Those eyes that were focused on the tip of her nose closed, and Fitz shook her head. “You were picking her up?”

“No.” That wasn’t exactly the truth. “I was looking for a name . . . maybe a phone number.”

Fitz wasn’t amused. “Trying to hook up.”

“For later. After the case.”

“Tell me again how she went down.”

Leo sighed, told the story again. “We were talking. She was facing the oncoming traffic. Suddenly she looked behind me and shouted. She must have seen the shooter. She grabbed me, and the next thing I knew we were both on the pavement.”

“How many shots were fired?”

“Couldn’t tell you. I didn’t hear the shot. They obviously used a silencer. The people around us didn’t react until the car sped away.” If he concentrated hard enough, he could remember the dull thud of a gunshot through a silencer, but the commotion of being pulled to the ground and tires . . . yeah, he wouldn’t swear to what he heard.

Fitz started to pace. A habit when she was thinking. “Did she push you away, or pull you toward her?”

“She didn’t push. She grabbed my arm.” He looked at his forearm as if seeing her fingers gripping him.

“Let’s hope she wakes up so we can question what she saw.”

Leo ran a hand through his hair. “Let’s just hope she wakes up. We both know that gun was pointed at me. If she hadn’t yelled, and I hadn’t moved . . .”

“I don’t know what the hell you were thinking going in there after Navi.”

“I was watching. Seeing who he talked to . . . met with. It’s called investigating.”

“Doesn’t do any good if you’re seen.”

Leo knew Fitz’s words were going to be repeated once their boss arrived.

“Can’t imagine Navi is dumb enough to try this after talking with me face-to-face.” Mob bosses might be complete scumbags, but they weren’t stupid.

“Unless the alibi for him and his men is rock solid.”

“I’m sure it is.”

“Which means you almost got popped for nothing. Did you at least get her name?”

“I was working on it.” The hospital had her listed as a Jane Doe. The wallet in her pocket had some cash and a casino voucher for two hundred and change. No ID. They weren’t able to get into her cell phone without facial recognition, and no one thought to try and unlock it until after she’d been wheeled off to the OR.

That had been two hours ago and no word on her condition.

“I need a cigarette,” he said aloud.

“You don’t smoke.”

He’d quit two years prior, but that didn’t stop his desire to smoke.

Leo pushed out of the chair and rolled his head around in an effort to clear the kinks.

It didn’t work.

The door to the waiting room opened, and the surgeon walked in, still wearing blue surgical scrubs complete with a hat. “She’s going to make it,” he said.

Leo released a long breath and sat back down.

“The bullet made a bit of a mess before exiting her body. A centimeter more and she would have likely bled out on the street before getting here. She’s lucky.”

“When will we be able to talk to her?” Fitz asked.

The doctor shook his head. “I’m keeping her sedated and on a ventilator for at least the next twelve hours.”

“Any idea why she was unconscious?” Leo asked.

“She hit the pavement pretty hard, decent laceration on the back of her head, but there wasn’t anything on the CT to indicate any long-term issue. A repeat CT will confirm that. When we take her off the vent, she should wake up.”

Leo and Fitz exchanged glances.

“Do you have her identity yet?”

“No,” Fitz answered.

The doctor shook his head. “We get a lot of Jane and John Does in Vegas. Eventually someone comes looking for them, often the police.”

“I’m sure that’s true.” Vegas didn’t earn the name Sin City for nothing.

When the surgeon turned to leave, Leo stood and put out his hand. “Thank you.”

“Of course.”

With a nod, he left the room.

Leo looked at his watch. “We have about four hours until Brackett arrives. You might as well go back to the hotel and get some rest.”

“What about you?”

He shook his head. “Better I stay here, get as much information from the locals so I have something to tell our boss when he gets here.”

Fitz looked as if she wanted to say something, but instead turned toward the door. She stopped. “If you do come back to the hotel . . .”

“I’ll take a police escort. No need to give the shooter a second chance.”

Fitz glanced over her shoulder. “For what it’s worth, I’m glad it’s her in the ICU and not you.”

Leo couldn’t say the same.

He lifted his tired ass out of the chair in search of fresh coffee.

It was going to be a very long night.

“You look like shit.”

Leo had managed an hour of chair sleeping in the waiting room before Brackett arrived and delivered a crap sandwich.

Now, in the early hours of the following day, Leo stood outside the courtroom doors with Neil MacBain passing judgment.

“Rough night.”

Neil was the head of the investigative team that had taken Mykonos down.

The man was big, the kind of big that you saw walking toward you in a dark alley and you hopped barbwire fences to avoid. Retired military, with a team filled with highly skilled special ops individuals that the feds would love to get their hands on. But those talents were happy in the private sector.

“I heard. How’s the girl?”

“Still in the ICU. Hoping she’s awake by the time I get back.”

“Any idea who did it?”

“Who squeezed the trigger and who asked for it to be squeezed are two different things.” Leo nodded toward the closed door of the courtroom. “Your guess is as solid as mine.”

Neil shifted his gaze without moving a muscle in his body. “I’ve sent Claire and Cooper back to LA. They were visible, you were visible.”

Yeah, Claire had pretended to be a high school student and Cooper a substitute teacher and coach in the sting to flush out Mykonos. It would be easy to assume Neil’s team could be a target as well. “Smart. Although I doubt they liked that.”

“I’m the boss.”

“When I spoke with Claire last night, she said you had eyes on Navi.”

“We do.”

“Wanna elaborate?”

Neil looked at him dead-on, then away without answering.

“Okay. If you have anything solid, you’ll share?”

Neil gave a quick nod, and then focused on the open space in the foyer. “Claire and Cooper’s replacements are here.” Without saying anything else, Neil stepped away.

Behind him, Fitz walked up with two cups of coffee, handed one to him. “You look like—”

“Shit! I know.” Leo accepted the coffee and added the new caffeine to the old. “Thanks,” he muttered, putting the cup to his lips.

Leo was halfway through his coffee when the lawyers arrived.

Mykonos had three high-profile, high-dollar, and high-attitude attorneys wearing suits that cost more than Leo made in a month.

It was nauseating.

Whoever said crime didn’t pay had their head up their ass. As that thought drifted through Leo’s mind, he followed the district attorneys into the courtroom and took a seat. One look at the victim . . . the twenty-year-old girl who’d lost her dignity, her innocence, and any value she had for her own life reinstated Leo’s desire for cheap suits and the path for right versus wrong.

Marie Nickerson had been sold into the sex trade at the age of sixteen.

Human trafficking took the form of a boyfriend who convinced her to join him in Vegas with a fake ID and the promise of a good time. Next thing the girl knew, she belonged to Mykonos.

And when she tried to escape Mykonos and the life he’d forced upon her, she was rewarded with attempted murder and dismemberment.

Her physical wounds had healed. The bruises gone, her hair grown back. But if you looked close enough, you saw a thinning at the base of her skull where the burn was too deep and the hair wouldn’t regrow.

Then there was the look in her eyes.

Empty.

Soulless.

Her eyes tracked Mykonos with palpable fear.

Every second of the trial was one second closer to her throwing in the towel and backtracking on her testimony.

Fear stopped victims from righting wrongs every second of every day.

The way Mykonos stared at Marie would make most people shrivel into a ball of dust as if Medusa herself had narrowed her gaze on them.

Every once in a while, Mykonos splayed his lies for the jury to hear, his easy smile and charming personality weaving a tale just as fanciful as Cinderella’s. Only he used broad strokes to describe his role as fairy godmother giving a young woman a home and security even though she was unfaithful to him. The defense’s case was based on a relationship where Marie was in the wrong, addicted to sex and drugs, and Mykonos was the hero.

But today was about cross-examination and closing arguments. His story wouldn’t hold up.

Or so Leo hoped.

The district attorneys wanted Mykonos and all of his kind exiled from Las Vegas as soon as humanly possible. He, and those like him, soiled the already slippery landscape that encompassed the Vegas lifestyle. Gamble, drink, have sex with strangers . . . but leave the kids out of the equation. Nothing infuriated the powers that be more than sexual predators targeting children.

No matter how much Mykonos tried to convince the jury that Marie was an adult, one look at her said something different. Yes, she was twenty now . . . but the photographs of her at sixteen running for her high school cross-country team painted a different picture.

All of those visuals were courtesy of Neil and his team.

The evidence against Mykonos trumped everything his fancy-suit-wearing attorneys could come up with.

The only way the jury would deliver anything but a guilty verdict would be with someone fucking with them. Which was where Navi stepped in.

The jury, however, had been sequestered for the duration.

And hopefully that safeguard hadn’t been compromised.

The courtroom filled, the doors closed, and the judge made his way to the bench.