Page 120 of Blue Moon

“Uh, I don’t have that information.”

I turned to Romeo. “Minimum wage? A buck or two more?”

“She also gets tips.”

“Which are unpredictable. Is she married? Does she have a serious boyfriend?”

Monroe shook his head again. “It’s only her and Kobie now. Her husband went to prison.”

“Prison? For what?”

And could it have any link to the mess we were dealing with at the moment?

“A bar fight. The other guy had some kind of seizure and died. Nola’s a good person—she just made the mistake of marrying an asshole.”

Okay, so probably no connection.

“Other family? Brothers? Sisters? Do her parents live close by?”

“Not that she’s ever mentioned.”

“So she’s a single mom who has to pay for childcare. And how much is rent in Las Vegas? Do you see what I’m getting at? Luna’s stalker isn’t living paycheck to paycheck. He was sending her gifts and buying her dinner every night. So maybe he offered Nola enough to cover the bills for six months, and she took it.” Now Romeo had paled a shade too. “We’re gonna need her address and phone number.”

While Monroe went to find that information for Echo, I took another walk through the building with Romeo. For once, he kept his big, talented mouth shut. In the video, we’d watched the elevator numbers tick from twelve down to one without stopping, so we knew where Nola had exited. The doors opened in a short hallway with the kitchen at the far end.

“We checked all the storerooms,” Romeo told me. “She’s not in there.”

“What about this?”

“The fire exit? It’s alarmed. We’d know if anyone left that way.”

“A silent alarm? Or an audible one?”

“Audible.”

I kicked the crash bar, and the door flew open. No bells rang, no siren blared. Priest could stand down and Connor Lowes could put his shirt back on—the shitbird definitely worked at the Nile Palace. Had Mark Antony paid her to do his dirty work?

“You were saying?”

Romeo cursed liberally, in both Italian and English, as I took a look outside. The fire exit led to a corral full of dumpsters. Great. Come join my new special ops team, Priest had said. We’ll have the best toys, a generous budget, and the leeway to innovate on challenging missions, he said.

And now I had to search through trash.

Fucking fantastic.

“We need to check all these.”

Romeo looked about as happy as I felt. “You think the perp might have dumped her body?”

Honestly, no. If Mark Antony had reversed a vehicle into the corral, it would have made the perfect handover point for his victim. But I wasn’t about to cut corners, unlike some people.

“You realise nobody outside of TV uses the term ‘perp,’ right?”

“So what would you call him?”

With Emmy Black involved? A dead man walking. “You start on the left; I’ll take the right. And do it fast.”

33

---