Page 3 of Blind Luck

CHAPTER 2

ERIN

Some you win, some you lose.

Thursday lunchtime found us sitting in the Library on the second floor of the Galaxy Hotel. And when I said “the Library,” I meant a bar called the Library that had bookshelves lining the walls and a menu where everything came with fries. Two men were sitting next to us, talking way too loudly about cars, and Ari kept giving melookswhenever I picked up my cutlery because she knew I wanted to stab one or both of them in the eye with a fork.

At least the fries were crispy.

I’d gone from the perfectest villa on the West Coast to the shonkiest hotel in Vegas, and now I didn’t even have hot water.

“Does your shower work?” I asked Ari. “I turned mine on, and cold water came out, so I thought that maybe it was labelled wrong, but when I turned the knob the other way, the water was still cold.”

“Mine works okay. Did you try calling guest services?”

“You said we should keep a low profile.”

“Yes, by acting like regular guests. A regular guest would call about the hot water.”

“Okay, I’ll call about the hot water.”

Great, one of the car dudes was playing a video on his phone, volume on full. Was it possible to ram a phone up a man’s ass? You always heard stories about doctors removing weird things from rectums in the ER, but you never found out how they got there. Now I knew.

Before we came to the Library, we’d met Jerry in a tiny apartment that she’d referred to as “my apartment” but it didn’t seem very homey, even if there was an art print of a cute kitten hanging on the wall and a variety of dirty mugs littering the counter.

“I don’t recognise him,” Ari had said when Jerry showed us a blurry photo of Jimmy on her laptop screen. “This is the only picture you have?”

“The Galaxy is suffering from a lack of security.”

“And hot water,” I’d muttered, but Jerry ignored me.

“Is that how he was able to get into Cole’s office?”

Jerry nodded and took a sip of her coffee. She’d picked up lunch for everyone—burgers and fries—but she’d only eaten one mouthful of her burger before she pushed it away. She was also wearing a cast on one leg, which had maybe contributed to her sour mood. If I were in pain, I’d be crotchety too.

“Apparently, Jimmy knocked on the door and then walked in without waiting for an answer,” she said. “Twice. At least, he called himself Jimmy. We have no idea whether that’s his real name.”

“Tell me everything you know about the situation. Try not to leave anything out—even the smallest clue can be important.”

Jerry glanced pointedly at me, and I wasn’t dumb. She didn’t think she could trust me with the details, and I wasn’t sure whether it was because Ari had told her aboutmy past and she thought I was fragile, or because she just didn’t know me very well. “I’ll have to gloss over some parts.”

Ari sucked in a breath. “Okay, so I don’t think I want to hear the detail on those aspects anyway.”

“Detail on what aspects?” I asked, then let out a yelp when Ari kicked me underneath the table. “Never mind.”

Ari took notes as Jerry started from the beginning, detailing her initial meeting with Cole through to the latest incident—an attempted hit-and-run on Wednesday morning. She’d had a one-night stand? I’d never be brave enough to do that. She told us that Cole had inherited the Galaxy resort from his Uncle Mike, but Uncle Mike wasn’t such a great businessman, and now Cole was fighting to stop the company from going bankrupt.

“There’s an offer for the land on the table, but Cole doesn’t want to take it because the staff will lose their jobs.”

“Wouldn’t the purchaser build a new hotel?” Ari asked. “Couldn’t they apply to work there?”

“No, the owner of the Neptune wants to buy it and build a golf course on the site. His older son is a pro golfer, so it would be a family thing.”

The Neptune was the hotel next door; I knew that much. It was bigger, shinier, and classier, and it undoubtedly had hot water too.

“So he would stand to gain if the hotel went under?”

“He would.”

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