"I think we have a lot of questions," Bill said. "Now let's go find out some answers."
Our first stop was my house, where I left Jannalynn's jacket and opened the bag Bill had brought.
"Good God," I said in disgust. "I got to wear that?"
"Part of the plan," Bill said, though he was smiling.
I stomped into my room and pulled on the blue "flirty" skirt, which began well below my navel and ended about two inches below my happy place. The "blouse"-and it was a blouse in name only-was white with red trim and tied between my breasts. It was just like a bra with sleeves. I put on white Nikes with red trim, which was the best match I had on my shoe rack. There sure wasn't any pocket in this outfit, so I stuck the cluviel dor in my shoulder bag. While I was preparing for this secret mission, I put my phone on vibrate so it couldn't ring at an awkward moment. I looked in the bathroom mirror. I was as ready as I'd ever be.
I felt ridiculously self-conscious when I came into the living room wearing the abbreviated outfit.
"You look just right," Bill said soberly, and I caught the corner of his mouth twitching. I had to laugh.
"I hope Sam doesn't decide we ought to dress this way at Merlotte's," I said.
"You would have a full house every night," Bill said.
"Not unless I lost some weight." My glance in the mirror had reminded me that my stomach was not exactly concave.
"You look mouthwatering," Bill said, and to make his point his fangs came down. He tactfully closed his mouth.
"Oh, well." I tried to accept this as an impersonal tribute, though I don't think any woman minds knowing she looks good, as long as the admiration isn't expressed in an offensive way and doesn't come from a disgusting source. "We better get going."
The Trifecta, a hotel/casino on the east side of Shreveport, was the closest thing the town had to "glamorous." At night it glowed silver with so many lights I was sure you could see it from the moon. Since the lot was full, we were forced to park outside the fenced employee parking area. But the gate was open and unguarded at the moment, so we simply walked through the lot and right up to the very prosaic beige metal door that was the employee entrance.
There was a keypad outside. Though I felt dismayed, Bill didn't seem worried. He looked down at his watch and then knocked on the door. There were some faint beeps inside, and Palomino swung the door open. She was balancing a room service tray on one hand. Laden as it was, that was an impressive achievement.
The young vampire was wearing the same outfit I was, and she looked mouthwatering in it. But at the moment, her appearance was the last thing on her mind. "Get in!" she snapped, and Bill and I entered the grungy back corridor. If you got to enter the Trifecta as a guest, it was glittery and gleaming and full of the constant machine noise and the frantic human yearning for pleasure that fills all casinos. But that wasn't for us, not tonight.
Wordlessly, Palomino set off at a fast clip. I noticed that she was able to balance the tray perfectly, no matter how much her speed picked up. I scurried after the two vampires along the beige-painted corridors, marred with scratches and chips. Everyone back here was in a hurry to get where they needed to be, either at a work station or out the back door to go somewhere more pleasant. They were saving their smiles for people they cared about. I saw a half-remembered face among the grim horde, and after I passed I recalled that she was one of the Long Tooth pack. She didn't let on by a twitch or a smile that she knew who I was.
Palomino strode ahead of us, her light-brown skin looking warm even though she'd been dead for years, her pale hair bouncing over a depressingly tight butt. We hustled onto a huge elevator. Instead of being lined with mirrors and shiny rails, this one was padded. The staff elevator was obviously used for bringing up palettes of food and other heavy items.
"I hate this fucking job," Palomino said as she jabbed a button. She glared at Bill.
"It's only for a little while," he said, and from his voice I could tell he'd told her the same thing many times before. "And then you can quit. You can quit dating the Were, too."
She was mollified and even managed to smile. "He's on the fifth floor, in 507," she said. "I walked all over this damn hotel tracking him, but since they didn't station guards outside the room, I couldn't pinpoint it until last night when I took in the room service tray."
"You've done a good job. Eric will be grateful," Bill said.
Her smile glowed even brighter. "Good! That's what I was hoping! Now Rubio and Parker may get a chance to show their skills." The two vampires were her nestmates. They were not great fighters. I hoped they did have other skills.
"I'll present that to Eric in the most urgent terms," Bill promised.
The staff elevator stopped, and Palomino handed the tray to me. I had to use both my hands. Lots of food and three drinks weighed it down. She pressed the Doors Closed button and began to talk very quickly.
"Keep your head turned away, and they'll think you're me," she said.
"No one would think that," I said, but after a second I could sort of see it.
Palomino was naturally brown, and I was very tan. Palomino's hair was paler than mine, but mine was as abundant and long. We were much the same height and build, and we were wearing identical outfits.
"I'm going to go be conspicuous out front," she said. "Give me three minutes to get within sight of the security cameras. I'll meet you at the back door ten minutes after that. Now, get off the elevator so I can go."
We got off. Bill held the tray for me while I took my hair out of its ponytail and shook my head from side to side to increase my resemblance to the vampire.
"As long as you had her here, why couldn't she have done this?" I hissed.
"This way she can be visibly elsewhere," Bill said. "If Felipe suspected her complicity, he could have her killed. He can't do that to you. You're Eric's wife. But that's a worst-case scenario. We'll pull the trick off." He pulled a khaki fishing hat out of his back pocket and pulled it over his head. I forbore to comment on the way he looked.
"What trick?" I asked, instead.
"Well, it is a sort of conjuring trick," he said. "Now you see him. Now you don't. Remember, there are two guards in there with him. They'll open the door, and your job is to make sure it stays open. I'll come in and do the rest."
"You couldn't just break the door down?"
"And have security here in two minutes? I don't think that would be a good plan."
"I'm not sure this is, either. But okay."
I marched down the hall and knocked on the door of 507 with the knuckles of my left hand, managing this by kind of wedging the tray into the corner formed by the door and its frame. I smiled big at the peephole and took a deep breath to let my chest do its thing. I sensed the appreciation through the door. I counted the heads inside the room: three, as Bill had told me.
The tray was not getting any lighter, and I was conscious of a definite relief when the door opened. I could hear Bill's footsteps coming up behind me.
"All right, come on in," said a bored voice.
Of course, both of the guards were human. They would have to be on duty during the day, too.
"Where you want this?" I asked.
"Over there on the coffee table'll be fine." He was very tall, pretty heavy, with very short gray hair. I smiled at him and bore the laden tray over to the low table. I squatted and slid it into place. The other guard was with Colton in the bathroom, waiting until I left to emerge; I read that right from his brain.
The room door was still open, but the guard was standing close to it. After a second's anxious search I spotted the plastic folder containing the check and handed it to the hulk without getting closer to him. He made a little face but moved nearer, his hand extended, the door he'd released beginning to swing shut. But in slid Bill, moving smoothly and silently at the man's back. While I kept my eyes fixed on the folder, Bill reached up and around to hit the man in the temple. The guard dropped like a sack of wet oatmeal.
I grabbed a napkin from the tray and wiped my fingerprints off the tray and the folder while Bill shut the room door.
"Dewey?" said the man in the bathroom. "She gone yet?"
"Uh-huh," Bill said, deepening his voice.
The second guard must have sensed something was up, because he had a gun in his hand when he opened the bathroom door. He might have been prepared with weaponry, but he wasn't mentally prepared, because at the sight of two strangers he froze, his eyes widening. It was just for a second, but that was all it took for Bill to leap onto him and sock him in the same place he'd hit the hulk. I kicked the gun under the couch when it fell from the guard's hand.
Bill hurried to pull the unconscious man out of the way while I darted into the bathroom to untie Colton. It was like we'd done this a dozen times! I confess I felt pretty proud at the way it was going.
I looked Colton over while I began working on the duct tape across his mouth. He was not in great shape. Colton had worked for Felipe in Reno and then followed Victor to Louisiana, where he'd been employed at Vampire's Kiss. His apparent devotion hadn't stemmed from affection but from a thirst for vengeance; Colton's mother had died as a result of Victor's teaching a lesson to Colton's half brother. Carelessly, Victor had never dug deep enough to get the connection, and as a result, Colton had been a great help to the Shreveport plan to eradicate Victor. His lover Audrina had taken part in the fight and paid for her devotion with her life. I hadn't seen Colton since that night, but I'd known he'd stayed in the area and even kept his job at Vampire's Kiss.
Colton's gray eyes were full of tears after I yanked the duct tape off. His first words were a stream of profanity.
"Bill, we need a handcuff key," I said, and as Bill began rummaging in the guards' pockets to track it down, I cut the tape around Colton's ankles. Bill threw the key to me, and I unlocked the cuffs. Once I tossed them aside, Colton didn't know what he wanted to do first: rub his wrists or massage his stinging face. Instead, he flung his arms around me and said, "God bless you."
I was startled and touched. I said, "This was Bill's plan, and now we've got to skedaddle before anyone comes looking. Those guys will come to eventually." Bill had reused the handcuffs on the hulk and was using Second Guard's own belt to secure his arms. The roll of duct tape they'd used on Colton was also heavily deployed.
"See how you like that, motherfuckers," Colton said, with some satisfaction. He stood up and we went to the door. "Thanks, Mr. Comp-ton."
"My pleasure," Bill said drily.
Colton seemed to take in my scanty outfit for the first time, and his gray eyes widened. "Wow," he said, one hand on the doorknob. "When Palomino brought in the food last night, I caught a glimpse of her. I hoped she recognized me and would do something for me, but I never expected this." He looked at me again before forcing his eyes away. "Wow," he said, and swallowed.
"If you've finished ogling Eric's woman, it's time to get out of here," Bill said. If his voice had been dry before, it was toast now.
"Just don't let anyone see me," Colton said. "And after I get out of this town, I never want to talk to another vampire in my life."
"Though we've risked our lives to rescue you," Bill said.
"Time to work out the philosophy later," I said, and they both nodded. In a second, we were on the move. I had a napkin in my hand, and I used it when I shut the door of 507 behind us. We went down the hall in single file and reached the staff elevator, passing only one couple on our journey. They were completely wrapped up in each other and didn't do more than stop groping for a moment in reaction to our presence. The staff elevator came quickly, and we stepped on to join a middle-aged woman who was carrying some dry cleaning in a plastic bag. She nodded to us and kept her eyes on the floor indicator. We had to go up with her before we could go down, and my palms started sweating with anxiety. She was ignoring Colton's disheveled condition with a deliberate air. She didn't want to know, which was great. It was a relief when she stepped off.
When we began our descent, I was terrified someone would be waiting for us on the fifth floor; the door would open, and we'd be confronted with the two men we'd left bound. But that didn't happen. We got down to the second floor, and the doors whooshed open. There were several other workers there: another room service server with a rolling cart, a bellman, and a woman in a black suit. She was very well groomed and wearing high heels, too, so she was definitely higher up on the food chain.
She was the only one who paid us any attention when they all crowded on. "Server," she said sharply. "Where's your name tag?" Palo-mino had worn one on the upper slope of her right breast, so I clapped my hand to the place mine should have been. "Sorry, it must have fallen off," I said apologetically.
"Get another one right away," she said, and I looked at her tag. "M. Norman," it said. I was sure I wouldn't get a surname. Mine would say "Candi" or "Brandi" or "Sandi."
"Yes, ma'am," I said, since now was not a time to start a class war.
M. Norman's gaze went to Colton's handsome face, admittedly marred by the removal of the duct tape and admittedly a little bruised. I could see a little crease between her brows as she tried to figure out what could have happened to him and if she should ask any questions. But her tailored shoulders lifted in a tiny shrug. She'd exerted her authority sufficiently for one night.