“When you look at me, do you think Daddy?” Dominic asked Carlos on Monday night.
Carlos coughed up a mouthful of beer, then grabbed a paper towel to wipe his chin. He gave Dominic a startled glance that turned thoughtful as his eyes swept Dominic from head to toe.
“Yeah, kinda,” he said.
Having expected to be laughed off, Dominic opened his mouth only to make a strangled, indignant noise.
“Oh, come on, Dom.” Carlos flapped a hand in his direction. “You’re a big, muscley dude, you’ve got the chest hair going on, the gravelly voice . . . How did this become a topic of conversation, exactly?”
Dominic sighed and scratched Rebel’s ears. She was sitting on his right foot, leaning her entire weight against his leg, her head propped on his knee.
He’d been revisiting his night with Luis all day, intrusive thoughts distracting him while he was trying to work. He’d cooked a vegetarian lasagna for lunch, eaten a small part of it, and brought the rest over to Carlos and Jasmine’s apartment for dinner under a pretense of “too much left over” that they’d both seen through immediately. But Dominic felt he at least owed them dinner if he was going to use them as a sounding board for an issue like this one.
“The guy I hooked up with last night called me Daddy while we were fucking.”
Carlos snorted out a laugh, then pressed his lips together. “Sorry. That can’t be the first time that’s happened to you, though.”
“It is!”
“Really? With all the twinky college boys you mess around with?”
Dominic rolled his eyes.
“What do you expect from sex with someone ten years younger than you?” Carlos asked. “You think a college kid is going to relate to you the same way he would to a guy his own age? That’s not going to happen.”
As Dominic shifted in discomfort, Rebel made a huffing noise and butted her head against his leg. He smoothed his hand down between her ears to the scruff of her neck.
Watching him, Carlos frowned. “Is it really bothering you that much? I get it if you’re not into that kind of thing, but it’s not an insult. If anything, it’s a compliment.”
“I . . .” The truth was, Dominic knew why he’d had such a strong reaction to what had happened last night—it had come too close on the heels of the unsettling conversation he’d had with his mother. He enjoyed his life the way it was, but what kind of future was he looking at?
Jasmine came into the living room from the kitchen, where she’d been reheating the lasagna in the oven. “What are you guys talking about?” she asked as she set the pan down beside a stack of mismatched plates.
“Dom’s hookup last night called him Daddy.”
“That’s what you get for robbing the cradle,” she said promptly. She sat down next to Carlos on the couch; when he moved to lean forward and serve himself, she caught his arm and gave him a stern look until he settled back against the cushions. His chest was still bandaged and the drains in place, though he’d told Dominic that they might come out tomorrow.
“Ten years isn’t cradle-robbing,” Dominic said.
“Maybe not, but where is it going to get you?” Jasmine sliced into the lasagna. “In all the time we’ve known you, you’ve never had a serious boyfriend.”
“I’ve had boyfriends.”
“I said serious.”
“Hey, you can’t put that all on me.” He accepted the plate and fork she handed to him. “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell was in effect the entire time I was in the Army—that’s most of my adult life to date. I didn’t have a lot of options.”
Cracking open her own bottle of beer, Jasmine said, “You left the Army four years ago.”
Touché. Appearances aside, however, Dominic wasn’t opposed to commitment in and of itself. He’d just never met a man he wanted to make a real commitment to.
Carlos and Jasmine—they’d been lucky to find each other, to meet that person who was best friend and lover and partner all rolled into one. Even in a simple moment like this one, eating leftover lasagna side-by-side with Jasmine’s bare foot hooked casually around Carlos’s ankle, the quiet strength of their love was palpable. Just being around them always lifted Dominic’s spirits.
“What time should we leave for your doctor’s appointment tomorrow?” he said to Carlos, changing the subject entirely. He’d done enough talking about himself for one night.
After dinner, he returned Rebel to his apartment and swapped car keys with Carlos, leaving his pickup in the lot and sliding behind the wheel of Carlos’s black Toyota Camry. It was a much subtler car, easily able to blend with traffic, which was something he needed tonight.
He’d spent the day ignoring his bounties in favor of creating a map of the flow of ketamine in Las Vegas. Utilizing electronic records searches and reaching out to the web of contacts he’d established throughout the city, he had started with the names he’d learned last night and worked outward from there, sketching likely supply lines as he went.
Most of the leads had turned into dead ends. Ketamine had plenty of legal uses; rather than manufacture the drug themselves, its illicit users stole or otherwise diverted it from legitimate sources that were licensed to produce, transport, or administer it. Almost all of the dealers he traced seemed to have their own private hookup—he was willing to bet on professionals who worked around ketamine and were willing to misplace discreet amounts for some extra cash.
Those connections would be too difficult for him to clarify without actual law enforcement powers, and it wouldn’t do him any good, anyway. Hookups like that produced small yields—good for supplying intimate circles at raves and clubs, but not enough to keep a serial killer flush. They also relied on personal relationships, which any intelligent killer would try to avoid as much as possible.
The killer might hop from one small-time dealer to another, but why risk it when they anticipated needing a large supply over the long term? It made more sense to establish a larger-scale, more impersonal source from the start. And there was one person who seemed the likeliest link in the chain.
Juan Morales was a name Dominic had run into several times while following connections between the city’s dealers. He regularly supplied at least four other people with not only ketamine, but Ecstasy, Adderall, and a host of prescription painkillers. All of that product was coming from somewhere.
It had been the work of seconds for Dominic to track down Morales’s day job, a retail position at one of the shops at CityCenter. A brief call to the store’s manager pretending to be a creditor had earned him—in addition to a rude brush-off—Morales’s work schedule for the day. He had just enough time now to get down to the Strip before Morales clocked out.
DMV records indicated that Morales neither owned a car nor possessed a driver’s license, so Dominic was relying on the probability that he used public transportation. Hanging around CityCenter in a car in the thick evening traffic wasn’t the most workable approach; instead, Dominic cruised up and down the Strip between the two bus stops closest to Morales’s workplace, keeping the picture from Morales’s Nevada state ID on the center console for reference.
Sure enough, on his second pass, he spotted Morales waiting at a stop on the east side of the Strip. Morales was an attractive Latino man, about mid-twenties, with dark slicked-back hair and a lean body that Dominic wouldn’t mind getting a better look at under different circumstances. As Dominic drove by, he saw Morales hop out of his seat under the bus shelter and offer it to an elderly woman who had just ambled up.
Since he was on the wrong side of the street, Dominic had to continue south until he could get back on the northbound side. By the time he reached the bus stop, Morales was already gone—but city buses were easy to follow in slow traffic. Dominic checked the bus schedule on his phone to confirm the route and kept an eye on it as he gradually caught up.
Morales got off at a Downtown bus stop and headed straight for the nearest bar. Dominic finagled himself one of the limited street-parking spaces nearby, resigning himself to a long night.
For the next few hours, Morales hopped from bar to bar throughout the neighborhood—though whether for business or pleasure, Dominic couldn’t tell. He seemed to be a popular, friendly guy, exchanging broad smiles and fist bumps with people he ran into on the sidewalk.
Dominic wasn’t going to learn much of use this way. It would be better if he could actually follow Morales inside and watch him in action, but one of the downsides of Dominic’s size was that he couldn’t go anywhere unnoticed. If Morales saw him in more than one place, it would raise suspicion.
He could try to arrange a casual run-in at one of these bars later this week, strike up a conversation with Morales as if he didn’t know who he was and see where that took him. It was a technique Dominic had used in the past to great effect.
Of course, all the other times he’d done that, it had been in pursuit of a bounty he would be paid for finding. He’d spent today conducting unpaid investigative work that nobody had even asked him to do, instead of tracking people who had actual prices on their heads. Why was he wasting his time this way?
It was just . . . He couldn’t shake the image of Goodwin’s posed, rotting body. He’d seen horrors with the Rangers, things he’d never forget, but nothing that had struck him quite the way Saturday’s crime scene had. The contempt with which the killer had handled Goodwin’s body, the sheer arrogance and sense of superiority that had come through in the tableau—it was as if the killer hadn’t considered Goodwin human at all. Dominic couldn’t focus on anything else, knowing a person like that was out walking around the city planning their next murder.
Shortly after eleven, Morales came out of the latest bar and got into a car with another man. Dominic let them get half a block away before he pulled away from the curb to follow, jotting down the make, model, and license plate on a notepad in the center console.
They headed east, into a more residential area, and after a few minutes, the back of Dominic’s neck prickled with unease. The neighborhood they were cruising through now was economically depressed, well-known for a high crime rate. Signs of the city’s neglect were everywhere—crumbling buildings, cracked sidewalks, broken street lamps nobody had bothered to replace. This wasn’t where Morales lived, so what was he doing here?
The car stopped in front of a small house where several young men and women were hanging out and smoking on the front stoop. Morales got out of the car, slapped the roof to bid the driver goodbye, and trotted up toward the house, cheerfully greeting the people there before proceeding inside. His friend in the car drove away.
Dominic dared to get closer, inching along the opposite side of the street. As he approached, one of the women turned sideways to stub her cigarette out in an ashtray, giving him a good view of her bare, muscled upper arm—and the abstract black tattoo of a hornet preparing to strike. The man next to her had the same tattoo on the side of his neck. And the hornet symbol was spray-painted on the corner of the house’s garage door.
This was fucking gang territory.
Dominic stopped the car where he was, his hands tightening on the wheel. None of his sources had mentioned anything about Morales being ganged up. But this house—and these people—indisputably belonged to Los Avispones.
This was a big flashing neon sign for Dominic to back off. Though he balked at the idea of admitting defeat, he wasn’t equipped to handle likely gang involvement in drug trades. Smarter to give the cops the information he’d learned so far and let them take it from here.
It would also be smart to drive away now before he got his ass shot.
He headed back toward his own neighborhood. Once he was in a somewhat safer part of the city, he stopped at a gas station to refill Carlos’s tank, then ducked inside the store to grab a burrito, a bag of chips, and—because he felt guilty about all the junk food—a banana.
He was already tearing into the burrito, the bag with the rest of the stuff dangling from his free hand, when he walked out of the store. There was something tucked underneath the wipers on the Camry’s windshield, and he groaned. He was not in a good headspace to deal with casino flyers right now.
He continued walking, got a better look at the windshield, and stopped in his tracks, choking on his mouthful of burrito.
It wasn’t a flyer. It was a playing card. And even from here, he could see that it was the seven of spades.
He forced himself to swallow his food and dropped the burrito into the bag. Feeling as if he were walking in a dream, he advanced toward the car and plucked the card from the windshield. There was nothing unusual about it; it was the same basic, ubiquitous brand sold everywhere in America. The same brand left at Goodwin’s crime scene.
He flipped it over and breathed out in one harsh exhalation.
A simple smiley face had been drawn in black marker on the abstract red background.