Rarities Unlimited 02 - Running Scared

questions before the Nevada Gaming Control Board. He would have to up his contributions to every politician in sight before this mess went away.
    The intercom buzzed, telling him that his executive assistant was still on duty. He approached the switch the way he would a coiled rattlesnake. “Yes?”
    “Your nephew called from a pay phone.” The voice was quiet, cultured, and female.
    “Did you tell him to give himself up to the police?” Firenze said.
    “As you requested, yes, I did.”
    “And?”
    “He declined. Vigorously.”
    Firenze could imagine. At the best of times Socks had a vicious temper. This wasn’t the best of times. He closed his eyes and tried to find a way out. There wasn’t one.
    “Connect me with the police,” he said.
    “Yes, sir. I’m sorry, sir.”
    “So am I. At least his mother isn’t alive.”
    “Yes, sir.”
    Impatiently Firenze waited while he was put through to whichever badge was chasing tips on the “Hawaiian Shooter,” as the local Vegas channel had dubbed him. It was very important that Firenze, as a casino owner, appear to be cooperating with the police.
    Not that he thought the cops had much chance of finding Socks really soon. Even his fucking stupid nephew would have enough sense to take the money his uncle had sent him and hang out on the houseboat at Lake Mead until they could cook up a passport and ship him off to some distant cousins in Italy and wait for everyone to forget his name.
    Much as Firenze wanted to throttle the miserable son of a bitch himself, blood was still blood.

Chapter 51
    Sedona
    November 4
    Night
    R isa knocked on Virgil O’Conner’s door again, waited again, knocked again. No light came on inside or out. No sound came from the small house.
    “Still no one stirring?” Shane asked as he came around from the rear of the house.
    “No. Is there a car parked back there?”
    “Just a bike.”
    “As in motorcycle?”
    “As in pedal your ass off.” While Shane spoke, he absently rubbed the back of his neck.
    “Still itchy?” she asked.
    “Yeah. You?”
    She hesitated. “It reminds me of . . .”
    “What?”
    Silence. A sigh. Her hands gleamed in the moonlight as she made a fluid gesture that managed to evoke both giving in and refusing to give in. “Wales.”
    “Where you dreamed?”
    She looked surprised that he had remembered. “Yes.”
    He turned toward the blank windows and closed door of Virgil’s home. The wood was the color of sycamore bark, ghostly. “Is the house making you itchy?”
    “Not quite. Or not only.” Risa made a frustrated sound. “Damn it, I don’t want this! I didn’t want it in Wales, and I don’t want it now.” She hissed between her teeth. “But it’s real, isn’t it?”
    “For some people.”
    “The odd ones, you mean.” The line of her mouth was unhappy.
    “Someone with musical ability is odd to people who are tone deaf.”
    “Are you?”
    “Tone deaf?” he asked, deliberately misunderstanding.
    She simply waited.
    “Yes,” he said after a minute. “I’m one of the odd ones. I guess.” He shrugged. “Hard to tell. All I know for sure is I live in a time and a place that financially rewards an understanding of numbers, of patterns, that damned few people have. The fact that many of my business choices—also known as hunches—have no basis in Western logic is politely ignored. Whenever I’m interviewed, I join in the chorus and sing about long-term trends and short-term gains and analyzing markets with fuzzy formulas and all the reassuring bullshit that explains why I’m rich and the next guy isn’t.”
    “You work hard.”
    “So do other people.”
    “You’re intelligent.”
    “So are—”
    “—other people,” she finished. “But you see things other people who are hardworking and intelligent don’t see, is that it?”
    “If seeing is another word for dreaming, and if dreaming is another word for knowing without logic, yes, I see.”
    “I missed that part of your biography,” she muttered.
    “I never told anyone except you. How many people have you told that you dream of things you have no way of logically knowing?”
    For a few moments it was so quiet that he could hear the night wind sliding down from the top of the bluffs, stirring over the land like a breath out of time.
    “You,” she whispered. “That’s it. I don’t even like admitting it to myself.”
    “Why?”
    She made a sound that could have been a laugh or a cry. “When I was a child, I