Rarities Unlimited 02 - Running Scared

room in my office. If it’s a big ol’ bunch, then they’re somewhere else.”
    “From what Tim said, there gotta be at least twenty.”
    Holy Mary, Mother of God. “Okay. A big ol’ bunch, so we forget the powder room in my office.” She made a show of looking around the shambles that was her apartment. “I’m thinking she didn’t leave them here or you’d have found them.”
    “Unless you got some secret place?”
    “Is that what she told you?”
    “Bitch wasn’t here.”
    Relief flickered through Risa. Cherelle wasn’t somewhere underneath all the mess, hurt or beaten or worse.
    “I don’t have a secret place except . . .” Risa let her voice trail off. It was a long shot, but sometimes you didn’t have any choice but to bet the odds that the game handed you.
    Socks jerked on her wrist hard enough to stagger her. “Where?”
    “Downstairs in the public restroom by the auditoriums.”
    “Huh? Why’d ya use a dumb-ass place like that?”
    She shrugged. “It works.”
    Socks muttered and looked around again. No inspiration came. He lifted his big shirt enough to show her the butt of a gun. “Don’t get wise with me.”
    She swallowed hard. “Hey, I’m with you on this, okay? No need to get snake mean.”
    “Just so you know.”
    He shouldered her out the apartment door. Side by side, her wrist clamped in his fingers, they walked to the elevator. He had an odd hitch in his stride. Not quite a limp, not quite a roll. More like a creaky old man than a young one.
    But there was nothing weak about the grip on her wrist.
    She prayed that whoever was on “God” duty at the cameras would be experienced enough to understand that if some guard barged in right now with his gun blazing, a lot of people would get hurt.
    And Risa would be first.
    Getting caught in that kind of crossfire was a guaranteed trip to the emergency room. Or the morgue.
    It took her three tries to get the passkey into the tiny slot near the elevator. Her hand wasn’t as steady as it had been before Bozo the Hawaiian Clown had grabbed her.
    When the door opened, he crowded her in and watched while she punched buttons with fingers that were a breath away from shaking too much to be useful. What was making her really nervous now was the fear that he would spot the discreet camera in the elevator ceiling and panic. Being locked alone in a falling metal box with a twitchy gunman wasn’t her idea of fun—and that was exactly what would happen if she triggered any of the obvious or subtle alarms on the elevator panel.
    As the elevator slowed, the man yanked off his mask and stuffed it in his back pocket. She was careful not to look at him. There was no point. The cameras could do a better job and not make him nervous.
    When the doors finally opened on the lobby floor and Risa stepped out, she wasn’t a whole lot happier than she had been in the elevator. She didn’t want her captor to go nuclear in the middle of the crowded casino. What she needed was a distraction, just a second or two, just long enough to wrench her sweaty wrist free and run for cover.
    Across the room a long buffet line of hungry tourists waited for the chance to spend fifteen dollars each for a place at the all-you-can-eat trough that was one of the Golden Fleece’s big attractions. To either side of the room the flash and glitter and strike-it-rich noise of the slots called out a siren song of instant wealth. The loudest—and best-paying—slots were parked near the street doors of the Golden Fleece, where everyone who came inside would be tempted to drop a little change into the pretty machines that seemed to pay off every third roll. And then drop a little more money farther inside the casino, and a little more at the tables, and then a little more . . .
    Gotcha.
    The slots were Risa’s target, but not the high-traffic ones. She wanted the less popular slots, where only the bleary-eyed and dedicated pumped smudged coins into the Las Vegas equivalent of a cosmic black hole. At the end of the row of quiet slots were the two auditoriums, closed now between shows. Between the auditoriums was a restroom that the employees called the Maze because people got lost in it so often. There was a west door and a south door to the restroom, but almost nobody read the signs on the way in, so they found themselves in the wrong area of the casino when they came out.
    Risa was counting on her captor being one of the people who didn’t read. If he wasn’t, at