When my phone rang, I was happy for the distraction, though I never took my eyes off my surroundings. I didn’t check the caller ID, not wanting to be off my guard even for a moment, so I was surprised to hear the familiar growl.
“Locryn?”
“Why’d ya say it like that?”
I cleared my throat. “You don’t normally call me.”
“Yeah, so?”
It was a minefield with him, he was so prickly, but at the moment, I didn’t care. Already, after only a handful of hours, I was sick of my current assignment, and because he was familiar, even if brooding and short-tempered, he sounded like home. Having him on the phone was comforting.
“Did you hear me?” he grumbled.
“Not at all, no,” I confessed.
“All right, let’s try this again for the concentration impaired.”
“You’re funny today,” I conceded, leaning on the counter, smiling into my phone.
“I’m funny every fuckin’ day,” he said, affronted. “But so you know, some lawyer came by looking for you.”
“A lawyer?”
“Yeah,” he replied solemnly, and then I heard it, a catch in his voice. “And I’m sorry, Croy, but I think somebody’s dead.”
“Why is that?”
“I don’t know, the guy had a look, he was somber, like he could have been a probate lawyer,” he said hoarsely, sounding uncomfortable. “He left his card; I’ll take a shot of it and text it to you so you can call him.”
I took a breath. “Yes, good. Thank you.”
He was silent for a moment, and I was going to let him go, but I was enjoying the lifeline to normal.
“Listen,” he said finally. “I know you left home young, but it’s still hard to lose one of your folks, so yeah, that sucks.”
I didn’t tell him that if either of my parents were dead, the surviving one would never reach out to me. And if they somehow died together, I would never know unless, for some reason, it showed up in the news. My brothers would not inform me. I simply wasn’t on their radar. I was dead to them, and I’d made my peace with that years ago. Whatever this was had nothing to do with my biological family, and in fact, the only thing I could think of was that one of my clients at Torus had passed, and I was racking my brain trying to think of who it could be.
“Thanks, Loc,” I said after a moment.
He coughed softly. “You’re gonna come back, aren’t you?”
It was a surprise that he cared, and the sound in his voice, uncertainty along with a slight tremble, was comforting. I had not had a family in years. When I was a policeman, I had trouble bonding with others because I was so focused on doing everything right that I had no time to let my guard down and simply be myself. The guys at Torus were the closest thing to a family that I had. And now, out of the blue, Locryn was showing me something, a peek behind the mask, and it meant a lot.
“Croy?”
“Sorry,” I rasped, hearing how thick with gravel my voice sounded. “Yes, I’m coming back. Have no doubt.”
“Good,” he said bluntly, and I could hear his armor going back on before there was an evil chuckle that told me he was back to normal. “So what, you havin’ fun in Vegas?”
“It’s snowing here; did you know?”
“No shit,” he sounded surprised.
I grunted.
His laughter sounded really good.
After they all changed for dinner—I didn’t have to, as I was already in a suit—we ate at Wolfgang Puck’s Cut in the Venetian. I’d never had a better steak, but for what it cost, it should have been nothing short of spectacular. I’d been to other restaurants and eaten meals that totaled in the thousands, just as this one did, but it was always for business, entertaining others to get something in return. The bill was footed as a corporate expense, a transaction to impress or to be in the good graces of another. This was different. This was Brig pulling out his personal credit card and plopping it down like it was nothing. That kind of excess, even though I’d been born into it, always seemed obscene.
After dinner, we went to a club and had bottle service under a heated tent on the roof lounge, looking out over the Strip. No one ventured far from the warmth, and I suspected the temperature being less desert and more tundra kept people from standing at the railing to look down over the crowds below. The tight space and milling people made it hard to keep track of who was trying to sit near Brig and his group, and who was merely walking by. I was on the lookout, though, so the man who detoured around the back of the couch did not escape my scrutiny. He glanced at the others, Brig’s friends, with their heads down, absorbed in their social media accounts, oblivious to all else around them, and then darted close, coming up behind the son of the multibillionaire.