Kitty and the Dead Man's Hand (Kitty Norville 5)

I still had to slink past that damned gun show.

Not everyone who came to Vegas for a gun show was like Boris. They couldn’t all be in Cormac’s line of work. Edging down the hallway from the elevators until the doors of the main ballroom came into sight, I watched the comings and goings of people. Know your enemy, after all. For the most part, the convention-goers were completely unremarkable. More men than women by a good factor, but there were some women. Most were casually dressed: jeans, shorts, T-shirts, tennis shoes. Of all ages—a few people even had kids along—the stream of people leaving and entering the ballroom seemed an unremarkable cross section of middle America. Firearm enthusiast. That didn’t sound so dangerous. These were hobbyists, people who went target shooting at the range and collected rare guns. Perfectly innocuous. Surely I didn’t have to worry about bounty hunters or assassins, not in the middle of a casino with its intense security. Especially not any who had a thing against werewolves and might take an opportunity—like, say, me sitting onstage under bright lights—to use me for target practice.

But I couldn’t help but think about how many people in this hotel were carrying handguns around with them right at that moment.

I’d started toward the casino and another hallway that led to the Jupiter Theater when my shoulders went stiff. Somebody was following me. Wolf felt it, or heard it, or smelled it, or all of them in the combination that made that side of me hypersensitive. I took a breath to keep from panicking and resisted jumping to the wrong conclusion.

When I turned, the woman looked startled, like she hadn’t expected me to know she was there. She was shorter than me, thin, with a tanned face and short, curly brown hair. She wore sandals, faded jeans, and a white blouse. Her earrings and necklaces were silver, her makeup understated. Inconspicuous in every way.

She recovered from her surprise quickly and offered a smile. “I’m sorry, I guess you must have seen me coming.”

“Yeah, sort of.”

Now she looked nervous, but the smile didn’t dim. “I don’t mean to bother you. This must seem really rude, but—you’re Kitty Norville, aren’t you?”

Ah, there it was. I ducked my gaze. “Yeah.”

“I recognized you from the article Time did last winter.”

“That’s what I was afraid of,” I said, grimacing, trying to be polite. Last fall, the Senate held hearings on, of all things, vampires and lycanthropes after a secret NIH project studying paranormal phenomena was made public. I was called to testify, and for various reasons Time chose me as their poster child. I would never live it down.

Doing the radio show, no one ever had to know what I looked like. I liked it that way. But after the hearings and publicity, not to mention being outed on live TV, it seemed silly trying to stay anonymous. Hence the possibility of my own TV show.

“Oh, you shouldn’t be embarrassed, it was a good article,” she said. “Interesting, anyway. Good publicity for you, I’m sure.”

Interesting in the Chinese-proverb sense. “Well, thanks. I can’t complain.” I expected her to make some more apologetic noises, then scurry away. Maybe I was secretly hoping she’d ask for an autograph. Secretly disappointed that she wasn’t asking for an autograph. But she just stood there, smiling up at me. Studying me, and it was making me nervous. “So. What brings you to Vegas?”

“I’m here for the show,” she said, nodding over her shoulder at the ballroom and gun exhibition. I surreptitiously glanced over her to see if she had any holsters or concealed weapons. Didn’t see anything. She looked so normal. “Well, you look busy, so I won’t keep you. But it was really nice talking to you.” She turned to walk away.

Occasionally, I was spotted in public. Not enough to ever get used to it. But having it happen here, right outside the gun show, was too much for my paranoia. Maybe it was a coincidence. Maybe it wasn’t. I glanced around for a big bald man in leather and didn’t see him. But that didn’t mean much.

On a hunch, I called, “Sylvia?”

She glanced back.

We met gazes. Her look darkened for a moment, but then she smiled. This wasn’t a normal, friendly smile. It was sly, challenging. Like she’d scoped me out, learned what she needed to, and didn’t care if I knew all about her. I resisted an urge to run.

She turned back around and merged with the crowd filing in and out of the ballroom.

My heart was pounding. I wasn’t sure what had just happened, but it couldn’t be good. I continued on, looking over my shoulder the whole way.

Maybe the bounty hunters weren’t really after me. But if they were, with all the sensory overload going on here, I might never hear them coming.

Chapter 4

I called Ben on my cell phone, but he must have still been in his poker game, because it rolled over to voice mail. I told him about meeting Sylvia and fished for some kind of reassurance that the entire hotel wasn’t out to get me.

Meanwhile, the show, as they say, must go on.

Following the producer’s instructions, I found an unlocked emergency door that led to the theater. Inside, a trio of people were working onstage. A couple of men were moving a table and equipment—radio broadcast gear—directed by a woman holding a clipboard. She seemed to be going over a checklist. I went straight to her. The clipboard: universal symbol of someone in charge.

“Hi, you must be Erica Decker? I’m Kitty Norville.”

She beamed at me as I climbed the stairs to reach the stage. She was a slim black woman with curly hair in a thick ponytail. She had the intense, manic attitude of most everyone in show business I’d ever met: everything was important, and everything had to get done right now. Strangely enough, that manner inspired confidence. She worked for one of the local network affiliates putting together half-hour news specials, and Ozzie knew her from his previous job in Los Angeles, where he’d been an assistant station manager and she’d been an intern.

“Great, you found the place,” she said. “What do you think?”

I’d hardly even looked at the theater. Small and intimate by Vegas standards, it usually hosted stand-up comedy or lounge acts. It was clean, functional, modern, with blue plush seats, walls painted dark blue, and unobtrusive lighting. Before I arrived we’d discussed putting a table onstage to hold my call monitor, supplying a couple of chairs for guests, and filling the seats with an audience. I hoped I had enough fans to fill the seats, or this was going to be embarrassing. According to Erica, advance ticket sales were doing well, but we hadn’t sold out yet. I was still thinking worst-case scenario—an empty house. Everyone would bail on my show to go see Mamma Mia! instead. Really, the place was great. But that didn’t change the fact that we were sharing the hotel with a ballroomful of guns.