Levitating Las Vegas(30)
Author: Jennifer Echols

She leaned forward with her elbows on the counter and examined herself more closely at what had to be the lowest point of her life. Her careful brunette half updo had survived more or less intact through a night of dancing and abuse, as had her false lashes and makeup. A beautiful girl even to her own eyes, with glossy tendrils of her hair curling around her bare shoulders in her glittering brassiere, blaming herself for her own sexual battery. She’d assumed her low point was seven years ago when she’d lost her marbles. But at least that night she’d relished those exquisite tingles. At least she’d been powerful in her own mind. Now, at this moment, she was nothing. Her parents might have lied to her about her potential career, and she had abysmal taste in boyfriends. The one quasi boyfriend she had lingering feelings for after all these years was just as sick as she was. There was no future in this.

Well. There was no future in staring at herself in the mirror, either. She changed into pj’s, not feeling any better, but thinking she might feel better if she could talk to Kaylee about it. As a twenty-two-year-old responsible for the security of millions of dollars every day, and a calm twenty-two-year-old at that, Kaylee was always helpful putting Holly’s problems in perspective. And though it was incredibly late, Kaylee would still be up. She was awake when Holly went to bed and gone to work by the time Holly woke some mornings.

Holly padded down the hall in her bare feet and knocked gently on Kaylee’s door. When there was no response, she figured Kaylee was listening in on a conference call with her underlings at the casino. Holly eased the door open.

Bathed in the gentle light of the lamp on her nightstand, Kaylee was sprawled on top of her bedcovers, fully clothed in her clubbing pants and gold lamé top, her platinum-blond hair likewise sprawled on the pillow. She was asleep, not assassinated by rivals at Caesars Palace, which was Holly’s first thought. To make sure, Holly watched Kaylee’s petite chest expand with one, two, three slow breaths. The news squawked quietly on the TV mounted on the wall, and sections of the newspaper spooned next to her like a lover. One arm was flung over her head, and her limp hand rested dangerously close to the grip of her ubiquitous pistol glinting underneath the pillow.

Holly took a step into the clutter of a normal twenty-two-year-old woman’s room: girl rock-band posters; an open closet with a pair of dirty tennis shoes next to a pair of deep-discount designer heels; a huge teddy bear sent by Kaylee’s mom, whom Kaylee did not like to talk about (she was supposed to hug the teddy bear when she wanted to hug her mom); Chinese paper lanterns hanging from the ceiling. With perfect features and a porcelain complexion, the unconscious Kaylee looked too delicate to be part of this saucy materialism, like some slender-necked white waterfowl blown from typhoon to Santa Ana to desert wind and dropped into an apartment complex in Vegas. Holly wondered what had tired Kaylee to the point that she actually succumbed to sleep.

Out of the corner of her eye, Holly caught a movement.

Not in the apartment—she sucked in a long, quiet breath and let it out slowly as she realized this. In the parking lot. She stepped to the window for a better view.

Her heart beat faster as the movement fluttered toward Kaylee’s black BMW. Two figures, a young man and woman dressed in black, squeezed on either side of the car in its parking space in the full lot. They looked through the back windows, then the front. The woman said something, and both figures looked up at the apartment building. Their eyes slid over it from Holly’s right to left, skipping over the window from which Holly gazed. They stopped. Came back to her window. Stared straight at her. Pointed.

This was not happening to Holly. This was a flare-up of MAD brought on by the distress of seeing Elijah pass out earlier, and the threat of running out of medicine. After all, she’d been dead sure when she was fourteen that she could float up to the level of her parents’ chandelier. But she could have sworn these two strangers knew who she was, and where she lived, and had a particular interest in her. From Kaylee’s car they crossed the parking lot without even looking both ways—it was three in the morning with no traffic, but if Holly had been them she would have looked up and down the parking lot before crossing anyway—and they stepped up onto the crushed rock around the apartment building.

As they drew closer, she could see their black clothes weren’t for prowling and skulking around strangers’ apartments in the wee hours. They were Goths. The man—more of a boy, really, not much older than her—wore a black trench coat, ridiculously hot in the Vegas night, and black jeans. The woman—a girl, also around her age—had dyed her hair a vibrant unnatural red, but otherwise wore a black dress, black leggings, and clunky black shoes. She should have worn heels, which would have made her legs look longer.

The boy’s shoulders shook with laughter as Holly thought this.

They kept walking toward Holly’s window. She could have written it off as curious when they looked in Kaylee’s car, it could have been a coincidence as they eyeballed her apartment, but now they walked up to the window and looked at her on the second story. They could see her in the lamplight. They stared right at her.

Holly was near panic. She wasn’t sure what she expected them to do—throw gravel at her window? uproot a cactus and heave that toward her too?—but their very presence was so threatening, their stare, their knowledge that she was there and she was linked with Kaylee’s car. They did know who she was.

She opened her mouth to wake Kaylee. She wanted Kaylee to see this too, Kaylee who was head of security, Kaylee who was sane. She took a breath to call to Kaylee and—

Suddenly that did not seem like a good idea.

The Goths still stared at her. They still made her decidedly uneasy. But she didn’t need to call to Kaylee. That was not a good idea. She simply stared back at them, watching them watch her. Her heart descended from panic mode and maintained a rapid beat of only mild alarm.

The man said something.

The woman held up one finger where he could see it: wait.

They stared at Holly, and Holly stood still, for another two minutes. Finally the man spoke again. The woman blew Holly a kiss. The two of them turned their backs on her, crossed the gravel, and disappeared around the corner of the building.

Holly’s alarm remained but didn’t grow. It hadn’t been a good idea to tell Kaylee about the Goths. So it wasn’t as big a deal as she’d first thought. She retreated from Kaylee’s room and went to her own. As she lay down, her hips hurt where Rob’s fingers had been. She curled into the fetal position and stared at the wall.