Chapter 5

I decided that my left wrist was sprained but not broken, and that the scrape on my cheek was not as bad as I'd initially thought, although my butt hadn't fared as well. Falling on top of my gun back in the storeroom had left me with a bruise the size of my palm, and it had turned an unappealing purple. Great. It matched the finger marks around my neck, so at least I was coordinated.

I'd just finished the inspection when Billy Joe drifted in the window. I glanced at the door, really wanting to tell him off but not liking the idea of an audience. Billy was my ace in the hole and best chance of getting out of here. I didn't want anybody to know he was around.

He saw my expression and grinned. "Don't worry. Somebody put one doozy of a silencing spell on these rooms. Whatever they're planning, they're serious about not being overheard."

"Well, in that case: where the hell have you been?" My emotions came flooding back at the sight of him trying to look casual, as if he hadn't left me out to dry earlier.

Billy Joe, a hard-drinking, cigar-smoking card shark in life, was one of my only friends now that he was many years dead. But he'd screwed up on this one and he knew it. The big, tough gambler fiddled with his little string tie and looked embarrassed. I knew his reaction was the real deal and not another of his put-ons because he hadn't yet made a lecherous comment about my lack of clothing.

"I ran into Portia and she told me what happened. I went to the club looking for you, but you'd left already." He pushed up his Stetson with a nearly transparent finger, then solidified a bit more. "Did you do all that? The back room was a mess, and there were police crawling all over the place."

"Yeah, I'm in the habit of knocking off five vamps, then leaving the bodies for the police to have a fit over." Standard policy among the supernatural community was to clean up your own mess. In some circumstances, you could get in more trouble for leaving bodies lying around that might give a pathologist heart palpitations than for the actual killings. That didn't used to be the case, which was how a lot of those old legends got started, I imagine, but the more the human population expanded, the more the policy became vital. The Senate didn't care for the idea of seeing vamps chopped up in laboratories while some human scientist tried to figure out the secret to eternal life, or having freaked-out governments start a modern version of the Inquisition.

"What bodies?" Billy Joe solidified to the point that I could see a hint of red in his fashionable ruffled shirt—fashionable for 1858 anyway, the year the cowboys had given him an up-close-and-personal tour of the bottom of the Mississippi. "Blood was everywhere and it looked like a cyclone blew through, but there weren't any bodies."

I shrugged. I wasn't real interested in knowing that Tomas had a partner who'd called in a cleanup crew. If any of the other people I'd trusted had been lying to me, I didn't want to know about it. "Great, so make up for letting me almost get killed. What do you know about my problem here?"

Billy Joe spat a wad of ghostly chewing tobacco against the bathroom wall. It left a slimy trail of ectoplasm as it slid down, and I frowned at him. "Don't do that."

"Hey, are you nekkid under there?" He sat on the side of the tub and batted ineffectually at my bubbles. If he concentrated, he could move things, but he was only playing, so his hand passed through. I made him turn around while I got out and dried off. I know it's stupid, but Billy Joe hasn't been with a woman in 150 years and sometimes he gets distracted. It's best not to let his mind wander.

"Talk to me. What do you know?"

"Not a lot. I had trouble finding you. Do you know you're in Nevada?"

"How could I… wait a minute. Why did you have trouble finding me?" Most ghosts are tied to a single location—usually a house or a crypt—but Billy Joe haunts the necklace I bought at a junk store when I was seventeen, so he's more mobile. I'd purchased it because I thought it was only a piece of Victorian pastiche that might work for Eugenie's birthday. If I had known what came with it, I'm not sure I wouldn't have left it in the case. Since I hadn't, though, and since I was wearing it as usual, he shouldn't have had any problem locating me. As for travel time, well, let's just say he takes a more direct route than most.

"What have you been doing instead of checking things out around here?" Billy Joe looked guilty, a fact that did not keep him from trying to look down my towel. "Stop that." I had an epiphany. "Hang on. We're somewhere near Vegas, aren't we?"

"Yeah, about thirty miles out. This place looks like a ranch, 'cept there're no horses, no tourists and the ranch hands dress a little funny. 'Course, it don't matter, since all any humans ever see is a big, bare canyon with a lot of keep-out signs."

"Thirty miles?" Billy could draw energy from the stored reserves in his necklace for up to fifty. "Don't tell me that while I've been bespelled, moved halfway across the country, threatened and imprisoned, you've been at the casinos!"

"Now, Cassie darlin'…"

"I can't believe this!" I don't get angry with him often, since it's mostly a waste of time—he is the definition of incorrigible—but this was the last straw. "I was almost killed! Twice! If you don't care about that, think about what happens to your precious necklace if somebody guns me down or rips my throat open. Let me spell it out for you: it ends up in some old lady's jewelry box in Podunk, USA, a hundred miles from nowhere!"

Billy Joe looked chastened, but I doubted it was guilt over what might have happened to me. He is unable to stay away from his home base for too long or his power runs dry—which was why I knew he'd be along sooner or later. The farther from the source he gets, the faster his strength bottoms out. His nightmare is getting stuck in a rural, one-horse town with no honky-tonks, strip clubs or gambling dens within reach. For him, it would be the equivalent of Hell. With me he had a guaranteed urban environment, since it's hard to hide in a small town. He also had something even more important.

Over time, we'd developed a sort of symbiotic relationship. Billy Joe is one of those spirits who can absorb energy from a living donor, rather like a vamp. Vamps take life energy through blood, which in magical terms is the repository for the life force of a person. When they feed, they receive part of the donor's life, which substitutes for the one they lost when they crossed over, at least for a while. Some ghosts can do the same thing, and like vamps, they don't always ask first. But Billy Joe vastly prefers a willing donor, not to mention that he says the «hit» is much longer lasting from me for some reason. In return for my agreeing to give him additional energy from time to time, he had agreed to keep watch for signs of Tony's impending return. Right then, I felt cheated.

"If you aren't going to be any use, I should sell this ugly thing." I rubbed some steam off the mirror and took a look at the monstrosity around my neck. It was hand-wrought gold, heavy and intricate, with a mass of squirming vines and flowers around a central cabochon ruby. The junk dealer had assumed it was glass, since he wasn't used to seeing nonfaceted jewels and it had been encrusted with years of accumulated dirt. Even all cleaned up, it was, without doubt, one of the ugliest necklaces I'd ever seen. I usually wore it inside my clothes.

"I'll have you know, I won that off a countess!"

"And judging by all the pawn marks, it was real important to you, wasn't it?"

"I always redeemed it, didn't I?" Billy Joe was starting to sulk, so I decided to lay off. I needed him cooperative if I was going to find out anything.