The White Gold Score (A Daniel Faust Novella) Read Free

of work. Come help me spend his money.”
    “Aw, sugar,” she said, her Kentucky drawl barely audible over the booming bass, “any other night I’d be on that like Elvis on a peanut butter and banana sandwich, but I’ve got my own thing. Entertainin’ a couple of lobbyists.”
    “Lobbyists? Why?”
    “You see what happened to black-market pot prices in Cali once medical marijuana went legal? If medical sales come to Nevada, I need to be first in line for a dealer’s permit—and folks on my payroll need to be second, third, fourth, and fiftieth, get that whole market on lockdown—or I’m gonna lose money hand over fist. So I got these fine gentlemen some twenty-year-old scotch and some twenty-year-old ladies, and everybody’s having a grand old time.” She pitched her voice lower. “Between you and me, I’m not convinced the scotch
or
the ladies are that old, but whatever.”
    “Well, good luck. I’ll give you a call tomorrow.”
    “Make it tomorrow afternoon,” she said. “I’m plannin’ on being
real
hungover.”
    I put away my phone and sighed at the empty penthouse.
    Nothing on TV I wanted to watch, nothing to do but kill time. Greenbriar had mentioned guests being woken up by the ghost. Maybe I’d have to go to sleep to get it to show. The idea of being jolted awake at three in the morning by an apparition screaming in my face didn’t sound like much fun, but it was more annoying than dangerous. I didn’t like jump scares in movies, and I sure as hell didn’t like them in real life. But fair was fair, and I was getting paid to do a job. I killed the last of the lights.
    I was too keyed up to sleep. After tossing and turning on the cloud-soft mattress, I tugged aside the covers and trudged into the bathroom, choosing between the shower and the hot tub. I didn’t feel like waiting to fill up the tub, so the shower won. It had a “color therapy” setting, and at the touch of a button, panels in the ceiling blossomed with soft, shimmering veils of color mimicking the flow from sunrise to sunset and back again. Shrouding the room in psychedelic tangerine and midnight blue. Then the water roared down, gusting from the rainfall showerheads, drenching me in a warm, misty torrent.
    I stood, tranquil in the glowing colors and the swirling water. Breathing deep, losing track of time as my muscles relaxed and my tension ebbed away. Once I finally felt tired enough to sleep, I poked my head out of the downpour and rubbed a hand across my eyes, blinking away droplets and squinting through the glass cage of the shower.
    A man stood in the bathroom doorway.
    My jaw tensed, my knees bending as my arms curled at my sides, instinctively getting ready for a fight. He just stood there, his face and form lost in shadow, hovering at the edge of the dim raspberry glow from the panels above my head. Motionless, silently blocking the only way out.
    The ghost
, I thought, steadying my nerves.
Time to earn my pay
. Still, I didn’t like it. Usually, with an apparition, you get some clue that what you’re seeing isn’t entirely on the up-and-up. A hazy glow, or translucent “skin.” The man on the threshold looked as solid, as real, as I did. Like he’d just let himself into the penthouse, watching me shower, waiting for me to notice him.
    A thought occurred to me: if Greenbriar or his casino bosses had decided to get proactive, bumping off some of the more notorious members of Vegas’s occult underground before we could cause them any headaches, he couldn’t have laid a better trap.
    I killed the water. The last few drizzles spattered down, running across my back in rivulets that turned ice cold. I pushed open the glass door and stepped out of the shower.
    Then I looked down and saw the gun—a stout nine-millimeter with a black matte sound suppressor—in his right hand. My feet froze on the wet tile floor.
    “Listen,” I started to say, “if Greenbriar sent you, you need to know—”
    But those weren’t