“No luck yet,” he confirms. He holds my eyes. “We’ll find the fucker, Carter.”
“I know.” I have to hold on to hope. I have to believe I’ll find Noah before Ed Wagner starts using again. My sources tell me he was clean in jail. But outside? He’ll get sucked in again, like he has before, time and time again. The same way my twin-sister Chloe was sucked in, until she died of an overdose.
“Carter,” he repeats. “Calm down. Noah’s not in danger. As much as I hate to admit it, Ed was a good enough father before Chloe died. And he’s not doing drugs anymore. All our sources tell us that.”
“And then he walked away,” I point out. “He disappeared and left me to take care of Noah. Are you forgetting that?”
“I’m not.” His voice is calm. “I’m not defending Ed Wagner. But you are only choosing to remember what you want. Ed called Noah every week. He didn’t abandon the kid - he left him with you while he went and tried to get his life straight.”
If Dominic wasn’t my best friend, I’d be tempted to punch him. “I’m not listening to this,” I say flatly. “I don’t need to hear you defend Ed. If my sister had never met that asshole, she’d still be alive. You know that as well as I do.”
The office phone on the desk rings loudly, startling both of us. Dominic shakes his head. “Ignore it,” he suggests, but I’ve already reached for the instrument. “What is it?” I ask. Though I’m not working tonight, the security staff have seen me make my way into my office, and they know that if I’m around and they have a concern, I’m usually available to respond.
“Carter, we need an authorization for a player to join the back room,” Linda, the woman in charge of the high rollers says. “Monitor One.”
This is routine stuff. The back room has the high-stakes tables, and we don’t let people play there until we know they can handle the heat. When the blind is more than a thousand dollars, the losses can rack up alarmingly fast. Two years ago, a guy lost fifty grand one night at the New Sun, just down the road from us. He walked outside into the cool night, put a gun to his head, and blew his brains out. Ever since then, no one gets an auto-entry into the back room.
I turn my head to look at the screen Linda has indicated, and my eyes lock on to a woman that my body remembers, even after five months. I click my fingers to get Dominic’s attention and gesture to the screen. “Brunette dressed in green,” I say to him, covering the receiver with a hand so my conversation is muffled from Linda. “Looks familiar?”
He focuses on the image, then a slow grin covers his face. “Well, well, what do you know?” he says. “Runaway Ella in my casino.”
“Linda says she wants to get into the high-stakes games.”
I watch his expression change as he puts it together. “She’s a poker player? You think Ed will go to Bulldog?”
“It’s a backup plan,” I reply. “Just in case we can’t locate Ed in the next forty-eight hours. If Ella will go for it, of course.”
He grins. “From the impression I got of her, she didn’t seem like the kind to back away from a challenge.”
Though I’m consumed in worry for Noah, I still remember that night. She’d been fiery. Passionate. She’d been open about her desires and she’d played no games. She’d wanted both of us and she hadn’t been afraid to tell us that.
And when we’d woken up in the morning, she was gone. No note. No contact information, and no way to find her again.
She should have been a passing fancy, but I haven’t been able to forget her. “What’s her name?” I ask Linda, knowing that she would have checked the woman’s identification before placing the call.
“Gabriella Alves,” she says. “New York license.”
That makes sense - we had met her in a bar in midtown Manhattan.
“Can she play poker? Did she play on the lower tables?”
“She did.” Linda sounds grudgingly impressed. “Girl did pretty damn good.”
I make my decision. “Can you have someone escort Ms. Alves to my office, Linda? I’d like to talk to her.”