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When he didn’t answer, Noelle glanced up to see him looking at her, his lips tipped very slightly. “I doubt she wants to hear from me just now. But I will.” He stood from the bed, walking toward her. “Listen, I know you didn’t ask, but I’m not involved with her. I was, a year ago. For a very short time. I decided it was a bad idea and ended it, okay? She obviously had hoped to take up where we’d left off, and she felt slighted and used by your presence in my house.”
“She shouldn’t have.”
“You made that clear.”
His tone conveyed his irritation, and she looked down, opening the file in her hands, avoiding the conversation altogether. “So this case ...” Her gaze ran over the particulars.
Evan reached forward and closed the folder. “Hey,” she protested.
“Her name is Tallulah Marsh. She’s a prostitute. Are you up for an overnight trip?”
Her mouth opened and then shut.Overnight trip?
He reached in his back pocket and pulled out two folded pieces of paper. She took them, unfolding the top one and reading. “It’s a boarding pass to Las Vegas in my name.”
“It takes less than an hour to get there. I took a chance that you’d be up for it.”
“I mean ... sure. If you think it’ll be worthwhile.”
“I have no idea, but I thought it was worth the ninety-nine-dollar airfare and thirty-nine-dollar rooms. Who knows, we might even win big on one of the slots.” He grinned, and she couldn’t help the chuckle that bubbled up.
“Okay, well, big spender, it sounds like an adventure at least.” She handed the papers back to him, and he stuck them in his pocket. “Let me pack an overnight bag while you go down to the restaurant in the lobby and get me a coffee.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
She grinned as she shut the door behind him, wondering what had happened to the cautious, well-planned single mother that she normally was. And why it was so easy to get swept up in Evan Sinclair’s vortex.
The bar smelled like musty carpet, sour beer, and old cigarette smoke. Evan drew back slightly as the door swung shut behind them, obviously enjoying the stench about as much as she did. She would have laughed, but that might have meant she’d inhale more air than she had to, so she held that back.
The bartender, a dead-eyed man with sparse, slicked-back hair, looked up slowly from the glass he was wiping out as they approached. “What can I getcha?” His voice was as flat as his expression.
“Hi. We’re looking for a woman named Tallulah Marsh. Her roommate said we might find her here,” Evan said.
Evan had told her he’d called Tallulah that morning, and she’d agreed to meet with them and given Evan her address. But when they’d shown up there, her roommate, a twitchy bleached blonde with sores on her face, had told them that Tallulah had gone to this musty hole-in-the-wall.
Without turning his head, the bartender pointed his finger to the back of the bar, where the tables disappeared into gloomy darkness, the high backs concealing anything they might have been able to see from where they stood. “Thanks,” Evan muttered. She felt like they were in some strange underworld, sort of like the bar fromStar Wars, the movies she’d once watched with her dad. She fully expected that when they rounded the corner of the first booth, there would be an alarming alien.
Her assumption wasn’t totally off.
“Tallulah Marsh?” Evan asked. The older woman raised her eyes, which had to be a feat, considering her eyelashes were about two inches long and heavily studded with rhinestones. She even managed to bat them at Evan.
“That’s me, handsome. Looking for a date?” she asked, shooting Noelle a grin. “Couples are extra.”
The woman grinned again, and despite her overdone makeup and white-blonde hair heavily streaked with pink, her cheeky smile was warm and made Noelle want to smile back.
“I’m Evan Sinclair. We spoke on the phone this morning.”
“Yes. You sounded like a dream on the phone, and you look like one too.” She gave him a wink. “You said you had questions.”
“I do. We do.” He gestured to Noelle. “This is Noelle Meyer. We wanted to ask you about a police report you filed a few years ago.”
Her expression faltered. She glanced between them and nodded. “For a price, I’ll give you just about anything,” she said.
A price.
Evan reached for his wallet and took out the bills he had inside. It looked like a couple hundred dollars. Well, there went their slot machine fund. “Is that enough?” he asked.
She picked it up, taking her time counting it out, and then stuffed it in the front of her shiny pink jumpsuit. From where Noelle was standing, she could see that the shorts or skirt or whatever it was ended at the very tops of her thighs, and tall white boots hit just below it.
