Rainy shook her head. “I’m not sure.”
“We have a Paul who’s a line cook, and another four of them front of house that I know personally. Oh, and I drink with some of the housekeepers after work and they call the maintenance guy Vucifer—Vegas Lucifer, get it?—but I think his real name’s Paul.” She dropped her cigarette butt and started walking for the door marked with a big number twelve.
“Wait! Are any of them from the east coast? Or does he, like...drink coffee syrup?”
The woman’s hand froze on the door handle. Rainy thought she looked a little nervous when her head swiveled around to look at her. “Yeah,” she said quickly. “And he’s a mean man.”
She was about to lose the woman, and she still had items on her fucked-up shopping list.
“Hey, do you think you could get something from Barry for me?”
She whipped around pretty fast, arms crossed over her chest. Rainy hadn’t expected that. Suddenly, her new friend looked hostile.
“Are you fucking with me? Are you?”
“Nope.” Money was the universal soother. Rainy pulled two hundred dollars out of her pocket and held it up for her to see. “This is for you. All you have to do is get something for me from Barry. When you bring it to me, I’ll give you two hundred more, plus the cost of the product.”
“How do I know you’re not a cop?”
“How do I know you’re not a cop?” Rainy shrugged. “I’d be a real cunt to do that to a woman who was just trying to make a living, right? What does a cop gain from a middleman like you? All I want is what’s on this list—just take a look.” She extended her receipt from the Quick Mart on which she’d scribbled three words.
“It’s a four-hundred-dollar gamble,” Rainy said. “This is Vegas.”
The woman took the list and the money and disappeared inside wordlessly. She won’t come back, Rainy thought. She’s going to take the two hundred and split. The door opened when two male housekeepers stepped out to smoke...or sample Barry’s wares. They took one look at her, sitting against the wall, swore profusely and went back inside. Thirty minutes later, when Rainy was convinced she’d been ghosted, the door opened again. Rainy stood up, smiling. The woman wordlessly handed her a tiny envelope.
“You’re a lifesaver,” Rainy said, handing her the rest of the bills.
The woman nodded curtly and disappeared through the door again.
“You’re definitely a New Englander, Paulie.” She typed a few notes into her phone and sent a text before making her way back to the front of the Bellum. Ditching her phone in the trash can out front like he’d told her to do, she stood in eyesight of the lobby and waited, counting to two hundred. He’d wanted to see her do it, then he wanted to have time to get away. She searched their faces: the comers and goers, the staff—there were too many bodies, too many options.
Fuck, fuck, fuck, said her heart.
She walked in.
At seven o clock, Rainy went to the buffet. She scanned the bodies at the various hot stations and spun around to look at the salad bar, where a line of gray-haired ladies was calling out to each other about cottage cheese. There were people everywhere, walking in twos, threes and fours. Rainy felt numb with a side of nausea. Grabbing a plate, she got in line, trying not to look at mounds of mayonnaise salad, keeping her eyes peeled for whatever Paul intended for her to see. Staff were positioned around the room in sparkling dinner jackets, looking ready to jump into action or song. It was a lot to keep track of. No wonder this was where he’d sent her; there was too much chaos for her to watch everything that was going on. He could be anywhere, posing as anyone. Rainy’s plate was still empty as the line crawled past the lettuce. She grabbed spinach with the tongs, her gaze carefully combing the area. This was stupid—ridiculous. What if he was toying with her? The ache of anxiety riding in her chest crested when there was nothing significant near the trays of onions and cucumber, and she thought of the message again; he’d told her to go through the buffet lines, and that she’d know what she was seeing when she was seeing it. She had no clue what that was supposed to mean, except that he was in charge and she had to do what he said. For now, she told herself. That made her feel better, the idea that she was just playing his game until she could play her own.
There was no sign of anything weird at the meat-cutting stations, so she turned left toward the soup, and then there it was: her name on a placard above one of the lidded soup containers: Rainy Chowder. Rainy peered closer, thinking that maybe it was a coincidence, but the script on the first word was slightly smaller than the second. It was an envelope, small and white, stuck to the top of the placard. She pulled it off to reveal the Corn. The envelope fit comfortably into her palm. Rainy abandoned her plate on a trolley of dirty dishes and walked straight for the door.
She didn’t open the envelope until she was safely in a bathroom stall. Her name was written with black marker in near-perfect script. She turned it over and used her nail to open the envelope, sliding out a rectangular room card. Handwritten in the bottom corner in permanent marker was the number 447. She was to go there now. He was probably watching her. She felt suddenly exposed, the stall around her flimsy protection. She signed into her email account from the burner phone, found the draft she’d been working on. What she had on the phone was her version of a police composite: what she thought he looked like, where she thought he worked, where he was from, where he’d instructed her to go. With more time, she could have tracked him down herself, but with Braithe’s life hanging in the balance, she had to trust the job to someone else.
And she did. If she trusted him to be able to do anything, it was this: find what he wanted, what he’d believe to be his. Paul had left a trail, albeit a small one, but it might be enough. She added one last line to the end of her email. It was more of a hopeful line, a hunch. If she couldn’t pull it off, he’d be looking for the wrong person.
He’ll have a broken nose, she typed. She sent the email, then threw the burner phone in the tampon disposal.
Reaching for the box of Band-Aids, she began to work.
The first letter from Taured had come to her apartment in New York. It was on his official church stationery and her first instinct upon opening the envelope was to toss it away from her as far as it would go. But she hadn’t; she’d clutched the paper in her closed fist until she felt ready to read it. She read the letter the same way she would read the five others he sent shortly after, with all the lights in the apartment on and her gun sitting on the counter in front of her. Loaded. How had he found her?
His tone was friendly and light, the threats buried under Bible verses and zealous concerns about her well-being. Last he’d seen her, she’d been just a young girl, and now here he was, reading about her on the internet. She was famous! Hopefully, one day, they’d be able to catch up. The last part had given her nightmares for a week. If Rainy had shown that letter to the police, they would have cocked an eyebrow at her and asked what the problem was. You had to know his language, understand the euphemisms he so often used to dig out what he was really saying:
Hello, I’m still watching you.
She’d moved after that, subletting an apartment from a friend so her name wasn’t attached to an address. The letters came to the galleries instead. Rainy would get calls saying a letter had arrived for her. It wasn’t completely unheard of to receive correspondence through a gallery, thank God. Rainy would take a cab to go pick them up and carry them home unopened.