******
Las Vegas: Airport
They had to rush through breakfast to catch their early morning flight. The Angel wasn’t happy about that. All she wanted was to get her money’s worth (Well, she reminded herself, The Hand’s money’s worth.), but there was also the fact that they were going to be on the plane for a good part of the day and plane food was notoriously bad. And scanty.
Breakfast unfortunately turned out to be the high point of the day, which went downhill really fast.
The Angel and Ray boarded the plane half an hour before take-off. The flight was already full. Ray grumbled endlessly about the fact that they’d gotten stuck in the main cabin because they’d had to buy their tickets at the last second. He was, the Angel thought, acting like a spoiled child. Their seats were perfectly adequate.
They had two seats in a row in the cabin’s central section. Ray offered her the aisle seat, but she declined. That was her first mistake. Her second was being nice to the man who sat down next to her, smiling at him when he first plopped down. He was young, rather handsome with lean, dark good looks. Almost Mediterranean, with thick, wavy hair and dark, puppy-dog eyes. She was somewhat suspicious of him at first, but she told herself not to stereotype. Not every Italian-looking man was an Allumbrado.
She had her first qualm when she smelled the liquor wafting off him in waves, the smell of which was undisguised by his rather potent hair tonic, skin lotion, and cologne. It was an uneasy combination of odors to experience so early in the morning and it didn’t help any when their take-off was delayed for unspecified reasons and the air-conditioning was turned off as they sat on the runway and waited. And waited. And waited.
The passenger sitting next to the Angel wanted to while away the time drinking, but the flight attendant refused him alcohol. He then turned his attention to the Angel and she finally realized that he was hitting on her when she felt his hand on her upper thigh.
“Take your hand off me,” she said in a cold voice.
He only smiled back at her. Ray, who had been focused in on his own little world, turned his head and frowned as she spoke. “You want to take it down a notch, Jack?” he asked.
“Please, Billy—” the Angel began, but the drunk interrupted her.
“I’m not poaching your private preserve, am I?” he asked Ray.
Ray frowned. “No, but—”
“Hey,” the drunk interrupted again, “she’s free, white, and twenty-one, ain’t she?”
Ray’s expression went cold. “How’d you like to be drunk, dead, and thirty-five, dork?”
“Billy!”
“You threatening me?” the drunk asked belligerently.
Ray laughed in his face. The drunk turned red, stood, and drew his fist back. The Angel caught it in her palm as he tried to punch Ray.
“Stop it!” she ordered.
The drunk tried to pull free. She twisted his wrist a little harder than she’d intended, and heard something snap. He screamed, “You broke my fucking arm, you fucking bitch!”
Then his face turned puce and he gagged.
“No,” the Angel said. “Oh, no.”
He threw up in her lap.
Ray was out of his seat and standing in the aisle before the spatter could hit him. “Son of a—” he started to say when a swarm of flight attendants descended on them. Some of them tried to placate Ray, some tried to help the Angel and a couple others led the still-retching drunk away.
“I saw it all,” one of the stewardesses said. “It wasn’t your fault. Not at all. But I’m afraid you’ll have to leave the plane so we can clean... this... all... up.”
The Angel saw Ray muttering to himself, barely under control.
“My name is Billy Ray. I’m with the Secret Service. This is my associate. We have to get to New York as soon as possible—”
”I sympathize,” the stewardess said. “But surely you can’t expect to travel in this condition.”
Ray took a deep breath as if to calm himself, then screwed up his face when he got a good whiff of the Angel.
“No,” he said woodenly. “Of course not.”
“I’m sorry,” the Angel said. She grimaced at the vomit-covered front of her pants and blouse, holding her arms out from her body in dismay. “I didn’t mean—”
“No one’s blaming you,” Ray said. He glared at the stewardess. “Are they?”
“No, certainly not, sir. We all saw that she was simply protecting herself from an obnoxious drunk.”
“That’s right,” chimed in an interested passenger. “We all saw it.”
The captain came down the aisle, frowning. “What’s going on here?” he asked. “Trouble?”
“No, sir,” the Angel said in a meek voice. “No trouble at all.”
But of course they had to deplane. She had to clean up, using one of the airport shower facilities to wash off the vomit that had soaked her to the skin. Ray had to buy her another outfit, because all the clothes she had in the world had finally taken off for New York City. Then the cops came and she had to tell the story. Then more cops came and they had to tell the story again. Then they had to tell it one more time, officially, for their statement. Ray’s status helped, but he didn’t want to push it because he didn’t want the locals to look at them too deeply. It was afternoon by the time they’d cut their way through the red tape, and having had the satisfaction of seeing the obnoxious drunk hauled off to the poky with his arm in a sling.
They were saying their good-byes to the airport cops, who, the Angel thought, were googling at her all too avidly in the tight jeans and form-fitting tee-shirt that said “I Lost It In Vegas” that Ray had purchased for her. Fortunately she’d been able to salvage her bra. Without it she would have been too much of a spectacle to be endured. She should have made Ray go back to the airport stores and find something a little more appropriate for her to wear. She supposed it wasn’t his fault. She was difficult to fit in the best of times, and the clothing selection in an airport mall was not exactly extensive.
They were leaving the security office when one of the cops who’d just answered a ringing phone yelled out for them to stop.
“Hey, Mr. Ray,” he called, “it’s headquarters.”
Ray stopped with a sigh and a put-upon expression on his face. He had something, the Angel decided, of a martyr’s complex.
“They need your help.”
He looked slightly mollified. “Sure,” he said, glancing at the Angel. She looked away, rolling her eyes. “What about?”
“It’s Butcher Dagon.” The Angel had a sudden bad feeling that was quickly confirmed. “He’s escaped.”
Ray shrugged. “That’s your—”
The Angel laid a hand on his arm. “We can’t let him run lose. Think of the innocents!”
“In Vegas?” Ray asked.
“You know what I mean,” she replied.
Ray sighed again. His expression was clouded, but the Angel knew that she had him half-convinced.
“I’ll go on ahead. I can handle things at the New York end. You take care of Butcher Dagon.” She added what she realized would be the clincher. “Only you can handle him.”
Ray paused to consider. “Well. Yeah. All right.”
The Angel paused as well. She really hated to do this, but she had no choice.
“One other thing.”
“Yeah?”
“I don’t have any money. I’ll need the credit card.”
Ray’s expression turned pained, but he nodded, somewhat regretfully, the Angel thought, and handed it over.
“Take good care of it,” Ray thought and added, with only the slightest hesitation, “and yourself.”
It was, the Angel thought, rather sweet of him to be concerned.