Gamma Blade - Tim Stevens Page 0,8

which kicked off the AMA conference. Venn wasn’t coming along - even if he’d been on the delegate list, he’d have been utterly lost among all the medics in the audience, and wouldn’t have been able to fathom what the professor delivering the address was saying - but he had been invited to the meal afterward. He figured many of the other people at the dinner would have spouses or significant others present who, like Venn, weren’t in the medical field, and there were sure to be a few of them he could find common ground with. Maybe even a cop or two.

Venn turned to Beth. He’d shaved this evening, something he never normally did after the morning. Beth reached up and rubbed a licked finger across his chin.

“Nicked yourself a little,” she said.

He breathed in her perfume. As always, she looked, and smelled, fabulous. She didn’t often go for the whole glamour thing, but when she did, she achieved with seeming effortlessness a radiance that made her resemble a catwalk model or society lady. Tonight, she wore a light summer evening gown, and had her auburn hair loose around her shoulders. The tiny sapphire-chip earrings Venn had gotten her as a sort-of engagement present highlighted the blue of her irises.

Hot damn, thought Venn, for maybe the millionth time. You’ve landed on your feet here, boy.

And: don’t screw it all up.

While Beth finished getting ready, collecting her purse and what-not, Venn took a look around the hotel room, marveling once more at its splendor. It was a suite, rather than just a room, with a colossal couch and matching recliners and a sumptuous carpet and a wholly redundant marble fireplace.

Until he and Beth had bought their Manhattan townhouse together, he’d only ever lived in apartments that weren’t much bigger than this place.

He felt kind of guilty, and though he knew it was irrational, he couldn’t help himself. He’d grown up in a small town in western Illinois with a tired, worn-down single mom and two siblings, a brother and a sister. His mother had held down a day job as a secretary and a night-time one as an attendant in a laundromat, and while her kids had never gone hungry, there hadn’t been a lot of money to spare. Young Joe had escaped the grinding, stifling prison of Nowheresville life by heading for Chicago when he was eighteen. It was only when he’d enlisted with the Marine Corps six months later that he’d discovered a sense of purpose.

So the kind of opulence, of easy, casual wealth, that he saw around him in this hotel, and in this room, felt uncomfortable, like an outsized sweater bought as a gift by a well-meaning but clueless aunt.

Still. He had to admit, he was enjoying it all a little.

The keynote address was taking place in the hotel’s main conference center at seven o’clock that evening, an hour from now. Afterward, the guests would make their way to a restaurant on the marina, within walking distance of the hotel, for an eight-thirty start. Venn had arranged to meet Beth in the lobby of the hotel at eight. He’d spend the hour before, while she was listening to the speech, taking a stroll outside.

“Okay,” Beth said, looking at her watch. “I need to get moving.”

Venn headed for the door with her. She turned in surprise.

“I’ll escort you down,” he said.

Beth smiled. “Venn... it’s here in the hotel. You don’t need to come.”

He held up his hands. “I’m not saying you need to be protected, or anything. I just thought I’d ride down in the elevator with you.”

She put her arms round him. “Sorry. Yes. I was being oversensitive.”

*

He left her to join the funnel of people heading toward the doors of the conference center, and began to make his way to the hotel entrance.

At the elevator, he stopped.

He’d brought his gun along, a Beretta. It was in the safe in their room upstairs.

He was only going for a stroll along the marina. And he was here on a weekend vacation.

Still. A cop was always a cop, even off-duty.

And a cop never left his gun behind.

Venn took the stairs, ignoring the elevator as was his custom. In the room, he retrieved the Beretta in its shoulder holster, took off his jacket and fitted the holster.

He looked at himself in the mirror. A slight bulge in the suit jacket. That was another reason he favored looser-fitting clothes like leather jackets. The cops he knew who wore suits tended