night is over,” Noah said, spinning James and propelling him toward the elevators. The group laughed and followed, the just-past-drunk, ambling stroll of men at midnight in Las Vegas. “We’ve got an early morning. C’mon.”
James groaned. “Why do they have this conference here?” He threw his head back and trudged toward the elevator bank. “Why can’t they have this conference in…” His eyes slid sideways. He grinned. “In Des Moines. Somewhere boring.” Noah knuckled his friend’s hair as James laughed.
All one thousand of them were there, spread across the tenth through twenty-fifth floors of the hotel. God bless the government and its bulk room discounts. Where should the Federal Bureau of Investigation put the special agents who attended the largest annual FBI conference? All together, like sardines in a can. No one could quite figure out whether the conference was a mini vacation or a horrible tease. Agents had to attend a week’s worth of sessions, lectures, and breakout workshops, each of them putting together their own thirty-hour-long conference schedule. Nights were theirs… as long as they badged in every morning on time. More than a few agents overslept each morning, hungover and destroyed from a night out on the town. If an agent was late two days in a row, they were sent home, and from there, it was a short trip to the doghouse—or worse. Maybe the whole conference was a test of character.
Whatever it was, the conference was Noah’s week away from home—Des Moines, Iowa—and a chance to reconnect with his friends from the academy. James had been his roommate way back when, and now he was chasing bank robbers in Southern California. Gary was running the white-collar crime squad out of Philly, while Pete and Carl were chasing right-wing terrorists in Seattle.
Everyone else was in a major field office, while Noah had somehow landed in the Des Moines resident agency—a satellite of the larger Omaha field office—and stayed, like a farmhouse dropped by a tornado. He was the assistant special agent in charge of Des Moines now. Technically, that meant he outranked all of his friends. Even if it was only Des Moines.
Everyone had done well. Everyone was at that comfortable point in their careers: close enough to the middle to settle in, far enough from the beginning to have shaken out the kinks and the nerves. Far enough away from retirement for that to still be a distant thing, something relegated to when the knees began to act up and the gray hairs were multiplying.
The elevator doors slid open, and the guys piled in. They leaned against the mirrored walls, laughing about the evening, reminiscing over the dinner they’d spent way too much money on, remembering the women they’d seen out in the casino and on the Strip. Everyone’s eyes were glassy. Their shoulders were starting to droop.
Noah’s hands shook inside his pants pockets. One foot tapped silently against the carpet. It’s Vegas. You waited all year for this.
He’d chickened out for the past two nights, heading back to his room when everyone else did and pacing for an hour before watching the neon glow of the Strip from his window. Eventually, he’d turned on CNN and listened to the warble of the news anchors as he face-planted in bed, hoping the drone of their voices would force out the thoughts that kept circling around and around his mind. Coward. You’ll never know. You’ll never know if you don’t try.
The elevator started spitting everyone out at the eleventh, fourteenth, and seventeenth floors, until it was just James and him stepping off on the twentieth. Their rooms were across the hall from each other.
James leaned back against his door, key card in one hand, sport coat crumpled in his other. His holster was out and visible now—a violation, but it was midnight, and they were alone. Who was going to write him up?
“I’m telling you, man,” James said, in the languid drawl of the inebriated. “You should go back down there. Maybe she’s not the one for tonight, but she definitely would be willing to flirt with you if you happened to run into her again. How long has it been since a pretty woman smiled at you?”
Noah’s eyes fell to the carpet as he dug his shoe into the wool fibers.
“I know you’ve been focused on your career, and…” James trailed off with a sigh. “I know it’s been a while. That can eat at a man, you know? You deserve to be happy. God,