all.
***
Johnny’s Hideaway was a hip, eclectic, upscale joint – the kind of place that played music ranging anywhere from Frank Sinatra and Tony Bennett and The Beach Boys to Madonna and Eminem and Rhianna. A little something for everybody. Just like Nicholas had a little something for Dinah Leach. The reality television star would just need to wait a little bit longer now to find out exactly what his gift to her would be. But it wouldn’t be the suspense killing her. It would be Nicholas himself pulling off the dirty deed.
Fifty feet away out on the crowded dance floor, Dinah Leach shook her shimmy to the upbeat sounds of Lady Gaga – looking like a complete and total slut as she did so, of course. As usual, the fame whore seemed to be enjoying the feeling of all the adoring eyeballs glued to her. Fake-ass celebrity bitch. With any luck at all, though, her fifteen minutes of fame would expire at just about the same time her worthless life did. And the clock was ticking now. Nicholas wondered if she could hear it. It was getting louder.
Tick, tick, tick.
Nicholas stretched his neck six inches to the left and sipped ice water through a plastic straw; wetting his lips at the same time he whetted his enormous appetite for murder. Of course Dinah Leach couldn’t hear the clock ticking. She was much too consumed with her own celebrity to notice something like that. Much too full of herself. Still, Nicholas supposed it would have been difficult for anybody to hear a goddamn thing above the deafening music blasting over the fifty or so speakers stationed around Johnny’s Hideaway, vibrating the floor beneath his shiny black dress shoes so violently that it reminded him of standing on the platform of a busy subway station in New York City.
From his shielded position in the corner of the club, Nicholas watched Dinah Leach swivel her hips suggestively in perfect time to Gaga’s Poker Face. The woman’s jeans looked expensive to him, and Nicholas had an eye trained to notice such things. The fancy denim had no doubt cost Dinah Leach five hundred bucks at a bare minimum, and they’d obviously been tailoured to show off her very best asset. Her only asset, really. The only thing that anyone in the world really valued about her.
Nicholas narrowed his eyes as a pair of hulking, muscular black men wearing oversized Atlanta Falcons football jerseys and matching baseball caps moved forward to sandwich Dinah Leach out on the crowded dance floor, trying their damndest to get some of her undeserved fame to rub off on them.
Nicholas smirked and took another sip of his ice water. Didn’t these idiots know that fake celebrity came with its own fake gloss that never quite rubbed off, no matter how hard you tried?
Apparently not.
Shaking his head, Nicholas lifted his wrist and checked his watch again. One forty-two a.m. now. Just a little bit longer until he could get this show on the road. And the clock was still ticking. He wondered if Dinah Leach could hear it yet. It was barreling down on her like a goddamn freight train now.
Tick, tick, tick…
CHAPTER 19
Dana’s eyes homed in like a powerful laser on the watch strapped around Nancy Lawson’s left wrist. It was a Tag Heuer.
She blew out a slow breath and tried to control the jack-hammering of her heartbeat against her ribcage. No use. Nancy Lawson’s timepiece looked like a fairly expensive piece of jewellery to her – especially for someone who’d been complaining about money ten minutes earlier – but it wasn’t the cheap Mickey Mouse watch that the woman in the video had been wearing.
Dana shook herself and tried to calm down. Wasn’t easy. She closed her eyes and wondered if she’d ever recover from the trauma of her life-and-death struggle in her brother’s underground bunker. She’d faced down other killers in the past, but never before had she felt this jumpy, this unsure of herself. She was acting like a scared little rabbit right now when what she really needed to be acting like was a goddamn lion. People’s lives depended on it.
‘Is everything OK, Agent Whitestone?’
Dana opened her eyes and pursed her lips. Balling up the wet paper towels in her hand, she tossed them into a metal garbage receptacle two feet away. ‘Actually, no, Miss Lawson,’ she said. ‘Everything’s not OK. Not even close.’
Dana paused then when the idea occurred to her. Fuck it. Worth a