Stella arrived in eighteen minutes, which told Holden two things: she’d been closer than she’d said, and she’d decided he was worth the speed.
She came through the villa door like a woman who’d seen worse, which given her line of work she probably had.
She looked at the tiger.
Looked at the baby.
Looked at Stu’s mouth.
Looked at Holden.
“Okay,” she said.
“Walk me through it.”
Holden handed her the list he’d made while they waited.
Three items, numbered, costed.
The tiger had an owner a boxer, probably Tyson, the villa was close enough to his place.
The baby had a hospital bracelet under the onesie.
Stu’s tooth was gone but the blood pattern said it happened at a dentist’s office, not a brawl.
“The groom,” Stella said.
“Still missing. Working on it.”
She read the list twice.
He watched her price it, the way he’d learned to price a load-in.
She looked up.
“This is an excess-damages situation.”
“I know.”
“My envelope was for preventative. This is reconstructive. The rate’s different.”
“Bill me.”
She studied him for a beat longer than she needed to.
Then she pulled out her phone and started making calls.
Twenty minutes later they were moving.
The tiger went first.
Stella knew a guy who knew a guy who worked Tyson’s security, and the call that came back was exactly what Holden had expected: the tiger was missed, the cops weren’t involved yet, and if it came home before noon there’d be no paperwork and no bill.
“Yet,” Phil said.
“There’s always a yet,” Stella said.
They got the tiger into the bathroom, then into a rolling laundry cart Stella had somehow produced from the villa’s back hallway.
Alan insisted on sitting with it.
The tiger, dosed and groggy, let him.
“This is the best day of my life,” Alan said.
“It’s ten a.m.,” Stu said.
The drive to Tyson’s estate took thirty minutes.
Holden stayed in the car.
Stella and Phil walked the cart up the drive, and Holden watched through the windshield as a very large man in a very good suit opened the door, looked at the tiger, looked at Phil, and after a long, unreadable pause accepted the cart without a word.
Phil came back to the car pale.
“He didn’t say anything.”
“That’s good,” Stella said.
“He just looked at me.”
“Also good.”
“I think he’s going to remember my face.”
“Everybody remembers your face, Phil,” Holden said.
“That’s not new.”
His phone buzzed.
A text from a number he didn’t recognize.
Nice work with the tiger.
You just made someone’s morning easier.
R
Holden stared at it.
He didn’t know anyone named R.
It didn’t feel like a wrong number.
The baby was harder.
The hospital bracelet led to Sunrise, and Sunrise led to a very tired nurse who looked at the baby, looked at the four of them, and made a call that took fifteen minutes.
By the time it was done, Holden had paid a fine he didn’t argue and signed a paper that said he’d been babysitting for a friend.
“You don’t look like a babysitter,” the nurse said.
“I get that a lot.”
The baby’s mother a cocktail waitress named April who looked like she hadn’t slept in a week showed up twenty minutes later.
She took the baby without asking questions.
Holden slipped her two hundred dollars on the way out.
“You didn’t have to do that,” Stella said in the parking lot.
“She looked like she needed it.”
Stella gave him the look again.
The one that said she was updating her file on him in real time.
Stu’s tooth was last, and it turned out Holden had been wrong.
It wasn’t a dentist.
It was Stu himself, at a pull-your-own-tooth stall off Fremont, drunk enough to think it was a good idea and precise enough to do it cleanly.
“I’m a dentist,” Stu said, prodding the gap with his tongue, staring at the receipt Stella’s contact had texted her.
“I pulled my own tooth.”
“You’re also an idiot,” Phil said.
“I don’t even remember it.”
“That’s the point of the dose,” Holden said.
The bill for the stall was thirty dollars.
Holden paid it.
The bill for Stella’s contact who’d tracked it down was two hundred.
Holden paid that too.
His poker roll was thinning faster than he’d planned.
They were back at the villa by one p.m.
The tiger was gone.
The baby was gone.
Stu’s mouth was still a problem but it wasn’t an escalating one.
Doug was still missing.
Holden sat on the couch and pulled the evidence back together.
The villa’s minibar bill.
The chapel receipt he’d found in Phil’s jacket.
The roof-access keycard in Alan’s satchel that didn’t match any door on their floor.
Stella sat next to him.
Close enough he could smell bergamot and the faint burn of printer toner.
“You’re good at this,” she said.
“I do events.”
“This isn’t an event. This is disaster forensics.”
“Same skill set.”
She didn’t believe him.
He could tell.
But she let it go, which told him she was deciding whether to trust him or just bill him.
“The groom,” she said.
“I know.”
“You’ve got a wedding tomorrow.”
“I know.”
“And you’re not panicking.”
She looked back, steady, unimpressed by the chaos in a way that made him feel slightly less alone.
“I panic after,” he said.
“During, I work.”
She almost smiled.
Almost.
“Okay,” she said.
“Let’s find him.”
The roof-access card was the key.
It took Holden ten minutes to backtrack it a hotel keycard, not a villa card, and the magnetic strip was still readable.
Stella called the Caesars security desk, and the desk called back with a flag: the card had been used at 11:47 p.m.
last night to access the rooftop deck of the main tower.
“Why would Doug go to the roof,” Phil said.
“He wouldn’t,” Holden said.
“Someone put him there.”
Before anyone could move on it, Stella’s phone rang.
She stepped away to take it, and when she came back her face had the flat, professional look Holden was starting to recognize as bad news dressed as calm.
“That was the front desk. Risk management wants a word.”
“About what,” Phil said.
“About the fact that in six hours this address has generated a tiger transport, a hospital intake, and a chapel receipt for services rendered to your party. Someone downstairs in a suit is writing things down.”
“How bad,” Holden said.
“Not police bad. Yet. But they want a deposit against future incidents, and they want it before you check out.” She named a number.
Phil made a sound like a man who’d just been sat on.
“That’s on top of everything else,” Stu said.
“Everything else has a running total,” Stella said.
“You want to see it?”
“No,” Holden and Phil said together.
Stella almost smiled at that the first real crack all morning.
“I’ll handle the deposit. That’s two more favors on top of what you’ve already spent, and one of them’s mine to call in whenever I want.”
“Fine,” Holden said.
“Whatever keeps this off a police blotter.”
“That’s the idea.” She was already dialing again, moving toward the door, competent and unhurried in a way that made the room feel less like it was ending.
Over her shoulder: “Cars are downstairs. You want the roof, we go now, before that risk manager decides a missing groom is also his problem.”
That got Phil moving.
Alan grabbed the satchel like it had somewhere to be.
Stu, tooth and all, was first out the door.
Holden looked at the keycard one more time a small rectangle of plastic that had already cost a hotel deposit and two favors just to make it speak and followed them out.
The elevator down was fast and silent, the kind of silence that came from four men doing math they didn’t like.
The tiger was home.
The baby was home.
Stu’s mouth was a problem for a dentist who wasn’t Stu.
None of it mattered if Doug wasn’t standing at an altar tomorrow.
Stella was already at the valet stand when they hit the lobby, keys in hand, phone still against her ear, negotiating a deposit like it was the easiest thing in the world.
“Which car,” Phil said.
“Mine,” she said, not looking up.
“I drive faster than you panic.”
They piled in.
The tower rose ahead of them through the windshield, forty stories of glass throwing back the noon sun, and somewhere up near the top of it Holden was almost sure now was a groom who had no idea how close he’d come to missing his own wedding.
“Punch it,” Phil said.
Stella pulled into traffic like she’d been waiting all morning for someone to say that.
Doug was still missing.
The clock was still running.
Whatever was waiting for them at the top of that tower, they were about to find out the hard way.