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while I had, admittedly, committed one misdemeanour by breaking into Masters’ suite, they had no reason to trouble themselves with the notion that I might have committed another, more heinous crime?
    Listen, if there’d been a chance that I could have saved her, I would have given it my absolute best shot, and to hell with the consequences. But she was way beyond that now, and I couldn’t risk hanging around. Over the years I’ve come to appreciate a number of hazards associated with the line of ungainful employment I’ve tended to pursue, and while being caught is one of the least appealing, being caught in the vicinity of a floating corpse is even worse.
    So I’m afraid I turned to leave, and it was only as I did so that I noticed a hotel robe lying crumpled on the floor behind the door. The robe was burgundy in colour, matching the felt on the gamingtables downstairs, and it had a fifty-cent coin embroidered on a chest pocket in silver thread. Tangled up with the robe was an item of clothing of an altogether skimpier design, fashioned from pink Lycra. I prodded it with my foot and discovered that it was a one-piece leotard with a short, frilly skirt. It seemed like the type of thing a Vegas showgirl might wear. I looked again at the body in the bath. She had the athletic build of a dancer, though perhaps the legs were a trifle short. But if it wasn’t a showgirl’s costume, then what could it be? It certainly didn’t remind me of any of the outfits I’d seen on the casino floor.
    And then, all too gradually, my thoughts clicked into place like the slowing drums on a slot machine. What was it Victoria had said about Josh Masters’ show? Something to do with volunteering during one of his tricks because his assistant had come down with a bug? Well, Christ, it must have been some variety of super bug if it was capable of sweeping a redhead off her feet and drowning her in a tub of bathwater.
    Leaving the robe and the costume and the girl where they were, I closed the bathroom door behind me and raised my hand to my forehead, asking myself if I should put the casino chips back where I’d found them. And of course, the sensible response was absolutely, no question, but it was being drowned out by the buzz of fear and panic swarming around my head. And my feet, the traitorous little blighters, had already carried me through into the sitting area before my rational self could take control of the situation, and by the time my rational self had gathered its senses, my irrational self had sided with my feet and was yammering away about how I should get the hell out of Dodge before I spent the rest of my days rotting in an American penitentiary for a death I’d had nothing to do with.
    Next thing I knew, I was scurrying along the hotel corridor towards the service stairs, and by the time I was careening downwards and hauling myself around the banister rail, the game was truly up and there was no way my brain could conceive of a set of circumstances in which it would be sensible for me to break back into a hotel suite with a dead woman inside it.
    So the casino chips were still in my jacket pocket, and not in the closet safe, and Josh Masters’ wallet was in the closet safe, and not in my pocket (or indeed, his). And I guess I should have been a bit more troubled by all of that than I presently was, but strange as it may sound, I could just about glimpse the merits in holding onto sixty thousand dollars’ worth of chips. Heck, if nothing else, it was going to make a mighty useful getaway fund, because fleeing Sin City was the first thing I intended to do once I’d found Victoria and brought her up to speed.
    There was no way we could stay in the hotel, you see, because as soon as the body was discovered, I’d be in a great deal of trouble. Yes, I’d thought it fair to assume that security didn’t spend their time watching over closed-circuit cameras in the hotel corridors, but that didn’t mean those cameras