Chapter 8: The Empty Floor

We didn't go back to Henderson.

Rafferty drove the van to the staff garage of the Wexley Las Vegas, and a night security guard lifted the gate before we reached it.

He took me up in a service elevator.

At the fortieth floor he swiped a card, and it kept going up.

"The empty floor," I said, because it was no use pretending.

"The empty floor," Rafferty said. "You knew about it."

"Everyone knows about it. Housekeeping says nobody's allowed to clean it but one woman who retired in 2019."

"She's my mother's friend. She still comes on Thursdays."

The doors opened on a hallway of dark wood and one soft lamp.

The penthouse took up the entire top floor.

There was a living room with a wall of glass and the whole Strip burning beneath it, and a kitchen the size of my apartment.

It was warm and strange and lived in, with a stack of paperbacks on the sofa and a jacket over a chair.

"Nobody lives here," I said.

"I live here," Rafferty said. "I haven't had a person up here in four years."

"Why not?"

"Because they want the elevator."

I turned from the window.

He stood in the middle of his living room with his hands at his sides, watching me watch it.

"Everyone who gets in the car wants something," he said.

"A job, a loan, a seat on a board."

"A girl in college pretended she liked fishing."

"I thought, if I found someone who didn't know..."

He stopped.

It was a long moment.

I understood then, very clearly, the thing I'd never said out loud.

He wanted to be wanted by someone who could leave.

And I had told him that I didn't know.

I went to him anyway, across the rug.

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