To Vegas with love Read online

  She bit her lip, thinking. Gail never really liked the whole “download information into her brain” thing, but she nodded after a moment. “I think I can make an exception this time. I’d hate to stand here and not be able to help.”

  “Right,” I said, making a quick note and giving Gail all the abilities she needed to be an awesome doctor, or at least to be able to assist an accomplished one like Maggie.

  “I think they’re starting to come,” Maggie said as we reached the pavilion. “We’d better get ready.”

  I turned to look and found she was one hundred percent correct. A few families were coming toward us, led by the woman with the boy.

  “Thank you,” she said to Maggie as she reached us. “I don’t know how much longer we’d be waiting.”

  “It was my pleasure,” Maggie said, smiling brightly at the woman.

  As they spoke, Gail began to organize the others who had arrived and sort out their treatment, so I decided to get ahead of things.

  Taking a moment to walk away, I quickly scribbled a permit for the pop-up hospital into existence as well as actual medical credentials for her and Maggie. Once that was done, I pulled out my phone and called Skye.

  Skye answered on the third ring. “Hey, Roger, what’s up?”

  “Long story short, we set up a pop-up hospital in the park across from the hospital we had that meeting at,” I said, unable to hide the combination of excitement and annoyance in my voice. I was glad to be helping people but annoyed at the process by which we’d had to do it.

  “Um … okay, is that legal?” Skye asked before laughing. “Let me guess, you made it legal?”

  “For now,” I said, but a quick glance at my pad let me know the sentence was already fading away, and once it was gone completely, well, our legitimacy would fade as well. That was one of the problems with the pen. I couldn’t just rewrite laws. I could sort of get around them if I knew how, but there was a huge difference between writing it all out in enough detail so that it stayed real and writing one sentence like how I just had, and even then, it was no guarantee.

  “So … let me guess. You need me to find out how to actually do it and send you an email with what to write?” Skye asked, and I could practically feel her smiling into the phone. “This isn’t like when you tried to change the bylaws at that bar, right?”

  “Nope, this is one hundred percent not for my personal gain.” I thought for a minute. “Well, ninety-five percent. Insurance companies are douchebags and thwarting them does bring a smile to my face.”

  “Right, give me a few, and I’ll have it.” I could already hear her trailing off as my stripper-turned-hacker-extraordinaire turned her expansive programming knowledge to the task at hand.

  “Cool, and can you have the others with medical experience or those who want some come over here to help?” I glanced at the line and was surprised to see it contained way more people than had been in the waiting room. “I think we’re going to be here for a while.”

  “On it,” Skye said in a tone that said she’d barely heard me, but I knew that was par for the course with her since she never forgot anything. “Want me to have Cami come too? She has this goop.”

  “Yeah, sure,” I said, smirking. Cami had been wanting to try out some of the new machines she’d created with ‘mad science’ because was there really another kind worth having? This seemed like the perfect opportunity.

  “Cool,” Skye said after a long pause. “This permitting process looks complicated, Roger. Can I call you back?”

  “Right, good luck,” I said right before she hung up. To my left, Gail and Maggie were doing their level best to help, but even still, I could tell this was going to take a while. That was fine though, I didn’t have anything else to do.

  So, after scribbling a few notes to give myself a few new abilities, I moved toward Maggie, pen in hand. “What do you want me to do to help?”

  “Do you know what you’re doing?” Maggie asked, barely glancing up from the old man in front of her which made sense. She was busy with a stethoscope after all.

  “I do,” I replied, allowing my pen to slip back into my shirt. “But I’m inclined to follow your lead. This is your jam, after all.”

  “Right.” Maggie nodded. “Let’s do this.”

  Only before I could help, a half-dozen police cars pulled up to the curb, and a dozen jackboots climbed out, most of whom looked like they didn’t really want to be there.

  “You need to take all this down,” the leader said, stomping toward me as he adjusted his belt. It was a touch strange because I could actually feel him glaring at me despite not being able to see his eyes behind his mirrored shades. “This is all illegal, and you’re trespassing.”

  “Actually no,” I said, pulling the permit from my pocket and showing it to him. “You’ll find it quite legal.”

  “Is that so?” he asked, snatching the permit from my hand. He barely glanced at it.

  “It is so,” I said with a shrug.

  He leaned in close to me so I could smell the stink of chewing tobacco on his breath. “I think you’re lying.”

  “Go, check it out.” I smiled. “And after that, feel free to get checked out.” I gestured at the girls who were busily taking care of the patients. “It’s free.”

  “I am going to check this out, and once I find out it’s fake, I’m going to take you to jail and throw away the key.” He turned and stomped off, and I watched him go, annoyed.

  It shouldn’t be this hard to help people.

  3

  “Do you know how much money you just cost me?” Chet cried as he stepped onto the grass in front of my clinic and glared at me

  “Bro, I haven’t even begun to cost you money,” I said as I helped our last patient, a tiny woman cradling an infant that had some kind of cough off the cot where she’d been sitting. As she smiled at me, I knew it was all worth it to have helped, even though it hadn’t felt like we’d done much. Just provided her with some much-needed medicine. It had been so easy, especially with my pen.

  “You don’t understand what you’ve done,” Chet snapped, putting his arms on his hips so that he was framed by the hospital we’d been kicked out of for helping people an hour before. “I also don’t know how you got that license.” His finger shook with rage as he stared at the license on the wall.

  “Yeah, well, I know this girl who is great at navigating government bureaucracy.” That was true, but that wasn’t quite, well, one hundred percent true. Even with her instructions, the words were fading. We probably had another two hours at best, which was fine since we were done for now.

  “Not for long.” He glared at me. “You do not want to fuck with me, Roger.”

  “Yeah, okay.” I shrugged and turned away from him, ignoring the jackass. “I think you stepped in some shit. It seemed pretty disgusting, by the way.” My pen pinged in my ear, letting me know the voice command had worked.

  Leaving Chet to deal with his gross shoes, I made my way toward my girls. They’d almost all come, and it was a good thing since we’d wound up treating a ridiculous amount of people. The thing was, it wasn’t really enough. How many other hospitals were there in this city just like this? Hell, how many were there in the country? Or the world?

  “I think we need a real location,” I said as I moved toward Skye and hugged her. “Found anything we can do?”

  “Not really …” Skye sighed, and I could tell like she wanted to gesture at her computer screen even though she didn’t have it since she’d been out here helping. “The easiest way is still to buy one.”

  “Well, we could steal the deed and use your pen to change it,” Amy said, sidling up to me and giving me a kiss on the cheek. “And that would be a lot cheaper. I had to leverage the Medallion pretty heavily to get the money to buy that.” She gestured at the hospital. “Well, to buy out everything. You sure you don’t want me to try the whole corporate raider method?”

  “Maybe.” I sighed, staring at my old boss. See,
I’d worked for Amy at my old job before I’d come into my magic pen, and now? Well, she was head of Stevens Investments, and largely bankrolled our whole operation. “I know that your plan might work in the end, but it’d take a while, assuming we could even buy it with our legitimate assets.” Amy was already frowning because we’d had this argument before. “I know Shelley doesn’t like that idea.”

  “That’s because Shelley is only concerned with Stevens Games, LLC.” Amy rolled her eyes. It was sort of funny because Shelley brought in a lot of money running my casino. The two constantly fought over capital. “She wants to use it for expansion, and I keep telling her we don’t need to do that because, well, you.” She gestured at me.

  “Right.” I nodded. “Let me go to the bank tomorrow and pay off the loan so we can use that cash, and Shelley will be okay. Then we can figure out what to do from there. The last thing I want to do is start a war with stockbroker assholes while they could buy out my debt or something stupid.”

  “Fair enough,” Amy said with a shrug. Then she glanced at her watch. “I have some things to do …”

  “Go on.” I nodded to her, and she gave me another kiss.

  “You know me, my mind’s on my money, and my money is on my mind.” She walked off then, heading toward one of the limos in the parking lot so she could head back to the casino I owned because, well, it had my secret lair beneath it.

  “I think Amy’s plan is solid,” Skye said after Amy had left. “Especially since I can hack into the hospital’s records and find out their financials. Then we can dump any dirt we find, drop their stock price to the floor, and buy it for a song.”

  “Again, we can try that, but it feels like a lot of work.” I sighed as I glanced at Chet who was busily yelling into his phone about permits that should never have been issued. “Why don’t we go ahead and start laying the groundwork?” I tapped my chin thinking. “Still, there has to be an easier way.”

  “You could always ask Beau,” Gail said, moving toward me and taking my hand. “He and his wife have that charity. Maybe they know how to get through all the red tape.” She frowned slightly at Chet as he climbed into his limo, still scowling at us. “Though I am inclined to tell you to say fuck it and go to war with that asshole, but a lot of people won’t be getting helped in the meantime.”

  “You know, that’s an interesting idea,” I said, nodding. I’d met the eccentric oil tycoon and his wife at a poker tournament a few months ago. At the time he’d talked about buying off politicians and the like. “Maybe I will give him a call.” I paused for a second. “Unless you want to try talking to his wife first?”

  “No.” Gail shrugged. “She might be able to bend Beau’s ear and the like, but they don’t have discussions about things like this.” Gail grinned. “Hell, they don’t even talk about purchases less than fifty million.”

  “Well, they do after that Caesar statue Beau bought.” I smirked.

  “Only because she thought he was buying a tiny statue and it was so huge, they had to reinforce the floors in the mansion, and even then, it wasn’t a money thing. It was more because her prized poodle was annoyed at the dust.” Gail gave me a long look. “That’s why I like the pen. No dust.”

  “I do hate dust,” I agreed, nodding. “Okay, let me give Beau a call. Can you guys clean all this up? Something tells me it would be to our advantage to be totally gone by the time our permit expires.”

  “I got that feeling too,” Gail said, glancing at Chet before heading toward the other girls who were already packing the equipment away.

  Letting them get to it, I pulled out my cell phone and dialed the man who had become something of a father figure to me over the last few months. And, despite being busy running his mega oil company, he answered by the third ring.

  “Roger, how’s it going?” he asked, his Southern drawl that reminding me the man’s version of a suit was a pair of jeans. “Are you coming to the party on the yacht next week? The missus would love to have you and your little lady.”

  “Oh, trust me, Beau. Gail wouldn’t miss it for the world,” I said, remembering the sixteen dresses Gail had tried on before in preparation for the event.

  “Good, I’ll introduce you to not one, but three former presidents.” The sad thing was, I knew he wasn’t joking. “But that’s not why you called, is it?”

  “Yeah … I need some advice,” I said, taking a deep breath while it got quiet on the other end of the phone.

  “The ‘fly down and drown your sorrows in hookers and blow’ kind, or another kind?” he asked, deadly serious.

  “Another kind,” I said, waving my hand at the hospital even though I knew he couldn’t see it. “I wanted to ask you about your charity.”

  “My charity? The Gucci for refugees thing?” he asked, voice muffled. I heard him moving about on the other end of the phone.

  “Yeah. See, I got it in my head to go buy a hospital and turn it into—”

  “Let me stop you right there, son,” Beau said as I heard a door close on his end of the line. “See, I get it. You’ve come into your money, and you think you can help people.” He took a long breath. “The thing is, there’s no money in actually helping people.”

  “I know that, but I don’t need money.” I frowned. This wasn’t going the way I’d hoped.

  “Do you think I wanna spend my time sending handbags to poor people?” he asked, an undercurrent of anger in his voice. “Of course not. It’s silly.”

  “Why do you do it then?”

  “Because that lets us get real help in,” Beau explained. “The guys who run those countries? They make billions off the misery of their people, and they don’t want us helping unless it’s by giving them generous amounts of money they can keep for themselves. But, hey, you come off as an idiot who wants to outfit the little people in Prada? Then you can sneak in the good stuff, really help people.”

  “I see …” I said, even though I sort of didn’t. “Are you saying that the reason your charity is dumb is so that everyone ignores you?”

  “Yes.” I could practically see him nodding on the other end of the phone. “Listen, when you come down next week, I’ll show you how to do it too because the last thing you want to do is piss off the guys who run the place. All sorts of bad stuff will happen.” He took a deep breath. “Those rats are in every ship, and they stick together. My advice? Figure out a way to do what you can without making them notice you.”

  “Yeah …” I said as I looked over at Chet’s hospital. “Somehow I think it’s too late for that.” I would have probably said more, but my phone started buzzing, letting me know Shelley was calling me. That was odd … she almost never called me since she was much more of an in-person type of girl.

  “I hope it isn’t,” Beau said, and I could hear the sigh in his voice. “If it gets really hairy for you, let me know. I’ll do what I can.” The humor came back to his voice. “I know three presidents, after all.”

  “Will do,” I said as the call from Shelley disappeared and an alert let me know I had voicemail. That was probably bad. “Thanks for the chat.”

  “It’s not a problem, Roger. Talk to you soon. Good luck with your hospital.”

  “Thanks, Beau,” I said right before he hung up. I took a quick glance around. The girls had already mostly cleaned up.

  “Roger!” Skye said, and as I turned toward her, I saw her coming toward me, one hand cradling her phone. “You need to get to the Medallion right now.”

  4

  “What the fuck are you doing here?” I snarled, glaring at the man in the cheap suit as he looked at me with barely disguised disgust. Behind him was a whole bevy of other clowns in suits.

  “As I told your manager,” he gestured at Shelley who stood just behind me in her navy power suit. She was glaring at the inspector so hard, I could practically feel heat wafting off of her. “We are from Modi Asset Management, and we’re here to inspect the facility.”

  “I heard that part,” I said, waving off his
comment. I was trying not to be annoyed with him, but it was hard. “I just don’t understand why you’re here at all.”

  “Again, as I explained to your manager,” - he nodded to Shelley who ground her teeth together - “your casino has a sizeable amount of debt, and as the servicer of said debt, we have the right to inspect the premises.” He tapped his clipboard without showing me the forms on it. “It’s all right here, as authorized by your CFO, Miss Amy Soli.” This time he waved the forms at me.

  “Skye?” I asked, glancing over my shoulder to see her already on the phone.

  “On it, Roger,” she said, turning away.

  “Thanks—”

  “I’ll thank you to step out of the way and let us begin your inspection.” He turned slightly, gesturing to a diminutive man with a bald spot and glasses. “And please prepare your books for Pierre to look through.”

  “You can just hold on a damned minute,” I snapped, glaring at the guy. “The most you’ll be doing is sitting in the conference room until I figure out what’s going on.”

  “I’m afraid that won’t be possible, Mr. Stevens. If you delay us any longer, you will be in violation of subsection sixteen-C which states—”

  “No one cares,” I huffed, reaching out to him. “Let me see your papers.”

  “Certainly.” He handed it to me, and as I took it, I tapped the top form.

  “I’m afraid you have the wrong date.” I pointed to the date as I got ready to cue up a mental command. “This inspection says its for next week on Friday.” There was a ping in my ear as the date on the papers changed. “So, I guess you’ll be leaving.” I offered him his forms.

  Mr. Suit blinked at me three times, the smug look dropping off his face. Then he reached out and took them from me, his eyes scanning them in a second.