Free Lucky In Love by Deborah Coonts Page B

to tell me what’s so important?”
    “The bottom-feeders have staked out one of the contest couples. They got ‘em pinned down.”
    “A rescue mission from the paparazzi. You’ve could’ve done that with a security guy or two.”
    “No, ma’am. They got them trapped at Spanish Trail.” Paolo gave me a knowing look in the rearview, bursting my little bubble of joie de vivre .
    “Let me guess. Phil Stewart’s house?”
    He didn’t answer. He didn’t have to. The look on his face told me all I needed to know.
    Phil Stewart. Just the thought of him made my skin crawl. Phil was a swinger. And he loved to host spouse-swapping parties at his estate in Spanish Trail. I attended one once... as a spectator. Before you take that the wrong way, Teddie and Dane had conspired with Detective Romeo to catch a killer at one of Phil’s little soirées. One had been more than enough.
    Spanish Trail was the first gated community in Las Vegas. Built almost thirty years ago, it was so far west of the Strip, on a two-lane dirt portion of Tropicana Avenue, that most thought it should have been called East Los Angeles. The power-trust running Las Vegas had deemed the developers fools. Now that section of Trop was a six-lane speed trap, and Spanish Trail was in the middle of suburbia and one of the most sought-after developments of its kind in the Valley. The developers had laughed all the way to the bank, and were probably living on their own islands in the South Pacific or the Med. None of that mattered right now, of course. But the fact that Spanish Trail was not only gated, but also had gated communities inside the gated community, mattered a lot. Phil Stewart’s house sat on a primo lot behind two gates.
    Paolo rolled down his window as we turned into the east gate and eased up to the guard shack. A bored adolescent in a yellow shirt black pants with a gun holstered on his hip gave us the once-over. “Help you?”
    Why, with each passing day, did everyone look younger and younger? I stuck my head out the back window and introduced myself. “I hear you got a bit of a problem in the Estates?”
    “Shutterbugs all anglin’ for a People magazine paycheck.”
    “I’m here to take the persons of interest off your hands.”
    His eyes widened. “Hope your life insurance is up to date.” He punched a button and the gates slowly inched open. “You got the code to the second set?”
    Paolo flashed a piece of paper and nodded as the guard waved us through.
    “We need a plan,” I said, trotting out my flair for the obvious. I watched Paolo maneuver the big car past the golf course on our right and the clubhouse on our left. I thought for a moment, but inspiration refused to strike. “We couldn’t do something so simple and bold as to pull up to the front of the house and grab them, could we? Who are we grabbing anyway?”
    “I don’t have the names. But no one can see in the windows on this car—the tint is several shades past legal.” Paolo grinned, but lines of tension bracketed his eyes. .
    “Well then, pull right up to the front door. After that, I’ll make it up as I go.”
    After opening the second gate with the magic numbers, Paolo eased the car through. Two white pickups with yellow lights and emblazoned with the Spanish Trail logo sat like sentries forming a gauntlet through which only the worthy would pass. From behind their mirrored Ray-Bans, the guards watched us.
    “Are rent-a-cops supposed to make us feel better or worse?” I mused out loud, not really expecting an answer.
    “Mostly they are here to make the residents behave. And to write tickets for exceeding the twenty-five-mile-per-hour limit.”
    “I feel safer already.” I leaned forward through the opening. “The house we want is that big one at the end—the one with the party house out back, and the naked dancing girls in bronze relief on the front door.”
    As it turned out, we couldn’t have missed it. A crowd ringed the front of the house—men