Chapter 2: The Gold Nugget

Las Vegas hit them like a wall of heat and bad lighting. The morning sun pressed down from a cloudless sky, and the Strip's neon still burned in the gaps between the buildings, though only the early risers would bother to look at that now. Jarrin walked out of the hotel with his hands in his pockets and Jazz three steps ahead of him, tiara still tucked somewhere in her jacket.

Nobody at the front desk looked up. Kevin had gone back to his paperback. The dead man's apartment was three floors above them, and Vegas didn't care. The city didn't care about bathtub deaths or Elvis marriages or the fact that Jarrin's phone had died completely and he'd been carrying it like a piece of scrap metal for the past forty minutes. Vegas had bigger problems, or at least louder ones, and that was enough for the moment.

Jazz stopped on the sidewalk and turned around. "Breakfast."

"Breakfast."

"We haven't eaten since whatever I ate at that bar. Two days ago, probably. The coffee from 2 AM doesn't count, the champagne doesn't count, and the hotel mini-bar has been compromised."

"Fine. Breakfast first." Jarrin adjusted his tank top. The fabric had slept wrong and left a sweat mark shaped like a question mark over his ribs. "There's a diner down the block."

He knew there was a diner down the block. He'd seen it the previous night, actually, from the hotel's rooftop bar, when he'd stood out there for an hour and watched the Strip from an angle he was pretty sure wasn't on any tourist map. Jazz hadn't come out. He'd drunk three beers and watched a pigeon try to steal a napkin from the railing. The pigeon had lost.

The diner was called Betty's, though the name was probably older than Betty herself. Red vinyl booths, a jukebox that looked like it hadn't been worked on since 1978, and a counter where two elderly women sat with mugs of coffee that looked like they'd been poured since before the previous owner's tenure.

Jarrin took a booth in the back. Jazz sat across from him and ordered eggs, toast, and a black coffee. Jarrin ordered the same, minus the toast. He didn't trust toast at nine in the morning after a night of questionable decisions.

The waitress came, took the order, and left. Jazz pulled a card from her deck and set it on the table between them, face down. Then another. Then another. She arranged them in a pattern Jarrin couldn't read from this angle, though it looked more like a tic-tac-toe board drawn by someone who couldn't decide whether they wanted to play.

The jukebox played something with a guitar solo that Jarrin recognized and couldn't place. He took a sip of his coffee, which was bad and too hot and exactly right for the moment.

The two old women at the counter were talking. Loudly. The kind of loud that came from years of being ignored by younger people. One of them, white hair in a bun, the other auburn with a plastic clip, were trading information like a news outlet run entirely by retirees.

"Did you hear what happened at the Gold Nugget?" the white-haired woman said, as if the diner had a direct line to casino security at 3 AM. "The manager told me himself. A man walked in. Walked in like he owned the place, like he'd done it a hundred times."

"Two nights ago," the auburn-haired woman confirmed. "He was wearing a suit. Brown, I think. Expensive. He asked for a tour of the vault."

"Nobody asked him to. They just let him in. The guard was young, a kid really, and he figured what the hell, tourists love vault tours."

"And the man walked through. Straight through the front door, past the guard, past the cameras, right into the vault corridor. The guard said he watched it on the monitors and he didn't move. He thought the man knew his way around."

"What happened next?"

"He didn't come out for twelve hours. The guard called it in when dawn came and the man still hadn't appeared. When they finally got a locksmith on site, the vault was empty. No money, no contents. Just a man. Naked, no clothes, no shoes, no wallet, no phone, no watch, nothing. His clothes were inside the vault, folded neatly on the floor."

Jazz's card pattern stopped moving.

The white-haired woman kept talking. "They searched the building. Nothing. The man was gone. Vanished. Not dead, not hurt. Just gone."

Jarrin looked at Jazz. Jazz looked at the counter. Her card pattern was still, but her fingers were tapping against the tabletop, a rhythm that reminded Jarrin of the elevator's descent, faster and sharper.

"He said it sounded like someone was messing with him, that the guard figured someone was messing with him." The auburn-haired woman picked up the thread. "The casino didn't report it to police. They reported it to corporate. Corporate sent people. The man was never found."

Jazz pushed her coffee toward the center of the table and leaned forward. The booth seat creaked. Jarrin caught her wrist before she could stand.

"Don't," he said.

"Let me ask them."

"They're two old ladies at a diner who talk about casino gossip like it's a news program."

"And yet they have details." Jazz pulled her wrist free. "One of them spoke directly to the casino manager. That's a reliable source, Jarrin."

"The other one's white-haired woman might be unreliable."

"Both are equally unreliable. Which means the actual truth is somewhere in the middle." Jazz was already halfway out of the booth. "I'm asking questions."

"Jazz—"

She crossed the diner in three steps. Jarrin watched her approach the counter like she approached every conversation, with an expression that ranged from polite interest to outright menace depending on how the conversation went. This one looked promising.

"Excuse me," Jazz said, planting herself next to the white-haired woman. "I couldn't help overhearing. You mentioned the Gold Nugget?"

The white-haired woman regarded Jazz with the particular scrutiny that only comes from decades of watching strangers come into her diner. "You work at the Nugget?"

"Could you tell me more about the man? What time did he arrive? Was he alone?"

The auburn-haired woman swiveled around in her stool. "You're asking about that too?"

"The man who vanished," Jazz said. "The casino kept it quiet, but I have connections. I might be able to help find out where he went." This was, in fact, a complete lie. Jazz had no connections to anyone at the Gold Nugget, though she did have the uncanny ability to make people believe things, and the white-haired woman immediately leaned in as if someone had handed her a microphone.

"What do you know?"

"Nothing yet. But if you can give me the shift manager's name, the time of day, whether there were witnesses besides the guard, I might be able to ask around discreetly." Jazz produced her business card from somewhere. Jarrin had never seen this card before in his life. It read Jazz Zepelli, Miscellaneous Services and had no phone number, which was either a bold marketing choice or a terrible one.

The auburn-haired woman produced the manager's name in exchange. A man called Delaney. The incident happened at approximately 11 PM. The guard's name was Ricky. There were no witnesses besides the guard and the security cameras, though the camera footage showed nothing unusual until the man entered the vault corridor, at which point the footage went blank for exactly four seconds. When it came back, the man was gone.

Jazz collected the information like a detective at a game of Jeopardy, nodding at every detail and scribbling on a napkin. Jarrin watched from the booth with his coffee and his eggs and the slow-dawning realization that his wife had, in less than five minutes, extracted more useful intelligence than he could have extracted in a week of asking people politely.

She returned to the booth with the napkin, sat down, and looked at Jarrin with the expression of someone who had just found a winning hand.

"A Stand user," she said.

"We don't know that."

"The camera footage went blank. The man walked into a vault and came out with nothing. No clothes, no wallet, no shoes, no trace. That's not a theft. That's a Stand."

Jarrin stared at his eggs. "Or a very good pickpocket with a vanishing trick."

"Jarrin. Nobody steals an entire suit of clothes from a grown man without leaving evidence. Clothes don't just disappear. A person might, but their clothing stays behind, folded neatly." She tapped the napkin. "Someone took them. Someone with a Stand that steals things, not just objects. Clothes, shoes, a watch, a phone. All of it. Gone."

Jarrin looked at the napkin. Jazz's handwriting was precise, the kind that came from years of learning how to write fast with one hand while performing a card trick with the other. Ricky. Delaney. The Nugget vault. Four seconds of blank footage.

"That's an active Stand user," Jazz said. "Right there. In Vegas. Walking around, stealing clothes, making men disappear into vaults. The police haven't been involved, which means whoever did this has enough presence to keep things under the table. Or whoever did this has a Stand that keeps things quiet. Either way, that's more dangerous than whatever is happening at our hotel."

"You're saying we should go investigate a Stand user while we're sitting in a diner with a dead man in the bathtub above us."

"I'm saying the dead man in the bathtub is a problem we can avoid by not talking to police. The Stand user is a problem we can't avoid, because if he keeps walking around Vegas, eventually someone is going to notice, and when they do, it won't be two old ladies at a diner who first noticed it."

Jarrin chewed a piece of toast he hadn't ordered. "Or we just leave Vegas."

Jazz folded the napkin into a square. "We just talked about that. You can't find your own house, Jarrin. Vegas is the one place we haven't left, and it's exactly what we need."

He considered. She was right. She was always right, actually, when she put it that way, though the reasoning rarely matched the confidence. An active Stand user meant someone like them, or something like what they were starting to understand about themselves. Staying away from the problem wasn't a strategy. It was just a longer way to trip over the same thing.

"We investigate," Jarrin said. "On our terms. If it looks like a trap, we walk."

"If it looks like anything other than interesting, we walk."

They ate the rest of their breakfast. The eggs were good, honestly. Not hotel-eggs. Actual eggs, cooked by someone who cared, which was a level of quality Jarrin had grown accustomed to avoiding. Jazz drank her coffee like it owed her money. The old women at the counter had finished their stories and moved on to discussing a neighbor's dog.

The Gold Nugget was twelve blocks away. Jarrin led. Jazz followed. The walk took fifteen minutes, mostly because Jarrin had to ask three separate strangers for directions, all of whom gave conflicting information. At one point he walked straight into a wall, apologized to it, and turned around. Jazz didn't comment. She rarely commented on his navigational failures. Calling attention to them only encouraged them.

The Gold Nugget looked exactly like a place called Gold Nugget. The facade was brass and glass, the entrance had two doormen who looked like they'd been hired for their size rather than their customer service skills, and the lobby smelled like carpet cleaner and old money. Half the gaming floor was cordoned off with caution tape. Renovations. The floor tiles were ripped up in long strips, and the exposed concrete beneath looked like the skeleton of something that had died years ago.

A security guard checked their IDs, looked at them with the particular disinterest that security guards developed after watching ten thousand people walk through his door each week, and waved them through. Jarrin and Jazz stepped past the turnstile and into a lobby that was quieter than it had any right to be for a casino that was supposedly open.

Jazz went straight for the front desk. The shift manager was a tall man with a receding hairline and the posture of someone who had been sitting in a chair too long. He answered Jazz's questions with the practiced vagueness of someone whose job included never saying anything useful.

"There was a maintenance issue with the vault corridor," he said. "A pipe burst. The corridor was closed for repairs."

"What about the man who went in?"

"The man who went in?" The manager looked at her with an expression that suggested he'd been expecting this question and had prepared nothing for it.

"The one who walked into the vault at eleven PM two nights ago and never came out."

The manager's eyes moved to the left. He was buying time. Jazz watched this.

"I can't discuss security incidents," he said. "I'm sure you understand."

"I understand that a man disappeared into a vault and the casino covered it up."

"I understand that you should leave."

Jazz smiled. The smile didn't reach her eyes. She took a card from her deck and placed it face-down on the desk. "Delaney. Your full name is Delaney. You started at the Nugget in March of last year. Your daughter is in college and she's studying journalism."

The manager looked at the card. Then at Jazz. Then at the card again. "How do you know my name?"

"Does it matter? We're just curious tourists." Jazz pocketed the card. "Thank you for your time. We'll be around if anyone has questions."

She walked away. Jarrin followed. The manager did not stop them.

Behind the slot machines, the casino narrowed into corridors that Jarrin had no business entering. The renovation tape stopped at the edge of the gaming floor, but past that, the aisles turned into service hallways with flickering lights and the hum of HVAC equipment that sounded like it was dying.

"I'll be right back," Jazz said. "I need to look at the vault corridor from the outside."

"I'll be right back," Jarrin said. "I need to look at the vault corridor from the inside."

"I think those are different things."

"Probably. I'll find you."

He turned down the corridor. The lights were worse here, the fluorescent tubes buzzing with that particular frequency that gave him a headache within thirty seconds. The walls were bare concrete, except for the occasional fire extinguisher, emergency exit sign, and the door he'd just passed, marked MAINTENANCE in letters that had been hand-painted and poorly.

He turned left. The corridor continued. A door on his right had no handle, just a lock. Straight ahead, the corridor branched, and Jarrin took the left branch. The floor dropped slightly, as if the building had been designed by someone who'd given up on level surfaces somewhere around the middle of construction.

Right. Then left. Then right again. Jarrin paused. The corridor looked the same as the one he'd just been in. Three identical service hallways with three identical fire extinguishers on the walls. The emergency exit signs pointed in opposite directions, which made no sense and was probably intentional.

He chose the corridor with the freshest fire extinguisher. The metal looked less dented than the other two.

The corridor ended in a dead end. A service stairwell, closed, with a padlock on the handle. Jarrin turned around and walked back the way he came. The corridor he'd just left was behind him. The corridor he'd entered from was still ahead. Everything was the same. The same fire extinguisher on the left wall. The same emergency exit sign pointing toward the door with no handle.

The problem wasn't the corridor itself. The problem was that he'd walked through three identical spaces in what felt like ten minutes, which meant either the building had been designed by someone who copied and pasted, or something in the corridor was making the distances wrong.

He took a step back. Then another. The corridor behind him was the same. The fire extinguisher was at the same position on the wall. The emergency exit sign pointed in the same direction. He had walked in a circle, though that wasn't possible, which was possible, given that this building might have more rules than regular geometry.

Jazz appeared from around the corner. She'd found the right corridor and was walking toward him with the same expression she always wore when she'd found something interesting and expected him to find it equally interesting.

"You lost," she said.

"I found the place."

"You walked in three loops."

"Does it matter? Here." He gestured down the corridor. "Somewhere in here, a man disappeared."

Jazz looked down the corridor. Her eyes moved along the walls, past the fire extinguisher, past the emergency exit sign, toward the far end where a door stood slightly ajar. A door she hadn't seen before.

"Someone's in there," she said.

They approached together. The door opened wider as they got closer, though Jarrin hadn't touched it. The young man inside held a stack of confiscated items, a watch, a wallet, a pen, keys. He was dressed in a suit that didn't fit him properly, too loose around the shoulders, and he looked up at them with an expression of someone who had been caught doing something he definitely shouldn't have been.

"I'm Theo," he said. "I work here. Maintenance. I'm just..." He held up the watch. "I'm just collecting things."

"Collecting things," Jazz repeated.

"From the corridor. From the floor. From the walls. I can't explain it. I just started doing it last week. I find something, I touch it, and it goes into my pocket. It's like the corridor keeps losing things and I keep picking them up."

Jarrin didn't move. Something had shifted in the air, a pressure change that he'd felt once before and never wanted to feel again. The dead man in the bathtub. The vault. The blank camera footage. The corridor that looped on itself.

Theo looked at Jarrin and took a step back. The stack of items in his arms shook. Jazz's cards appeared in her hand, though how they'd gotten there was unclear.

"Whoa," Theo said. "What is that?"

A white pirate stood behind Jarrin. Red eyes, blue bandana, a skull on the bandana, a gold belt buckle with a bubble inside. Jolly Roger. He hadn't summoned the Stand. The Stand had arrived on its own, drawn by whatever Theo was doing in the corridor.

Theo raised his hands. A second Stand materialized behind him. Smaller, shorter. A man in a brown suit with a clipboard. The Manager. It held its clipboard like a weapon.

Jarrin didn't think. Jolly Roger didn't think either. The bubble formed at the belt buckle, a perfect sphere that pulsed once, twice, and then fired across the corridor. It hit Theo in the chest and popped.

The theft was immediate. Theo's suit jacket came off in a burst of torn fabric. His left shoe flew off his foot and hit the wall. The kinetic blast from the popped bubble slammed both Jarrin and Theo against the opposite wall, and Jarrin's shoulder screamed with the impact. The bubble had stolen two things at once, and the force had doubled accordingly.

Theo hit the wall hard enough to crack plaster. He slid down, holding his chest. Jolly Roger stood motionless behind Jarrin, the belt buckle now dim. A piece of Theo's suit jacket materialized in the air between them and dropped to the floor.

The Manager, Theo's Stand, retaliated. It stepped forward, touched the corridor wall, and a small bubble formed. The bubble popped, and a piece of wall plaster shot backward like shrapnel, tearing into the hallway where they'd just been standing. The Manager had stolen the wall's structural integrity, converted it into kinetic force, and thrown it back.

Jazz moved. Poker Face appeared beside her, gray-skinned, white-haired, with long bunny ears that twitched as it surveyed the corridor. The Stand caught a piece of flying debris in its hand, absorbed it into a card, and the card glowed faintly. Poker Face then pulled a second card from the deck, one that had been pre-loaded with stored kinetic energy, and fused the two cards together. The result was a playing card that burned with heat, a blade of compressed energy that Jazz flicked forward like a throwing knife.

Theo flinched. The blade passed close enough to nick his shoulder, and blood welled on his skin. The Manager raised a hand, and another bubble formed at its clipboard. This one was bigger. The theft stole the fire extinguisher from the wall opposite them, and the resulting blast sent Jarrin sideways into a row of slot machines.

Jazz grabbed a real fire extinguisher from the wall next to where Theo had been standing. She held it out as Poker Face reached for it, and the Stand absorbed it into a card. The card glowed. Jazz flipped it. The fire extinguisher's mass, stored in compressed form, fused with stored kinetic energy, and the resulting card-sharp cut through the air. Theo took the hit on the opposite shoulder. He staggered and fell against the corridor wall, bleeding.

Jarrin recovered enough to stand. He launched Jolly Roger's next bubble. It hit Theo in the stomach and stole his belt, his other shoe, and a piece of corridor tile. Three things at once meant three times the force. The blast threw Theo against the wall with enough velocity to knock the breath out of him.

He slid down the wall. His belt, his shoes, the tile fragment, and his suit jacket lay on the floor around him. He was half-naked, bleeding, and shaking.

Poker Face pressed a fused card against his shoulder, pinning the Stand's arm to the wall. The Manager strained against it, the Stand's clipboard glowing, but Poker Face's grip was solid. The fused card held.

Jazz stepped over the wall. She stood above Theo, who looked up at her with the expression of someone who had just been thoroughly outmatched by two people he'd never expected to encounter.

"What does The Manager feed on?" Jazz asked.

Theo's mouth opened. He tried to speak. Blood ran from the corner of his lip. "Objects. Small objects. Everything I touch, it takes. I can't stop. It feeds me. I can feel it, the energy, the power, and I can't stop."

"Why are you in a service corridor?"

"I didn't know anyone else was here. I was just... I was picking up the things the corridor kept dropping. The vault corridor. The man who went in, the one who vanished. He left things behind. My Stand takes them before they disappear completely." He swallowed. "I didn't know I was doing something wrong."

Jazz held the fused card against his shoulder. Jarrin watched the whole thing, processing what he'd just done, how fast it had all happened, and how natural it felt. The bubble had stolen Theo's belt and his shoes, and the kinetic blast had thrown them both into the wall. Jarrin's shoulder still hurt from the impact, and he was pretty sure he'd bruised his ribs. That was the price. His Stand fought, and he felt the hits, even the ones that landed on the target.

Theo looked at them. Then at the door. Then at the corridor. He scrambled free from Poker Face's grip with a sound that was half gasp, half scream, and ran through the door at the end of the corridor. The door slammed shut behind him.

Jarrin was already on the floor. He picked up Theo's Stand ring from where it had fallen during the blast, a small silver band with a faintly glowing outline. Insurance. Whatever Theo did next, the ring would tell him.

Jazz picked up one of the stolen shoes. The left one. Theo's left shoe, the one Jolly Roger had torn off during the first bubble. Jazz looked at it, then at Jarrin.

Neither of them spoke for the full length of the walk back through the corridor. The corridor looped twice before they found the right path. Jazz led. Jarrin followed. They reached the gaming floor, walked past the cordon tape, and stepped out through the main entrance into the Vegas afternoon.

Neither of them spoke. Both of them processed.