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Luckily, Caleb couldn’t really linger, not with more people queued up behind him, so he gave her a casual nod and walked back into the hallway.

A tall, heavyset man with thinning light brown hair who also looked as if he was in his forties — although closer to fifty than otherwise — stood there, apparently absorbed in whatever he was reading on his phone’s screen.

As Caleb approached, though, the man put the phone in his pocket and sent him a friendly smile.

“First time, huh?” he said, and Caleb paused.

“You heard that?”

“I have sharp ears,” the man said, then extended a hand. “Hank Bowers. I’ve been doing this for a while, and I thought I knew most of the people who play in the Desert Paradise tournaments.”

“Caleb Lowe,” he responded, glad that after three months of giving people that fake name, he was mostly used to saying it rather than the one he’d been born with.

“And yeah, I’m a newbie. But my friends kept telling me I should try a tournament one of these days, and then I saw the ad on TV for this one and thought, why not? ”

“You picked a good tournament,” Hank replied.

“Lots of great players here, but the overall atmosphere is a lot more low-key than some of the big-money competitions.” He paused there, still wearing the easy smile of a man completely at home in his surroundings.

In his polo shirt and khaki slacks, he could have come straight off the golf course, and a tan that was probably in place all year ’round only reinforced that impression. “Did you get a brochure from Lauren?”

Caleb shook his head. “Is she the gal who’s registering the players?”

“The very one,” Hank said. “We’ve been pretty slammed today — a lot of people like to wait until the last minute to sign up — so it probably slipped her mind. I’ll go grab you one.”

Before Caleb was able to say that he could fetch the brochure, Hank had already headed over to the meeting room they were using as a registration station and come back with a nicely printed four-color leaflet.

“Here you go,” he said. “Most of it is pretty straightforward stuff, but if you’ve never played in a tournament before or have watched too many of them on TV, then it would probably be helpful for you to read it over before the first elimination round starts on Thursday.”

Considering that was four days from now, Caleb didn’t think he’d have too hard a time reading and absorbing the information the brochure contained. It wasn’t as if Hank had handed him a copy of War and Peace or something. “Thanks,” he replied. “How many players have signed up?”

“I think we’re around eighty or so,” he said. “We don’t have anyone feeding in from satellites, though, because the buy-in for this tournament isn’t high.”

Caleb had read enough about how poker tournaments worked that he knew “satellites” were simply smaller competitions with lower buy-ins that would feed people into the larger, higher-stakes tournaments. “Does this competition feed into bigger ones?”

“Nope,” Hank said cheerfully. “It’s more of a standalone, just-for-fun kind of event. That’s what makes it more approachable to people who’re getting started, like you.”

Well, at least the older man hadn’t called him a rank amateur. True, Caleb had never formally competed, but those months he’d spent gathering funds for his new life here in Las Vegas had given him plenty of intel on how to get by at a poker table.

Except for the part where he’d used his demonic powers to ensure that he always came out ahead.

Even so, he knew a lot about poker and the rules of the various games than he had three months ago. He’d do fine.

“Good to know,” he said. “Anyway, I need to get going — I still have some errands I need to run. See you on Thursday.”

“See you then,” Hank replied, then turned and headed back into the room where people were signing up.

Maybe he was affiliated with the tournament in some way, or maybe he was just the event’s unofficial greeter. He did seem pretty at home here.

Caleb headed for the exit. No, he didn’t have any errands to run — that had been a complete fabrication — but he hadn’t seen the need to hang around and keep chatting.

People who seemed friendly with no real motivation for being that way always put him on his guard.

Hank Bowers might simply have been a genial sort of guy…

or maybe he liked to engage with the people who’d come in to register for the competition so he could size them up beforehand and see if they had any weaknesses he could exploit.

Possibly that was a pretty jaded way to look at the situation. On the other hand, Caleb hadn’t run into too many purely good people in this world. Rosemary McGuire, the woman he’d thought he loved back in L.A., the one who turned out to have an angel for a father?

Sure.

Delia Dunne? Probably. She was much more smoothly efficient than Rosemary could have ever hoped to be — and Caleb guessed that Rosemary hadn’t been a punk rock chick in high school like Delia — but his new friend still seemed to be motivated by a sense of justice, of making sure things were right in the world, even if her mechanism for doing so was simply finding a family the perfect house where they could be happy.

Which sort of begged the question as to why she was all right hanging around with a quarter demon like him.

He didn’t think it was purely business, not when they could have parted ways just as soon as the purchase of the Pueblo Street house was complete.

Instead, she’d stuck around and provided design advice…

had even helped him move his most valuable possessions into the new place without a single complaint.

Then again, maybe all that was just part of her bid for sainthood.

Smiling to himself, he headed outside, pulling his sunglasses from where they’d been hanging from the neck of his T-shirt so he could plant them on his nose to protect his eyes from the fierce sun overhead.

It wasn’t nearly as hot as it would get in the next couple of months, but even though the temperature outside was comfortable enough, the light was extremely bright.

So bright that it was easy enough to see the smudges on the driver’s-side door of his Range Rover near the handle once he got close enough. Eyes narrowing, he bent down to take a closer look.

Those smudges looked suspiciously like the ones Delia had first noticed on the patio door at the old house.

Straightening, he glanced around the parking lot, but no one was nearby. That didn’t mean much, though. If they were really dealing with a demon here, it could have blinked itself away less than a second after it had touched the Range Rover’s door.

A scowl pulled at his brow as he clicked the remote to unlock the vehicle.

His T-shirt was untucked anyway, so he wrapped the hem around his fingers as he opened the door and got in.

Even doing that much might have wrecked the prints — or whatever those smudges were — but it wasn’t like he could just stand here in the parking lot forever.

No, he wanted to go home and check to see if those blurry smudges were also suspiciously missing their prints.

He had a feeling he knew the answer already.