Heat

Chapter 62

Fifty miles out of Las Vegas, Jesse tuned in the unicom frequency for the airport. “Sky Harbor Unicom,” he said, “This is November one, two, three Tango Foxtrot. Do you read?” Nothing. He repeated the transmission until, twenty miles out, he got an answer.

“Aircraft calling Sky Harbor,” a voice with a thick foreign accent said.

“Sky Harbor, this is November one, two, three Tango Foxtrot. My name is Smith; I’m landing in fifteen minutes; can you arrange a rent-a-car for me?”

“Sure thing, Mr. Smith,” the voice said. “The active runway is three-six.”

Jenny had not noticed the blinking “low fuel” light, and Jesse saw no need to mention it to her. He began to get ready for his landing. He had descended to thirty-five hundred feet and reduced power when he spotted the airport at twelve o’clock. His instruments said he had four minutes to the airport and three minutes of fuel. He was approaching from the north, so in order to land on runway three-six he would have to fly around the airport and turn back to the north. The hell with runway three-six, he thought. I’m approaching from the north, and I’m going straight in to one-eight. He got on the radio. “Sky Harbor traffic, Sky Harbor traffic, this is November one, two, three, Tango Foxtrot. I am short of fuel, and I am straight in for runway one-eight.”

A voice came back, “Tango Foxtrot, this is Whiskey Romeo; the active runway is three-six, and I’m already on base.”

Jesse had the runway in sight now. “Whiskey Romeo and all Sky Harbor traffic, Tango Foxtrot is on a three-mile final for three-six and short of fuel. I say again, short of fuel. I’m landing on one-eight, so get the hell out of my way.”

There was a brief silence. “This is Whiskey Romeo; one-eight is all yours.”

Over the runway numbers, Jesse began to breathe normally again. He taxied toward a row of tied-down airplanes and spotted a space between two other Cessnas. Camouflage, he thought. He turned into the space and stopped. As he reached for the mixture control to stop the engine, it stopped itself. The airplane was out of fuel.

“Okay, everybody, out of the airplane!” he cried.

Jenny woke the girls and, carrying their luggage, they walked to the terminal. Jesse kept a particularly tight grip on the plastic bag.

He persuaded the man at the counter to accept a five hundred-dollar cash deposit in lieu of a credit card, and a hundred-dollar bill for himself, in lieu of a driver’s license. Jesse explained that he had left his wallet at home.

The car was filthy; it appeared never to have been washed, the ashtrays were full and it had eighty thousand miles on the speedometer, but Jesse loved it. No one would give it a second glance. On the drive into town, a happy thought occurred to him: they were in the one city in the United States where no one would bat an eye at the sight of large numbers of one-hundred-dollar bills.

They drove down the main drag, blinking in the desert sunlight and agog at all the neon. Jesse picked the biggest, gaudiest hotel he could see and pulled into the driveway.

“Checking in, sir?” a doorman asked.

“You bet.” Jesse handed him the keys. “Take everything in the trunk, please.” The man began removing their bags. “I’ll carry this one,” Jesse said, taking the plastic bag from him. As they were about to enter the hotel, there was a huge roar behind them. They turned and stood, transfixed, as a man-made volcano erupted before their eyes. “Only in America,” Jesse said to the sleepy girls.

Jesse presented himself at the front desk. “I’d like a two-bedroom suite, something very nice,” he said to the desk clerk.

The young man typed a few strokes on his computer keyboard. “I’m afraid we don’t have anything at all, sir,” he said, eyeing the rough-looking man in the sheepskin coat with the hillbilly accent.

Jesse placed the plastic bag on the counter, counted out ten banded stacks of hundred-dollar bills and stacked them on the counter. “And I’d like a hundred one-thousand-dollar chips,” he said.

A sharp-eyed older man in an expensive suit practically elbowed the clerk out of the way. “Good morning, Mr... ?”

“Churchill,” Jesse said. “W. S. Churchill.”

The man scribbled out a receipt for Jesse’s money, then hit a bell on the desk. A bellhop materialized. “Take the Churchill family up to the Frank Sinatra suite,” he said to the man, then turned back to Jesse. “Your accommodations and all your food and drink will be compliments of the house, Mr. Churchill. May I send your chips up to your suite?”

“Thank you, yes,” Jesse said. They followed the bellman toward the elevators.

Jenny tugged at Jesse’s sleeve. “Did that man mean everything is free?”

“Sweetheart, when you can afford to buy it, you often don’t have to,” Jesse replied.

“I don’t understand this place at all,” Jenny muttered as they got onto the elevator.

The following morning, they breakfasted en famille on their rooftop terrace. The living room was filled with boxes and tissue paper and luggage from their shopping, and there were one hundred and twelve one-thousand-dollar chips on the coffee table. Jesse had been down nineteen thousand dollars at one point, but he had come out ahead.

Jesse was transfixed by the New York Times. The story began on page one and was continued inside on two full pages. The explosion at St. Clair was being compared to Mount St. Helen. Troops were in charge of the town, hundreds of people were being questioned at the church and, in spite of sporadic gunfights, casualties were light, and there had been only two deaths, the guards on the mountaintop. Jack Gene Coldwater and his principal lieutenants were presumed dead in the explosion. He’d have to do something about that.

Jesse got up from the table and found the plastic bag. He emptied all the money into a new plastic briefcase, then took the papers from Coldwater’s safe and spread them out on the coffee table. Jesse became short of breath. The documents were bank statements from all over the world, and, at a rough calculation, the balances totaled something over fifty million dollars in Coldwater’s accounts alone. Letters from the various banks contained the secret numbers for all the accounts — Coldwater, Casey and Ruger’s.

It occurred to Jesse that he was now rich beyond his wildest dreams. If he wanted that. He thought about it for a while, then he put the documents in an envelope, along with the recorder he had worn, and scribbled an address. He picked up the phone and asked the hotel manager to come to his suite.

When the doorbell rang he cinched his new silk robe around his waist and went to answer it. The manager stood at the door. “Good morning, Mr. Churchill. You wished to see me?”

“Yes, please come in,” Jesse replied.

The man removed an envelope from his breast pocket. “Incidentally, here are the air tickets to Los Angeles you requested.”

“Thank you.” Jesse had made Tokyo reservations from Los Angeles in their new name at a travel agent’s. “Please have a seat.” The two men sat in chairs on opposite sides of the coffee table.

“What else can I do for you, Mr. Churchill?” the manager asked.

Jesse set a plastic briefcase on the coffee table beside his chips. “I have a hundred and twelve thousand dollars in chips to cash in, and inside this case is another one million, four hundred thousand dollars in cash, all quite legal, I assure you. I probably shouldn’t be carrying around this much cash, and I would like your advice as to what sorts of negotiable instruments I could exchange it for.”

“Will you be traveling abroad?” the man asked.

“Possibly.”

“I would suggest either gold certificates or bearer bonds,” the manager said. “Either can be negotiated at any large bank in the world in a matter of hours, and I could arrange either for you by lunchtime.”

Jesse scooped the chips into a large ashtray and handed them to the manager, along with the briefcase. “A million and a half in bearer bonds will do very nicely,” he said. “I’m sure there will be some fees and commissions involved; the extra twelve thousand in chips should cover that.”

“Oh, much more than cover it,” the manager said.

“See that anything left over goes to your favorite charity,” Jesse said.

“Thank you, sir,” the man said, writing out a receipt for the funds. “Will there be anything else?”

Jesse held out his parking check. “Would you see that this rent-a-car is returned to Sky Harbor airport as soon as possible. There’s a five-hundred-dollar cash deposit there; that can go to charity, too. And may we have your limousine for the airport at two o’clock?”

“Of course.”

“One other thing.” He handed the manager the large envelope containing Coldwater’s banking documents. “I want to send a friend this package, and I don’t want him to know where it came from; sort of a little joke.”

“I understand,” the manager said. “Perhaps I could forward it through our New York office.”

“Excellent. Could you Federal Express it to them and have them take it to a FedEx office there and resend it?”

“Of course.” The manager looked at the envelope and repeated the address. “Mr. Kipling Fuller, Nashua Building Products, 1010 Parkway, College Park, Maryland.”

“That’s it. And I think that’s all you can do for me.”

The manager stood. “May I say what a great pleasure it has been having you and your family as guests in our hotel? We hope you’ll come back soon and often.”

“Thank you very much. You may be sure that when we are in Las Vegas we will always stay with you.”

At two o’clock, the Churchill family departed the hotel in the longest limousine Jesse had ever seen, even in Miami. Outside the terminal, Jesse dropped a paper bag containing his pistol in a trash can. The luggage was checked at the curb and the skycap handed Jesse his baggage tickets.

“Gate three, sir; you have thirty-five minutes before your flight.”

Jesse gave the man twenty dollars and followed his family to the departure lounge. He had been there for ten minutes when a uniformed airline employee approached.

“Excuse me, Mr. Churchill, there’s a problem with a piece of your luggage; could you follow me, please?”

“What sort of problem?” Jesse asked.

“They didn’t say, but it should only take a moment.”

Jesse turned to Jenny. “I’ll be right back, but in any case, you get on that plane, you hear?” He handed her the briefcase containing the bearer bonds. “Take care of this.”

She nodded.

Jesse got up and followed the man across the lounge and down a flight of stairs. “Down at the end, there,” the man said, pausing at the bottom of the stairs and pointing at a door a hundred feet away.

“Thanks,” Jesse said. He walked through the area, where baggage was being moved to and from airplanes, then came to a door marked, “M. Quentin, Baggage Manager.”

Jesse stepped into the office. A man seated at a desk looked up.

“Hello, Jesse,” Coldwater said.