Take Down

TWENTY

Coming out of Brando’s, Ike handed his cell phone to Billy.

“Guess who wants to bust your balls,” Ike said.

“Who’s this?” Billy said.

“Hey, Billy, did you have a nice meal in Brando’s? What’s that you’ve got in your hand? A wet bagel? You have strange tastes, kid,” Crunchie said, laughing in his face.

Billy scanned the hotel lobby. Thursday was the beginning of the weekend in Vegas, the lobby a mob scene, with snaking lines of tourists wrestling with luggage in the check-in line. Seeing no sign of the old grifter, he said, “Where are you hiding? Under a rock?”

“I’m in the surveillance room watching you on a monitor,” Crunchie said. “I just wanted you to know that I’m going to catch the Gypsies before you do.”

Casino surveillance rooms were filled with the latest electronic spying equipment. Trained techs stared at a matrix of high-def video monitors, hunting for cheaters and thieves on the casino floor. The old grifter had a huge advantage and had called him to rub it in.

“Want to bet on it?” Billy asked, not willing to throw in the towel.

“You’re a cocky little bastard. Ten grand says I find the Gypsies first.”

“You’re on. You know, Crunch, if you’d made Ricky Boswell like you were hired to do, none of this would have been necessary. You blew it, you dumb shit.”

“Who told you that?”

“A little bird. Have a nice day.”

He ended the call and tossed Ike the cell phone. The game was on.

He sifted through the lobby with the punishers on his heels. The hotel was big enough to hold a few thousand guests, and any one of them could have been a member of the Gypsy clan. He needed to narrow down his search if he was going to catch them.

Raised voices snapped his head. At the check-in, a comely blond reservationist was trying to calm down an irate male guest wearing a rumpled suit and a livid expression.

“I’m terribly sorry, sir, but I can’t do that,” the reservationist said.

“I just traveled two thousand miles,” the man protested.

“Sir, the hotel is completely sold out. There are no rooms.”

“Are you telling me there’s not one available room? I don’t believe that for a minute.”

“Are you part of a group or convention?”

“No. I’m here by myself.”

“Then I’m afraid I can’t help you.”

The man stormed off. Weekends were a hot ticket in town, with bookings made months in advance. The Gypsies would have needed to book their rooms a long time ago, unless they were part of a convention. The hotels always reserved blocks of rooms for conventions, and those rooms were held open, even when the rest of the hotel was sold out.

It made sense, when he thought about it. Being part of a group was the perfect cover to pull off a scam. Just wear the plastic registration badge around your neck inside the casino, and no one would pay the slightest attention to you. He needed to find out the names of the groups booked into the hotel and whittle down the list. That couldn’t be terribly hard.

Concierges generally knew the hotel guest list inside out. The concierge on duty was tan and pretty and wore a gold uniform with a burgundy vest and a gold necktie with a crisp knot. He was talking on the phone to a guest when Billy slapped the bell on his desk.

“I need to see your welcome board.”

He followed the direction of the concierge’s finger. A digital welcome board the size of a movie poster hung by the elevators, with names of groups booked into the hotel crawling down the iridescent blue screen. The American Society of Podiatric Surgeons, Esurance, the CAR Group, and the Grocery Manufacturers Association, plus a slot tournament, the MacGregor family reunion, and nine weddings. Eenie meeny miney mo. Which group were the Gypsies with?

“What you looking at?” Ike said into his ear.

“Be quiet. I’m working,” he said.

On the board, a calendar of Friday’s events appeared, listing the conference rooms each group was meeting in. The podiatrists were in the Clark Gable lecture hall from nine until four, the car salesmen in the Humphrey Bogart room from eight until noon, followed by a golf tourney on the casino’s Golden Bear course, and so on, every group on the list accounted for. Each group had their days planned out for them, morning, noon, and night. Now he was getting somewhere. Returning to the concierge’s desk, he slapped the bell again, this time much louder.

“What do you want?” the concierge asked.

“Pico,” Billy said, not liking the concierge’s attitude.

“Excuse me?” the concierge said.

“Thomas Pico. I’m a guest in your hotel.”

“You and two thousand other people.”

“Are they all comped in a high-roller suite?”

Tap, tap, tap across the keyboard went the concierge’s fingers. His eyes looked at the screen and grew embarrassingly wide. “Mr. Pico, my apologies. How may I help you?”

“I need to see Saturday’s calendar of events.”

“I’m sorry, but I’m not allowed to give out that information. House rules.”

“Does the GM have that information?”

“I’m sure he does.”

Billy turned from the concierge desk. “Call Doucette, and ask him to put a call into the GM,” he said to Ike. “I need to see the events calendar for Saturday. The Gypsies are going to be attending a function in the hotel. If I can see the calendar, I should be able to narrow down which group they’re with.”

“You just figured that out staring at that stupid board?” Ike said.

Inanimate objects weren’t stupid. People were stupid.

“That’s right,” he replied.

Ike made the call to Doucette.

A minute later, Shaz emerged from an elevator and crossed the lobby to the concierge desk, snapping heads in a black leather mini, sensuous black leggings, and a black leather jacket zippered to her neck bomber-pilot style. Her outlandish outfits seemed to change by the hour.

“Marcus said you’re onto them,” she said.

“I need to see Saturday’s events calendar,” Billy said. “The Gypsies are booked into the hotel with a group, and I want to see which groups are holding events in the hotel Saturday afternoon. The concierge said the GM has the information.”

“Piece of cake,” she said.

At the registration desk she got a reservationist’s attention by snapping her fingers. A door beside the desk sprung open. Soon they were walking past a warren of sales cubicles to the GM’s corner office. As was her custom, she entered without bothering to knock.

“Surprise,” she said, as if jumping out of a cake.

The GM was on the phone putting out a fire. With the weary expression of a man who spent his day making tough decisions, he said, “I’ll call you right back,” and rose with a pained expression on his face, as if Shaz was the bane of his existence.

“Hello, Ms. Doucette, what can I do for you?” the GM asked.

“Hello, Jerry. We need to see Saturday’s events calendar,” she said.

The nameplate on the desk said his name was Jack, not Jerry. The GM tapped a command into his computer and pivoted the monitor so Saturday’s events calendar faced them.

“That’s the whole list. Anything else I can do, Ms. Doucette?” the GM asked.

“Disappear for a few minutes,” she said.

The GM left the office with the attitude of a man who just might not come back. Billy brought his face up to the monitor to read the calendar. The foot doctors were attending a lecture from 2:00 until 4:00 p.m., as were the insurance agents. The MacGregor clan was also gathering in the hotel during that time period.

“The Gypsies are part of one of these three groups,” he said.

“How can you know that looking at a screen?” she asked.

“That’s what I asked him,” Ike said.

“Shut the fuck up.” To Billy she said, “Explain yourself.”

“The timing is right. At four o’clock, a shift change will be taking place inside your casino. The day shift will be leaving, and the swing shift will be coming in. At the same time, these groups will be coming out of their conference rooms and flooding the casino floor. You can’t buy a better distraction than that. You’re going to get royally fucked.”

“We’ll post guards on the floor and catch them.”

“Good luck.”

“What’s that supposed to mean? We know when they’re coming.”

“Doesn’t matter. You still won’t see them.”

A dark cloud passed over her face. Ike and T-Bird had inched up behind Billy’s chair, hanging on every word. She took her anger out on Ike and dug her elbow into the big man’s gut, making him yelp.

“Out of here, both of you,” she snapped.

The punishers bolted. Shaz was throwing off some seriously bad vibes, and Billy felt himself getting nervous. Lying on the desk was a sterling-silver letter opener shaped like a dagger. If she made a move for it, he was going to knock her down.

“Explain what you just said to me,” she said.

“This isn’t a heist. The Gypsies are cleverer than that,” he said.

“If it’s not a heist, then what is it?”

“It’s a scam. Around four on Saturday afternoon, the Gypsies will enter your casino and rig one of your games right under your nose. Then they’ll split. Later, other members of their family will play that rigged game and win a ton of money. You’ll have to pay them because it will look legit. Only it won’t be. Not by a long shot.”

The cloud left, replaced by a look of subtle appreciation. She rested her hands on his shoulders and looked into his eyes as if trying to tear out his soul. She had to be the scariest woman he’d ever encountered.

“You ever pull a scam like that?” she asked.

“Me? Never.”

“Tell me what you did.”

“You get off on this stuff, don’t you?”

“More than you’ll ever know.”

“Super Bowl, couple years back, I was part of a gang that ripped off Caesars for a million bucks, same sort of deal, rigged the craps game as the first touchdown was scored.”

“Was that part of the plan?”

“Absolutely.”

“Why then?”

Her breath was tickling his skin, getting him aroused. A bad idea, not that his dick ever listened to anything his brain ever said. “More money is wagered on the Super Bowl than any other sporting event in the world. A lot of the bets are proposition bets. Who will fumble first, who’ll kick the first field goal, that sort of thing. The biggest prop bet is on which team will score the first touchdown. That’s when we struck.”

“Was that your idea?”

“Come to think of it, it was.”

“I should have known. Were you the ringleader?”

“I’d rather not say.”

She brought her mouth up close to his face. “Tell me, you sneaky little shit.”

“Yeah, I was in charge.”

She wrapped her arms around his waist, drawing closer.

“Tell me how the scam worked.”

He blew out his lungs. This wasn’t going to end well-he knew that going in-but boy, the ride was going to be something else. “Caesars had wheeled giant-screen TVs onto the floor of their casino for the game. The images were larger than life. Packers were playing the Steelers. Rodgers throws a twenty-one yarder to Jennings and he runs into the end zone. The casino erupts. That’s when we whacked them. One of the members of my crew was a woman with a shopping bag. We used the bag to switch a bowl of dice off the craps table for a duplicate bowl filled with shaved dice. No one saw a thing. A few minutes later, a whale staying in the casino strayed over to the craps table and started playing.”

“Was the whale part of your gang?” she asked, one step ahead of him now.

“Uh-huh.”

“How much did he win?”

“He didn’t win. He got cleaned out.”

She frowned. “I thought you said he was part of your gang.”

“He was.”

Red flared in both her cheeks, the demon resting just below the surface.

“We set him up. He was a Brazilian playboy who wore designer sports jackets with no shirt underneath. Real asshole. We convinced him to bet a million bucks of his own money and told him he’d double it. Wrong.”

“The dice were shaved for him to lose?”

“Yeah. Two other members of my crew bet against him.”

“So you really stole his money.”

“That’s right. Caesars never felt the loss.”

“That’s absolutely beautiful. You enjoy fucking people, don’t you?”

“Some people, yeah, I do.”

“Want to fuck me?”

“Here? You can’t be serious.”

Her hand rose to her throat and pulled down the zipper of her bomber jacket. She was naked underneath, and her breasts spilled out with an urgency that caught the breath in his throat. Her nipples were red and hard and called to him like forbidden fruit.

“Jesus,” he said under his breath.

“Impressed?”

“They’re beautiful.”

“Natural, too. No silicone.”

“God loves you.”

That got a rise out of her. Getting on her knees, she yanked down his fly and pulled his very hard cock out of his trousers. “Well, look at that. No wonder the girls adore you.” She stuck his erection between her breasts while gazing up at him, very matter-of-fact about the whole thing, ready to seize the moment. “So tell me, have you ever been titty-fucked?”

“This would be the first time.”

“Enjoy.”

She squeezed her breasts together and moved her chest rhythmically back and forth while humming a pretty song whose name he couldn’t remember. His prick got so hard and extended that it didn’t resemble his anymore. Hot white stars exploded in front of his eyes and he gasped for breath. At any moment, he envisioned Doucette barging into the office and catching them in the act. Not that he cared. Every nerve ending in his body was screaming, and he tilted his head back and felt the floor start to tremble. Fifty years from now, he’d remember this orgasm while forgetting all the shit that went with it, what psychologists called euphoric recall, that wonderful mechanism that let a person forget the bad and remember only the good.

He came back to earth. She gazed up at him with a satisfied look on her face. He helped her to her feet. She swiped a Kleenex off the desk and cleaned herself off before zippering her jacket. He tried to kiss her and she shook her head. They started to leave.

“That song you were singing. Whose is it?” he asked.

“It’s by Usher,” she said. “It’s called ‘Burn.’ ”