Vegas Moon

21.

“What are you doing?” Lucky says.

“Pulling over.”

“Something wrong?”

“You tell me.”

I’d been heading toward Phyllis’s house, but now I slow down to turn into the entrance of a Wendy’s. I find an empty space and claim it. The sign light casts a yellow glow across part of the back seat where Gwen is sitting, and crosses her diagonally, illuminating her face, right arm and shoulder, leaving the rest of her in shadow. Lucky, in the front passenger seat, is directly in front of her. When he stares straight ahead like he’s doing now, his face is backlit, and has an aura around it, that reminds me of a lunar eclipse. If the moon was wearing a cowboy hat.

Lucky’s nervous, but acting cool. Gwen hasn’t spoken since we entered the car. I see her giving me a quizzical look in the mirror. No one speaks for a minute.

Finally Gwen says, “Would you like to try a combo?”

“Shut up, Gwen,” Lucky says. To me he says, “You know how late it is? I’ve been up twenty hours, nonstop. Not to mention my ass feels like the doctor left his scalpel in my upper intestine.”

I say, “Lucky, look at me.”

“Fine. I’m looking. What do you want?”

“I know what we’re looking for. But I want to know what you plan to do with it.”

He shrugs. “Phyllis had a device. A work product. I need it.”

“Start at the beginning. But before you say anything, I’m going to allow you one lie.”

“Excuse me?”

“You’re going to tell me everything you know about the device, and how you first learned about it, and I’ll let you lie up to one time. If I believe you’re lying twice, I’ll kill you without giving it a second thought. Do you believe me?”

“I don’t know. You could be bluffing.”

“Spoken like a gambler.”

“Thanks.”

“It’s not a compliment.”

I glance in the mirror and see the sudden flash of Gwen’s smile as she realizes I just made a reference to what she said earlier in the day: that I was great looking, but it wasn’t a compliment. I give her a wink.

“Spill it,” I say to Lucky. “I won’t use this information against you. You have my word.”

He pauses a few seconds, then says, “How much do you know?”

“I know a lot about the device. Things I haven’t told you. But I need to know what you know, or we could be at a disadvantage with Connor Payne.”

“What do you know about Ropic Industries?”

“I know you put twenty million bucks into a technology company that had a surplus of sixty million at the time. You bought your way onto the board, and worked a deal with your accountant to get your hands on twelve million of their investment capital. I think you took that money and bet it on college hoops, or pro football, or whatever the hell you like to bet on. And I think you lost your ass. So you went back to the trough for more money, and you lost that, too. I think you maxed out what you could get from the accountant, so you came up with this whole Vegas Moon bullshit. You can’t get bank financing, so you’re scamming your degenerate gambling friends, a million here, a half-million there. You’re supposed to be using it to replace the money you stole from Ropic Industries, but you figure if you put it on the Lakers to beat Boston, you’ll be able to repay twice as much. Only you’re in a slump, and nothing’s going your way. You know you’ll dig out eventually, but you need some cash to get you through this slump. Meanwhile, you’ve got this device that Ropic manufactured, and somehow you’re planning to cash in on it. Stop me if I’m wrong.”

“You’re wrong.”

“Which part?”

“I don’t want to do this in front of Gwen.”

“She deserves to know what you’ve been up to.”

“It’s okay, Lucky,” Gwen says. “You can tell the truth. I’ll love you no matter what.”

“You think?”

“I know. ’Cause you’re a winner, Lucky. Everyone knows that.”

He nods.

“Everything you said is true,” Lucky says, “except the part about Vegas Moon, and the device.”

“You’ve just told the first lie,” I said. “Next lie kills you.”

“It’s not a lie! Not exactly.”

Something in his voice makes me believe him. A little.

“Go on.”

“Vegas Moon was my dream,” he says. “I always planned to build it. I put two million of my own money into it, and bought an option on the land. Then the bank crisis hit, and the regulators went ape shit and forced the banks and insurance companies out of the project. So I tried to raise the money myself. But the economy is so fucked up, only a few people invested. It wasn’t enough to start the project. So I used Ropic’s money as a nest egg for my bets. I figured if I could win enough, I could pay Ropic back, with interest, and break ground on Vegas Moon. Here in Vegas, once you break ground, the money starts pouring in.”

I think about what he says, and decide it could have gone down that way.

“Okay, you can have your lie back. Now tell me about the device.”

“I liked Ropic because, like you said, they had a lot of cash, and no one knows this, but the accountant was one of my employees. He’d made money with me before, but never had any real cash to bet. Plus, he was frustrated, tired of counting other people’s money all day. I convinced him I had some locks, some sure-thing bets, and kicked him back fifty grand for every million he got me. He used his share to mirror my bets, meaning, we both lost everything. But there was another reason I liked Ropic: their research team owned patents on super-secret technology the government needed for high tech weapons. For a corporation that size, a government contract would have made the stockholders rich.”

“But that didn’t work out.”

“Right. Because the new administration cut the funding, and the military backed out. Our products had no use beyond weaponry that’s illegal for civilians to own. I thought about selling it to the enemy, but our tech people said no one else has the technology. Our devices were just one piece of a sophisticated weapons system. So I called a board meeting and said, ‘what the fuck do we own that we can make money with?’ And the answer was ‘Nothing.’ Can you believe it? Ropic had all their eggs in one government basket.

“So the board says, ‘Good thing we’ve got that sixty million dollars. We can buy some technology, stamp our name on it, and start a whole new dog and pony show.’ And that’s when me and Stevie went into a panic.”

“Stevie the accountant?”

“Right.”

“I’m falling asleep here, Lucky. Tell me about the device.”

“After the board meeting, Phyllis—Dr. Willis, I mean, brought me a little metal box. It was like something you’d see in the movies. She said, ‘What I’m about to tell you, no one knows.’ She said she went to a secret government facility and watched a doctor implant a heat chip into Connor Payne’s brain. The chip has a four-digit code that can be entered from anywhere in the world by using a remote unit that looks like a large wrist watch. When you punch a code into the wrist unit, the chip will instantly kill Mr. Payne.”

“Jesus!” Gwen says.

“Right. And then Dr. Willis said that the government thought they had the only two wrist devices ever made, but Ropic Industries actually had three more that no one knew about.”

“Three?”

“Three.”

“Are you sure about that?”

“That’s what she said. Five wrist devices were manufactured.”

Darwin had one, Doc Howard had the second, which he sold to me for a hundred million bucks. I took Phyllis’s unit with me after killing her. Which leaves two wrist devices unaccounted for.

“Where are they?” I ask.

“Phyllis had one. I don’t know what happened to it. Probably the cops have it. But this morning—or is it yesterday morning?—Anyway, Connor Payne showed up at Phyllis’s office. She figured he knew about the device and planned to kill her. So she input the code, thinking he’d die in her lobby. But it didn’t work.”

“And why’s that, do you suppose?”

“Someone must’ve reprogrammed the chip.”

“But there’s a small device in a metal box that Phyllis gave you.”

“Right. That little device can override any code. You plug it into one of the wrist units, punch in any four numbers, and the chip will boil Mr. Payne’s brains anywhere in the world.”

“Were you planning to blackmail Mr. Payne?”

“Hell no! You think I’m crazy? The whole thing gave me the creeps. I told Phyllis I didn’t want any part of it. Told her to hide the device and never tell me where she put it. But Connor Payne has to know about the device.”

“If he doesn’t have it, he might start killing Ropic board members until he finds it?”

“Exactly,” Lucky says.

“So you hope to find the chip, place it with a wrist unit, and kill Conner Payne?”

“Yes. In self-defense.”

“A pre-emptive strike.”

“Exactly.”

“Only now you can’t find the wrist unit or the device.”

“Right. But if I get the chip back, maybe I can find out who has the other wrist units.”

It was giving me a sick feeling too, wondering who might have them.

“You should have a record of the sales,” I say.

“I doubt they were sold. I don’t know what happened to them. Maybe they’re locked away in a storage container somewhere.”

I think about it from Lucky’s point of view. “This whole Connor Payne thing has sidetracked you from raising money to recover your losses.”

“It has.”

“As I see it, you need two things: Connor Payne out of your life, and capital to finance your play till your luck changes.”

“Exactly.”

“Let’s go home, get some rest. I’ll keep Conner Payne at bay while you meet more investors.”

“I still want to search Phyllis’s house. I doubt we’ll find anything, but we need to try.”

“It’s your call,” I say.

He thinks about it a minute. “Let’s look for an hour. If we don’t find it, we’ll just have to live in fear.”

In the back seat, Gwen groans.

“What?” Lucky says.

“I’m starving.”

To me he says, “Can you go through the drive-through, get her some fries or something?”

I give him a look.

“Please, Mr. Creed?” Gwen says. “I love french fries.”

I look at her in the mirror. She licks her lips in a way that indicates far more than her love of french fries.

To Lucky I say, “You want anything?”

“Diet coke.”

“And a shake,” Gwen says. “If you don’t mind.”

“Uh huh.” Long as I’m a waiter, might as well go all in. “Anything else, Mr. Peters?”

“No,” Lucky says, “just the drink. And get yourself something. I’m buying.”

Something in his tone. Disrespect? Or maybe I just don’t like the man. I think about how he made his housekeeper, Tina, work tonight, and feel a twitch, the kind I get when bad things start to go down.

Lucky’s staring straight ahead, his eyes focused on something outside the car. Probably calculating the odds on what color car might turn into the lot next. His hands are in his lap, and all I can think of is how careless he is to offer me complete access to two unguarded targets. I’m three feet away. I could kill him two different ways with a single strike. He’s left me not only the temple, but the jugular as well. Temple or jugular. Temple or…”

“Mr. Creed?” Gwen says. “Fries?”

I glance in the mirror.

She does that tongue thing again, and now I’m thinking fries.

That’s me, in the white rental car. Donovan Creed, deadliest man on earth. Ordering fries, a Diet Coke, and a shake at the Wendy’s drive through. Telling the guy, “I’m only going through this line once, son. Don’t fuck up my order.” Him saying, “Relax, Pops. I’m on it.”

Pops?