by Donn Cortez
“Well, we’re pretty sure we know who was fired out of that air cannon. Too bad we didn’t find any prints or trace that could prove it. So what’s next?”
Nick got up. “I don’t know about you,” he said, “but I’m going to go back over everything we’ve done so far. We must be missing something.”
Greg got to his feet, too. “When in doubt,” he said, “run in circles, scream and shout.”
Nick stopped. “How does that apply?”
Greg shrugged. “It doesn’t. I just couldn’t think of something that rhymed.”
“Oh.” Nick paused. “Yeah, okay.”
Greg stood in the crime lab parking lot, studying the mock-up they’d built of the Panhandle’s roof. Pulleys were attached with clamps at the pipe, the edge of the roof, and the windowsill.
Nick walked up behind him. “You still working on your fire-hose theory?”
“Nah. I think I made a wrong turn there.”
“Hey, it happens to everybody—”
“No, I mean a literal wrong turn.” Greg pointed at the pulley mounted on the pipe that had bent. “We thought that something was being lowered or raised from the roof, right?”
“That’s the direction the pipe was bent.”
“Yeah, but what if there was another pulley? One over here?” Greg walked over to an empty section of the mock-up with a taped-off square marked “Elevator Machine Room.”
“Well, that’s in the same general area—it’s to the left instead of the right, but the pipe would still bend the same way.”
“And if we forget about trying to thread a fire hose through a pulley,” Greg pointed out, “then we eliminate the jamming problem.”
“So the hose was a completely separate thing—”
“—and the pulleys were used with something more conventional, like rope. Not over the edge of the roof, but into the elevator shaft.”
“Where it was used to haul something up or lower something down.” Nick nodded. “We need to take another look at that roof.”
“And that elevator shaft.”
Greg squinted up at the roof of the elevator machine room.
“Can you see anything?” asked Nick from behind him.
“There’s a lot of dirt and grease up here. Just a second . . .” Greg shone his flashlight on the cables that pulled the elevator up and down, then on the two massive pulleys that they ran through, bolted to a steel I-beam set into the concrete of the elevator shaft itself. “Wait a minute. I think I’ve got something, behind one of the pulleys. Yeah, there’s something there. Tool mark, same as the others.”
“So a pulley was clamped there. All we have to do now—”
“—is find out what was being hauled.”
“And which direction it was going.”
“And where it wound up.”
“And who—you know, let’s just focus on what.”
“Good idea.”
After they’d documented the tool marks with pictures, they headed down to the lobby. They’d already arranged with the hotel engineer to have the private elevator locked down on the main floor; now they had security let them into the basement offices via the regular one.
A few curious employees on their coffee break stood around and watched as they used a crowbar to crack open the sliding elevator doors.
“Couldn’t they just press a button or something?” a brunette in a dark business skirt and white blouse said.
The man standing beside her, dressed in a gray suit and sipping coffee out of a tall paper cup, shook his head. “Nah. They have to shut all the electrics down for safety. That way, they don’t have to worry about the car coming down and, you know, squashing them.”
“I think I saw that happen in a movie once. It was gross. Cut this guy right in half.”
Greg did his best to ignore them. “Great,” he muttered under his breath. “Now that I don’t have to worry about plunging to my death, all I can think of is a big metal box hanging over my head. That, and Wile E. Coyote cartoons.”
The doors popped open and Nick set the pry bar down. “This one’s mine,” he said. He shone a flashlight around the base of the elevator shaft; other than the shock absorber—a large piston mounted in an oil-filled cylinder that provided a cushion in case of emergencies—there was a variety of accumulated junk, things that had slipped through the crack between the floor of the car and whatever floor it had stopped at. Pens, key cards, pieces of paper, playing cards, change, combs, a butter knife, even a few casino chips.
“It’s like the world’s largest couch cushion,” said Nick. “Most of this stuff has been here for a while—you can tell by the layer of dust and grease.”
“Not all of it, though,” said Greg. “Some of the stuff is cleaner than the rest.” He pointed at one corner.
“I see it. Looks like a casino chip—newer than the others, though. And is that—”
“Blood,” said Greg. “How much do you want to bet it turns out to be from a pig?”
Nick climbed into the shaft, picked the chip up with a gloved hand, and studied it. “Maybe,” he said. “But so far, just about everything in this case hasn’t been what it seems. I’m not ready to put my money on a winner just yet.”
Jim Brass studied the man sitting across the interview table the way a gourmet chef would consider a side of beef. Brass’s eyes were coldly analytical, but the rest of his face suggested that he was mulling over various recipes and couldn’t quite decide on one.
The man’s name was Leon James Governor. He was a college student with a certain amount of technical skill that he was using to help with tuition—at least, that’s what Brass was sure he’d say to defend himself. The fact that he’d dropped out last year was no doubt just a temporary glitch, to be rectified as soon as he’d put a little hard-earned money aside. Leon had short, curly hair, wire-framed glasses at least ten years out of style, and the build of a scarecrow.
“Oh, if I only had a brain,” Brass remarked.
Leon looked confused. It was a look he’d worn more or less since the first moment Brass had laid eyes on him, but they’d been together long enough now that certain subtle nuances of his bafflement had become apparent. The look he was wearing now, for instance, was the one Leon got when one of Brass’s comments failed to register as being clever and/or witty.
“What?” Leon blurted.
“Never mind. How you doing, Leon?”
“I’m—I’m okay.”
“Really? Seen a lot of people die right in front of you, have you?”
The look on Leon’s face slid away from confused and toward queasy. “Uh—no.”
“Oh, I’m sorry. I misspoke. What I meant to ask was, have you seen a lot of people killed right in front of you.” Brass paused. “Well, have you?”
“No. No, I haven’t.”
“Well, if I’d run into you before today, I’d have told you to get used to it. Because these thugs you’re working for, the Red Mafiya? They order assassinations the way other people order eggs. Scrambled, sunny-side up, fried. . . you get the idea.”
“I don’t—I don’t know anything about a Red Mafiya.”
“No? What language did you think your boss was yelling in? Pig Latin?”
“I don’t know.”
Brass nodded. “Sure. Just like you didn’t know about all that phony plastic you were cranking out. You know, right now the crime lab is processing everything in that room, and we both know they’re going to find your fingerprints all over the place. But I guess that doesn’t really matter.”
“Why not?”
“Same reason you won’t have to get used to watching people get murdered in front of you. Well, you might have to watch one, but only if there’s a mirror in the room.”
Leon turned the volume on his confusion a little higher. Brass was starting to suspect it wasn’t so much a lack of reasoning skills as a defense mechanism. “What are you talking about?”
“Vory v zakone. Know what that means? ‘Thieves in
law.’ See, these guys live by a very strict code, and they kill anyone who breaks it. Did you know that in World War Two, members of the Red Mafiya in Soviet prisons were offered a deal? Enlist in the army and fight for Mother Russia in return for reduced jail time. Considering the conditions in some of those prisons, facing death on the front lines probably seemed like a pretty good idea.”
“Let me guess. None of them took it.”
Brass smiled gently. “Who’s telling this story, you or me? No, there were Russians—even psychotic criminal Russians—who loved their country just as much as any other patriot. They joined up, fought the good fight—and then, at the conclusion of the war, the ones who survived were sent back to finish their shortened sentences.”
Brass shook his head. “Unfortunately, the first rule of the code is Never cooperate with the authorities. Every last one of them was dead within a year—killed by their former comrades.”
The confusion on Leon’s face cranked up to new heights, pushed there by the terror bubbling up underneath. “Why are you telling me this? I mean, if you’re trying to get me to cooperate, that’s like the worst possible thing you could possibly say.”
“Gee, you think so? I’m pretty sure I haven’t played my ace yet.”
Leon shook his head violently, as if he could shake free all the horrifying thoughts competing for attention. “No. I’m not talking to you. No way.”
“See, the guys you were working for aren’t dumb. Evil, ruthless, and cruel, yes, but not dumb. I’m sure they already gave you some version of this speech before you ever saw a credit-card blank, and maybe they even spiced it up with some visual aids.” Brass shrugged. “I would have brought in some slides, but our department’s budget is tight. Besides, what’s the point in trying to compete with a multinational criminal organization? They can afford to blow up a warehouse full of Lamborghinis just to make a point. Me, I have to fill out a requisition form if I lose a Sharpie.”
Brass sighed and stared off into space for a moment. “Anyway, where was I? Oh, yeah, how completely screwed you are. As I was saying, the zakone boys play for keeps. That means that when a loose end—like you—is left dangling in the wind, they make sure to”—Brass made a scissoring motion with two of his fingers—“cut it off.”
“But—but I’m not going to talk.”
“I know. Dead men tell no tales and all that.”
“No! No, I mean I’m not going to inform on them! They can’t kill me if I don’t talk!”
Now it was Brass’s turn to look confused. He had no desire to compete with a master, so he kept it down around simple puzzlement. “Why not? Did I miss a memo? Was there a change in the official rule book? Oh, wait—there isn’t one.”
He leaned forward and favored Leon with a cold, completely humorless smile. “They can do pretty much whatever they want, Leon. The only reason you’re still breathing at this very moment is because you’re in police custody. And now I’m going to tell you the very, very worst thing I could possibly say to you at this moment.”
Brass met Leon’s eyes, but didn’t say anything. The moment stretched out until Leon finally whispered, “What?”
“I’m letting you go,” said Brass.
19
HIGH HOPES, CATHERINE thought. There was only one place in Vegas she could think of that would embody that phrase in literal as opposed to metaphorical terms.
She stood on the sidewalk—sorry, the slidewalk—outside the Silver Spire and looked up. Way, way up. The Spire was the fifth-tallest free-standing observation tower in the United States, and looked like a gleaming rocket about to take off. The casino in the base, the rooms with their porthole-shaped windows, the restaurant named the Bridge at the very peak of the structure—all of it was designed around one theme: the future.
Can’t have a future without hope—though some futures are grimmer than others.
Screams rose into the air as if to underscore her point. They came from the belly of the massive, semitransparent alien that pulsed its way up the side of the gleaming superstructure, suckered tentacles writhing with menace. It made the ascent every ten minutes or so; at the top, it was blasted with laser beams, which sent it ululating to its death far, far below. Then it was time for another bellyload of customers, another slow ascent, another fast plunge to its doom.
To the tourists who rode it, the Alienator was just another Vegas thrill ride, though it was one of the highest in the world.
But to John Bannister and Theria Kostapolis?
The ship reaches into the sky, a mile or more high. The creature that scales its heights is horrible, a continually shifting monstrosity that’s hard to look at—not only because of the screaming souls dissolving in its transparent guts, but because it doesn’t seem to be wholly of this dimension. It has a terrifying sort of depth to it that induces the same kind of stomach-tickling fear Bannister feels when looking down from an extreme height. Up and down it goes, never stopping, always feeding.
Both Bannister and Theria are familiar with the myth of Pandora, who opened a chest and set loose of all the world’s evils. They understand the meaning of the myth, as well. The very last thing to leave the chest was hope, and the reason for that wasn’t to give the story a happy ending. Hope is the greatest monster of all, the one that makes all the others worse simply by existing.
And that’s exactly what this immense ship represents: the hope that one day, the residents of hell will be able to leave. It’s visible from any point in the land, and clearly big enough to carry every last tormented soul to safety. Every time one of the damned sees its elegant, silvery shape, all that they’ve suffered—all that they have yet to suffer—seems unimaginably worse, because the possibility of freedom is right there in front of their eyes.
Bannister and Theria do not hesitate. They enter.
Catherine walked through the main entrance, a curving line of revolving doors made to look like transparent rocket tubes. Inside, the casino was laid out like the surface of a distant planet; the sky was a black dome overhead, projected images of at least seven moons of varying size and color moving at different speeds through a starry sky. The omnipresent chime and whir of the slot machines seemed both more natural and more alien in the setting.
The place is full of robots. One-armed robots, busy using their singular appendage to perform brain surgery on the blank-eyed subjects perched on stools before them. At second glance, Bannister realizes they aren’t actually stools; they’re a kind of four-legged docking station, a thick translucent cable plugging into the base of the spinal cord of the people sitting on them.
Bannister wonders what kind of bizarre fantasies are being fed to their brains. Are they living in an even worse world than this one, or are they experiencing scenarios where happiness is always just out of reach?
He thinks he knows the answer.
“Hope,” Catherine muttered. “Demonstrating a commitment to hope, that’s why they came here. That has to mean trying to escape from hell.”
She headed for the elevators. She knew how crazy it would sound if she said it out loud, but if you were going to escape from Hell Vegas in a giant rocket, you obviously had to commandeer the flight deck. That would presumably be located in the nose of the ship, the restaurant known as the Bridge.
The elevator was made of glass, the soundtrack an upbeat version of “Major Tom.” High hopes, she thought as the car surged upward and the ground receded. High hopes . . .
The fact that no one tries to stop them bothers Bannister a lot.
He knows they can’t be the first to have tried this. He wonders, briefly, if the reason Satan has put up a gigantic beacon in the middle of hell is simply as a glorified bug zapper, with nothing but an agonizing, twitching death waiting at the top. Or maybe there’s no fuel, the ship a grounded derelict kept gleaming solely for the sake of appearances, its engine a rusted, inoperable hulk.
But no. Word would get out. Hope had to be kept alive, a dim but persistent spark, in order to wring th
e maximum amount of cruelty out of it. The ship would be capable of flight.
Not that it matters.
“Not that it matters,” Catherine said under her breath, then frowned. Why did I say that?
The elevator stopped, the door slid open, and abruptly she knew.
Because they didn’t come here to escape. They came here to demonstrate their commitment to the idea of hope. . . and that’s exactly what they did, about twenty feet straight in front of me.
The sign in the lobby of the restaurant read: “Enter to Win a Trip to Outer Space!” A mock-up of a sleek, double-bodied ship hung suspended from the roof with wires, but Catherine recognized it as more than just another prop. It was a model of the SkyArrow, a ship now being built by one of the burgeoning space-tourism start-ups; they planned to offer actual rides into orbit for those wealthy enough to shell out a hundred thousand dollars for a few minutes of weightlessness and the most spectacular view they’d ever see. Apparently, one of the ways they were raising the necessary capital was by raffling off a seat on one of their flights.
The model hung over a booth, manned by an attractive young woman wearing a uniform that looked as if a Star Trek convention attendee and a stewardess had a mix-up at the dry cleaner’s. Catherine walked up and said, “Excuse me. I was wondering if you’d seen this couple in here today?” She handed over a picture.
The woman—her name was either Annika or Veronika; the font on her name tag was so futuristic it was hard to read—glanced at the picture and nodded. “Sure, I remember them. He had one arm in a sling, and he walked with a very pronounced limp—well, actually, it was more like he couldn’t bend one of his legs. They bought two draw tickets, one for each of them. I told them that even if they won the draw they’d probably have to pass a physical, but they were very insistent.”
“I’ll bet. Did they say anything else? In particular, where they were headed after this?”
Annika-or-Veronika frowned. “Well, they did ask me something kind of odd—after they filled out the forms they wanted to know if I was satisfied, or maybe if my boss was satisfied. I told them I was, and so far my boss hasn’t had any complaints. They seemed happy with that. As for where they were going next. . . I thought I heard the woman say something about ‘following the signs.’ ”