The Highest Stakes

by Rick Reed

  Jack asked Payne, “What did you find out for me?”

  Payne sat back. “Skippy Walker has a bank account with Old National Bank. Or at least he did. He withdrew all of his money three days ago. Fifteen thousand, two hundred and thirty dollars. He also borrowed against his 401(k). Thirty-five thousand dollars. In other words, he has no savings.”

  “That explains the new truck and toys,” Jack said. “And what about Shirley West?”

  “Shirley West has quite a bit put away in a couple of banks. Nothing that he couldn’t of earned though. He hasn’t made any large deposits recently. He hasn’t touched his 401(k) and there’s a bunch of money there. The only withdrawal he made was a year ago. He pulled out five thousand.”

  “He got divorced a year ago,” Jack said.

  “That’s all I could get,” Payne said.

  “That’s plenty. Thanks for your help. I owe you one.”

  “And I’ll collect someday too,” Payne said.

  “Well, we have two choices now,” Jack said to Susan. “I can turn myself in. Or you can hide out here with Payne while I find this Quinn guy. If I catch him first, the CIA will most likely go away.”

  Her answer surprised him. “Maybe you should turn yourself in. This is the federal government we’re dealing with, Jack.”

  He noticed she said “we” and not “you.” “I’m not sure who they are,” Jack said. “But there’s no way in hell I’m sitting around while Killian’s shooter is still out there.

  Susan picked up the motorcycle keys from the table. “Let’s go,” she said.

  “Can you ride a motorcycle? I mean, you want to drive?” Jack asked.

  Payne cradled his crippled hands in his lap. “I think you should both stay here where you are safe. But if you’re bent on going, you’ll be less conspicuous in my car.”

  * * *

  Payne’s car turned out to be a seventies model MG Midget. Jack couldn’t imagine why a blind man needed a car, but it was a welcome piece of luck. Payne unlocked the chain holding the garage’s sliding doors and pulled them open. Susan got behind the wheel and drove the MG into the alley while Jack put the Gold Wing inside the shed. She seemed at home in the cramped car but Jack had to duck his head and pull his knees up to his chin. Payne closed and chained the doors behind them.

  “Where to?” Susan asked.

  “Let’s go to Moon Pie’s,” Jack said. “But first, let’s stop at a pay phone. You can call Mabel and I’ll see if I can reach Liddell.” He patted his pockets and asked, “Do you have some change?”

  Susan rummaged in her purse. “I’ve got plenty of change, but you have to promise me, no more burglaries.”

  “I promise,” Jack lied.

  They went to a pay phone on Riverside Drive near an insurance building.

  Susan tried several phone numbers for her receptionist and finally reached her. She was fine, but concerned, and Jack could hear her voice from five feet away and with traffic going past. She sounded like the witch in The Wizard of Oz. He imagined her saying, “I’ll get you, my pretty. And that detective of yours too.” And then she would cackle and he would wet himself.

  Susan hung up and only had enough change left for two phone calls.

  Jack called Stu Sanders’s work number and didn’t get an answer. He only had change left for one more call. “To hell with it,” he said, and tried Stu’s personal cell phone. Stu answered on the second ring.

  “Stu, I’m glad I caught you. Have some guys come by asking about me?”

  “What are you talking about, Jack? What did you do now?”

  He told Stu about the run-in with Crenshaw and the fight with Agent Thompson in the hospital parking lot. “If they ask, you should tell them what you know. I don’t want to be responsible for you being arrested for helping me.”

  “Are you kidding? I’d never go to jail for you.”

  “That’s the spirit, Stu.”

  “Listen, pal, stay safe. Call if you need anything, and good luck.”

  Susan said, “I thought you were going to call Liddell. I don’t have any more change.”

  “We’ll be on the move,” Jack said, and turned his cell phone back on. “Let’s drive around. I only need to talk to him for a minute. I’ll shut the phone off again after.”

  They got back in the MG and Susan drove through the downtown streets in a crisscross pattern.

  Jack tried Liddell at work. No answer. He was about to call Liddell’s cell when the phone vibrated in his hand. The number displayed was from a detective’s desk, but not Liddell’s or his own work number. He answered.

  “Where have you been? Can you talk?” Jack asked.

  “The captain called me in and ordered me to stay in the office. I’m not supposed to talk to anyone. He said you’d gone out of town for a couple of weeks, but he didn’t say where or why and I didn’t ask. I had to turn Killian’s case over to him. There were two guys with the captain and one of them looked and smelled pretty bad. Is that the guys you were telling me about?”

  Jack said, “I just wanted to make sure you were safe.” He told Liddell about the fiasco at the hospital.

  “Well, that proves they’re not CIA,” Liddell said.

  “How’s that?”

  “Because the CIA would have just shot you and hid the body,” Liddell said.

  “Do what the captain says and stay out of this. I might need you later,” Jack said, and Liddell reluctantly agreed. Jack powered the phone off.

  “So?” Susan asked.

  “Obviously these guys planned to put me on ice for a couple of weeks. The captain told Liddell to stay in the office and keep his mouth shut. Liddell had to give our case file to the Feds.”

  Jack looked up and down the street. He didn’t like being so exposed.

  Chapter Thirty-two

  Susan drove down First Avenue. Before they reached Moon Pie’s street, they saw him pull out onto First Avenue heading south. Susan made a quick U-turn and caught up with Moon Pie’s truck.

  “Stay several cars back,” Jack said.

  “Hey, who’s driving?” She slid into the left lane and stayed three cars behind Moon Pie.

  Moon Pie stopped for a red light at First Avenue and Franklin Street. Jack could see through the back window that Moon Pie was jamming to some music. The light changed, and he went straight ahead, through the light at John Street and onto 4th Street. Moon Pie hung a right on Court Street. There was very little traffic, so Susan backed off.

  “Where do you think he’s going?” Susan asked. She allowed a Toyota truck to get in front of her.

  “You’re pretty good at this tailing stuff,” Jack said.

  “Thank you. I saw it on television.”

  “He’s not going to Shirl’s,” Jack said.

  When Moon Pie turned into the parking garage for the Blue Star Casino, Susan pulled to the curb next to the abandoned building that had housed the Indiana State Employment Office a few years earlier. The same people who owned the Blue Star now owned the building. They were gobbling up as much property and land as they could before people woke up and realized that gambling was bad.

  They left the car on the street and walked into the parking garage. After passing tour buses parked near the visitor entrance, they went inside and up the escalator to the second floor, where a skyway connected the casino’s hotel with the pavilion. Jack could see Moon Pie a hundred feet ahead of them on the skywalk.

  Jack and Susan looked like a couple on their way to get fleeced. Inside the pavilion, Jack went to the railing and watched Moon Pie show some kind of card to the guard. He headed toward the boarding gate. Moon Pie was wearing a straw porkpie hat. He had on chinos with a lime green and tan bowling shirt and tan boating shoes with no socks.

  He was a man on a mission.

  Jack and Susan followed. At the turnstiles, the security guard stopped them.

  “You have member cards?” the guard asked. It was the young guy with acne Jack saw on the boat during his tour with Stu
. The kid’s eyes traveled Susan’s body from stem to stern.

  “We’ve never been here,” Susan said, smiling at the young guard whose scraggy beard was fighting for life in the craters on his face. “Is it a lot of fun?” she cooed.

  “Well,” the guard said with lust in his eyes and a stick shift in his groin. He wasn’t sure what to say, so Jack helped him along.

  “Don’t you make an exception for visitors from out of town?” Jack suggested.

  The guard’s full attention was on Susan as he motioned for them to go ahead. The wall clock next to the boarding gate showed 5:30.

  Jack was curious and asked the guard. “How did the guy in front of us get through without a ticket?”

  “Gold VIP Card.” He smiled and Jack noticed he had no teeth. Either that or they were hiding from the man’s bad breath.

  Susan asked, “A what?”

  “Gold VIP Card, capital G-O-L-D, capital V, capital I, capital P,” he spelled for them.

  “How does a feller get one of them there cards?” Jack asked, and Susan nudged him in the ribs.

  “When yo’re a reg’lar, you apply fer one, an’ they sen’ it to ya,” he answered. And, still smiling, added helpfully, “If yo’re lookin’ fer that fella just come through, you’ll pob’ly find him in the Crystal Room. Deck two.”

  “Why is that?” Jack looked at his name tag, “Why is that, Clete?”

  “Cause that’s where all them high rollers go,” he said.

  “Thanks fer yore hep’,” Jack said and handed the security guard a ten-dollar bill. He thought of something else and asked, “Clete, is the boat sailing?”

  “Nope. In a couple weeks it won’t be sailin’ ever agin. They got a new law that the boat don’t haf’ta sail no more. If y’all hurry you’ll pob’ly make it. Boat’s almost full up.”

  They thanked the guard and headed down the gangway and entered the riverboat casino. The lights inside the room were more annoying and the noise louder than he remembered from last time. And the patrons were more inebriated. People tend to get louder as they get drunker. It wasn’t even three thirty and some of them were already half-past drunk, going on stupor.

  “Let’s get tokens,” Susan said and nudged him toward the cashiers’ cage.

  “I don’t gamble. Besides, I only have eleven dollars.”

  “Well, I have money.” She pulled the wad of bills from her bag. “I’ll get a few tokens so we can blend in.”

  Before he could stop her, she was gone. She came back with a bucket of tokens, gave Jack a fistful and headed toward the slot machines. Jack saw the Crystal Room to his left and went to find Moon Pie.

  The Crystal Room lived up to its name. The ceiling appeared to be inlaid with gold, and above every table hung sparkling, crystal chandeliers. Dancing lights filled the room like a scene from Saturday Night Fever. Little dangly things made of glass and brass hung from every wall fixture. The effects would be dizzying even if you weren’t drunk.

  At a craps table, a frail gray-haired woman was yelling at the pair of dice in her hand, “C’mon, baby, c’mon, baby.” Jack hoped she didn’t say, “Baby needs a new pair of shoes” or “Grandma needs some new teeth” or some other nostalgic phrase.

  Colorful characters skulked around the perimeter of the room waiting for someone to give up a machine. Everyone was drinking and pulling slot handles or staggering about like creatures from the gambling laboratory of Doctor Frankenstein.

  He was about to give up on this floor and try to find Susan when he saw Moon Pie coming out of the starboard stairwell. He was with a security guard, and as they got closer Jack could see the guard was wearing the oak leaf insignia of a major on his shirt collar. The boss.

  Moon Pie and the guard stopped near the slot machine Jack was pretending to play without even glancing in his direction. Jack saw “J. Ellert” embossed on the guard’s name tag.

  J. Ellert and Moon Pie were having an animated discussion, and Ellert was none too happy. Jack heard Ellert say, “Listen, asshole. Stay away from me.” This surely wasn’t the way a security chief should be talking to a V.I.P. customer. Especially when the customer was an off-duty city policeman.

  Jack decided he would follow Ellert. Moon Pie should know who Jack was, but maybe he was in “gambling mode” and incognizant of anything but throwing his money away. When they split up he started to follow Ellert but Susan rushed up and nearly bowled him over. She had a death grip on a large plastic cup with the Blue Star logo on it and it was overflowing with tokens.

  “I won! Look. I won.” He could see that he would have to get her into therapy if she came here often.

  “Wonderful,” he said with a plastic smile. “Come on.” He took her by the arm, led her in the direction Ellert had gone, and explained what he’d seen and heard.

  “How did Moon Pie react?” she asked.

  “Moon Pie didn’t say anything to Ellert, but Ellert was coming unglued. I don’t think Moon Pie recognized me.”

  “What with you being a rock star and all,” she said.

  Moon Pie was following Ellert, his new un-friend, to the aft stairwell. The two men disappeared behind a metal door that said TO DECKS.

  Jack held Susan back. “Let’s give them a minute to get away from the door.” They were rewarded for not being hasty by the sudden reappearance of Major Ellert, who shot out of the doorway, brushing past them without so much as an “excuse me” or even a “get out of my way.”

  “Boy,” Susan said under her breath, “that man is pissed!”

  It was an understatement. Ellert was taller than Jack and had a few extra pounds on him, with a lot of them hanging below his belt line. Jack said, “It’s a safe bet he isn’t one of Moon Pie’s friends from the gym.”

  Susan leaned in, kissed him on the cheek and said, “You go after Moon Pie. I’ll see what’s eating Ugly.”

  Jack entered the stairway and heard a door below shutting. He hurried down the stairs. At the bottom, he cracked the door open to be sure he wouldn’t run into Moon Pie or anyone who was looking for him. He didn’t see any CIA guys wearing black trench coats and Boris Badenov hats, so he pursued the elusive flying squirrel... Moon Pie.

  Moon Pie stopped at a five-dollar slot and was feeding it bills by the fistful. Jack kept a respectful distance and played a poker machine. He lost about a dollar fifty in the same amount of time Moon Pie fed several hundred dollars into his machine. Moon Pie was a loser. What a surprise.

  Moon Pie moved on to a craps table where Jack watched him for a couple of minutes. Losing at this too, he was about to move to a roulette wheel when Jack saw Major Ellert crossing the room. Moon Pie must’ve spotted Ellert too, because he disengaged from playing roulette and locked on target. Then something strange happened. Ellert saw Moon Pie coming, did an about-face, and almost ran to the nearest stairway and disappeared. It was as if Ellert was afraid of Moon Pie. Either that or he didn’t want to be seen with him.

  Ellert being afraid of Moon Pie was unimaginable. It was like a bear avoiding a gerbil. Ellert had the size advantage and, unless Moon Pie was the next Jackie Chan, Ellert could squash him like a bug.

  Susan came up beside Jack and put her arm in his and whispered in his ear, “We need to talk somewhere private.” She led him to the stairwell Ellert had disappeared into.

  Once there, Susan let go of his arm and pointed to a pay phone on the wall on the next landing down. “The big ugly one was on that phone. He punched in a number several times and would say about two words, wait a few seconds, then hang up. He was very agitated.”

  Jack put his hand out for change and Susan dug in her purse again. They descended the stairs to the pay phone. Jack fed some coins in the phone slot and punched a series of buttons and waited. The phone rang and was answered by a tired female voice, “Sugar Creek Inn, how may I direct your call?”

  Jack hung up.

  “What did you do?” Susan asked.

  “In college I dated a girl at the phone company. She told me
how to do a redial off a pay phone. Ellert was calling the Sugar Creek Inn.”

  “Why would Major Ellert be so angry at Moon Pie?” Susan asked. “And why was he calling the Sugar Creek Inn? Isn’t that in Kentucky?”

  Both good questions that Jack didn’t have answers for.

  “Let’s go to the Sugar Creek Inn,” he suggested.

  Susan gave him a sly look. “Is this your way of making a pass at me?”

  He let that go and said, “We can’t go home. We’ve got to stay somewhere.”

  “You’re joking,” she said, then, “you’re not joking.”

  “Well, we can’t stay here,” he said.

  “We don’t have any luggage or clothes,” she reminded him.

  Clothes are the least of our problems. He asked, “So are you in?”

  “Absolutely,” she said without hesitation.

  Chapter Thirty-three

  At Sugar Creek Inn they checked in as Mr. and Mrs. Jones, which earned them a smirk from the woman behind the counter. She introduced herself as Millie Hardy. Millie was in her mid-forties, shapely, with curly dark hair that framed her face and lay across her shoulders. She wore a leopard patterned silk blouse that left nothing to the imagination, low cut, skin tight. On her ample bosom was a tattoo of a tree, its leafy limbs seemed to spread across her cleavage.

  “You like my tattoo?”

  “Very nice,” Jack said, and Susan gave him a wink.

  Millie explained, “It’s the Tree of Life,” and leaned across the counter, giving him an arborist’s view. “The Celts believe the natural world is the giver and keeper of life. This . . .” she ran a finger down her cleavage, “. . . represents the intertwined desires of man and nature. The branches reach into the sky and the roots,” she ran her eyes down to his crotch, “reach into the sacred streams. Deep below. Creating an explosion of life.” Her eyes rose to his and she smiled seductively.