by Wesley Lewis
“Not really.”
Crocker tried the other doors first. Both were locked. He cracked the men’s room door a couple of inches and peeked in at a tiny trash can and a couple of paper-towel dispensers. He opened the door and stepped inside.
The facilities were hidden behind a wall to his left. He took a couple of steps, made a U-turn around the wall, and found himself standing in the midst of a completely unremarkable and completely empty public restroom.
He checked both of the stalls and confirmed that nobody was standing on the toilet seats and that nothing was stashed in the bowls. He noticed a small storage cabinet beneath the sink but found it locked.
He backtracked around the dividing wall and checked the trash can: It contained only a couple of soiled paper towels. He peered through the small plastic windows on the paper-towel dispensers and saw nothing out of the ordinary.
I’m missing something, he thought.
He opened the bathroom door and poked his head out into the alcove, where Jennifer awaited his return. He glanced around, saw nobody, and quickly pulled her inside.
“What are you doing?” she protested. “You’re going to get us in trouble.”
“Relax, there’s nobody here.”
He led her around the bend, into the main part of the restroom.
“I guess this is the one place where we’re safe from surveillance cameras,” she said.
Crocker’s eyes searched the room. “That’s why I think Trooper Haley was up to something. He didn’t come all the way up here just to use the facilities.”
“Did you check the stalls?”
“Yes.”
She glanced around. “What about that cabinet under the sink?”
“It’s locked.”
“And the changing table?”
“The what?”
She walked to the large rectangular object mounted to the wall. “Don’t tell me you’ve never seen a baby-changing table.” She flipped the latch and folded down the plastic table.
“I know what it is, but it didn’t occur to me to check it.” He inspected the table and pointed to what appeared to be a built-in tissue dispenser. “What’s this?”
“Disposable liners. So you don’t have to lay your baby on a dirty table.”
The edge of one liner protruded from the plastic container. Crocker grabbed it and pulled. It slid easily from the box. He watched to see if another liner took its place at the mouth of the container but none did.
“Looks like you got the last one,” she said.
“Lucky me.”
He stuck a finger into the mouth of the empty dispenser. It was a tight fit, and he strained to feel around inside the plastic box. The tip of his finger grazed something that felt like leather. He pressed harder and felt a solid object shift behind the leather.
He withdrew his finger. “Any idea how to get this open?”
After a couple of seconds of experimentation, Jennifer managed to open the dispenser. Crocker reached in and pulled out a brown leather bank bag.
“What’s that?” she asked.
“Evidence that our young highway patrolman is on Dudka’s payroll.”
“What do you think is inside?”
Crocker didn’t need to open the bag—he could tell from the feel what was inside—but he unzipped it anyway, for Jennifer’s benefit. Together, they surveyed the contents.
As he’d surmised, the bag contained three compact semiautomatic handguns, which he now recognized as Walther P22s, and three silencers, each of which could be threaded onto the barrel of one of the guns. The small-caliber pistols were not very powerful, but when fitted with the silencers and loaded with subsonic ammunition, a shot fired from one would be no louder than a strong sneeze.
In tonight’s production of The Godfather, the role of Clemenza will be played by Trooper Haley.
The faintest hint of a smile formed at the corners of Crocker’s mouth.
Jennifer looked at him like he’d lost his mind. “Do you find this amusing?”
“No,” he replied, “but it’s not surprising. A mob boss with cops on his payroll shouldn’t have much difficulty slipping guns past security. Haley probably hid the bag under his shirt, flashed his badge to the guards, and bypassed the metal detectors without attracting so much as a suspicious glance.”
“Well, now we have their guns, and we have a pretty good idea who’s been tipping off Dudka.”
Crocker zipped the bag shut. “You’re half right.” He placed it back inside the plastic dispenser.
Alarm washed over Jennifer’s face. “What are you doing?”
He closed the dispenser. “If these guns aren’t where they’re supposed to be, Dudka’s men will abort the exchange, and Ashley will be gone forever.” He folded the changing table shut and latched it.
Jennifer looked as if she were about to say something in protest, but a chorus of men’s voices interrupted.
Outside the restroom, a man with a heavy Eastern European accent asked, “Is this it?”
“Da,” replied another, “ėto ono.”
Crocker was still processing the fact that the second man had responded in what sounded like Russian when he felt Jennifer shoving him toward one of the stalls. Since he had no plan of his own, he complied, stepping into the stall just as he heard the restroom’s main door swing open with a loud thud.
“Gde stol,” said a third man.
Jennifer followed Crocker into the stall and quickly but quietly pulled the stall door closed behind her as footsteps echoed from the other side of the dividing wall.
“Vot,” replied one of the men.
Jennifer eased the latch into place, locking the stall door.
“Viktor,” said the first man, “open the table. Dima, prover′ tualet.”
Crocker’s knowledge of Russian was limited to the three or four words he’d picked up from Cold War–era spy films, but he didn’t need to speak the language to know that that last word sounded a whole lot like toilet.
For the second time in five minutes, Jennifer surprised Crocker by kissing him. But this kiss wasn’t so much romantic as abrasive. As she did this, she simultaneously untucked his dress shirt with one hand and tousled his hair with the other. Apparently satisfied with the results, she stepped back, grabbed the hem of her already ridiculously short dress, and hiked it up well above the point of decency. Crocker’s brain was still playing catch-up when the stall door rattled violently.
Without missing a beat, Jennifer called out, in what sounded like a bad New Jersey accent, “Hol’ ya horses, already—we’re comin’.”
She flipped the latch, and as the door swung open, the first thing the burly man on the other side saw was a stunning redhead pulling down the hem of her provocative gold minidress.
She looked up at the stout man in the tight black slacks and yellow dress shirt and, in the same accent, said, “It’s gettin’ so a gal can’t even make a livin’ in this town.”
She reached back, grabbed Crocker by the hand, and led him out of the stall, past the confused-looking thug. Crocker saw himself in the mirror above the sink and realized what a first-class job Jennifer had done. With his hair and clothes a mess and his face smeared with lipstick, he looked like a man who’d been caught getting a little bathroom nookie.
Two men stood near the changing table. Both looked every inch the part of Eastern European gangsters. One wore a tight-fitting sharkskin suit over a half-buttoned dress shirt. The other wore all black and had his long hair pulled back in a ponytail.
The three goons watched Crocker and Jennifer walk toward the exit. As Crocker made the U-turn around the dividing wall, he gave the men a sheepish I’m-so-embarrassed look and followed Jennifer to the door.
The couple hurried into t
he small alcove outside the restroom and almost crashed into a squat little woman who was dragging a mop and bucket from the maintenance closet. The woman glanced up at the disheveled man and the scandalously dressed woman, shook her head in disgust, and continued on her way.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
Jennifer closed her eyes and let the cool evening breeze wash over her, drying the beads of perspiration that still lingered ten minutes after the close encounter in the men’s room. She focused on the sound of the wind and tuned out the noise of the traffic snaking along the Strip and the screams of the thrill seekers enjoying the rides on the other side of the observation deck.
She opened her eyes to find she’d squeezed the guardrail so tightly that the color had drained from her hands. She loosened her grip and felt a slight tingle as the blood returned to her fingers. She took in the view, searching for anything that might distract her from her problems. She found nothing.
Almost nine hundred feet below, men and women strolled Las Vegas Boulevard without a care more pressing than, perhaps, a losing streak at the tables. By the simple virtue of not having wandered into the Placer Gold truck stop at one o’clock that morning, they got to go on living their lives just as they always had.
To her right, Crocker leaned against the guardrail, absentmindedly seesawing a coin-operated telescope on its base.
Jennifer wasn’t scared because Dudka’s men had guns—she knew firsthand that Crocker could handle three armed assailants. She was scared because Dudka’s men had guns inside one of the most secure buildings in Las Vegas.
Her problems were not going to end with a brief statement to the authorities and a business-class flight back to Dallas. Regardless of whether the plan to save Ashley succeeded or failed, Jennifer could not simply return to her life in Texas and assume that what had happened in Vegas would stay in Vegas.
What if, some evening six months or a year from now, she came home to find three of Dudka’s henchmen waiting in her living room?
“Tell me something,” she said.
Crocker stopped playing with the telescope. “Okay.”
“Assuming this actually works and we get Ashley back, then what?”
“Then Tom gets her to safety, and you and I go to the feds, just like we discussed.”
“And when Dudka sends his army of thugs and dirty cops after us?”
“You’re worried Dudka is going to carry out a vendetta against us?”
“He dismembers incompetent employees and buries the pieces in the desert. I get the impression he’s prone to holding grudges.”
Crocker offered a sympathetic smile. “We made Dudka’s list twenty-some-odd hours ago. Nothing we do here tonight is going to change that.”
Jennifer sighed. “I just wish we didn’t have to throw fuel on the fire. If we had a little more time, maybe we could come up with the money and—”
“Don’t start playing that game. Take it from me, dwelling on the what-ifs gets you nowhere. We have to deal with the reality of the situation, and the reality is that we don’t have any more time or money.”
“Or anything else,” quipped Jennifer.
“That’s not true—we have friends.” He pulled a business card from his jacket pocket. “And those friends are going to make sure we’re safe.” He handed her the card.
She examined it. “Sheriff Cargill?”
“Flip it over.”
She looked at the writing on the back side. “Who is SA Bruce Eastland?”
“That’s Special Agent Bruce Eastland. He’s with the FBI’s organized crime division.”
“And you think he can help?”
“He’s flying in from DC as we speak. First thing in the morning, you and I are meeting Special Agent Eastland and Sheriff Cargill. They’re going to take care of us.”
“Take care of us how? By changing our names, moving us to Idaho, and giving us jobs at the Department of Motor Vehicles?”
“Nobody said anything about witness relocation.”
“How else are they going to protect us from a man like Dudka?”
“I don’t know. But I do know we’ll be safe. And I know that this mess will finally be out of our hands and in the hands of the professionals. For now, that’s good enough for me.”
Jennifer shared Crocker’s desire to turn over control of the situation to a team of highly capable federal agents, but she needed to believe that doing so wouldn’t mean the end of life as she knew it. She watched the handful of tourists milling about the observation deck and tried to conceive a plausible happy ending.
She was mentally sketching out the broad strokes of a scenario that involved spending a few months on a beach in South America when she saw one of the lobby doors swing open twenty feet behind Crocker. Her fantasy dissolved into stark reality as the goon in the sharkskin suit stepped out onto the observation deck, followed by the longhaired man in black.
Jennifer tucked the business card into the cleavage of her dress and, doing her best to remain calm, leaned forward and whispered in Crocker’s ear, “They’re here.”
“The men from the restroom?”
“Yeah. Two of them, anyway.”
He nuzzled her neck. “What are they doing?”
“They’re splitting up. One is walking this way.”
She pretended to enjoy Crocker’s undivided attention as the ponytailed man in black walked past.
“They’re scoping out the location,” whispered Crocker when the man had passed. “Avoid eye contact—we can’t afford to look interested.”
Jennifer turned back toward the sea of neon lights. Crocker did the same.
He stared out at the city. “Try to act natural.”
“No problem.” Her voice dripped with sarcasm. “I’ll just stand here mouthing ‘peas and carrots’ over and over until we hear from Tom.”
Crocker gave her a sideways glance. “Peas and carrots?”
“That’s what actors in the background of movies do so that it looks like they’re having conversations.”
When Crocker didn’t reply, Jennifer peeked over and saw his lips moving.
They continued like that for a couple of minutes—staring out at the skyline, occasionally mouthing peas and carrots—until Crocker gently elbowed her in the ribs. She took a casual look around and saw the man in black headed back their way.
“Anyway,” she said as if midconversation, “that’s when I realized that that’s just a replica and that the real Eiffel Tower is still somewhere in Europe.”
Crocker laughed, and the man in black continued by without paying them any attention. A few seconds later, Crocker’s jacket began to vibrate.
“Here we go.” He pulled Vegas’s cell phone from an inside pocket, accepted the call, and muted it without saying a word to the caller. He then forwarded the call. After a moment, his jacket began vibrating again. He reached into the same inside pocket, pulled out a second cell phone—this one borrowed from Scarlett—and offered it to Jennifer. “It’s for you.”
Jennifer took the vibrating phone and asked, “Should I try to warn him about the guns before I mute it?”
“No. He’d have to take the phone out of his pocket to understand you, and that might tip off anybody watching.”
She accepted the call and, as Crocker had done, immediately muted it so as to avoid any suspicious sounds emanating from Tom’s pants. She and Crocker held their respective phones to their ears and listened.
Tom’s voice was soft and muffled. “I’m watching the two of you from the doors. Signal if you can hear me.”
Jennifer waited for Crocker’s nod, then ran her free hand through her hair.
“Copy that,” said Tom. “We’re live. You hear what I hear.”
Across the way, one of the lobby doors opened,
and Tom emerged onto the observation deck. His suit and dress shoes had been replaced by a long-sleeved T-shirt, a pair of cargo pants, and white sneakers. He wore the cheap canvas backpack Jennifer had seen at the Prickly Pear.
“That’s your cue,” whispered Crocker.
Jennifer walked casually toward the lobby doors. Neither she nor Tom acknowledged the other as they passed. She mouthed peas and carrots into the phone as she walked.
She passed through the same door through which Tom had just exited and sat on a bench on the small landing atop the lobby stairs. From the bench, she could watch Tom through the glass doors and keep an eye on the steps leading down to the elevators.
Tom walked to a coin-operated telescope near the guardrail and waited. He didn’t have to wait long.
He’d been standing there for less than a minute when Jennifer heard a phone ring. She heard it faintly through the glass doors and loudly through Scarlett’s phone.
Tom reached into his right front pocket, hesitated, then reached into his left front pocket and pulled out the cheap prepaid cell phone Crocker had given him in the chapel.
He almost pulled out the wrong phone, thought Jennifer with a shudder.
“Hello,” he answered.
Jennifer couldn’t hear what, if anything, was said on the other end of Tom’s call, but within a matter of seconds, the man in the sharkskin suit and the man in black appeared on either side of him.
Before Tom could say anything, the man in black grabbed the cell phone from his hand and flung it over the ledge.
Tom recoiled but quickly regained his composure. “Would one of you gentlemen happen to be Mr. Black?”
“Yes,” said the man in the sharkskin suit, his accent thick, “I am Mr. Black.”
“Really?” asked Tom. “I would have put my money on Johnny Cash here.” He cocked his thumb at the man dressed in black.