He’d started by following the man following her.
The man was tall and excessively thin, his jeans hanging on his lanky frame, his leather jacket two sizes too big. He parked down the street from Abby’s house, followed her to the coffee shop every morning before work, tailed her to the Tangier in his car. When she left work at the end of the day, he was standing in the shadows of the parking garage.
Max’s fists had itched to pummel the guy the first time he’d spotted him. He’d watched instead, waiting, wanting to be sure.
Wanting to be smart.
Max had no doubt the man had seen Abby with him, and while he didn’t know if the man was employed by Jason or the DeLucas, it didn’t really matter.
By now, Jason knew Max and Abby were back together.
Now he was sure, and he watched as Abby checked her phone on the way into work, her heels clicking on the pavement as she headed for the elevator that would take her into the casino.
He turned his eyes toward the man in the alcove, watching the orange light of his cigarette appear in the darkness. It was a ritual the man always performed once Abby was out of sight — the lighting of the cigarette, a few seconds delay while he enjoyed a couple of pulls, a slow amble away from the area Abby had occupied moments before.
Max usually let him go, but not today.
The man strolled out of the shadows, making his way across the parking lot. Max pushed off the wall and followed him toward the stairs. His mark was almost to the door of the stairwell when he slowed down half a beat, suddenly aware that Max was behind him.
Unfortunately, he also seemed aware there was nowhere to go in the sprawling parking garage. Abby got to work early every day. No one else in the executive offices had arrived, except maybe Jason, who gave his car to the valet instead of parking it in the garage.
The man kept walking, opening the door to the stairwell without hesitation, like that would somehow save him.
Max kept his pace even. He was in no hurry. The man could only go down from the top level of the garage, and Max would reach him before he hit one of the other levels.
He removed his gun as he approached the door, then kicked it open with the weapon drawn.
The man was stupid, firing his gun, giving away his position on the landing between the first and second levels of the garage before Max was even all the way through the doorframe.
Max was used to men hiding in stairwells, waiting to kill him. He’d become accustomed in Afghanistan to the advantages and disadvantages of stairs and closets and alcoves, had learned not to hesitate, that there was no way to make sure someone wasn’t going to kill you as you tried to advance your position.
Most of the time you held out your weapon and advanced, knowing full fucking well you might be dead in the next second.
But in Afghanistan he might have had a grenade thrown his way. He might have been met with five men instead of one. He might have been stabbed by a man hiding in a wardrobe or behind a piece of furniture.
This fucker was just a thug in a stairwell.
He turned toward the stairs, taking them two at a time as he fired his weapon, advancing on the man sliding along the wall, trying to make his way to the next flight of stairs while attempting to avoid Max’s fire.
Max shot the guy in the foot as he rushed him, if only to keep him occupied. The man’s screams echoed off metal and concrete, blood seeping from his foot onto the stark white cement.
Max knocked the gun from his hand and grabbed ahold of the leather jacket. He slammed the man against the wall of the stairwell and stuck his gun in the man’s mouth.
“We’re going to have a little chat, and if you’re real nice, I might not even blow your head off,” Max said. “Nod if you understand.”
The man nodded as best he could with the barrel of Max’s gun in his mouth.
“Good. I’m going to take this gun out of your mouth, and then you’re going to listen, nice and quiet, while I talk. No screaming or sudden moves if you want to walk out of here alive. Nod if you understand.”
He nodded again.
Max removed his gun from the man’s mouth. “Who told you to watch Abby Sterling?”
“I don’t know — ”
Max hit him with the butt of his gun. Blood dripped down the man’s forehead, stopping momentarily when it hit the dam of his brow, then continuing as it overflowed into his eyes.
“Let’s not waste time,” Max said. “Who sent you?”
“DeLuca,” the man said.
“Do you have orders to hurt her?” Max asked.
He shook his head. “I’m just supposed to watch and report back, I swear.”
“And have you reported back?”
“Once a week,” the man said.
“How long have you been tailing her?” Max asked.
“Two weeks.”
Max processed the information as the man talked, weighing it against what he already knew. Jason had hired Bruce Frazier, had surrounded himself with mercenaries who wouldn’t hesitate to kill anyone who threatened him. Max had assumed the security had been orchestrated as protection against the Syndicate — against Max — but now he wondered if Jason was guarding against a possible attack from the DeLuca family.
And if Fredo DeLuca had hired someone to tail Abby, it meant he was looking for information he could use against Jason. Either that or he didn’t trust Jason and he was keeping an eye on the players in Jason’s orbit in case they sought to betray him.
In case someone like Abby started poking around the process used to clean DeLuca’s money.
“Tell DeLuca that Abby Sterling is off the table,” Max said. “If DeLuca has a problem with it, he can come for me himself. But if I see another one of his men tailing her, that man will be dead on sight, and after I kill him, I’ll burn every member of the DeLuca family — every relative, every asset, every interest — to the ground. You got that?”
“I got it,” the man said.
Max stepped back and waved his gun at the stairs. “Get the fuck out of here.”
The man hesitated.
“Go before I change my mind and match your other foot to the one that’s already bleeding.”
He bolted for the stairs, the metal treads ringing as he raced downward. Max listened to his receding footsteps and waited for the door to close at the bottom of the stairwell to lean against the wall.
He was still seeing red, still second-guessing his decision not to kill the man for the crime of following Abby. Adrenaline surged through his bloodstream, not because he’d been scared, but because he hadn’t been.
It had all come back to him in an instant: the instinct to use his rage as a weapon, to kill.
It was something no one talked about when they came back from war. Not how hard it had been, but how easy it had become, how inured to the pain of others. The ability to hold himself separate had served him well in Afghanistan. Had allowed him to kill in service to his country.
That’s what they’d told him anyway.
But back home, it only served to separate him from others. From Abby.
Drinking and gambling and fucking had numbed him enough to keep this new knowledge of himself at bay, knowledge that he was a killer, that he was capable of horrible things.
But he wasn’t numb now. His hands were shaking, sweat breaking out on his forehead as he recalled the grip of the weapon in his hand, the power flooding his body as he’d held it in the man’s mouth, the knowledge that he could end the other man’s life with a twitch of his finger.
He’d wanted to do it. Had had to fight against himself to keep from pulling the trigger.
In the end, it had been Abby who’d stopped him. It had been thinking about her, about protecting her and about what was best for her. Because if he’d killed the man in the stairwell, DeLuca would have sent someone else, probably more than one man. The mobster would have felt the need to make a point — and might have made it with Abby.
Better to put a target on Max�
�s own back with a message.
He straightened and holstered his weapon before starting back up the stairs. He would find a way to let Abby know he’d taken care of the man without calling her out for not telling Max about him.
He felt only mild relief at the fact that he’d sent the man running with his tail between his legs. It was an escalation that couldn’t have been avoided, but an escalation nonetheless. They needed to neutralize the DeLuca family — and Jason — and they needed to do it quickly.
They were running out of time.
Sixteen
Abby kept her gaze forward as she passed Bruce Frazier at the desk at the front of the hall. She’d done her best to ignore him since she’d been back, but it wasn’t easy: the man had an eerie gaze she could feel even when her back was turned, his looming figure a shadowy presence that cast a pall over Abby’s workdays.
He made her skin crawl, and she still hadn’t gotten used to seeing him by Jason’s side. The rest of the detail was only present when Jason went out in public, but Frazier arrived with Jason in the morning and departed with him at night. Abby wouldn’t have been surprised to learn he was on duty even at Jason’s house after hours.
She smiled at Samantha, the receptionist, and stepped into the elevator. She’d been nervous the first time she’d gone snooping around the casino — the only hands-on work required by her job involved numbers — but over the past three weeks, she’d gotten used to it. The key was acting natural, in pretending she had every right to be wherever she was, asking whatever questions she was asking.
It had started with the numbers. That’s always where it started for her. Numbers made sense. Two plus two equaled four, and if it didn’t, something was amiss.
She’d spent hours going through the incoming revenue of every department, analyzing the expenditures, checking what was left against the money that was eventually transferred into the casino’s accounts.
It hadn’t taken long to see patterns — certain days of the week when more money came in than others, losses written off within a certain range that was considered normal, returns to suppliers in the restaurant, bar, and retail divisions.
It had been the returns that had finally tripped the part of her mind trained to see financial anomalies.
Damaged items and those left unsold from the casino’s gift shops were stored on the supply level underground and returned to the appropriate supplier once a month. At some point in the following two months, the casino would be credited for the return by the supplier.
It was all in keeping with standard procedure for an enterprise as large as the Tangier. In fact, it was the value of the merchandise that had at first kept her from seeing the anomaly, a value that had been consistent within a couple of percentage points since shortly after the casino opened.
But she saw it now.
She stepped out of the elevator onto the warehouse floor one level below the lobby and took a minute to get her bearings. The space was enormous, extending as far as she could see, tall metal shelves reaching almost all the way up the twenty-foot-high ceilings.
A forklift drove past her, the driver clad in an orange vest and matching hardhat. He tipped his head at her as he passed, navigating the machine down one of the wide aisles lined with supplies.
Abby fought against a surge of fear. This was way bigger than she’d expected, although she didn’t know why she’d never thought about it before. She should have known the warehouse would be huge. It took a lot of food and booze, a lot of chips and merchandise, a lot of sheets and towels, to keep a place the size of the Tangier running.
Still, there was no way she could take the warehouse aisle by aisle in search of the merchandising returns. Jason was anything but a micromanager — he’d always left her to her work, allowing her to see to her responsibilities without question — but she didn’t want to count on that continuing, especially now.
She hadn’t spotted the man who’d been following her in a few days, and while she’d almost convinced herself she’d imagined his presence, she knew that would be a mistake. The DeLucas were dangerous — and Jason maybe more so.
Her safety was far from guaranteed, even inside the Tangier.
She was about to start wandering the aisles, looking for someone to help her, when she spotted an industrial golf cart making its way toward her.
She lifted a hand in greeting and the cart came to a stop a few feet away.
The driver was a grizzled man of about sixty with a sizable paunch and a weathered face. He looked her up and down, taking in her skirt and heels with concern.
“You shouldn’t be down here without a hardhat, ma’am,” he said.
“I’m afraid I left mine at home this morning.” He didn’t smile, making it clear he found her lack of protective gear no laughing matter. “I’m from the executive office. Can you answer a couple questions for me about inventory procedures?”
He hesitated. “I think I can do that.”
“Great. I’m looking for the holding area for merchandising returns. I understand they’re moved out once a month?”
“That’s right,” he said. “Last Friday of every month.”
She saw the current calendar in her mind. Today was Tuesday the 26th.
The last Friday of the month was three days away.
“Would you be able to show me that area?” she asked.
He reached into the back of the cart and pulled out an orange hardhat. “Have to wear the hat.”
“Of course.”
She put it on and he nodded at the empty seat next to him in the cart. “Best get in.”
She slid into the seat and held on as he hit the gas. The cart zipped through the aisles like a mouse through a maze. Her escort obviously knew exactly where he was going, but Abby lost track of their movements almost immediately, each aisle blending into the next, the scenery passing by in a blur of cardboard boxes, metal shelves, and warehouse machinery that seemed to follow its own set of traffic rules.
Finally they came to a stop. A giant conveyor belt sat to one side of the aisle, another row of metal shelving on the other. The shelves were lined with boxes, each one labeled with its destination.
She stepped out of the cart. “This is where everything is held before it’s picked up for return to the suppliers?”
“That’s right,” the man said behind her, still in the cart.
She pursued the labels, recognizing the names from the audit she’d done of the accounts.
“Is it all moved out in one truck?”
“No, ma’am. Going back to different suppliers. They send their own trucks.”
She turned to look at him. “They send their own trucks?”
“Not our job to sort it all out,” he said. “Executive office schedules the pickup — that would be you — and they send the truck.”
“And once its picked up? Where does it go then?”
He shrugged. “Back to the wholesaler, I guess.”
“And do you log the merchandise when it comes into the warehouse and again when it goes out?” she asked.
He looked at her like she was dim. “How’d we know what was here otherwise?”
She checked the time on her phone. She’d already been gone too long, but it was too late to stop now. Her heart was racing as she looked up at the man, still sitting in the golf cart.
“I’d like to see inventory reports for the past year, please.”
Seventeen
Max watched as Farrell Black paced to the banister overlooking the surrounding landscape. Nico sat casually in one of the chairs next to Luca on the terrace, looking every bit at home on Max’s territory as he did everywhere else. Christophe was in Paris. Everyone had agreed the meeting was too critical to put off while they waited for him to return the States.
Max was still standing, oddly uncomfortable with the presence of the three men in his home. He watched Farrell’s back, wondering what the other man saw when he looked out across the desert landscape. He’d been unusua
lly quiet since arriving, minus the sarcastic barbs Max had come to expect.
He’d agreed to host the meeting in consideration for the need for privacy. His paranoia about Abby’s safety had reached a pinnacle in the two days since she’d discovered how Jason was returning the cleaned money to the DeLuca family. He didn’t want anyone on camera anywhere uttering her name in the context of this meeting — especially not in Vegas where casino owners had a certain loyalty to each other and where the DeLuca family reigned supreme.
Which was how he’d come to be on his terrace after dark with three of the four Syndicate leaders. They’d poured drinks in the house and moved outside just as the sun sank behind the mountains in the distance. The patio was illuminated by the soft lights that turned on automatically after dark, giving the whole affair a strangely festive air.
“We only have three options,” Farrell said, his back still turned. “We take the money before it leaves the Tangier, intercept it on the truck, or take it after it arrives at the storage facility, but before DeLuca’s men pick it up.”
They’d all been surprised to learn the money was being dropped at a storage unit outside of town, although if ever there was a town where five million dollars was sitting around in a storage facility, it would be Vegas.
“Sounds about right,” Max said. “Although I’d remove the Tangier from the list. It’s the riskiest of all the options.”
He didn’t say the rest of what he was thinking: that Abby had risked enough, that he wanted to punch something every time he thought about her snooping around the casino’s warehouse, talking to the men who worked there, leaving a footprint on the security cameras and with Jason’s employees.
Digging around in the books was one thing. The kind of recon that resulted in the knowledge they now had about DeLuca’s money was something else entirely.
He’d wanted her to quit the day she gave them the information, but she’d argued that it would only make her a more obvious target after the Syndicate stole the money.
Wages of Sin: Las Vegas Syndicate Book Two Page 9