by Joseph Flynn
“A truck big enough to hold eight motorcycles,” John said. “Don’t let the news get out that we’re not looking for Native Americans. We don’t want to give that away.”
“Right. I’ll just tell the troops to look for the truck.”
“That’s enough for now. We find either the truck driver or the one robber whose face we know, we’ll get the others.”
— Chapter 24 —
J.W. Marriott Resort & Spa, Las Vegas, Nevada
Captain Grunwald detailed a patrol car to take John to the Desert Mountain National Bank. They were en route when a radio call reached the officer behind the wheel. The lieutenant in charge of the crime scene had chosen to release the customers and bank staff; they’d all gone home. The lieutenant insisted he’d done what was best for the investigation.
“Half the people were crying, the other half were screaming. They all wanted out. Nobody was in a mood to talk to the feds. Give ‘em a little time, they’ll all play nice,” the lieutenant said.
John didn’t offer any criticism.
If things didn’t work out well, though, he thought that particular cop’s head would wind up on a platter. The vice president herself might see to that. Or maybe Marlene Flower Moon might come up with some other ghastly fate for him.
The patrol cop saved John the trouble of asking the obvious question. “You got everybody’s names, addresses and phone numbers, right, Lieutenant?
“Jesus Christ, of course, I did. Verified by drivers licenses.” Knowing John was in the patrol car, the lieutenant asked, “Your passenger got anything to say?”
John shook his head.
“Negative, sir.”
There was a moment of silence, as if the lieutenant regretted not being able to use an argument he’d devised to defend himself against the visiting big shot. “Okay, then. All the bank people will be here tomorrow, if he wants to talk with them. Metro will round up the customers for him, at his request.”
And that was that. The first step in John’s investigation had bit the desert dust.
He asked his driver, “You have a local hotel you can recommend?”
The cop nodded. “I’ll set you up somewhere nice. Make up for the aggravation.”
He took John to the J.W. Marriott Resort & Spa, got him a room with a mountain view, all for a price that worked with his per diem. The cop explained, “Places here discount the rooms because they make their money in the casinos.”
John had never wagered on anything except his own athletic abilities.
Hadn’t even done that for a while.
He told the cop, “That business model works for me.”
John was unpacking his suitcase when his cell phone rang. Marcellus Darcy was calling from New Orleans. “We’ve got three mugs we like, Edmee and me, for the robbers’ scout. All the shots were taken by the bank’s security cameras.”
Edmee, John thought. The beginning of a beautiful friendship?
“Any of them connected to trucking?” he asked.
Marcellus chuckled. “Our favorite is an independent operator with his own rig.”
“Promising. You have a picture of the truck?”
“Edmee found one. I’ll send it with the mug shots.”
“Great.” John thought he’d forward the pictures to Captain Grunwald and Deputy Director DeWitt.
“I’ll email them to you right now,” Marcellus said.
John said, “One more thing. You and Edmee up for a little more digging?”
“Sure.”
“This trucker, see if he has any education in computer programming.” John thought it would be a point of efficiency for the gang’s ninth Indian to have more than one skill set. He might be reaching, but what the heck?
Marcellus also thought it was a stretch. “A trucker who knows computers?”
“Maybe plans bank robberies, too,” John reminded him.
John’s view of the mountains was enhanced when he went out to take a seat on the room’s balcony. He stared into the distance trying to find the clue that had eluded him: Why did that one robber’s sign language seem familiar. It wasn’t American Sign Language; he’d checked that out on the flight from Washington.
Another thought occurred to him.
He took Ellie Booker’s card out of a pocket and called her.
She answered by asking, “You have something for me, Special Agent?”
“Yes, a question. You interested in doing some legwork for me? The payoff might not be immediate but there could be a big credit in the future.”
“You’re asking me to work on spec?”
“Only if you want to; only if you think I’m being straight with you.”
After a moment of silence, Ellie asked, “The credit would be with you?”
“Me at a minimum. Possibly someone high up in the FBI.”
A longer pause followed. It ended with Ellie asking, “What do you want?”
“Over a period of say the past twelve months, can you find out if a Chinese national lost a large sum of money at a Las Vegas casino?”
Hearing from the Metro cop how the hotels subsidized their room rates made him remember stories he’d read about big-time gamblers getting all sorts of freebies because they dropped so much money. That tied in with DeWitt’s strong suspicion that China could be the country that might be behind the cyberattacks. Unlike John, the Chinese had a reputation for loving to gamble.
Ellie confirmed that. “With the money the Chinese have these days and the way they like to hit casinos, there could be more than one.”
“Okay, give me the top three and the amounts they lost, if you can find that.”
“Anything else?”
A second consideration came to John’s mind. “Yes, see if any of these guys who lost a fortune, if they exist, has an Ivy League connection.”
“You know you’re making me crazy, right?” Ellie said. “Wondering how all this ties in to the bank robberies.”
On a bit of roll for the moment, John decided to take a risk.
“You have access to all sorts of entertainment databases, don’t you?”
“Yeah. Movies, TV, theatre, even commercials.”
“Great.”
John thought the African-American robber’s face might have been deleted from the NCIC, but what if his likeness had found its way into another digital archive?
“You going to tell me why you want to know that?” Ellie asked.
“I’m going to send you a copy of a picture. I’d like to see if you can find out the man’s name. Check newspaper files, too, if you can.”
“All this does tie in somehow, doesn’t it? With the robberies, I mean.”
John said, “We’re back to the area where I can’t comment. You decide if it’s worth your time.”
Tulane University, New Orleans, Louisiana
Louis Mercer, sitting in his tiny TA’s office, was supposed to be busy preparing for the media classes he would teach that fall term. He also had his doctoral dissertation to think about. Think about? Hell, he had to start writing the damn thing … though, given his area of study, he thought it might be cool to do a short film instead.
But what really lit up his prefrontal cortex just then was thinking about the return to campus of one of his students from last year, Dana Bang, a Danish-American beauty from Tangletown, Minnesota. She would be both a senior this year and twenty-one years old. Louis was very careful about dating women in the student body. Seventeen was the legal age of consent in Louisiana, though you could get married at sixteen with parental approval, but Louis saw teenage girls as nothing but trouble for a man planning a career in academia.
A twenty-one-year-old woman, however, was fair game.
Not that he’d ever speak of a woman as someone to be hunted.
Still, he felt sure some other guy would snap her up if he didn’t move fast.
At the moment, however, he was unable to either plan his seduction or meet his scholarly obligations because his literary agent w
as talking to him on his cell phone.
“I didn’t have the time to do exactly what you wanted; I’ve got to make a living.”
“Yeah, David, we all do. Nothing special about that.”
“Paying the rent on Midtown office space and the mortgage on a Manhattan apartment is very special, Louis. You hustle all the time or you disappear without a trace.”
“You ever think of moving somewhere else?”
“Louis, there isn’t anywhere else.”
“I thought half of New York had moved to L.A.”
“Yeah, the half that couldn’t cut it here. You want to hear what I have for you or not? We can call it quits, if you’re not satisfied.”
Considering that Louis had conned the agent into conducting a search for him in the first place, he felt it would be smart to play along.
“Okay, David, what do you have for me?”
“Every nonfiction publishing proposal that has been submitted to a Big Five publisher for the last three months.”
“Wow! Wait a minute. If the bank robbers sent in the idea for their book that far in advance, wouldn’t that be giving themselves away?”
“Only if they gave an exact time and location. Otherwise, banks are always thinking they might get robbed anyway, aren’t they?”
“Yeah, I suppose.”
“There’s another thing.”
“What’s that?”
“You know how many of these proposals were never read?”
“No.”
“Well, neither do I, but you can be damn sure it was most of them.”
“How many are there?” Louis asked.
“Eight hundred and ninety-two.”
“Jesus.”
“Yeah, be glad everything’s electronic or you’d have to pay me a ton for the postage. Let me know if you find what you need to complete a front list title.”
Front list meaning a best seller. Or don’t bother calling back.
That point was made clear when David ended the call without saying goodbye.
It took Louis almost ten minutes to download David’s email attachments.
Christ, eight hundred and ninety-two proposals. No wonder publishers called their unsolicited submissions a slush pile. He didn’t have the time to wade through all that shit. Classes were about to start. Dana would arrive tomorrow. So what could he do?
He found the card John Tall Wolf had given him.
Forwarded David’s email to the special agent.
Let Tall Wolf be the one to get eye strain.
It was his damn idea.
— Chapter 25 —
Mirage Hotel, Las Vegas, Nevada, Saturday, August, 24th
Captain Eric Grunwald of the Metro Police apologized to John at 8:00 a.m. that morning when the federal agent arrived at the hotel in his rental car. “Lieutenant Hoskins, who let everybody go home from Desert Mountain National Bank yesterday, was informed that he’d made a serious mistake.”
“Did you hear from Washington?” John asked.
Grunwald nodded. “Never had a woman talk to me like that before.”
“The vice president?”
“Uh-huh.”
“I heard she played ice hockey in college,” John said.
“Must’ve been the enforcer.”
“Just so you know, it wasn’t me who complained.”
The Metro cop gave John a long look. The special agent momentarily lowered his sunglasses so Grunwald could see his eyes. “Okay, if it wasn’t you, then who?”
Ellie Booker came to John’s mind.
He had seen her on TV interviewing Marlene Flower Moon. He had no doubt Ellie had also cultivated more than one source of information inside the local police department. Thing was, he didn’t see what she’d gain from ratting out Hoskins. And he pegged Ellie as someone who always acted to gain personal advantage.
He told Grunwald, “I don’t know, but I’ll try to find out.”
Not that he was sure he’d succeed. If Coyote was involved, it might not be possible.
Grunwald led him into the hotel and then a small conference room.
A quick head-count told John there were thirty-four people there, not counting two people from the hotel setting up a coffee urn and platters of pastries.
Grunwald told John, “This is everybody who was in the bank during the robbery, staff and customers. Thought we’d try to save you some time that way.”
Rather than speak to each person individually, John had the witnesses sit in two semi-circular rows with the chairs staggered so he could see everyone and they could see him.
“Everyone comfortable? Good. I’ll ask a question and any of you may respond if you have something to say, but please wait until I call on you so we’re not talking over each other and have to repeat things. The first thing I’d like to know is how you would describe the robbers in terms of their physical appearance.”
Every hand went up.
John pointed to the woman nearest him, matronly but upscale.
“Indians,” she said.
John said, “Real Native Americans or masquerade Indians? A show of hands for real.”
The matron kept her hand up and was joined by two more people. Several of those who thought otherwise rolled their eyes. After everyone else dropped their hands, a woman in the second row held hers up.
“Yes?” John said.
“I’m a makeup artist. I worked revues in this town for fifteen years. These guys all wore makeup and it wasn’t well done. It was too thick. The warpaint markings looked like something from a kid’s storybook. You, you’re Native American. They didn’t come close to your skin tones.”
“Thank you.”
A man raised his hand.
“Yes?”
“I don’t know anything about makeup, but I thought these guys were just about perfect in everything else they did. The one that clocked that poor guard who went for his gun? He moved quicker and smoother than some of the stiffs I’ve seen in boxing rings here.”
John asked, “Everyone agree with that?”
Heads bobbed in both rows without any dissent.
“Did any of the robbers speak to anyone?”
This time every head shook.
Another man raised his hand and John recognized him.
“They had written signs for us and little hand motions for each other.”
Just like New Orleans, John thought.
He felt a spark of intuition. “Did these hand motions the robbers used look anything like the ones soldiers use in combat situations where they need to communicate silently?”
Only four of the witnesses had been in the military; none had seen combat.
They were unable to answer John’s question.
One man, speaking without being recognized, said, “I can tell you what they looked like to me: a well-oiled team.”
That might make them military, John thought.
Then, in a darker turn of mind, he considered that they might even be cops.
A renegade SWAT team, say. Wouldn’t that be a kick in the pants?
John wondered if he’d get anything new or useful. He could see that his audience, polite to a fault thus far, was getting restive.
A woman at the far end of the front row raised her hand.
“Yes?” John said.
“I work in entertainment, too. I’m a choreographer. I like to watch how everyone moves, not just dancers. After I went home yesterday, I drew sketches of how the robbers moved. They were fluid. Not like dancers, though. More like athletes.”
John had heard that before, too.
Then the woman said, “I also noticed the one robber signaling the others. It reminded me of jazz hands, only his palms were facing him not his men. I sketched his hands, too, if you’d like to see them.”
Couldn’t hurt, John decided. “Yes, please, I’d like copies of all your drawings.”
Grunwald said he’d see to it John got the sketches.
John thanked everyone for their help.
As the last of the witnesses departed, John shook hands with Grunwald.
They were about to leave when Deputy Director DeWitt entered the room.
The Strip, Las Vegas, Nevada
Despite the growing heat of the day, John and DeWitt decided to go for a walk along Las Vegas Boulevard South past the ranks of hotels and casinos. DeWitt’s car with two FBI agents inside idled along in the curb lane fifty feet back. There was no one else on the sidewalk.
DeWitt looked around, as if to be sure no one was pointing a directional mike their way.
Before getting down to business, he said, “Never saw the appeal of this place. Every game the casinos run, except for Twenty-One, is stacked in the house’s favor. And they don’t let you count cards in Twenty-One. Always thought that was a mistake. Letting a few sharp cookies win would encourage a lot of chumps to think they could do the same. They couldn’t, of course, and the house would —”
John heard a small voice buzz in DeWitt’s earbud.
“Okay, we’re good,” he told John. “No one’s trying to eavesdrop.”
“From a parked vehicle or a hotel room?” John asked.
“Yeah.”
“Things have gotten to the point where the bad guys might be doing counterintelligence?”
“Word has come down: Don’t make any mistakes. That suggests an abundance of caution is in order.”
“That’s why you came to see me?” John asked.
“That and to tell you the spooks say there’s no doubt the Chinese are behind the robberies and the infrastructure attacks.”
“Are you supposed to share that with me?” John asked.
“I was told to share it. You seem to have won the vice president’s favor.”
John felt a chill run down his spine, and not because the vice president was a looker. He’d made keeping a low profile the signature of his career at the BIA. He left the politics to Marlene Flower Moon. Now, if he was on the vice president’s radar, he had the uneasy feeling he wouldn’t like what might come next.