“Anything wrong?” Carmelita said, watching the skinny Tyrone walk quickly to the couch and grab the phone off the seat cushion.
He ignored her, then snapped at the caller: “You better be calling to say it’s done.”
Carmelita could hear the male voice of the caller but could not make out what he was saying, only picking up on his tone. He sounded, she thought, excited in a nervous way—maybe even scared.
“Look, man,” Tyrone said angrily, his eyes darting at Carmelita then away, “we’ve been over this. You gotta just do it. You hearing me? ’Cause if you don’t, you know what happens.”
There was no reply for a moment, then Carmelita heard the caller mumble, “All right.”
“Don’t say it—do it! Let me know when it’s done. No surprises.”
Hooks ended the call, and was about to toss the phone back on the cushion when it made a Ping-Ping! sound.
He looked at the screen and read the text message: “Yo, King. Bags in AC safe. All good here. TV news keeps showing smash & grab. That dude really dead???”
Tyrone turned his back to Carmelita, then thumbed a reply: “News says 1 dead 1 shot. Stay there. No casinos!! Lay low til I say.”
He nodded as he glanced at the crushed velvet pouch and thought: Lucky they got to the Shore quick. Five-Oh really got to be looking hard for them, especially since he killed that guy. Damn good news that loot’s locked up.
Right after he hit SEND, the phone made another Ping-Ping!
“Damn,” he said in a hiss, then flipped the switch to silence the phone.
He suddenly felt the warmth of Carmelita’s skin against his back, then her arms wrapping around him, her gentle fingers finding his curly black chest hairs. She rested her chin on his shoulder. He could feel her moist breath on his ear.
“You ever shoot anyone, King?” she said.
Hooks jerked his head.
“Why the hell you say that?”
“You rap about it,” she said, her tone playful but serious. “You got the nine. Just wonder sometimes if you’ve done it.”
She buried her face in his neck as her right hand slipped down to his belly and then to his groin.
Hooks inhaled deeply.
“Well, baby, I rap about some super-hot sex, too, so what do you think?”
He exhaled as he glanced at the phone screen and saw that the text massage read “Call me QUICK!”
“What’s that text about?” Carmelita said.
“You oughta not ask so many questions,” Hooks said sharply, turning from the phone toward her.
She stuck out her lower lip in a pout—just as her hand grasped him in a way that left no question she wasn’t really pouting.
After a very brief moment he grinned, tossed the phone back beside the pistol on the couch, and said, “But that one’s about nothing that ain’t gonna wait!”
He then roughly pulled a giggling Carmelita back across the room to the bed.
—
A half hour later, Hooks hit a speed-dial key on his cellular phone as he watched Carmelita, sitting up in bed beside him, take a fat pinch of crushed marijuana from a clear plastic zip-top bag and refill the bowl of the glass pipe that had been on the desk.
“Don’t forget I need you to call your brother after that bowl’s burned,” Tyrone told her. “I got a job for him.”
“What you want with Ruben?” she said, picking up a matchbook from the bedsheet.
“Baby girl, what’d I tell you about asking so many questions?” Tyrone said, then barked into the phone, “Yo!”
“You call that calling me quick?” DiAndre Pringle answered.
“I had something I had to do first.”
Carmelita giggled.
“Whatever, Ty,” Pringle said.
Hooks guessed that Pringle had overheard Carmelita, and grinned at her.
“Listen,” Pringle went on, “I wanted you to call quick ’cause I’d just got an idea for you.”
“This about me performing at that Turkey Day gig?”
“No.”
“What? I’m still doing the gig, right?”
“Yeah, Ty. But you want to work another gig?”
Hooks looked at Carmelita, grinned, then said, “Depends. I don’t know. Might be busy. When?”
“This afternoon.”
“Today? You messing with me?”
“No. You heard that the Rev is putting on a rally, right?”
“Rally? About what?”
“About all the killing that’s going on. About stopping Killadelphia.”
Hooks felt the hair on his neck stand up.
He can’t mean what happened this morning.
How’d he know about my boys?
Unless somebody else went and talked . . .
“Going to be lots of people at the ministry here, Ty. And I figured you’d be really good at really amping up the crowd.”
Yeah, he does mean my raps.
“How much?” Hooks said.
“How many people?”
“No. How much I get paid?”
“Are you serious? Ain’t nobody getting paid. I mean, c’mon, it’s for our people!”
Hooks was quiet a moment.
Guess I’m about to get me a good grip for that loot—plenty of benjamins for a while.
And it’d look good if I played that rally.
Might even be news covering it. Get me on TV.
“TV news coming?” he said.
“Yeah. I left messages with ’em all. That Philly News Now and Channel 10 called back and said they were sending reporters. Sure there’ll be more.”
Hooks’s eyebrows went up.
“Yeah, man,” he said, nodding, “I could seriously amp that crowd up.”
“Don’t need you to do a whole set or nothing. Just rap one or two songs. Rev Cross doesn’t like folks taking over his stage.”
Carmelita lit a match, then put the flame to the pot in the pipe bowl. She took a deep puff on the glass pipe and held it in, before holding out the pipe to Hooks.
“So,” Pringle said, “whatcha say, King?”
Tyrone Hooks looked at his gold Rolex watch.
“I say what time you want me there?” he said, winked at Carmelita, then took a puff on the pipe.
[ FOUR ]
Lucky Stars Casino & Entertainment
North Beach Street, Philadelphia
Saturday, December 15, 3:45 P.M.
“The way this ghetto punk strutted out of here, he must’ve really thought that he’d conned everyone, that we were just gonna swallow this little charade of his,” Security Director Sean Francis O’Sullivan said, as he gestured toward the wall of flat-panel monitors showing live video feeds of activity throughout the casino property. One monitor had a sharp freeze-framed close-up image of a smirking Tyrone Hooks as he sat on a Winner’s Lounge barstool.
O’Sullivan looked at Homicide Detective Anthony Harris, and went on: “He expects us to believe that, after being in the jewelry store, he just happened to be having a beer while the robbery was taking place downstairs? Innocently playing a couple hands of five-card stud on the video game at the bar? And then that he just happened to leave the scene after it’s all gone down?”
“That really is pretty ballsy bullshit, Sully,” Harris said, looking from the close-up image and meeting O’Sullivan’s eyes. “Almost like he’s taunting whoever’s watching.”
“I’d say more bullshit than ballsy, Tony. I really don’t think he’s that smart, or that he realizes what deep shit he’s in. Because what I do know is that Mr. Antonov is more than a little pissed. He’s been in and out of here constantly all day, watching the videos, getting information updates, and saying to make sure that we—meaning me personally—give you everything you need.”
Har
ris and O’Sullivan were in the large security office on the top floor of the casino complex, which was down the hall from the office of the casino’s general manager, Nikoli Antonov.
Harris thought the forty-by-forty-foot space—with a small staff busy at a dozen workstations and watching the wall of flat-panel monitors—looked somewhat like the ECC war room at the Roundhouse. O’Sullivan had told him that, while not nearly as impenetrable as the casino’s vault room, which had been built inside a fortress of reinforced concrete walls one floor below ground level, it was highly secure.
O’Sullivan was forty-three years old, tall and fair-skinned, with a smoothly shaven face and scalp and a bushy mustache and goatee and eyebrows that in recent years had faded from carrot-red and added flecks of gray. He wore a nicely cut dark woolen two-piece suit that had been tailored to accommodate the Sig Sauer .40 caliber semiautomatic that Harris knew he carried in a black leather holster on his right hip.
O’Sullivan had put in just over twenty-two years at the Philadelphia Police Department, leaving as a lieutenant in the Citywide Vice Unit, which fell under Specialized Investigations along with Narcotics, Special Victims, Homicide, and other units.
For someone who had served in such an intense unit of the department—while most officers worked within one of the department’s twenty-five districts, performing the necessary street-walking grunt work, Vice worked big complicated cases throughout the city—O’Sullivan required a challenge after retirement.
He had found that challenge at the casino, he said, “protecting the facility from a constant string of knuckleheads who misinterpret its ‘More Money! More Winners!’ slogan as an open invitation to rip off the place.”
O’Sullivan had replayed for Harris that morning’s security camera videos of the flash mob raging through the casino, of the four males in black hoodies and bandannas obscuring their faces while robbing the jewelry store, and finally of Tyrone Hooks. The videos had been made using scores of camera angles to create seamless detailed time lines of each subject’s every step at the casino.
The compilation of Hooks began with the cameras first picking him up strutting across the parking lot and entering the revolving doors, then, approximately an hour later, showed him exiting doors to the parking garage at the opposite end of the complex and hailing a taxicab.
“Hooks,” O’Sullivan said, “bragged to the bartender that he was some hot-shit hip-hopper going by the name King Two-One-Five, and tried to make himself sound like he was something of a regular big-time gambler. When he flashed that gold Rolex President, the bartender felt obligated to ask about it, and Hooks was quick to pull the wrinkled bill of sale from his pocket to authenticate it was in fact his and that he had paid for it with his winnings . . . and probably flashing how much he had paid for it.
“Clearly he thought,” O’Sullivan went on, “that everything he’d done would give him a pretty solid alibi. We know that he knows the casino cameras capture everything, because we have record of him taking our beginner’s intro tour, and that’s one major point we make to all the newbies. We show them the cameras.”
He gestured at the monitors. Tony’s eyes went to them.
“We’re not actually watching every table in live time,” O’Sullivan went on, “but the cameras certainly are, and when someone starts really winning a shitload of money, we say, ‘Whoa,’ and go to check the forensic recordings.”
“How often does that happen?”
“Every damn week. This week we caught this guy—a really bright numbers guy who just graduated from Wharton—counting cards at the blackjack tables. He denied he was doing it. So we showed him the video, then escorted him from the building. We were nice about it. Didn’t kick him in the ass on the way out. But a lifetime ban, he got. And we shared his name with other casinos. Now he’ll have to figure out some other way to come up with the funds to pay off that massive MBA student loan he probably has.”
“Lifetime ban? That’s pretty harsh, isn’t it? It’s not like he was cheating, he’s playing smart.”
“We’re not in this business to go broke, Tony. Look, we make the rules, and one of those is that the odds are in the casino’s favor. And we tell people exactly that, especially during that beginner’s intro tour—right before we then tell them, ‘You don’t like it, then start your own damn casino.’”
Harris caught himself chuckling.
“Valid point,” he said.
“This ain’t a charity nonprofit. We keep track of everything. Which is why this ghetto punk may or may not be aware that we know his real history, how much he’s won and lost, what he paid for that Rolex, everything.”
“Because he has one of those customer loyalty cards that he put that two hundred bucks on?”
“That’s exactly right. The Lucky Stars More Money! Rewards Program,” O’Sullivan said. “For taking the intro tour, he got a debit card with twenty bucks preloaded on it. It’s a loss leader—”
“C’mon, that’s not really a loss,” Harris interrupted. “You’re going to get that twenty—and lots more—back because, as you like to say, the odds are in the casino’s favor.”
“It’s not like we make it a secret,” O’Sullivan said. “And not everyone who gambles has to join the program and get the card that comes with it. But the ones who like thinking they’re getting something for nothing—it’s a point for every dollar bet or spent, and the points can be used for booze, rooms, cash back—they’re all in. There’re even people who don’t gamble but want to use just the debit card function and earn points that they can cash in. Almost all gamble, though, either in one of our thirty-two casinos worldwide or on our Internet site. More than fifty million users, and growing.”
“And those are prepaid cards, too, right? Meaning the casino gets to sit on all that cash interest-free.”
O’Sullivan smiled. “You’re right. But that’s another point we make on the beginner’s intro tour and in the fine print of the user agreement everyone signs to get the card. Remember, ‘You don’t like it . . .’”
Harris chuckled again. “Right.”
“So, anyway, we checked out this punk’s account.” O’Sullivan looked at his notes. “We know he lost a hundred bucks at the video poker game while he drank a five-dollar Philly Pale Ale.”
Harris grunted. “A hipster craft brew? I would’ve guessed he was more a Pabst Blue Ribbon in the can drinker.”
“He probably was, but I bet it was the card. If I researched further back, I could find out from day one all he’s ordered—booze, food—and which games he’s played, how much he wagers, even which shows, if any, he’s seen.”
“Remarkable.”
“All that data gives our marketing people details that they can use to target customers’ likes—then offer them more of that, or even carefully get them to move up to a more expensive level. So he could’ve started out drinking two-buck PBRs, but at some point the system made him an offer that moved him into the five-buck craft microbrews. I’ve heard the value of that program—just the user information, the spending habits of those fifty million, not counting the money in the accounts—has been pegged at more than a billion dollars.”
Harris shook his head.
“No offense,” he said, “but I’m suddenly reminded why I hate these places. People pissing away money they can’t afford to. Then pissing away even more trying to win it back.”
“To each his own. Nobody has a gun to their head, making them do it.” He paused, gestured toward what would be the office at the end of the hallway, then went on: “Which is why Mr. Antonov is not pleased.”
“A robbery and a murder in your casino isn’t exactly good for business, huh? Not to mention the two hundred grand in jewelry they stole. I wouldn’t want to be the one reporting it to Tikhonov.”
“No shit, Tony. That’s the understatement of the day. And you’re getting ahead of me.”
Harris knew that Nikoli Antonov worked for Yuri Tikhonov, the forty-eight-year-old international investor who had made his first billion dollars more than a dozen years earlier. In addition to owning almost half of Lucky Stars and a large interest in an entertainment complex being built on just the other side of the I-95 Delaware Expressway, Tikhonov had significant investments around the world.
It was said that Tikhonov’s remarkable rapid rise as a successful businessman was in large part due to his having served in Russia’s Sluzhba Vneshney Razvedki, the latest incarnation of the external spying and intelligence-gathering agency formerly known as the KGB. Being closely associated with high-ranking politicians in the Kremlin—powerful ones whom he had worked with in the SVR—did not hurt.
Nikoli Antonov was thirty-seven years old. Born in Russia, he was fluent in his mother tongue, but had no obvious accent due to his early years attending a Helsinki boarding school. He looked Western European, and dressed expensively, favoring custom-tailored dark two-piece suits with a crisp white dress shirt, no tie.
O’Sullivan had told Harris, “Mr. Antonov embodies Teddy Roosevelt’s ‘Speak softly and carry a big a stick.’ He can be quietly ruthless.” And that Antonov had been sent to Philadelphia by Tikhonov to get Lucky Stars up and running, and then was set to do the same in Macao, where Tikhonov was opening a new casino.
“Mr. Antonov,” O’Sullivan went on, “wants to have an acceptable explanation of what happened—and what’s been done about it—when Mr. Tikhonov is made aware of the situation.”
“He doesn’t know?”
O’Sullivan shrugged. “I don’t think so. At least not yet. Mr. Antonov is very selective about what he tells me. He’s good about just letting me do my job on the straight and narrow. And that’s why I wanted to let you in on something—and why I just said you were getting ahead of me.”
Harris raised his eyebrows, wrinkling his forehead.
“You’ve got my undivided attention.”
“As I said, Tony, Mr. Antonov prefers to deliver good news to his boss, such as how a problem was addressed and was no longer a problem.” He glanced up at the image of Hooks smirking at the Winner’s Lounge, then looked at Harris. “I know you have plenty of open cases you’re working. Homicide clearance rate is still about—what?—maybe forty percent?”
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