Each of the five casinos was different, reflective of the idiosyncratic personalities of the detectives who were the principal owners.
Kevin Smith was an Old West buff. Read all of Zane Grey. Collected antique weaponry. Liked the idea of his showgirls wearing heavy petticoats, dresses of scarlet satin and billowing plume hats. His casino emphasized the elegance of that era—particularly the feminine kind. Captain Smith had hired the most beautiful women in Vegas to dance the floor shows and work the casino.
One of the other cops was an outdoorsman. Liked hunting and fishing. He decorated his casino like an elite men’s club: plush leather furniture, gigantic stone fireplaces, mounted tarpon and elk on the walls.
The other casinos were equally individualized. As a result, they seemed to attract a better and more loyal clientele.
As Hawker stepped into the hallway, he noted that there were times when even clientele of the highest class looked bad.
It was a Friday morning, but the haggard faces of the men and women in the casino said it was very late Thursday night.
In the casino, full-breasted waitresses in tight shorts and cowboy hats carried drinks on trays to the men and women hunched over the craps and blackjack tables. The casino’s piped-in music was fast and jazzy.
There were no clocks on any of the walls.
In the front hall, a couple of dozen matronly women kept the slot machines busy. Bells clanked, lights flashed and the machines whirred. The women played with a religious intensity, stopping only to light cigarettes or get more change.
Hawker wondered how many of them knew that of the two billion dollars in winnings the Vegas casinos took in annually, the largest percentage of the money came not from the glamour games—blackjack and roulette—but from slot machines.
The billion-dollar shimmer of Vegas was fired by the nickels and quarters of America’s matriarchs.
Straightening his tie, Hawker made his way down the hall to the front desk.
The desk was mahogany and brass. Behind it was a switchboard and two personal computer stations for handling reservations. Hawker jotted a note telling Kevin Smith his plans for the afternoon and asked the deskman for an envelope.
“You’ll give this to Mr. Smith?”
The deskman’s nod was as European as his accent. “Of course, Mr. Hawker. I’ll deliver it personally. Is there anything else I can do for you?”
“Captain Smith said something about a car being at my disposal.”
“Anything you wish, Mr. Hawker. Those were our instructions.” The deskman allowed himself a sophisticated pause that seemed to be the equivalent of a smile. “Cars, food, chips for the casino … women—or whatever diversion you choose.” He shrugged humorously. “Of course, I can’t provide you with a woman from the casino. Mr. Smith doesn’t approve of that sort of thing and doesn’t allow it—”
“I’ll settle for just a car right now.”
“Would you like a car with a driver? Perhaps a nice tour of the city?”
“No. Just a car. And a map.”
“Of Las Vegas?”
“Of Nevada.”
“Ah!” There was the implication of a smile again. “I think we have just the vehicle for a day of touring.” He tapped the brass bell sharply. The bellboy wore the red double-breasted jacket and round red hat of a bellboy from the old days.
The deskman held out a set of keys. “Bring number six around from the casino car pool for Mr. Hawker. Make sure it’s fueled and ready for a long drive.” He looked at Hawker. “Can we have the kitchen pack a lunch for you? Perhaps some cracked crab and a split of champagne on ice?”
“A car,” said Hawker, growing impatient. “All I want is a car.”
The deskman nodded at the bellboy. “You heard Mr. Hawker. A car right away!”
Hawker followed the bellboy outside and waited on the curb. The valets were men in their early twenties. They wore white dinner jackets. Hawker wondered how they kept from looking bored. He guessed it was because Captain Smith had ordered them not to.
Smith ran a tight ship. No doubt about that.
When the bellboy finally came with the car, Hawker did a double take.
“Are you sure that’s the car I’m supposed to use?”
The bellboy grinned. “This is the one. Number six.” He held out the keys. “Some machine, huh, Mr. Hawker? Some French count or someone like that transferred the title to Mr. Smith to settle a gambling debt.”
“A gambling debt? How much did he lose?”
“I heard about twenty grand. I guess the car would be worth more than that, huh?”
Hawker ran his hand over the fender. It was a vintage twelve-cylinder Jaguar XKE convertible. Maybe a 1961 or ’62. Midnight blue with light blue leather interior, all in absolutely mint condition.
“More,” said Hawker. “Considerably more, I would guess.”
“When Mr. Smith first took it in trade, he had a mechanic make sure it was in tip-top shape. Engine, brakes, tires, everything. Then he took it out on the flats to see what she would do. He never really said how fast he got her up to, but I saw him when he got back. His face looked kind of pale and his hands were shaking.” The bellboy laughed. “My guess was that he quit before this baby did. I’d say a hundred and sixty would be conservative. Gas was cheap back then, and they built ’em fast.”
Hawker slid in behind the walnut veneer and the bank of gauges.
The convertible canvas was down and the car smelled of fresh leather.
He shifted into first and touched the accelerator. The bank of mufflers burbled huskily as he drove out of the parking lot, around the circle that connected the five casinos and onto the main road.
It was a spring day in Nevada. High, clear sky of the palest blue. A dry wind blew across the sand flats, cooled by the distant mountains of Toiyabe Range.
The wind whipped through Hawker’s dark red-brown hair as he drove. Once he was on the open road, he had to suppress the adolescent urge to flatten the accelerator and see just how fast the Jag really would go.
Instead, he kept it at a comfortable sixty-five.
There was too much on his mind to concentrate on high-speed driving.
Kevin Smith had told him a little about the problems they had been having. There had been telephone threats. Some careful vandalism. One of his associates, Charlie Kullenburg, had been beaten almost to death. And Barbara Blaine’s boyfriend had disappeared.
Hawker had pressed for all Smith knew about Jason Stratton, the young man who, in Barbara Blaine’s opinion, had been murdered.
Stratton was an outsider. Something of a hermit. Lived in a mountain cabin on a secondary road that led to Kyle Canyon. Liked classical music, good books and intelligent talk. Stratton pieced together a livelihood by operating a backroom biological specimens wholesale business.
He collected insects, snakes, fossils and sold them to the universities.
Stratton also made a little money as a watercolor artist and as a pulp fiction writer.
It was an odd love affair: an intellectual recluse and the proprietor of a whorehouse.
Hawker doubted there was anything to gain by visiting Stratton’s cottage. The local cops had already gone over it—but not as carefully as they probably would have if there’d been a corpse involved.
Stratton had been listed as a missing person.
In Las Vegas, people turned up missing every day of the year. Usually by choice.
So Hawker doubted if the cops had given the place a thorough search. At least he hoped they hadn’t, because it was really the only thing he had to go on.
At State Route 157, he turned southwest, then left again onto a dirt road. According to Captain Smith’s directions, Jason Stratton’s cabin wasn’t far.
The mountains were ahead of him now, cool and smoky blue in the distance. He had passed no cars for some time, so he noticed immediately when the black Datsun 280Z came charging out behind him, blasting a plume of red dust.
The Datsun surge
d right up behind him, disappearing in the dust wake of Hawker’s Jag.
Hawker backed off on the accelerator, figuring it was some teenager who wanted to race. Some acne-faced kid who, like too many adult male drivers, used the gearshift as an extension of his libido.
He expected the Datsun to pass, but it didn’t. Instead, it edged right up behind and nudged the Jag’s bumper.
Hawker’s face tightened and he swore softly. He glanced at the speedometer. He had slowed to forty-five. Even at that speed, the nudge on the bumper caused him to fishtail slightly.
He slowed even more, pulling off the dirt road to the right a little to give the Datsun one more chance to pass.
Instead, it smacked him in the rear bumper again.
Hawker knew then. He knew it was no teenager out for a joyride. He knew that somehow the mob had found out about his arrival, and about his plans to search Jason Stratton’s cabin.
This was no childish encounter on a mountain road. This was an assassination attempt. A matter of life and death.
Calmly Hawker reached beneath his jacket and placed the Walther PPK in the bucket seat beside him. He glanced over his shoulder to see how many men were in the Datsun, but the dust squall thrown by the Jag made it impossible to tell.
Once again the Datsun rammed him, and Hawker had to fight to keep the British sports car on the road.
Somehow he had to get behind them. Or beside them. But first, he had to get ahead of them. Way ahead of them.
Then, if he could, he would find some way to get them out of their car and force information out of them.
Information was what he needed now. Not corpses.
The corpses would come later.
four
James Hawker downshifted into second and put the Jag into a controlled drift to make a solid dust screen across the road. Then he straightened the car on the weedy shoulder, where traction would be best, and accelerated.
Hawker was no stranger to high-performance automobiles. He owned a classic Corvette fastback, a gem he had rescued from the police auction table and had refurbished by a master mechanic friend of his, Big Nick Clements.
But even the Vet didn’t compare to this XKE for sheer power and handling ability.
When he touched the accelerator, the Jag seemed to flatten itself over the road as the tires struggled for purchase. When the treads caught, the car lunged forward at a velocity beyond Hawker’s imagination. The G-force pinned his head to the neck brace.
Holding the steering wheel at the ten and two position, he glanced at the speedometer when he was sure he had the vehicle under control.
He had gone from forty to ninety miles an hour in a matter of only a few seconds.
He checked the rearview mirror.
The 280Z was a hundred yards behind, but gaining on him.
The dirt road was narrow but relatively smooth. Hawker was grateful for that. At high speed, a single pothole could prove fatal. He concentrated on reading the road, his left foot riding lightly midway between the brake and the clutch.
Hawker was aware that the road was climbing steadily. These would be the foothills near Kyle Canyon. Off to his left, he saw a small brown cabin near a river flash past. He wondered if it was Jason Stratton’s cabin.
But he didn’t have long to think about it. Ahead, the yellow road sign told him he was about to enter a series of hairpin curves.
The bank of mufflers roared as he downshifted into third, then second. The Jag skidded and held as he accelerated his way through the S turns.
Off to his left now was the beginning of the canyon. A short piece of corrugated guardrail was all that separated the road from the sheer drop to the rocks below. Three white wooden crosses were planted near the rail; people had died here before.
Coming out of the hairpin curves, Hawker mashed the accelerator flat and held it on the long straightaway until the speedometer hit 130 miles an hour.
The road was asphalt here, and the Jag seemed to absorb the white dividing lines ahead. Trees and telephone poles streamed past in a blur. Beyond the straightaway, Hawker could see that the road ribboned its way up the mountain.
He swore softly.
Somewhere there had to be a turnoff. Some place he could lose his attackers and reappear behind them.
The Datsun was about seventy yards behind now and no longer gaining. Without the dust haze, he could see that there were at least two people in the car. Two men.
The next bank of curves appeared with less warning. But at 130 miles an hour, everything happens with less warning.
Hawker touched the brake the moment he saw the yellow sign and prepared to downshift. His concentration was broken momentarily when a rock apparently flew up, shattering the Jag’s windshield.
But then he realized it was no rock.
It was a bullet.
A man was leaning out the window of the 280Z. A man with a rifle.
Hawker knew it would take a phenomenally lucky shot to hit him at that distance from a moving car.
Even so, it didn’t make driving any easier.
Now more than ever he had to put distance between the two cars and find a turnoff, a place he could lose them.
But first, he had to make it off this road alive.
Hawker hit the curves faster than he wanted to. He downshifted, braked—and was fully prepared for the Jag to flip and begin the long and deadly slow-motion tumble down the mountain.
But the Jag handled as if bolted to rails. The tires screamed briefly as he drifted through the first curve, then held fast as he accelerated into the next swing to the left.
Another right bank, then a swing left, another curve to the right, and he was working the Jaguar through the gears again, powering hard down the straightaway.
There was no warning for what happened next. Highway departments do not post warning signs for hills. Only yellow no-passing lines.
As Hawker came to the top of the hill, he found himself slowing slightly through sheer habit. Only fools top a hill without slowing, for there is no telling what is on the other side—a car stalled, some idiot passing. Hawker had been a cop too long and seen too many lives wasted through sheer carelessness and childish bravado not to have good driving habits.
And it was the little bit he slowed that saved him.
As he topped the hill, he immediately saw the man with the flag. An old man in coveralls waving a red towel on a stick.
The old man was driving a herd of sheep from one pasture to the next, his black-haired collie nipping at the heels of the animals; a flock of a couple of hundred.
At the bottom of the hill was a curve. A guardrail cupped the asphalt from the rocky gorge below. To the right was a low rock ledge, on top of which was a pasture fenced by wire paling. The sheep covered both lanes of the road, with the old man trailing behind.
Hawker hit the brakes immediately, but with controlled pressure so the wheels did not lock. The old man was waving his arms over his head frantically. The collie paid no heed, tending to the business of guiding the sheep.
It was the dog that gave Hawker his opening. It cut outside the herd, and the sheep flushed toward the right lane. It was a small opening, but Hawker had no choice. The old man was directly in his path now.
He downshifted, hit the accelerator and the Jag jumped through the narrow opening between the dog and the guardrail, throwing gravel.
The opening widened momentarily after he passed, then closed again.
Hawker was on a straightaway now, and he watched through the rearview mirror to see how the driver of the 280Z handled the roadblock.
The Datsun topped the hill at such tremendous speed that all four wheels temporarily left the asphalt. When the car touched down again, the driver appeared to brake briefly and downshift—but too late.
The 280Z hit the herd of sheep going about forty. Hawker saw the old man sag slightly as the collie was knocked high in the air, somersaulting like a rag animal. The car skidded left, then right, leaving a wake of s
creaming, kicking sheep behind.
The driver of the car brought the 280Z under control again, accelerating toward Hawker. Then Hawker was into the next curve and he could see no more.
It had been a sickening thing to witness, and Hawker sped on grimly.
Ahead was another straightaway climbing toward another hill. He was well into the mountains now, more than two miles above sea level. Below were the moonscape crags of the canyon.
Hawker held the accelerator to the floor, and the speedometer touched 155 before he backed off for the hill. He was about a quarter-mile ahead of the Datsun now. It was all the room he needed to make a move.
At the top of the hill, he slowed to sixty. An eighth of a mile down the hill, he hit the brakes and stopped the Jag in a controlled skid. To the right was a dirt lane that climbed back into the mountains. It was a blind intersection, shielded by a high rock ledge.
It was just what Hawker was looking for.
He punched the Jaguar into reverse and backed into the lane far enough so that he was hidden from anyone passing on the main road. It was his plan to come out behind the Datsun, force it off the road, then beat some information out of the two goons inside.
But then he had another idea.
Hawker edged the car back onto the main road, blocking both lanes. In front of him was a guardrail and a sheer five-hundred-foot drop onto the rocks below. Behind him was the dirt trail.
Hawker shifted the Jag into reverse and waited.
The driver of the 280Z hadn’t learned anything from his disaster with the sheep. He flew over the hill at full speed. Hawker wondered what was going through the driver’s mind as he saw the Jag blocking his path less than two hundred yards away.
The Datsun skidded wildly, fishtailing down the hill. Hawker waited until the last possible moment before gunning the Jag backward, out of harm’s way.
It was too late to help the men in the 280Z.
The driver of the Datsun made the wisest possible choice. Rather than broadside the Jag or go over the cliff, he slowed his car by careening along the stone ledge on the inside edge of the road.
There was the nauseating scream of wrenching metal. A rocky outcrop caught the right bumper, spinning the car in a violent 360-degree turn. Then the Datsun flipped side over side, tumbling three times before finally coming to rest on its wheels just past the dirt lane.
Vegas Vengeance Page 2