by Jeff Abbott
They pulled into the airport parking lot. Holly glanced around. The only place more observed than a casino under the constant glare of security cameras is an airport. You can’t kill them here, she thought. It’s too public. Wait until it’s just you and Janice. Then Belias. Then you’re safe.
Holly said, “So this Felix guy, what is his story? He knows about us? That means Sam knew about us before…” Before Diana came into his bar asking for help. But that didn’t seem to make sense. There was more to the story.
“Let’s not speculate, Holly,” Belias interrupted. He wrote down an address. “You’ll find what you need in Chicago here. Guns, cash. Leave your weapons you’ve got here with me, we don’t want attention from the TSA today. Here’s the name and address of the man. I’ll tell you where to meet him.” Wade Rawlings, the note read.
“And when this man Rawlings is dead, what then?” Janice asked.
“Then come home,” he said. “And enjoy the time with your families. Janice, given your medical situation, perhaps it would be best if first I met your daughter with you. We could do a meeting as soon as you are home. You can…introduce her to me. And me to her and help her understand why she should be part of what we do.”
Holly watched Janice’s reaction, which would have done a poker player proud. “All right.”
He’ll kill her, Holly thought. He’s used Janice up. Diana will be gone and she’ll know he had something to do with it. Janice Keene is not going to die from cancer after all, she thought, and a hysterical bubble of laughter nearly erupted from her chest.
And now that you know the truth about his most powerful puppet, he’ll kill you, too. She had wondered how far he would dare go in his recruitment of those who wanted his special brand of help. He would have a person he owned a heartbeat away from the presidency. Would he dare an assassination? Yes. He would. He had nothing to lose and everything to gain. He wouldn’t use a network member to kill the president—would he?—but he would be sure his pawn made it into the Oval Office.
The thought frightened her. Where would he stop? What if Belias thought a war would profit him?
She felt dizzy.
But…there would have to be some way for him to communicate with his pawn, and how? Everything the president and the vice president did was archived, every e-mail, every phone call…There was so little actual privacy in the office. How would he work it? She was sure he would have figured it out. The thought, unbidden, as to how he would make this work, tickled at the back of her mind.
“Do you need a doctor?” Belias asked Janice.
“Between the beatings and the cancer? No,” she said. “Let’s just get this over with.” She sounded resigned.
Belias gave Janice a replacement ID for the third leg of her trip. Belias booked them their Chicago flight, seating them in first class, and arranged for the jet that had brought him to Vegas to take him to Washington.
“I’m going to go wash my face,” Janice said. “Freshen up a bit.” She went toward the ladies’ room.
Belias watched her. “You don’t tell her a single word about her daughter. Not a word.”
“I wouldn’t dream of it,” Holly said.
Belias drew Holly close to him and she was so surprised her mouth fell open. His lips came very close to hers. “I know you think you want out, Holly. But think what I can do for you now. Think of the life I can give you. Everything. You could be a very special help to me—a special job only you could do.”
She thought of the smell of drying paint, the bed where the one man she’d loved died. Haven’t you done enough to me? she thought. She’d shoved away the realization that he was attracted to her. It wasn’t something her brain could process, not in all the horror of the past few days.
She swallowed and she didn’t pull away. His lips brushed hers, a tease. He didn’t want their first kiss to be in an airport, she figured. Men were that way.
She nearly laughed. She was wondering if he’d killed her husband and now she was getting on a plane with a woman whose daughter she’d killed. This was one bloody circle she was trapped inside.
Janice returned. She and Janice headed for the security line, and on the TVs in the terminal, the stations were showing smartphone-shot footage of Sam Capra on the side of the Mystik; the feed headline said, SHOOTINGS AT MYSTIK CASINO; MAN AT LARGE, and she thought, Sam got away. Sam got away and he will be hunting us now.
68
Sunday, November 7, afternoon
BELIAS HAD TAKEN my phone from me. I had a hundred dollars in my wallet and a credit card that would alert anyone looking for me that I was on the move.
Chicago. Rawlings. That was all I knew.
The key was Felix, who clearly knew more.
Felix wove his way through the crowd, and I followed. Sirens still howled at the Mystik.
I started to run toward him as the crowd thinned out. I couldn’t do that before—I would have been shoving people left and right and I had to get out of the area. If I was caught or recognized, I’d be the prime suspect in three murders.
He walked four casinos away from the Mystik, turning onto a side street. I hung back, hiding behind cars as we went across the lots. If he saw me he gave no sign. He hurried to a parked black Navigator, parked in front of a dive bar, got into the car. The Navigator began to pull away out of the lot.
I had no way to follow. He’d betrayed me, and so I’d had to assume he’d betrayed Mila and Jimmy and the Round Table…
Parked behind the bar I saw an old motorcycle, vintage, but not restored. It looked like it needed work. I cracked the case, jiggled the wires. Spark. You can only do it with the old ones and I had found some spare luck.
The motorcycle cranked to life.
I zoomed after the Navigator, weaving into the Vegas traffic. As we got farther away from the Mystik and the Strip, the traffic jam thinned considerably. What I did next would depend on the following possibilities: Mila was inside the Navigator, a prisoner, or unaware that Felix had left me to die; Mila was a hostage somewhere else. Mila was perfectly fine and had been left behind in San Francisco, just like Felix said; maybe Felix never told Mila where he was heading, and she wasn’t even here in Vegas.
I had no weapon on me, just the bike. If I attacked in traffic, he’d either shoot me or run over me or I’d draw police attention.
But Mila. If Mila was in trouble…
I revved the motorcycle close up behind the blacked-out windows of the Navigator. Every impulse told me to try and run them off the road, do anything to stop them; but I couldn’t draw attention to myself.
The Navigator accelerated, heading away from the Strip into suburbia. Then he started whipping through traffic, either panicking or certain that he could lose me. It is hard to lose a motorbike. His advantage was that a collision is much less risky in a heavy SUV than it is for a helmetless rider on a junky old stolen motorcycle.
He kept on his course away from the busiest part of the city. I followed. He had to have seen me. I had no helmet to hide my features, and as the traffic got sparser there was no place for me to hide. So be it.
He took a chance then, accelerating through a red light, horns screeching at him. I peeled around a car that had wisely stopped, blasted through the intersection, narrowly avoiding a Jaguar that screeched to a stop. It slowed me for ten seconds as I had to pivot the old bike around the stopped car and then power back up to speed. Now Felix had floored it, gunning the engine up toward eighty. A light ahead started to gleam red and he steered the Navigator up onto the sidewalk, screaming past the stopped cars. He hit a fruit display at a market; fruit and wood exploded up over the Navigator.
But it slowed him for a minute.
The motorbike coughed a choking noise I did not care for at all. But I just had to get close enough…
The Navigator slewed around the traffic, laying hard on the horn, and I revved the motorcycle harder, dodging an apple-red pickup truck and an SUV. Both honked in loud, braying cries. I flew between th
em, head down, intent on Felix. I heard the squeal of brakes, the chunk of a crash. I glanced back—I didn’t want to get anyone hurt. The truck and the SUV had bounced off each other’s sides. They looked drivable. I put my attention back on the road ahead of me.
As we both roared down a stretch of road that wasn’t so busy, me hoping the sputtering sound didn’t mean the motorbike was about to die, I heard an engine driving, surging behind me. I glanced back. The bright red pickup truck. Apparently the Navigator or I had pissed off the driver and he’d decided to join in the chase.
I hate vigilantes.
The red pickup drew close to me. Very close. In the motorcycle’s cracked rearview mirror the bumper must have been scant centimeters behind me; if I slowed or turned, he’d run me down. Then he cut over to my left, his window sliding down, and I could see a guy my age, midtwenties, baseball capped and screaming at me. He didn’t have kind words.
I pointed hard at the Navigator.
He didn’t care. Apparently I was the one who had angered him or dented his truck, and I was the one to pay the price. He kept gesturing me to stop.
So I did. Not entirely. I dropped back and he arrowed over again, intent on forcing me to stop. I had nothing to fight him with but my fists and those were useless while I was on the ancient motorcycle.
So. This jerk was going to cost me Felix. Maybe Mila if she was a prisoner inside the Navigator. Ahead I could see the Navigator powering up fast, racing toward eighty again. He was on a straight outshoot from the city. At this speed and playing road hockey with the jerk, I would lose him.
I revved the bike up close to the pickup’s back bed, and the jerk thoughtfully headed over toward me again, closer. I threw myself off the cycle and grabbed hold of the truck’s edge. I started to pull myself over the edge, and the jerk blasted into an abandoned shopping center lot, nearly scraping me off a light pole at the entrance. The pole missed hitting me by inches.
Now I was really mad.
He slammed to a stop and I dropped off the edge, racing toward him. He stormed out of the driver’s seat, smelling of beer, with the arrogant air of a football player who was used to intimidating people.
“You little—” His breath reeked of afternoon brews and those were the only words he ever spoke to me. I slammed hands into his throat, his face, his chest and he was folding before he knew what hit him. I dug the keys out of his pocket—they were the electronic kind—and I wheeled out fast, back on the street, leaving him choking and half-conscious in the parking lot.
It was a sweet truck, and I was grateful for his indignation and happy to get a drunk off the road. I plowed ahead, blasting the powerful engine. But the Navigator was gone. I’d gone four miles, no sign of it. I backtracked on the roads.
Two police cars shot past me, looking for whoever had caused the wreck three blocks back. One of them suddenly slowed and I remembered I was driving a truck that had clearly taken a hard hit.
He’d probably want to question me, the driver. No, thanks.
I wheeled the truck hard about in a circle as the police car U-turned back toward me. I floored it, racing back into oncoming traffic. Horns blared. I leveled the truck across the median strip of grit and desert dust, blasted onto the correct side of the road. The police car revved past me and then sluiced around, blocking the road.
Only a dummy T-bones a police car, at least with the front of the truck.
I spun it hard, putting the truck bed between me and the police car. I veered to the right at the last second, hammering the cop car’s trunk rather than the engine, bursting past the supposed blockade. The cop car whirled past the median and into the opposite lanes, where cars honked and slowed and stopped.
I drove the truck away as fast as I could, zooming across another parking lot, revving behind a small shopping center. I could hear the pursuing whine of the other police car. In my rearview I saw the police car, lights flashing, shoot past the shopping center. It would barely buy me a minute’s time. I ditched the truck, jumped over a fence. I found myself in another parking lot for what looked like a slightly seedy office complex.
Felix was gone. And maybe Mila with him. I’d failed. And I was currently the most hunted man in Las Vegas.
So I did the only thing I could do. I walked. I headed for a bar.
69
Sunday, November 7, early evening
MY BAR IN LAS VEGAS, The Canyon, was not a place where I’d spent a lot of time. I’d only been there once before to meet and detain the woman who’d taken my missing child (she thought I was someone else), but none of that had gone right and my major contribution to the bar was evacuating it before a bomb hidden there could detonate.
I’m pretty sure if The Canyon was a person, it’d want to punch me.
My sorry neglect of it aside, The Canyon is a lovely bar. I would be walking a good ways across town. I didn’t know if the police now had an ID on me, if they knew my name and would be waiting for me at the bar. Early in my hike I stopped at a local drugstore, bought what I needed to mend my temple. My clothes were dry from the motorcycle ride and I just looked like a disheveled type, and those aren’t that unusual in Vegas. I walked from there toward the bar, past an electronics store, and in the window I saw the television coverage of myself descending the Mystik’s side. I watched the entire footage. My face was hidden by the shirt; you could only see my back side. The footage replayed twice and you couldn’t know it was me.
So unless Belias gave the authorities my name…and that was suicide for him. I’d spill all with nothing to lose. I knew too many of his secrets.
By the time I reached The Canyon, it was early evening, opening time, surprisingly busy—I remembered The Canyon started its happy hour at four. It is hard to stay hip in Las Vegas; it was a very different kind of bar from The Select in San Francisco or The Last Minute in New York or Adrenaline in London. Those were bars with a regular clientele. Tourists were far more easily distracted.
The bouncer looked at me like I was gum off last year’s shoe.
“Dress code, sir.”
I was still in the clothes I’d stolen from the room at the Mystik. I looked like a grimy, filthy dork who’d been in a fight. Bouncers do not like people who look like they’ve already fought in the evening or have the dust of a crosstown walk on their shoes.
“Understood, but I’m Sam Capra. I own the bar.”
I didn’t know the bouncer. But he pushed me with his thick finger in the chest. “I have my doubts.”
“I’m Sam Capra. I own the bar. Go get Gigi. She’ll vouch for me.” Gigi was the manager of The Canyon.
He started to shove me, going for the wrist, clearly with a mind to steer me away from the door with a minimum of force. I didn’t have time to spare him the humiliation. He was taller than me and wider than me, but in three seconds he was facedown on the pavement, his wrists in my grip, and my knee on his back. I fished the earpiece out of his ear and said into the mike, “Gigi, it’s Sam. I’m here in town. Would you please come to the front?”
Gigi arrived at the door in about forty seconds. She stopped, stared, and said, “Oh, Sam. This is Michael. Michael, this is Mr. Capra, the owner. Sam, would you please let Michael up?”
“Hi, Michael. I apologize. I need to speak to Gigi now, but I’ll be happy to review bouncer protocols with you at a future time.” Yeah, I can be a jerk.
“Yes, sir,” he said. I let him up and I made him shake my hand although I thought he didn’t enjoy it.
Gigi hurried me inside. “Oh, that’s great publicity, wrangling with the employees. He could sue you.”
“I have worse publicity problems.” I shut the door to the upstairs office, cutting off the thrum of remixed dance music below.
“What’s the matter?”
“I need your help badly. First, I need to get in touch with Mila. I need you to call every number you have for her, start with the bar in San Francisco. See if she’s there. If not, then I need to talk to a higher-up at the Round Tabl
e.”
“They don’t exactly have a directory,” Gigi said.
“There must be a number to reach Jimmy.”
“Mila’s our sole contact,” she said. “I honestly do not have another way to contact them. Compartmentalizing protects them.”
“Give me a phone.” I called the number I’d been given to reach Leonie.
There was no answer. I tried her cell phone.
She answered on the third ring. “Yes?”
“Are you okay? Is Daniel okay?”
“We’re fine.”
“Where are you?”
“Still in Los Angeles. Still at our hotel. I wish Daniel was old enough to appreciate Disneyland, I’d take him there…”
“I need to speak with Jimmy.”
“I’ve not seen him since this morning.”
“How do I reach him?”
She fed me a number. I spoke to Daniel for a minute; then she came back on the line.
“Leonie, is there anyone there to protect you?”
“Yes. Jimmy has a guy in the next room for us.”
“But you don’t know where Jimmy is.”
“No, Sam, what’s wrong?”
“Maybe nothing.” There was no point in worrying her. I told her I’d call back soon and I tried the number she’d given me for Jimmy. No answer. I tried Mila’s number. No answer. I tried the number for The Select. No answer. I left messages in the voice mails.
I clicked off the phone. “The other problem is Felix Neare.”
Gigi made a face. Gigi is short, strongly built, with an angelic face. She was once a Marine, and one year after an honorable discharge an ex-girlfriend of hers tried to talk Gigi into murdering the girlfriend’s parents for all the goodies in the will. Gigi refused and so the girlfriend framed her for the murders. The Round Table, with some subtle work and behind-the-scenes maneuvering, got her wrongful sentence overturned, and now Gigi, like many of the other managers, offered the Round Table an extraordinary loyalty. “I don’t much like him.”