She realized she had made a serious mistake by coming. She knew the mob ran Vegas, but it had never hit her head-on before. This immense man with his dead eyes was a gangster! And she had come into his room! She knew about the mob’s lock on the Las Vegas Police and Sheriff’s departments. No matter what happened, she could forget pressing charges for rape if the guy wouldn’t let her leave.
“By the way, Eddie paid you, didn’t he?”
Dumb hadn’t worked, so she decided to try outraged.
“Paid me?”
“Yeah. I don’t know what you charge, but he should have paid up front. The Outfit don’t pay for nothin’ in this town.”
“What I charge? Listen, I’m not some cheap trick.”
“Sure, sure you’re not. But you’re here, ain’t you? Means you got a price. Eddie shoulda paid it. Not to say I won’t leave a good tip, you was to do good.”
“Look, I don’t know what Eddie Mazzetti told you ….”
The smile left the big man’s face. His voice went very cold.
“I’m Frankie Pescatore. They call me Frankie “The Whale” behind my back. The ones who called me that to my face are all dead. I’m not some chump. I’m from The Outfit. Eddie Mazzetti don’t tell me. I tell him.”
“Eddie Mazzetti runs the Serengeti. Everybody knows that.”
“That’s for the citizens, dummy. Eddie Mazzetti is just the local bozo.”
Kiko looked doubtful.
Frankie’s face got red. He wasn’t used to being questioned.
“Don’t believe me?
See that case over there on the table?”
“The metal one?”
“Jesus, see one ain’t metal?
Yeah. Metal one, combination locks.
Know what’s in there? More money you ever seen in your life. Over a half a million dollars, off-the-books money. Money don’t get reported. And Frankie Pescatore is the man The Outfit trusts, carry it to Chicago. Know nobody’s gonna mess with Frankie!
Eddie Mazzetti?” The big man laughed. “Compared to me, Eddie Mazzetti’s a putz.”
“If you’re such an important man, why am I here? I’m just a Keno girl.”
“You stupid or somethin’? You can’t figure it out?
Look, was walkin’ through the casino and seen you. Pretty sharp little fortune cookie. Got a thing, you oriental types. Look like little dolls.”
“Fortune cookies are Chinese. I’m Japanese.”
“Chinese, Japanese, whatever.”
“So, you never had Eddie pull my file?”
“Pull your file? Think this some job interview? I’m Frankie Pescatore, for Chrissake. Don’t interview whores, high priced or low priced.
Now, quit yankin’ my chain, get them clothes off. Let’s get the party started. I gotta catch the redeye at two in the morning, and I wanna get some sleep before I go.”
Frankie stood up and dropped his robe to the floor.
Kiko stood there horrified and speechless. She was looking at an obscenely obese man wearing nothing but tiny underpants that had almost disappeared into disgusting rolls of fat and the thatch of coarse, black hair covering his stomach and groin. A man who weighed at least three hundred and fifty pounds. A man who clearly expected her to have sex with him in the next few minutes.
I wonder how he walks with those fat thighs rubbing together, she thought, and was immediately alarmed. How could she be thinking such a stupid thing when she should be devising an escape plan?
She was clearly in trouble. The fat man might not be very swift, but there was no way she could get to the door, get the security chain off and unlock both locks before he reached her. And if she tried such a move and failed, she would not have another chance to get away.
Options flashed through her brain.
She shifted gears. Dumb hadn’t worked, and outrage had failed, so she decided to try charm. He apparently thought she was a high-priced call girl trying to get a big tip, so she decided to act like one.
She ran her eyes up and down his body and licked her lips. “My goodness, you’re a big man. What’s the hurry? Let’s enjoy this and have some fun.”
Her eyes flicked to the wet bar in the corner of the big room.
“How about I fix us a little drink?”
Frankie kicked the tent-sized robe away from his feet and sat down on the leather couch. It groaned as it accommodated his bulk.
“That’s more like it, doll baby.
Scotch rocks for me. Whatever you want for yourself. Make it quick.”
Kiko moved to the bar.
As a dancer, she was very aware of her body and also aware of the effect it had on many men. She put everything she had into the movement as she walked away from him.
A whistle escaped his lips.
“Hey, baby, I like the way you move. Hurry with them drinks. I can’t wait to get you on my lap.”
As she put ice cubes into a glass and covered them with scotch from a heavy, crystal decanter, she thought about the man sitting on the couch.
The fact that he was sitting down was good, but the real element in her favor was that he was barefoot. She wasn’t.
She walked back toward him with his drink and the decanter.
“Hey, you ain’t got no drink.”
“Don’t need one, Frankie. Not with a big man like you.”
He groaned with the effort as he rose to his feet, looking at her suspiciously. Maybe she had overplayed the charm thing. Now that he was standing up, part of her advantage was gone.
“Go the bedroom, you’n me. Big, round bed in there you’re really gonna like. Mirrors on the ceiling.”
Kiko deliberately flicked her eyes to the door.
Frankie picked up on the movement.
“Hey, don’t get no ideas. You ain’t gettin’ out of here ‘till I’m done with you. After that, can jump out the window, all I care.”
Kiko hoped she now had him thinking she might make a dash for the door. From three feet away, she threw the glass full of scotch at his face. When he put his hands up to deflect it, she raised the crystal decanter with both hands and smashed it to the white marble floor.
As the crystal shattered and the air filled with the sharp smell of whiskey, she took two steps toward the door.
He moved to his right to cut off her escape.
Kiko quickly changed course and went the other way.
His face contorted in fury, Frankie tried to change directions too, but overcoming the inertia of over three hundred and fifty moving pounds and pivoting in a different direction is not easy. Especially not on a wet, marble floor.
Frankie went down. Hard.
Kiko had already rounded the couch and was headed for the door from the other side when she realized Frankie was not only down, he was making strange noises and didn’t seem to be able to get to his feet.
Afraid it was some kind of trick to gain him time, she went quickly to the door, unhooked the security chain, and turned both locks before she looked at him more carefully.
Frankie “The Whale’s” eyes were open wide and darting frantically from side to side. His mouth was moving like a fish out of water. A pool of blood was rapidly spreading out from beneath his head.
She realized what had happened.
As Frankie twisted, lost his balance and fell, he had landed on a substantial, upright shard from the base of the shattered decanter. The sharp edge of the big fragment had jammed into his neck and hit an artery. Blood was spurting straight down onto the marble floor beneath him.
Frankie had landed on his left side, and his left arm was trapped beneath his bulk. With his right hand, he was clawing at the shard, but the heavy fall had dazed him, and the effort was feeble. Even if he had been able to pull it out, he would not be able to stop the heavy flow of blood pumping out of his body. Kiko made no move to help him. She didn’t want to go anywhere near him.
Even as she watched, his hand fell away from his neck. His fingers began to twitch, and his eyes went out
of focus. A long, shuddering sigh escaped his lips. A moment later he voided his bladder, and the yellow stain spread onto the floor below his groin. It mingled with the pool of blood. Then his sphincter let go.
Keeping her eyes on the now-motionless man, Kiko put her ear against the door and listened. It did not escape her that she was mimicking an action she had seen the giant mobster make not long before. As she listened, she was aware of the sharp odor of raw whiskey mixed with the iron scent of blood, the pungent smell of Frankie’s urine and the reek of his bowel movement.
There was no sound from the hallway.
She put the security chain back on the door and turned both locks.
Her legs were suddenly weak. She moved to one of the chairs and sat down with her head between her knees. She concentrated on taking deep breaths to bring her racing pulse and spinning thoughts under control. This was no time to panic and do something foolish. She had made one mistake when she knocked on the door. She couldn’t afford to make another if she hoped to stay alive.
As her breathing evened out, she went to a special place in her mind. It was a pond. The surface of the pond was calm and smooth under the light of a full moon. She hovered above the pond. In the bottom of the pond was a smooth, round stone. She entered the pond and then the stone and remained there, perfectly still, for a time. When she was completely calm, she left the stone and the pond behind and returned to the hotel room in Las Vegas.
She considered her options. They were not good.
She obviously couldn’t call Serengeti Management for help. The mobster who lay dead on the marble floor of the luxurious suite had made it quite clear he outranked the locals in a criminal organization. No matter the circumstances surrounding the man’s death, someone was going to pay a heavy price. She didn’t want to be that someone.
She knew calling the police would be the same as calling Eddie Mazzetti.
She looked in her tiny purse. Nothing in there but a California driver’s license, a five dollar bill, and sixty five cents in change.
She looked across the room at the case Frankie Pescatore had bragged about while he was trying to impress her. She got up and walked over to look at it. The metal had a flat finish. There were combination locks beneath each of the latches. On the off chance that Frankie had not set the locks, she tried both latches.
No luck.
She hoisted the case. It was heavy. Frankie’s words echoed in her head. “Know what’s in there? More money you ever seen in your life.” If Frankie hadn’t been exaggerating, there was more than half a million dollars inside. She had five. She didn’t dare go by her apartment to get more.
She got up and walked over to Frankie’s corpse. An incredible amount of blood had pumped out of the man’s body. The huge pool, some of it now spreading toward the door, had engulfed most of the pieces of scattered glass. Then there was the deadly shard stuck in his throat. She had smashed the decanter that had produced that shard, but she felt no guilt about what she had done. She thought again about Frankie losing his balance as he tried to pivot and cut off her escape.
She returned to the chair and sat down again to think logically about her next moves.
She thought of movies she had seen about people trying to get away with murder, not that she thought she had murdered Frankie. They were always concerned about fingerprints. She thought about everything she had touched in the room and realized her prints were on some of the broken glass scattered on the floor. She didn’t think that mattered because Eddie would already know she had been in the room. After all, he had sent a driver to take her to the “date” with the dead man.
She also didn’t think Eddie was going to call in the police in any official capacity. She knew he would have to make arrangements for the body. That would take cooperation from some of the cops he owned, but Kiko was positive Eddie wouldn’t tell the police about the woman who had been in the room and the missing money. The money Frankie had called “off the books money.”
Unbidden, a phrase popped into her head. A line her English Literature professor at Cal had quoted from a D. H. Laurence novel: “But she might as well be hung for a sheep as for a lamb.”
In that moment, she made her decision. She wasn’t going to be an easily slaughtered lamb. She was going to run, and she was going to take the money with her. But she wasn’t going to run in a panic. She was going to think things through.
That’s when the finality of it all really struck her. The moment Frankie had fallen, her life had changed forever. She started to cry. But she was not crying tears of hysteria. She was crying for her lost life. She let the tears flow freely. She had time.
Somebody would come for Frankie. There was no way he was going to the airport alone with all that money. Not the man who was so afraid someone might have followed her that he almost yanked her arm off pulling her into the room so he could slam the door. But the mobster had told her he was going to catch a flight at two o’clock in the morning. He said he wanted to get some sleep first. That meant his driver or escort or whatever he was wouldn’t knock on Frankie’s door for a while.
She sobbed until she had cried herself out.
“There,” she thought. “No more tears. Down to business.”
She began to think about what she had to do to survive.
First, she had to disappear. Her immediate need, of course, was to get out of Vegas, but beyond that, Kiko Yoshida had to cease to exist. That meant she couldn’t contact anyone she considered a friend for help. She was sure Eddie’s people would go to her apartment. They would look through all her things, or simply pack them up and take them. They were going to have her address book, so they would be watching her friends and family. She just hoped they wouldn’t do anything worse than watch them.
Second, the money in the case was the key to her survival. In fact, she realized she would probably have to make it last for the rest of her life. But she couldn’t take the case with her when she ran. She was going to be on public transportation, or even worse, out on the highway hitchhiking. What if someone got the case away from her? She would be a dead woman.
She had to secure the money somewhere, get out of Las Vegas for at least a few months, and then come back for it. As much as it frightened her just to think about ever returning, she couldn’t imagine trusting someone else enough to have them pick it up for her.
Her thoughts turned to the man who would be looking for her.
If Eddie Mazzetti really was a “putz” compared to Frankie Pescatore, he was in as much trouble as she was. When he found out Frankie was dead and the case was gone, his first concern would be the missing money. He would pull out all the stops looking for her and the case.
But he couldn’t let very many people know the money was missing. He would be desperate to find it before “The Outfit” even knew Frankie “The Whale” was dead. Eddie would confer with Silverstein and Meyer and then send men he could trust to search for her. Men well up in the criminal organization.
There couldn’t be that many high-ranking gangsters available on such short notice. And even the ones Eddie thought he could trust he’d have to send in teams of two so they could keep an eye on each other. After all, since they were high up in the organization they would know about what Frankie had called “off the books money.” Once Eddie told the men to look for her and the case both, they’d know the case was full of money, even if they didn’t know how much.
The critical question was: how many teams would he have? Maybe two, maybe three, maybe four? Surely no more than that. She had to believe his resources were limited. If they weren’t, she’d be dead before the sun came up.
Okay. Okay. Push those kinds of thought away.
First car to the airport, since that was the fastest way to get the farthest away from Las Vegas.
Probably wouldn’t check the Union Pacific Depot because the two daily passenger trains had already come and gone. Eddie would know the schedule from sending cars to pick up very important guests.
Third car to her apartment.
And the fourth car? That one would slowly cruise the city. She shivered when she thought of it rolling silently through the streets with the windows down, driver and passenger scanning the faces for a Japanese woman.
Since there was a good chance they would not discover Frankie was dead until after midnight or one o’clock, she might have a chance.
But she had to move, and move quickly.
All she had in her purse was five dollars and change, but she had jewelry worth a good deal more. If she could somehow get to L.A., she could turn it into enough money to hide out until things cooled off and she could come back for the case.
She took off the diamond bracelet, the pearls and the diamond earrings and put them in the little purse.
She walked over to the case. She realized the metal finish and the combination locks made it unusual and memorable. She didn’t want it to draw attention to her when she was on the street. She went into the bedroom and took a pillow case off one of the huge pillows. She walked out and shoved the courier case inside it.
She moved to the door, circling well away from Frankie’s corpse. She stood listening at the door again. When she was satisfied she could hear no sounds, she gathered her courage. She knew this was a dangerous moment. The blood was almost to the door. If someone were passing by, they would not only see her but might also see the blood. She removed the security chain and unsnapped both locks. When she peered into the hallway, she saw no one. She stood for a moment, listening for voices or footsteps. She heard none. She pulled the door wider and eased into the hallway. She switched off the lights. No reason to have someone wonder why light was showing under the door of the suite later that night.
She pulled the heavy door closed and headed off down the hall, hoping she would meet no one before she reached the stairwell.
The ground floor exit door took her into the parking lot behind the casino. She walked across the lot and forced her way through the oleanders separating the Serengeti parking lot from the Silver Slipper. She crossed the Silver Slipper lot and one more before exiting onto the Las Vegas Strip. She crossed to the south side and turned east toward Fremont Street and downtown Las Vegas.
Mojave Desert Sanctuary Page 2