Death On the Flop (26 page)

Frank chuckled, deep and low. “You’re dangerous, Honey Bee.”

“Nobody’s ever told me that before.”

“Maybe nobody’s ever really known you before.”

I had to leave that one alone because, as usual, he said exactly the right thing and left me so overwhelmed that I was touched, tongue-tied and afraid.

 
We actually didn’t have to go to jail after all. The
deputy on duty told us over the phone that Rudy De La Rosa was at Las Vegas General Hospital in serious condition. He wasn’t sure he was allowed to have visitors, but we could try.

Once we’d made it through the metal detectors (with me holding my breath because of Frank’s gun that he’d apparently removed), Frank leaned down to me. “This is going to be your starring role, Bee. Good practice for tonight.”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean, if they allow anyone it will be only family. I look gringo, I sound gringo and I am male. You, on the other hand, put on your shades, take down that hair and push up that bra and you can be anything you want to be to the cops on duty.”

“What about the nurses?”

“That’s where your Spanish comes in: fast and loud as you can and the same for the crying. I know you can cry.”

I shot him a loaded glare. He smiled. “Come on, you can jerk out a tear or two for your—”

“Mi esposo?”
I sniffed.

Frank pulled a handkerchief out of his pocket. It was warm and smelled like Dove. Did he eat the stuff? Did it exude from his pores? I breathed it in.

He watched me and cocked his head. “You’re supposed to blow on it, silly, not inhale it.”

Oops. I slid my Gargoyles onto my face.

He grabbed my elbow protectively and led me forward. We turned the corner and saw a uniformed guard sitting outside a door. “Excuse me,” Frank said. “Is this Rudy De La Rosa’s room?”

The obvious rookie stiffened then stood. “Who told you?”

“A carcel,”
I said, cocking my chin toward the door.
“Déjeme entrar. Soy su esposa.”

He drew his eyebrows together and shook his head. “Is this the wife? Did she say she wants to go in?”

Blinking apologetically, Frank nodded.

The deputy shook his head. “No visitors.”

Pushing my size Ds together strategically with my upper arms, I let off a rapid fire litany in Spanish. The poor guy stared for a moment at my cleavage and then looked at Frank in dismay, holding up his hand. “Tell her to stop.”

Out of the corner of my eye I saw a nurse look around the corner and put her finger to her lips. The deputy nodded desperately. I raised my volume a tick or two and went on about how my poor kids at home might not have a father and how were we going to live? Besides, I had to find out where his
sancha
lived, because that is where most of his money went, when the babies went hungry. More nurses joined the first. One walked up to us.

“What’s the problem?”

“She wants to visit her husband, but—”

“Oh just let her in,” the nurse snapped. I think she could relate to the
sancha
thing. “She is disturbing the whole floor. We can’t have that.”

“But I’m sure the doctor—”

“This guy isn’t going to lose any more blood talking to his wife than’s already flowed out of him from that knife wound. Chill, Junior.”

The deputy sighed and gestured for me to go in. I blew my nose, scurried in, giving Junior a nice eyeful of cleavage to think about while Frank slipped by. It wasn’t what it used to be, apparently—he stopped Frank with a hand to his chest. “Only family.”

Uh-oh. I was on my own.

Rudy had been listening to the ruckus, because he watched me come in the door with a wide smile. “
Eres mi esposa? Que buena suerte tengo
!”

“Aren’t you kind,” I told the pale, thin boy with angel eyes who couldn’t be more than eighteen.

“No, you are beautiful. Who are you?” he asked curiously.

“My name’s Belinda. It’s a long story,” I began saying, sinking down into the chair next to his bed. I slid my glasses to the top of my head. “But I don’t have much time, so I will just have to tell you the important parts. My brother is missing and I think the people you work for might have kidnapped him and hurt him.”

His eyes closed for a moment, then opened with fiery hate. “They put me in jail, they hurt me.”

“What happened?”

“I work in Nogales, packing fruits to bring here. I work for two years. Now someone doesn’t come to work one day and they tell me I have to drive the truck to Las Vegas. They say the drivers make a lot of money. So I go. They give me a cell phone and tell me they might call to check on me. But they call and tell me where to stop. A rest stop on a highway. A man who says he is an inspector for the company gets out and tells me he needs to check something inside. He is inside the truck for about twenty minutes then he leaves.

“I don’t like it. I go into the truck and check myself. I opened a couple of boxes and everything was okay. I checked another box and saw a mango that looked strange. I pulled on the stem and the top came off, it had no inside, no pit. It was just an empty hole. I tried to check the rest of the boxes but only found two more mangoes like that. Then my bosses were calling because I was late. They were suspicious.”

“What did the inspector look like?”

“Big, two hundred fifty pounds, big hat, big mustache, big everything except mean little eyes.” It could easily be Steely Stan.

“When I went to go back to Nogales, the same thing happened. They called me and told me to stop, a different place this time.”

“But I thought you only exported fruits. You import them into Mexico too?”

“Apples, from Washington we take to Mexico. And this time more inspector men came on the truck and when they left I drove on for a while before I stopped and checked. I didn’t see anything at first, but then the middle of one looked wrong and I pulled the stem and the top came off. No core inside just a space with a bag full of pills. Drugs.”

“What happened?”

“I didn’t want to go across the border with that. I turned around and came back and told them the truck was acting wrong, that it needed work. I don’t think they believed me. When they told me to drive a different one, I told them I quit. A police man picked me up when I was waiting for my bus and arrested me for stealing from a convenience store. I didn’t even go into a convenience store here in Las Vegas.”

“What did the policeman look like?”

Tall, over six feet. Dark hair, dark heart.
Ojos muy azul.
Daniel Conner.

“Why didn’t you tell anyone about this?”

“The man who stabbed me in jail? He told me if I said anything that they would take my sister and do bad, bad things to her.”

I tried to hang on to my temper. I felt like taking Frank’s gun out of his boot and blowing Conner’s brains out. “Tell me where the warehouse is here in Las Vegas.”

“It is on Goodwin Street on the north side of the city.”

The door swung open and a nurse bustled in. End of interrogation. “Time to take your vital signs, sir.”

Good thing she wasn’t going to take mine. They’d be off the chart.

I tried to relay as much as I could to Frank in a frantic
whisper on our way back to the parking lot but we were interrupted when Joe called on his cell phone. While they talked, I tried to enjoy the desert sunset—I don’t think there is a richer orange in the world. I also tried to focus on my strategy for the final round of the Hold ’Em tournament, but my mind was buzzing from what I’d learned from Rudy and what it meant when combined with what we already knew.

Later I wished I hadn’t been so distracted. I might have figured out we were being followed.

As Frank held the passenger door open for me, he hung up with Joe. He looked at me, “You’ll never guess who owns Fresh Foods.”

“You’re right. I’ll never guess because my brain is already overloaded from trying to connect the dots on the rest of the puzzle.”

Frank looked at the digital clock on the dashboard as he turned the key. It was already six o’clock. “I’ve got to get you back and get you some dinner before your tournament.”

“So, who owns Fresh Foods?”

“His name is Ranocy, Joseph Ranocy.”

“Do we know him?”

“Listen closer, Bee,” Frank said. “To the last name.”

“Cyrano with the letters scrambled,” I paused as Frank nodded. “Well, that explains his wealth, I suppose. It explains why he seemed to be more a CEO with a sick hobby than your garden variety pervert.”

“Of course it doesn’t explain why his company is sponsoring Stan, who may be producing and smuggling snuff films that Cyrano clearly did not approve of.”

“Do you remember how weird he got when we said we’d heard Fresh Foods wouldn’t be sponsoring Stan anymore?”

Frank shrugged, keeping too close a watch on his rearview mirror for my taste. “Maybe Cyrano found out about what Stan and Conner were doing and wants to shut it down.”

“But that doesn’t explain why he wanted to sponsor him in the first place,” I mused.

Suddenly, Frank made a hard right onto a side street and gunned the engine. I grabbed for the dashboard to keep from flying into his lap. “Miss your turn?” I asked as my head bounced off his shoulder.

Frank’s mouth was a tight line. “Our friend in the sedan got his tires fixed and is behind us.”

I looked back and saw the car gaining on us like a long black shark. Frank hooked a sharp left down an alley between two buildings and landed us south on Paradise Road. We were parallel with The Strip now, the darkening sky illuminated by the neon to our right. I could see our hotel in the distance, the oversize motorized palm trees on the roof swaying. Frank whipped in and out of traffic and headed right toward an oncoming Clark County Sheriff ’s Department cruiser. It did a wild U-turn after us, ending up behind our pursuer.

“What are you doing?” I asked.

“As much as I don’t like the cops here, I think they might ask questions first and shoot later. The guy chasing is going to shoot. Questions won’t be involved.” Frank cranked the wheel to the left then right, barely avoiding a slow moving Volkswagen Bug. As Frank spun right down Spring Mountain Road, I looked back to see the police car going straight on Paradise. The black sedan was still gaining on us.

“What’s going on?” I breathed.

Frank whistled under his breath. “Conner called the squad car off. He’s got major pull.”

“How do you know the black car is Conner?”

“He’s the only one who could call the wolves off a highspeed chase.”

We fishtailed onto Koval and almost made it back to The Strip before Frank slammed on the brakes. The black car zoomed past us before correcting and spinning in the middle of the road as we ducked into a side street behind the casinos. I thought for a minute we’d lost him as we flew past the backside of Bourbon Street. Frank slipped next to a dumpster behind Barbary Coast and we waited, engine idling, holding our breath as the seconds ticked by. Suddenly it appeared, headlights blinding us, heading for our back bumper. Frank stepped on the gas and we leaped ahead, bouncing off the curb, and finally through an alley and back onto Las Vegas Boulevard.

“Maybe he’ll have a harder time being aggressive here,” Frank said through clenched teeth.

But it didn’t look like the traffic or the tourists had intimidated him as he rammed our bumper.

“Ouch,” I said, “It looks like I’m not going to make enough in the tournament to replace all the cars we’re going to lose.”

“We just hope that’s all we’re going to lose.”

As I mulled over that happy thought, Frank swerved into the Mirage parking garage, squealing across the smooth concrete.

“Bee,” Frank said tensely as he wheeled around the turns, his knuckles white on the steering wheel. “As soon as I slam on my brakes, we are going to run for the stairs. Don’t wait for me, don’t call for me, just run as fast as you can, into the casino. Conner doesn’t have any pull in the Mirage, so hopefully he can’t call the house goons to shackle us. We’ll meet at the Hold ’Em tables. If we get separated and I’m not there in five minutes go back to the Lanai and get to the tournament. You’ll be safe in the TV lights. Do not wait more than five minutes, you understand? The longer you are here, the more you risk getting caught. If you get caught, the odds of ever finding Ben will virtually disappear.”

We were on the fourth floor now. Frank had risked hitting parked cars and bystanders to get us far enough ahead of Conner that he was out of sight. I yanked off my shoes and held them. We heard Conner’s wheels squealing around the corner as we opened the doors and ran for the stairs. Frank had stopped so close I was only half a stride away. I was already half a flight down before I heard him screech to a stop. I heard a huge thump and a gunshot.

I paused on the stairwell. Frank wasn’t behind me. Maybe he’d gotten a shot off at Conner. Then I remembered the hospital metal detector. He didn’t have his gun.