The Good Thief's Guide to Vegas (14 page)

NINETEEN

I returned Gerry’s tunic to the exact same peg in the exact same cloakroom from where I’d acquired it, pulled my shirt out of the waistband of my trousers and made my way back to the casino floor. It turned out that Victoria hadn’t moved from the blackjack table where I’d last seen her, but she appeared to have aged quite dramatically. The skin around her eyes was swollen, as though she’d been stung by a swarm of insects, and her eyes appeared bleary and unfocused. Her face was pale, her lips were cracked, and she looked so drawn that I wouldn’t have been altogether surprised to learn that her glass of cranberry juice had been laced with Rohypnol. I could only imagine how desperately she must have wanted to sleep, so I knew right away that I wouldn’t be mentioning my accidental nap.

‘Hey, Big Spender.’ I pointed towards her surprisingly respectable pile of chips. ‘You’re doing pretty well.’

‘I’m winning, if that’s what you mean.’

‘How much?’

Victoria shrugged and ran her thumbnail up a stack of red markers. ‘Something in the region of nine thousand dollars.’

‘That’s terrific.’

She didn’t look as though she believed it. Don’t get me wrong, if she’d simply walked in off the street and made that kind of money, I’m sure she’d have been delighted. But the fact was she knew as well as I did that it left us considerably short of where we needed to be.

‘Come on,’ I told her. ‘Imagine if you’d lost everything.’

She barely smiled as she tossed two chips into the betting circle on the felt. Her dealer had changed – Randy had morphed into Estelle. According to Estelle’s name badge, she hailed from Fort Lauderdale, Florida, and if it wasn’t for her ill-fitting spacesuit, she would have made an ideal extra on an episode of
The Golden Girls
. Her hair was dyed a virulent chestnut brown, and it was cut short and feathered around her temples. She had on a pair of gold-rimmed, half-moon spectacles, secured around her neck with a gold chain. There was more gold on her wrists and her fingers, and when she slipped Victoria’s cards from the shoe and turned them over, I couldn’t help but notice her plum-coloured nails.

‘What happened to the Stormtroopers?’ I asked Victoria, as she studied the pair of eights she’d been dealt.

‘They left. Hours ago. Where have you been?’

I watched as Victoria slid two more chips forwards and opted to split the eights.

‘Working,’ I said, and shot a look towards Estelle, who stared fixedly at Victoria’s cards.

‘You were gone a long time.’

‘I was working hard.’

‘And?’

I patted my nose. ‘And maybe we should discuss this in private.’

Estelle did her best to act invisible, meanwhile dealing Victoria a Ten of Diamonds and a King of Spades. She flipped her hole card over, showing a four and a nine. She hit and bust out with a Jack of Hearts, then reached for her chip tray and paid Victoria her winnings.

‘Is it good news?’ Victoria asked, with a yawn.

‘It’s not great news.’

‘Then perhaps I’ll just stay here.’

‘I can give you a little more cash, if you like.’

Victoria held out her hand and I dropped the four hundred and twenty dollars I’d cadged into her palm. She hesitated. Her expression darkened and her eyebrows knitted together as though I’d confounded her.

‘You really weren’t kidding about the little part.’

‘I encountered some difficulties.’

‘But you’ve been gone for hours, Charlie.’

‘And you’re beginning to repeat yourself.’

Victoria considered the cash for a long moment, then shook her head and pressed the notes back into my hand.

‘You might as well hold onto it,’ she said. ‘If we get really desperate, at least we’ll have something left.’

‘You think?’

‘I do.’

‘Maybe you’re right.’ I slipped the money into my back pocket. ‘Feel free to take a break. I won’t be able to work for a good few hours now. Too many people asleep.’

Victoria laughed half-heartedly. ‘They should come down here and breathe some of the oxygen being pumped out of those vents. A few lungfuls and you begin to forget what time it is. Not that there are any clocks, of course.’

‘You look pretty wiped out, Vic.’

‘You hear that, Estelle? He wants me to quit.’ Victoria doubled her bet and gestured for Estelle to lay the next card on the felt.

‘Some people quit when they’re winning,’ Estelle observed.

‘Sure,’ Victoria replied. ‘But how are you going to get along without my stimulating conversation?’

Estelle’s eyes twinkled, and she worked a sly grin as she dealt Victoria’s cards. She tapped the top card with one of her plum fingernails.

‘Blackjack, hon.’

‘See?’ Victoria said, gesturing to the Jack and the Ace of Spades on the felt in front of her. ‘Can’t quit when I’m running this hot. And besides,’ she added, nodding towards a near-deserted bar on the far side of the room, ‘I have no idea what our friend would do if I left.’

I glanced in the direction Victoria had indicated and felt my breath catch in my throat. Staring clean back at me from over the rows of twinkling slots was Terry Ricks. He was sitting on a galvanised metal stool, legs parted, with his elbow resting on the glass screen of one of the video poker machines that had been sunk into the bar counter. He still had on his brown blazer and blue shirt, though he’d ditched the yellow tie and his top button was undone. His pressed brown trousers had ridden up on his thighs, and I could see that he sported pale yellow socks to complement the absent tie.

While my jaw grazed the table felt, Ricks raised a bottle of spring water in a wordless toast. He reached for some bar nuts, tossed one into his mouth and cracked it between his shark-grin teeth, then smoothed the silver-grey hairs of his beard with his finger and thumb.

‘What’s he doing here?’

‘What does it look like?’

‘It looks like he’s making a nuisance of himself.’

‘I get the impression that’s something he’s very good at.’

I felt Ricks’ eyes on me again, and turned to find him winking as he threw another nut into his mouth. He chewed and swallowed without averting his gaze, almost as if watching us was entirely beyond his control. I found that hard to believe. Even supposing he’d finished his shift, Space Station One was an unlikely venue for him to come to, to wind down. It was dead of all atmosphere, the casino floor empty aside from the hardiest of gamblers, the most determined of boozers and the loneliest of night owls.

A skeleton staff crewed the tables, while in the background a team of cleaners and janitors did their best to refresh the area for another day. Carpets were being shampooed and machine dried; flower arrangements perked up; table felts vacuumed; litterbins emptied.

I edged closer to Victoria and spoke from the corner of my mouth. ‘Maybe we should go back to our hotel for a few hours and get some rest. Let Ricks bother someone else for a while.’

‘Oh, I don’t know,’ Victoria said. ‘I quite like it. It’s almost like having a guardian angel watching over me.’

I slumped onto the metal stool alongside her and helped myself to some of the cranberry juice she was drinking. Even the juice tasted stale. Pushing her glass away, I scanned the area for a cocktail waitress but couldn’t see one anywhere close.

‘Can I borrow your phone?’

Victoria sighed rather dramatically and snatched open her bag. She held her mobile out to me, but when I reached for it, she didn’t let go.

‘I don’t know why you can’t get one of your own,’ she told me.

‘What, and risk having someone call me in the middle of a job? I don’t think so.’

‘Who are you going to call?’

‘Tell you in a minute.’

I pulled Josh’s wallet from my pocket and was just using my thumb to edge out the napkin with the telephone number scrawled on it when Estelle interrupted me.

‘I’m sorry, sir, but you can’t use a cellphone at our tables.’

I pulled a face. It was a pretty unflattering kind of face. ‘Even when it’s so quiet?’

She blinked from behind her half-moon spectacles, completely unmoved. ‘House rules.’

‘Then I guess I’ll go breathe some real air.’ I checked on Ricks’ position and comforted myself with the knowledge that he hadn’t moved. Victoria caught me looking and I rested my hand on her shoulder. ‘Don’t worry about him. You’ll still be here when I get back, right?’

She shrugged. ‘I may try my luck at the roulette-table. But you won’t be long, will you?’

‘Absolutely not. I’ll be five minutes, maximum.’

TWENTY

The bland morning light wasn’t kind to Las Vegas. What had appeared glamorous and spectacular in the dark, now seemed cheap and badly staged, like the backdrop to some improbable B-movie. Take the shuttle outside Space Station One. The nose cone was pitted with dents and nicks, the paint on the launch tower was flaking, and the bare bulbs strung along the metal structure looked like ugly glass cysts. If that was bad, then the robots beside the entrance doors were even worse. I’d owned toasters that were more technologically advanced.

On the opposite side of the Strip, along from the cranes and construction towers that dotted the evolving skyline, and beneath the chain of tourist helicopters flying towards the Grand Canyon, the Bellagio fountains were undergoing maintenance. A man in a wetsuit yanked at one of the fountainheads while a second man in a rubber boat fished litter from the lake. While they worked, a section of the fountains and lights were being tested. I watched the water loop and whirl and dip. The effect wasn’t nearly so spectacular without Sinatra’s ‘Luck Be A Lady’ blaring out of the speaker system.

Flipping open Victoria’s mobile telephone, I punched in the number from the napkin in Masters’ wallet. The display on the telephone told me it was twenty past six in the morning, which was hardly the most civil of times to place a call – but I didn’t care. If Tom-Thumb-gone-bad and his oversized companion were prepared to break into Josh’s room to leave a note telling him to ring a gentleman called Maurice, I figured the man in question would be willing to have his beauty sleep interrupted. Of course, the fact that I couldn’t tell him where Josh had run to might darken his mood just a fraction, but I was prepared to run that risk.

The phone rang twice before my call was answered. There was a pause, and I was just readying myself to speak when a recorded message cut in.

Thank you for calling Hawaiian Airways. Please press one to speak to a booking agent, press two for flight enquiries, press three for
. . .

I closed the phone and stuffed the napkin back inside Josh’s wallet. So it wasn’t the number for the mysterious Maurice, though at least I finally had some idea of where Josh had disappeared to. Hawaii. Not somewhere I’d ever been, and not somewhere I’d been planning to vacation anytime soon, but I imagine it had its charms, particularly if you were looking for a place to hide out and avoid having your limbs remodelled with a metal pipe.

Discovering that the telephone number belonged to an airline booking service didn’t do a great deal to improve my mental health. On the one hand, it seemed very possible that Josh had flown so far away from Nevada that I wouldn’t have a hope of handing him to the Fisher Twins in what remained of my twenty-four hours. And on the other side of what was turning into a seriously bleak equation, my badly fatigued literary agent was preparing to take her chances at roulette. I hadn’t had the energy, let alone the desire, to ask Victoria how she intended to play. It could be she was aiming to bet small sums on red or black, with the idea of building towards our target figure. Or it could be she was planning to gamble it all on a single, straight-up bet. If she did, and she happened to win, the payout would answer all our prayers and buy us a speedboat besides. And if she lost – well, I really didn’t want to think about what we’d do if she lost.

All things considered, it struck me as an ideal moment to smoke a cigarette. A little nicotine, some fresh desert air, perhaps as much as a minute to relax and try to shut out the prospect of being shot in the back of the head somewhere in the middle of the barren Mojave . . . It didn’t seem too much to ask, so I headed around the side of the casino towards the main entrance of the hotel, where the valets and doormen and bell staff looked as if they’d just started in for the day. They had on cotton polo-shirts and khaki shorts, and they fairly bounced on the toes of their smart white sneakers as they hailed cabs and stacked suitcases and ushered guests in and out of the hotel foyer.

The cab passengers themselves were a different story. Bedraggled women in skimpy outfits; middle-management types in creased suits; honeymoon couples still reeling from their Drive-Thru vows; all of them wearing dazed smiles and blinking in the early sun as if their retinas might burn.

I cracked the seal on my precious cigarette packet, flipped back the cardboard lid and inhaled the new-box smell. I slipped a filter between my lips, and just the weight of it caused me to groan and close my eyes in satisfaction.

One of the bell staff obliged me with a light in return for a dollar tip and I might go so far as to say it was the best dollar I’ve spent in my entire life. From the instant I inhaled, I could have wept at how perfect the cigarette tasted, at how full the smoke felt in my mouth, at how wonderful it was to experience the familiar warmth spreading out through my chest.

Two draws later, and I felt so light-headed I could have believed the cigarettes packed a mildly illegal punch. It didn’t help when I saw a group of men pacing across the asphalt towards the revolving glass doors in matching Elvis costumes. They had the side-burn wigs and the gaudy plastic shades, the fake medallions and the powder-blue jumpsuits; they even had the platform shoes. The formation they walked in went from slim through to fat, with the belly of the last guy bulging against his jumpsuit as though he was pregnant with Tom Jones.

My, but cigarettes were wonderful things, and as if to prove as much, I was about to catch one heck of a break. I put it entirely down to the smokes. After all, if I hadn’t been standing at that exact spot, inhaling that exact cigarette, I might never have seen the yellow Ford Crown Victoria taxi pull up and deposit two Nordic blondes with very fine legs. And if those same legs hadn’t belonged to those same blondes, my attention might never have lingered on the cab they were vacating. And, well, if none of those things had happened, I almost certainly wouldn’t have seen the advertisement on the cab roof.

The advertisement was pasted to a triangular pod, and it was colourful and arresting in the way that any decent ad should be. The main image featured a troop of performers lined up as if they were standing on water, with fountains bursting and fireworks exploding from behind them. The troop included showgirls and clowns, acrobats and trapeze artists, jugglers and sword swallowers, elephants and tigers and snow-white stallions. Above them all, in a bold aqua font, were the words:
The World-Famous Fate of Atlantis, at the Atlantis-Las Vegas Casino Resort
.

It was a busy poster, made even more crowded by a couple of ‘sensational’ quotes from the local rags, and it might have caught my eye regardless. But the reason I stared particularly hard, and even went so far as to approach the taxi to get a closer look, was that I recognised two of the performers. One was the trapeze artist in the skin-tight Lycra, hanging upside down from a horizontal bar with a waif-like girl suspended from his wrists. The other was the clown at the front of the troop, who looked no taller than a child. And although the trapeze artist was the wrong way up, and the clown wore white face paint with a blue rubber nose, they sure looked like the unlikely couple who’d come calling for Josh.

It would have been nice to have studied the poster for a little longer, but all of a sudden I heard a door thud closed and the burst of a throaty carburettor as the cab pulled sharply away. I suppose I could have run after it, or yelled at the driver to stop, but the truth is the taxi was gone before it even occurred to me.

There were at least a dozen more cabs waiting in line to be called upon, but none of them featured the same advertisement. I walked among them just to make sure, feeling as though I should perhaps shake my head and acknowledge that I’d experienced some variety of hallucination. A large part of me wanted to believe that my lack of sleep, combined with that first cigarette, had somehow made me see something that wasn’t really there. But the reality was that I finally had a lead to follow up. And if only I could pull my wits and my guts together, I thought I might be so bold as to do just that.