THE KING OF MACAU (The Jack Shepherd International Crime Novels) (26 page)

“Hello?”

“It’s Brady, Jack. The cashiers in position 9 at Cage B just took in $10,000, all in $50 bills. Where are you?”

“We’re in the Lion Bar. Right under that big chandelier in the middle.”

“Okay, here’s what you do. Walk straight ahead to the second marble walkway. It’s got big number 8s laid out on it in a mosaic design. Turn left. There will be blackjack tables to your right and Sic Bo tables to your left. Walk all the way to the end of that walkway and to the left you’ll see a line of cashiers’ windows in the back wall. There are numbers over each window designating the cashier positions. I’ll tell number 9 you’re on your way and to stall the smurf as long as possible.”

“Do you have a description?”

“Female, mid-thirties, about five foot four, short black hair, wearing jeans and a yellow t-shirt. Large black purse over her shoulder.”

“Got it. Thanks.”

I stood up and dropped some money on the table.

“Let’s kick some ass, guys.”

WE WALKED AS FAST
as we could without attracting attention and I filled Archie and Pete in on what Brady had told me. I had plenty of time to do it. It was a long walk to the cashier who had raised the alarm.

“Female, mid-thirties, five foot four, short black hair, jeans and a yellow t-shirt,” Archie repeated like a man memorizing his part in a play.

“She’ll be long gone before we get there,” Pete said.

“Let’s spread out and go in from different directions. Maybe she’ll pass one of us coming back this way or we’ll spot her at a table.”

Archie went left between two Sic Bo tables and was quickly swallowed up in the clouds of cigarette smoke rising from the mob of Chinese gamblers. I turned to say something to Pete, but all I saw was his back disappearing off to the right behind a roulette table. That left me to continue along the walkway and follow Brady’s original directions to the cashier.

I noticed that all the tables I passed had plenty of comfortable-looking upholstered chairs around them, but not many people were sitting in them. Instead, the players were standing around the tables, peering intently, even grimly at the progress of whatever game they were trying to outwit. Comfort and relaxation isn’t really part of the Chinese view of gambling. Gambling is serious work, a way to get rich, not a pastime. What did being comfortable have to do with anything?

I was walking past a casino worker pushing a teacart at a stately pace when I saw a flash of yellow off to my left. I stopped so abruptly that the elderly man walking behind me stumbled into the teacart and knocked two empty cups onto the floor. He muttered something at me in Mandarin as he brushed past. I had no idea what he was saying, but somehow I doubted it was
Welcome to our country, foreigner!

I turned in the direction where I had seen the flash of yellow and moved as quickly as I could. The casino was so crowded I didn’t have a clear line of sight for more than twenty feet in any direction so I kept my head and eyes moving back and forth in front of me, peered into the crush of bodies as well as I could, and hoped for the best.

It was only a minute or two before I spotted her.

SHE WAS SITTING IN
front of a video poker machine. Yellow t-shirt, jeans, middle-aged, short black hair. She didn’t look particularly Korean, and I didn’t recognize her from the security photos I had seen, but that didn’t really mean much. She clearly met the description the cashier had given Brady.

I walked past the woman without turning my head, moved quickly up another aisle of video poker machines, and came around behind her. I sat down on a stool about a dozen machines away and pretended to study its operating directions while watching her out of the corner of my eye. She was attractive enough, slim and feminine in her movements, and she sat primly on the stool, legs crossed, playing slowly like a woman more interested in killing time than in winning money. I took out my phone to call Archie, but before I could dial him it buzzed in my hand.

“I’ve got her,” Archie said when I answered. “She’s at a slot machine.”

“I’ve got her, too. But it’s a video poker machine, not a slot.”

“I thought she was supposed to be by herself.”

“She is by herself.”

“Doesn’t look like that to me. That guy on the next stool looks awfully friendly.”

I swiveled my head back toward the woman in the yellow t-shirt who was still playing her video poker machine without much apparent interest. There was nobody on the stool next to her.

Oh shit.

“We’re looking at two different women, Archie.”

“But mine matches the description perfectly.”

“Mine, too. Where are you?”

“I’m standing in front of a platform with a red Bentley on it. Do they sell cars here or something?”

“Nope. They’re giving it away.”

“They’re giving a Bentley away?”

“It’s the grand prize this week in some sort of progressive slot machine deal. Don’t ask me how it works.”

“Well fuck me dead. A free Bentley? Bloody hell.”

I stood up and walked out of the aisle of poker machines into a relatively open area and looked around until I saw the red car up on a platform.

“You’re about two hundred feet from me, Archie, back in the direction of the Lion Bar.”

I listened to Archie exhale heavily on the other end of the phone. “Okay, mate,” he said, “what do you want to do now?”

I mulled over Archie’s question while I walked back toward where I had been sitting. Could we possibly keep both women covered until we figured out which was the right one? I was thinking so hard about how we might be able to do it that I didn’t notice for a moment that the woman wasn’t sitting in front of her video poker machine any longer. And when I did notice, my first thought was I must have gone into a different aisle of poker machines by mistake.

But I hadn’t. The woman I had been watching wasn’t where I had left her.

“She’s gone, Archie. Call Pete and get him to come to your position. I’m going to try and find this one again.”

“Roger that.”

I disconnected, shoved the phone into my pocket, and walked over to the stool where the woman had been sitting. When I got to it, I wondered why I had bothered. What was I going to do, collect DNA or something? I needed to know where this woman was going, not prove she had been here. I looked around. Not a sign of her. She couldn’t have gone far. I hadn’t stepped away to look for Archie for more than a minute, probably less. So which way? Right, or left? I flipped a mental coin.

Right.

There was a broad walkway to the right that ran through a small flotilla of at least thirty Caribbean stud poker tables, and off in the distance at the end of it I could see an exit from the casino. I thought it was the exit that was opposite the entrance to the Wynn Macau, but I wasn’t absolutely certain. If it was, and if the lady in yellow went out through there and back into the casino at the Wynn, I’d never find her.

Making straight for the exit, I kept my eyes moving back but I got no joy. No flashes of yellow. I knew I could be going in the wrong direction altogether so I pulled out my phone and called Archie.

“I’m walking toward an exit, but I don’t see her. She may be outside already.”

“My girl’s still playing her slot, but the guy who was hustling her has hit the road.”

“Is Pete with you?”

“I see him coming now.”

“Okay, tell Pete to sit on her and you head for the exit that’s on the other side of the Bentley sign. I’m going to…wait, I got her!”

The lady in yellow was walking crisply toward the exit from the left. I was pretty sure there was another cashier’s cage off in the direction she was coming from, and that could only mean…

“She’s cashed out, Archie, and she’s heading outside! This has to be the right one!”

“I’m on my way.”

The closer I got to the exit the thinner the crowds became so I found myself covering ground faster. It looked like I was going to hit the exit about a hundred feet behind her. But what the hell was I going to do after that?

If she crossed the street and went into the Wynn after she got outside, I was toast. Even if she didn’t go into the Wynn, I didn’t much like my chances of keeping up with her on the street without being made. Following people looked easy in the movies, but I had tried it a couple of times in real life and for some reason it never worked out quite the same way for me that it did for Matt Damon.

The lady in yellow reached the exit and pushed out through the big brass doors. About ten seconds later, so did I, and a moment later I was standing out on the curb of
Praceta 24 de Junho
looking toward the entrance to the Wynn on the other side.

I quickly spotted the woman walking away from me a little less than a hundred feet off to my left. Suddenly she veered off the sidewalk and climbed the steps into a bus that was parked at the curb.

Shit, shit, shit!

What was I going to now? Hail a cab and shout
Follow that bus
? And, by the way, how exactly did I say
Follow that bus
in Mandarin?

I was still trying to decide what to do when Archie walked up beside me. I pointed at the bus.

“So now we know she wasn’t the right one,” he said.

“What are you talking about?”

“The bus. Look at the sign on the front of it.”

There was indeed a large sign taped in the front window of the bus, but it was written entirely in Chinese characters and meant less than nothing to me.

“You can read Chinese?” I asked Archie.

Archie gave me a look. ”That’s a junket bus,” he said. “It shuttles Chinese gamblers back and forth from Zhuhai right across the border in China. Tens of thousands of Chinese day-trippers come in every day and go right back after they give all their money to the casinos. There’s no one on that bus that isn’t a mainland Chinese. I promise you that.”

I pulled out my phone and called Pete. He answered and I quickly asked him, “Is the girl you’re watching still at the table?”

There was a short silence and I knew what Pete was going to say before he said it, but he said it anyway.

“I never found her. Archie told me where she was when he lit out after you, but she wasn’t where I thought he told me to look. Either I misunderstood him or she left before I got here. What happened to the one you were following?”

I told him.

“Well…shit,” Pete said, and I thought that summed up where we were pretty well.

I told Pete to meet us in the Lion Bar, and Archie and I turned around and headed back inside.

THE LION BAR AT
THE MGM is usually a pretty good place to hang out. It’s comfortable, cool, and sophisticated, and they have a great selection of malt whiskys. Even better, it has a reputation for attracting an enticing crowd of young Filipina women.

The problem right at that moment was that I didn’t feel particularly comfortable, cool, or sophisticated, and I was drinking a Diet Coke. And I was so pissed off I didn’t even notice if there were any women in the place, Filipino or otherwise.

“We’ll get another shot, Jack.”

Pete sounded like he meant it and so I nodded. Yes, we would get another shot, but now I had real doubts this was going to work when we did. Certainly not without far more luck than I had any right to hope for.

Archie and Pete had tried to tell me how tough it would be to pick up one of the smurfs in a crowded casino and stay on them until they got to wherever they were going. Between the vast size of the casino, the multitude of exits, and the huge number of forms of transportation available once the target was outside, I now understood what they had been saying. It seemed like an impossible task to pull off with only three guys. I had let my optimism rule my good sense and now my good sense had pushed its way to the front of the line and was having a good laugh at my expense.

“What do you want to do, Jack?” Archie asked.

“I have to have a pee. Let me think about it until I get back.”

I walked across the Lion Bar and went out into the casino looking for a men’s room. I passed the stage where the bands worked later in the evening and turned up a walkway that according to the overhead signs led to the hotel’s main lobby. I hadn’t gone more than fifty feet when I saw a woman walking straight toward me.

She wasn’t wearing blue jeans or a yellow t-shirt, or carrying a black purse. She was in a black pants suit and her purse was red. And she wasn’t middle-aged and slim. She was young, probably in her mid-twenties, wearing glasses too big for her face, and a bit on the chunky side.

But I recognized her. She was one of the faces in the security photos. She was one of the smurfs. I had not the slightest doubt about it.

There no plan better than pure dumb luck, is there?

We were back in business.

FREDDY HAD NO IDEA
what time it was when Pine came for him. He never wore a watch. Knowing what time it was in a place like Macau had never really seemed all that important. Judging by the delivery of his meals, he thought he had been there about two days, but he wasn’t even certain of that.

“We’re moving you,” Pine said.

“To Pyongyang?”

“No, we’re cleaning up.”

Freddy’s head snapped up.
Did that mean…?

“Don’t worry,” Pine said when he realized what Freddy was thinking. “I only meant we’re taking you someplace else for a day or two, not killing you. We’ll ship you to Pyongyang when the load is ready to go.”

“Load?”

“Never mind. I talk too much. I know I talk too much and yet I still do it. Funny, isn’t it?”

Freddy was glad to hear Pine hadn’t decided to shoot him after all at least, and he was happy too to know that he still had a day or two before he was being sent to Pyongyang. Every day he was somewhere other than Pyongyang was a day that something might happen to keep him from being sent there. Maybe he would find some way to get in touch with Shepherd and be rescued. Maybe Pine would die. Maybe he would die. Well…not that, of course.

Pine had left the door open. Freddy couldn’t see anything outside except a dim hallway, but he eyed it nevertheless. It wasn’t much of an escape chance, he knew, but it was something. Then two of Pine’s goons came through the door and it was nothing.