Vegas Knights (14 page)

  "Last-minute flights are pricey," I said as we walked toward the security lines. The airport seemed like a dark cave after all the flash and thrum of the Strip, but I could still hear the echoing sound of slot machines working somewhere in the distance. "What we have left wouldn't get us all that far."

  "Then we'll live it up in town," he said. "Every night out: Dominick's, Ricks, Ashley's, the Full Moon, the Grizzly Peak. Dinner at Blimpy's and Cottage Inn. Dessert at Stucchi's. Late-night munchies at the Fleetwood or the Brown Jug. Nurse our hangovers in the Half Ass in the mornings."

  "Paradise." I gave him a fist bump.

  "This is only the beginning," he said. "Just because Vegas kicked us out doesn't mean we're done. The world is filled with casinos all ripe for the skimming."

  I shook my head and laughed. "Let's just get home and enjoy the week. We can plan our conquest of the universe from East Quad."

  There was a line at security, but it moved fast. Our fellow travelers shuffled along next to us. At this time of night, no one had tried to drag any kids along on a trip, no mothers struggling with strollers or fathers hauling carts full of toy-stuffed luggage. Some of them were kids our age heading out of town, giggling and chatting, texting friends or playing games on their phones. The rest were grim-faced adults determined to get out of town and back to the realities that awaited them in the world outside of Vegas.

  We handed the TSA woman at the front of the line our boarding passes and IDs. It made me nervous to have anyone examine the fakes, but we'd bought our tickets with them so we couldn't safely change them back until we left the airport in Detroit. She handed them back to us without even looking up at our faces.

  When we were about halfway to the metal detectors, a TSA officer stepped forward and grabbed our attention. "Can you two come this way?" she said. She disengaged one of the black retractable ropes that formed the maze that led to the security checkpoint and motioned for us to join her on the other side.

  "Is there a problem?" I asked, half laughing.

  "Not at all, sir. We're just testing out some new security equipment, so we're routing a few passengers at a time through it."

  "Will it take long?" asked Bill. "Our flight leaves in a half hour."

  "Not at all." She looked at the line of people still in front of us. "You might get through faster than the rest of them."

  Bill nodded at me, and we followed the woman around the maze of security ropes and through a short hallway that circumvented the metal detectors. She brought us to a doorway and opened it with her security card. "Right through here," she said, gesturing for us to enter first.

  I stepped into a small bright room with white walls and a set of hard chairs around a small table. Another door in the wall to the right stood closed. Bill entered after me, and the woman followed us both.

  "This doesn't look very high-tech," said Bill. He flashed her the grin he always used when he thought he might be in trouble and needed to charm his way out of it. I recognized it too well.

  The woman smiled. "This isn't it." She tapped her headset with a finger. "Are we ready?" she asked. A moment later, she nodded and smiled. "Right through there." She pointed at the door.

  As soon as I opened the door, I knew something was wrong. The room looked just like the other one – bare white walls and industrial gray carpeting – but there was nothing in it at all.

  I turned back to say something to Bill. As I did, I spotted Gaviota coming through the wall behind him.

  I grabbed Bill and pulled him after me as I backpedaled through the door.

  "What's the big–?"

  His back arched as every one of his muscles contracted at once. I heard the distinct crackle of an electrical discharge, and I could smell ozone in the air, as if lightning had struck inside the building. I caught him as he stumbled into me, and I saw the Taser dart sticking out of the back of his jacket.

  I have to admit I froze. I should have slipped through the floor then and gotten away. I should have gotten rid of the dart, tried to swap it out for air on the other side of the room, like Gaviota had done with the bullets I'd fired at him.

  Instead, my first instinct was to help my friend. Having grabbed Bill, I tried to hold him up and failed. He was too heavy, and I'd not been braced for his fall as I moved backward through the door.

  As Bill slipped to the floor, Gaviota shot me with a second Taser dart. It stabbed right through my shirt and into the flesh of my chest. I didn't have any time to think about how much that hurt, though, because the shock that coursed through me right after that blotted out every other sensation in my entire body.

  As every muscle in my body clenched at once, I gurgled in pain and toppled over backward to the floor. Bill landed on my legs, and we both writhed there for an instant, hurting horribly but unable to give voice to it.

  When the current stopped flowing, Bill howled in agony, and I echoed him a moment later. Before I could clear my head, I felt hands on me, grabbing me by my chest and shoulders and hauling me to my feet. They shoved me into one of the hard chairs at the small table in the first room and held me there, a hand clamped under each of my upper arms.

  The TSA woman had disappeared, but four unforgiving large men in dark suits had taken her place. Two of them held Bill, and the other two held me. Gaviota sat across the table from us and glared at each of us in turn.

  Bill started hollering for help, and I joined in too. While Gaviota and his men might have gotten one TSA woman to help them capture us, I figured that there had to be someone within the sound of our voices that might be able to help. At the moment, I was willing to confess everything to anyone – the fake IDs, the gambling, even the magic – if it meant we could leave Vegas alive.

  Gaviota reached across the table and slapped Bill's face. When he turned to me, I joined Bill in shutting up before I had to be smacked into it.

  "No one here is going to help you boys." Gaviota said. "This is our town. We run things here."

  "Not everything," I said. "You don't own everyone."

  He smiled at me as if I were a slow but promising child. "Let's just say we have a controlling interest then."

  "What are you going to do with us?" Bill asked.

  The question had been on my mind too, but I hadn't been about to ask it. I was too afraid that I wouldn't like the answer.

  Gaviota folded his hands on the table before him and gave us a professionally pleasant smile, like a banker about to set out the terms of a loan. "Let's start over, boys. I'm Benito Gaviota. You can call me Ben."

  "Hi, Ben," I said. "You don't seem mad at us."

  "Why should I be?"

  Bill and I gaped at him.

  "Oh, that incident at the Bolthole?" He grunted. "Don't let that bother you."

  "It doesn't bother you?" said Bill.

  "Of course not." He gestured at his placid face. "Do I look bothered?"

  "I shot you in the face," I said.

  Gaviota stuck up a finger. "You
tried
to shoot me in the face. You failed. But that's not important. Not at all."

  Bill and I glanced at each other, confused. The men holding us didn't look at us or even move a muscle. I realized, though, why Gaviota had them pinning us to our chairs by our arms. If we tried to pass through the chair and the floor to get away, we'd get hung up on their hands. He'd effectively trapped us in the room with him. We had little choice but to hear him out.

  "Then why did you keep chasing us?"

  Gaviota sat back in his chair. "Because you got away." He said it as if it explained everything.

  "I don't get it."

  "If you boys had just let us, we would have taken our chips back and then thrown you out of the casino, just like we do with every average cheater we catch."

  "We weren't cheating," Bill said.

  Gaviota gave him a cold wink. "Call it what you like. The fact is that just using a bit of magic to manipulate the cards isn't such a big thing. We deal with people who manage that all the time. Some of them don't even know they're doing it."

  He shook his head. "No, what's important is that you two had enough mojo going to get away from us. To get away from me. And that hasn't happened in a very long time."

  I might have felt a burst of pride at that if I hadn't been so damned scared.

  "That's very kind of you, but our flight leaves in twenty minutes," Bill said. "It's probably boarding right now."

  "Don't worry about that," said Gaviota. "You're going to miss it. We have an appointment to keep."

  "What are you talking about?" I asked.

  "The big boss wants to see you," he said, "now more than ever."

  He stood up. With a jerk of his head, he signaled for the men holding Bill and me to haul us to our feet.

  "It's time someone finally told you the rules of the game you're playing, boys. That way, you can be sure that you wind up on the right team."

  "And whose team is that?" Bill asked.

  "The winning team," said Gaviota. "Ours."

 
 

CHAPTER FIFTEEN
 

A black stretch limousine brought us back to Bootleggers from the airport. The men who'd helped Gaviota capture us kept their hands on us the entire time. I had no desire to slip through the floor of a moving car and wind up in the center of the interstate, but they were determined to make sure that neither Bill nor I gave it a try.

  By the time we reached Bootleggers, it was two in the morning. Despite that, the adrenaline coursing through me kept me from even letting loose a single yawn. My life as I knew it was on the line here, and that kept me more alert than any energy drink.

  The limo slipped around the back of the casino and into a private parking structure directly under the place. Gaviota led us out of the car and into an oversized elevator. With a flick of his security card, it took us on a nonstop trip to the penthouse suite atop the hotel tower.

  "Who is this big boss?" I asked.

  "Are either of you a student of history?" Gaviota asked.

  I shook my head. "Engineering."

  "Political science," Bill said. "Mostly European conflicts."

  Gaviota gave a resigned nod. "Then this will likely be lost on you."

  The elevator doors opened, and Gaviota and his men led us into the penthouse. The room we stood in occupied half of the tower's entire top floor. It was as large as a ballroom, but it served as an office and a place to entertain guests.

  A fireplace crackled off to the left, flames leaping from a woodless stove to take some of the night chill out of the room. A set of couches and chairs – enough to seat twenty or thirty people – clustered around it, but they all stood empty. Tall windows broken up only by overstuffed bookshelves lined the walls. Beyond them, the Strip sparkled in all its neon, incandescent, and LED glory.

  To the right sat an office area dominated by a broad desk made of a thick slab of polished gray granite standing atop four marble pillars carved to resemble bones so large they would have had to come from an elephant's leg. The whole thing was skirted with more of the gray granite, and it reminded me of the aboveground graves scattered about New Orleans cemeteries. Stacks of shuffled papers and ancient scrolls covered one side of the desk, and a large flat-screen computer monitor stood on the other. No one sat in the highbacked chair that stood behind it.

  Black marble tiles covered the floor except for a wide, sandy-colored path that led from the elevator to an open set of double doors straight across the room from it. These let out onto a wide balcony that ran all the way around the penthouse.

  "He's not here," Gaviota said, "but he should be any minute."

  The men holding us didn't say a word. They hadn't muttered even a single syllable the entire time.

  Gaviota turned to us. "A word to the wise. When he tells you who he is, even if you've never heard of him before, pretend you have."

  "What?" I said. "Why?"

  Gaviota sucked at his teeth. "He was famous once, and while he may live like a hermit these days, he still likes to think people remember him. He calls it his legacy."

  "Can't you just tell us all about him right now?" Bill asked.

  "What?" Gaviota smiled. "And spoil all his fun? I wouldn't dream of it."

  We stood there in silence for a full minute, the tension mounting with every second. Gaviota eventually turned to his men and signaled for them to let Bill and me go. While they relinquished their iron grips on our arms, they did not back off far.

  "The floors here are lined with something no one can phase through," Gaviota said. "I don't care how powerful you are."

  "What is it?" I asked.

  "You don't want to know."

  I decided to take him at his word. Even if I could have slipped away through the floor, I had no doubts that I wouldn't get far, and the man had piqued my curiosity. I wasn't leaving until I knew exactly who his boss might be.

  A chilly gust of desert night wind blew through the open doors at the edge of the room, bringing a man with it. He swooped down out of the midnight sky, and alighted in the center of the balcony. His momentum carried him forward into the room as he touched down, and the doors swung shut behind him.

  "Hello, Ben," the man said, his voice dry and raspy. "I'm relieved to see you've brought our guests."

  "As requested, Mr Weiss." Gaviota stood up straighter and motioned for Bill and me to come forward. When we hesitated, his men gave us each a little shove. "We found them at the airport."

  The man allowed himself a tight smile as he strode forward, dressed in a classically styled black suit with a white shirt but no tie. He did not offer us his hand but instead gave us a little bow.