The Scam

by Janet Evanovich

  “That you’ve spent two long years infiltrating Nick Sweet’s criminal operation to bring him down, but now that he’s in the wind, you’re screwed and looking for a way to turn a disaster into a win,” Nick said. “So you’ll offer Trace protection from the Yakuza, the Canadian mob, and the Somali warlords if he agrees to rat out all of the terrorists, despots, and crooks that he’s ever helped. Or you could keep him in business as an FBI front and gather invaluable intelligence. Either way, Trace will jump at the offer.”

  Kate smiled at her dad. “He’s good.”

  “Not as good as you,” Jake said. “Because you caught him.”

  “Hey,” Nick said. “Whose side are you on?”

  “Kate’s,” Jake said. “Always.”

  Nick nodded. “As it should be.”

  “I think your scam is great,” Jake said, “but in the meantime, I’m not convinced that Harlan will be safe from Alika. So there’s something I’d like to do before we go.”

  “I’m not going to let you blow up anything else,” Kate said. “Or kill anybody.”

  “Don’t worry,” Jake said. “All I have in mind is some friendly persuasion.”

  Kate raised an eyebrow. “Because that worked so well last time?”

  Jake grinned. “I think we’re developing a relationship.”

  —

  Da Grinds & Da Shave Ice was a dive restaurant with a red-dirt parking lot on the Kamehameha Highway near Kahuku. It was a wooden shack with a corrugated metal roof that extended out over a sagging porch and a few picnic tables. Food was served through a takeout window that had a hand-painted, flaking menu board beside it.

  The restaurant was owned by Lono Alika, who was often the only patron besides the occasional ignorant tourists who didn’t know any better and never would because they were always politely served and not harassed in any way. But the locals saw it for what it was—Alika’s front office, a place you didn’t go unless you were summoned, which inevitably meant pain and suffering, or if you sought his help, which also inevitably meant pain and suffering. Everyone on the North Shore knew him but few wanted him to know them.

  Alika sat at his picnic table, eating a plate lunch, when Jake took a seat across from the 350-pound, six-foot-tall, bald-headed Hawaiian. The huge man, who always wore a tank top and board shorts to show off the Polynesian tattoos that covered his arms and legs, looked up from his two scoops of white rice, macaroni salad, teriyaki chicken, and short ribs and regarded Jake with a slow, sleepy gaze.

  “Eh, watchu want, buggah?” Alika said, speaking in Hawaiian pidgin English, the local dialect.

  “I want you to apologize to my friend Harlan Appleton and buy him a new food truck.”

  “Last time you say dat I have my men chase you into da woods, you old fut.”

  “And I put three of your men in the hospital.”

  Alika showed his teeth like a dog, and started to rise from his seat. “I’m gonna give you da dirty lickin’s and put you in da ground.”

  “I wouldn’t if I were you.” Jake calmly wagged a finger at him in warning. “Do you really think I’d be here without backup? You’re in the crosshairs of a sniper right now.” Jake pointed his finger at Alika’s chest.

  Alika looked down and saw a red laser dot over his heart, then looked up into the dense thicket of trees that was alongside the restaurant and that ran up the slope to the mountains beyond. He sat back down, but his face was tomato red with rage.

  “How I know dat’s not just some fool wit’ a laser pointer in da trees?”

  “You don’t. So go ahead and make your move, though you’re so fat and slow, I could probably save my friend a bullet and kill you myself before you cleared the bench.”

  Alika snorted. “Oh, yeah? How you do dat, old man?”

  Jake tipped his head toward Alika’s plate lunch. “I’d shove that fork in your neck and watch you choke to death on your own blood.”

  Jake was relaxed when he spoke, and his general posture conveyed complete confidence in his safety. It clearly unnerved Alika, who swiped his fork off the table.

  “Say what you wanna say,” Alika said. “Tink hard cuz dey be your last words.”

  “First off, Harlan had nothing to do with what happened to your pickup truck. I did that on my own. Secondly, my friend doesn’t owe you anything. He’s already paid his dues on the battlefield so mokes like you can enjoy your freedom. So you’re going to show him some respect and back off.”

  “We have dis talk before. If he fool nuff to go back in business, he pays me or he gets real buss’up. Dat’s how it is.”

  “Harlan has a lot of friends on this island from his days in the military,” Jake said. “Whatever happens to him, happens to you. That’s how it is. That’s how it was with your truck.”

  Alika looked down at the laser targeting dot on his chest then back at Jake. “I wanna show you something. Come wit’ me.”

  “Only if we stay in the open.”

  “Chillax,” Alika said, rising slowly, the dot moving along with him as he walked off the porch to the red-dirt parking lot. “I want you to meet somebody.”

  Alika stopped and pointed at the ground. Jake looked down and saw a man buried up to his neck in red dirt, his face sunburned and crawling with ants. The man opened one pleading eye for a moment, then quickly closed it again before an ant could crawl in.

  “Dis Kimo,” Alika said. “His job was to take care of my truck. Now he got a new job. He fertilizer.”

  Kimo whimpered.

  “It wasn’t his fault,” Jake said. “Dig him out.”

  “I will, maybe tonight, maybe tomorrow,” Alika said. “Point is, I evah see you again, dat brah be you, only you stay buried till the ants get fat an’ I see yo’ skull.”

  —

  Jake drove up the highway for fifty yards, and then pulled over to the shoulder to pick up Kate, who was dressed in camo and carried a rifle case. She climbed in and Jake drove off.

  “Thanks for covering me,” he said.

  “Any time.”

  “I think Alika will lay off Harlan for the time being. But I’m worried about that guy in the dirt.”

  “Don’t be. Alika won’t kill the guy now that he’s shown him off to you. It’s too risky. You could call the cops. But to be on the safe side, I’ll ask Steadman to swing by.”

  “Were you tempted to shoot Alika while you had him in your sights?”

  “Hell, yes,” she said.

  “What stopped you?”

  “The rifle wasn’t loaded,” she said.

  Nick and Jake left Honolulu later that afternoon. Kate stayed behind and met with the local FBI agent in charge. She asked him to let Alika know that it would be very bad for his business if any further harm came to Harlan Appleton. The agent said he’d be glad to do it. Next she drove to Kahuku and visited Lieutenant Gregg Steadman at the Kahuku police station to make the same request and to inform him that Jake was safely off the island.

  Steadman agreed to have a word with Alika, too, and was confident that Harlan wouldn’t be harassed any further, at least not until he opened another food truck in the sugar mill parking lot. Kate was counting on Alika being out of the picture by the time Harlan was ready to open for business again.

  The next morning Kate caught the first flight to Las Vegas. She arrived late in the afternoon and took a taxi straight to the Treasure Island casino to see Billy Dee Snipes, a retired Somali pirate. Billy Dee now lived in a condo complex in Summerlin for “active seniors,” and liked to spend his afternoons playing the nickel slots. In the past he had occasionally worked with Kate’s father on some black-ops missions in the South China Sea. More recently Billy Dee had worked with Kate and Nick on a con in Portugal.

  Kate found Billy Dee sitting at a Blazing Sevens slot machine near the buffet, drinking a cocktail with one hand and tapping the “spin” button with the other. He looked like a scarecrow in a blue tracksuit, propped on a stool to keep birds away from the machines.

 
Although Billy Dee appeared to be mortally ill or suffering from starvation, Kate had been assured by her father that the pirate had always had zero percent body fat.

  Kate sat down at the slot machine next to Billy Dee. “I hope you haven’t fed that machine all of the money you made from us.”

  Billy Dee turned and smiled at her. “I believe my savings are safe at my current rate of play.”

  “How would you feel about switching your game to baccarat for a while?”

  “Well, baccarat is all luck and no skill, like slots, and the house edge is small, but they don’t let you play baccarat for a nickel a hand. I’d burn through my retirement money way too fast. So, I think I’ll stick to this.”

  In fact, he hadn’t stopped playing for a second while he spoke with her. He constantly tapped the spin button as if it were a necessary part of his breathing.

  “How would you feel about playing high-stakes baccarat in Macau with our money? We don’t care if you win or lose and we’ll pay you a hundred thousand dollars to do it.”

  “What’s the catch?” he asked.

  “You’d have to travel to Hong Kong from Mogadishu and pretend to be a ruthless Somali pirate.”

  “I am a ruthless Somali pirate,” he said.

  She gestured to his feet. “You’re wearing sneakers with Velcro straps.”

  “You need comfortable footwear to be ruthless.”

  “You’ll be playing the part of a Somali pirate who is gambling with the millions of dollars that you’ve made hijacking oil tankers and cargo ships in the Strait of Malacca,” Kate said. “But what you’ll really be doing is helping us bring down a casino money laundering operation. If it goes wrong, you don’t need to worry about getting arrested. You’ll need to worry about getting out of Macau alive.”

  “That used to be the charm of Macau. You always had to worry about getting killed. For five hundred years, it was a Portuguese trading port for smugglers, slavers, and pirates. I sold a lot of stolen ships and cargoes there. But then the Portuguese handed Macau over to the Chinese and they turned it into this.” Billy Dee waved his hand around to indicate the casino around them. “Treasure Island. The world is becoming too clean and safe. Soon there won’t be any place left where hookers, assassins, and thieves roam the streets and will slit your throat for the coins in your pocket.”

  “Most people don’t have a problem with that change.”

  “Most people aren’t ruthless Somali pirates. We like a little danger in our lives, and since I have absolutely none now, I’d be glad to gamble with your money and my life. When do I leave for Mogadishu?”

  “In a couple days,” she said. “We still have arrangements to make, identities to create, and documents to forge. Speaking of which, I’ve got to go back to the airport and catch a flight to Los Angeles tonight.”

  “How about having a bite with me before you go? My treat.” He took his Treasure Island Players Club card out of the slot machine and held it up. “I get a club discount at the buffet and it opens for dinner in five minutes.”

  Kate checked her watch. “It’s only four thirty.”

  “So you’re not going to join me?”

  “Of course I will,” Kate said. “It’s never too early for an all-you-can-eat buffet.”

  —

  A few blocks from Treasure Island, Evan Trace sat at his million-dollar desk in his office suite atop the Côte d’Argent tower. His desk was essentially an iPad the size of a dining room table, and he was typing furiously on his virtual keyboard and making lots of mistakes. He’d been a lousy typist even before his hands were smashed with a mallet.

  Elsewhere on the desktop, hundreds of security camera images from throughout the casino played in thumbnails like a checkerboard tablecloth with animated squares. If he wanted to, he could touch and expand any of the video squares to full screen or shuffle them around like mahjong tiles. But he wasn’t interested in that right now. All of his attention was focused on the email he was writing to TMZ, the notorious gossip website and TV show.

  He’d logged onto the TMZ site as Emilia Guttierez, a nonexistent Côte d’Argent maid, a character he’d created as a seemingly legitimate front for the anonymous tips that he regularly sent to the media. To make Emilia more credible, just in case anyone decided to snoop, he’d put her on the Côte d’Argent payroll, rented an apartment for her, and had credit cards and various utility company accounts opened in her name.

  Trace was tipping off TMZ that a world-famous young singer, a twenty-year-old man who’d once been a Disney star, had just registered in the hotel under the pseudonym Bolt Stryker and had two cross-dressers in his room. He attached a photo to Emilia’s email of the disguised singer slipping into the hotel through the VIP entrance and another photo of him letting the two “ladies” into his room. Trace added one more line.

  He’s with them right now!!! You can’t ever say where you got this information or hint that it was someone on the cleaning staff. After the last tip I sent you, Trace went ballistic and threatened to fire every single employee.

  Trace was sure that the news would go viral on a global scale and would generate a million dollars’ worth of free publicity for Côte d’Argent. Of course, he’d booked the room for the singer, he’d arranged for the cross-dressing hookers, and promised him absolute secrecy. But Trace didn’t have any qualms about breaking that promise, or lying to the singer about it later when the news broke. The lurid publicity, and with it the constant association of Côte d’Argent with celebrity and scandal, was worth a lot more to Trace than the singer’s future business. He clicked the SEND button just as Niles Goodwell, his manager of player relations, waddled in like an enormous penguin.

  “I hope I’m not disturbing you,” Goodwell said.

  “Not at all. I was just catching up on my email.”

  “I got a call from Nick Sweet, the guy who blew a couple million at one of our blackjack tables last week,” Goodwell said. “He’s wired fifteen million dollars from a bank account in St. Kitts to our casino in Macau to establish a credit line.”

  It was amazing to Trace what he could accomplish with his personal touch. High rollers like Sweet were always flattered to get attention from the man in charge, and it took the sting out of their gambling losses. It had obviously sealed the deal this time.

  “Make sure he gets the royal treatment,” Trace said. “Offer to fly him to Macau on our jet as our guest. Comp his suite and have one of our chauffeur-driven Rolls-Royce Phantoms available for his personal use at all times during his stay. Whatever he desires, he gets, especially if it’s kinky and disgraceful. That way we’ve got leverage to use against him in the future. We want him to continue losing his money with us until we have it all.”

  “There’s just one wrinkle, sir,” Goodwell said. “Sweet doesn’t want the credit for his own play. He’d like to establish an account with us as a junket operator so he can bring in some high rollers. He’s asking for a VIP suite with a baccarat table and all of the amenities.”

  “We’ll still treat him well, but don’t offer to fly him in. He’ll have to get himself and his guests to Macau and pay top dollar for his rooms,” Trace said. “But at least now we know what his short visit here was all about. He wanted to show us his credentials.”

  “We don’t know anything about him,” Goodwell said. “All he showed us was his money.”

  “That’s all that matters,” Trace said. “Especially now.”

  Trace was on the brink of a bold expansion in Macau. In addition to his existing property in old Macau, he wanted to build a much larger resort. Monde d’Argent would sit on the Cotai Strip, two square miles of reclaimed land that joined the former islands of Taipa and Coloane into one.

  The Cotai Strip was already home to the Venetian Macao, the largest hotel casino complex on earth, and a half dozen other mega-casinos that were either finished or in the midst of being built. If his company was going to survive, Trace believed that he had to be on the Cotai Strip, too. He des
perately needed the revenue that came from high-roller play to fund the construction. But there was a problem.

  “There’s new leadership in China and they’re cracking down on high-level corruption on the mainland,” Trace told Goodwell. “It’s a publicity stunt, and it’ll go away in a few months, but until then, the richest people in China are afraid to draw attention to themselves by gambling in Macau. This couldn’t have come at a worse time for me. We’ve broken ground on Monde d’Argent and everybody is fighting over the handful of high rollers that are left.”

  “I understand that, sir,” Goodwell said. “But I don’t trust Sweet and Porter. I’m worried that they are working on some kind of a big score.”

  “I’m certain they are, but I can’t let them take their fifteen million dollars and their future business across the street to one of the other casinos,” Trace said. “So we’ll welcome Sweet and we’ll keep our eyes on him. Just make sure that he knows the ground rules. We run the table and the chips need to be rolled three times.”

  That meant that Nick’s whales would have to gamble their chips at least three times, greatly increasing their chances of losing their initial stake and any winnings they got along the way.

  “Our dealer in the room will stay on top of it,” Goodwell said. “We’ll watch every chip and guarantee that the games are honest.”

  “When is this junket supposed to come in?”

  “Next Wednesday.”

  That was a week away. “What do we know about his guests?”

  “Nothing, sir,” Goodwell said. “Do you really want to know about them?”

  It was a sensible question to ask. It was often better not to know who was in the room, especially if the players were coming to Côte d’Argent Macau to launder their money. The junkets gave Trace plausible deniability if the money was used to finance the bombing of a U.S. embassy somewhere and the Justice Department ever started asking him questions. But Trace’s curiosity was stronger than his caution.

  “Get whatever information you can,” Trace said. “But make sure your inquiries don’t leave a trail of any kind back to us.”