Dark Sundays

by Donn Cortez

  But that wasn’t what caught Nick’s attention. At the far side of the arena was an oversize cannon, painted a lurid purple with red stars running the length of the barrel. “Is that what I think it is?” Nick said, a wide grin on his face.

  “Absolutely. We’re declaring war on Utah and using that to shell the Mormons.”

  Nick was already striding toward it. “A human-cannonball act. I didn’t think anybody did those anymore.”

  “The classics never die. They just get a new coat of paint and a hip-hop soundtrack.”

  Nick stopped in front of the cannon and peered into the barrel. “Man, this is great. When I was a kid, this was number one on my list of future careers.”

  “Don’t be too eager. The attrition rate is more than sixty percent—mostly by missing the net at the other end. There was one famous act, the Zacchinis, who thought they’d shake things up by doubling the danger—they used two cannons, one at either end of the arena, firing simultaneously. You’ll never guess what happened.”

  “They didn’t.“

  “They did. In midair. Both of them survived, but one broke her back.” Shayduko slapped a hand on the barrel. “It’s a lot harder than you might think, even when you don’t have to dodge a family member going the other way. First of all, the cylinder that launches you is compressed into the base of the barrel at a pressure of two hundred pounds per square inch. When that gets released, it throws you into the air at around seventy miles an hour. You’d better have strong leg muscles, because you have to keep your body as straight and aerodynamic as possible to control your trajectory.”

  Shayduko walked around the other side of the cannon, then pointed to the net set up against the opposite wall of the arena. “If you don’t hit that, you’re pretty much a stain on the wall. But just hitting it isn’t enough; you go into it headfirst, you’ll probably snap your neck. So you have to turn in midair, just enough that you land your back instead of your front.”

  “Okay, I’m reconsidering.”

  Shayduko chuckled. “Oh, and sometimes the g-forces make you black out for a second. Or so I’m told.”

  “Don’t believe a word he says,” said a voice from the bleachers. “He’s a terrible liar.”

  Nick looked up. A man sat sprawled out in a seat a few rows up, holding one hand to the back of his neck. He wore only baggy black shorts and sneakers, his lean chest bare and hairless. His hair was short and chestnut-brown, his features sharp.

  “Fyodor,” said Shayduko. His voice was neutral. “Shouldn’t you be out drinking?”

  Fyodor took his hand from behind his head, and Nick saw that it held a bag of ice. “Got an early start today,” said Fyodor. “Already done.”

  “Such an industrious lad,” said Shayduko. “Mr. Stokes, this is Fyodor Brish. He’s our walking, talking ammunition.”

  Fyodor winced and moved the bag of ice to his shoulder. “Talking, yes. Walking, I’m not so sure.”

  “Rough night?” asked Nick.

  “No more than any other,” said Fyodor. “It’s not being fired out of a cannon that’s hard on you—it’s the sudden stop at the end.”

  “I’ll bet. You do the pyro for this, too, Mr. Shayduko?”

  Shayduko nodded. “The compressed air does all the work, but I throw in a few fireworks to give it a bang and some smoke. You show people a big gun, they want to hear a big boom.”

  Nick nodded. “Well, I’ve taken up enough of your time. Thanks for showing me around.”

  Shayduko shrugged. “My pleasure. Good luck with finding your mad zeppelinist.”

  By the time he got back to his Denali, Nick was frowning. Something was nagging at him, but he wasn’t quite sure what.

  He was halfway back to the lab when it hit him.

  “Well, well, well,” Nick murmured, staring at the monitor in the AV lab.

  Greg walked up behind him. “Pictures from the penthouse party?”

  “Yeah. I pulled these from cell-phone footage of the dirigible. See that guy in the corner?” The man Nick pointed to was out of focus and half turned away.

  “Yeah, so?”

  “So I think I know who he is—and he’s definitely not on the guest list.”

  “If he wasn’t on the guest list, how’d he get in?”

  “You’re not going to believe it. I’m not sure I believe it. In fact, I have to verify his identity before I even say it out loud.” Nick got up and headed for the door.

  “Where are you going?”

  “To talk to a man about a bathrobe.”

  Greg shrugged, then went looking for Hodges. He found him in the break room, drinking from a water bottle and leafing through a newspaper. “Hey, Hodges—you finish the analysis on that powder yet?”

  Hodges didn’t look up. “In case you hadn’t noticed, I am on a break.”

  “I was just wondering—”

  Hodges sighed. “Yes, yes, I’m finished. I take it you’re talking about the powder you found in the hotel room of the Panhandle and not one of the million other random powders I’m expected to identify on a daily basis?”

  “Well, yeah.”

  “Mostly silica and calcium carbonate, with some sodium, magnesium, and iron. If you want the exact figures, you’ll have to wait another”—Hodges glanced at his watch—“seven minutes to get them. Oh, the suspense.”

  “Silica, sodium, magnesium, iron—that sounds like diatomaceous earth.”

  “Or in other words, tiny little ground-up fossils. The calcium carbonate, on the other hand—”

  “—could have come from all sorts of sources: eggshells, snails, seashells, even pearls. The question is, what were they doing together?”

  “It’s not that I don’t care,” said Hodges. “But I’m going to pretend I don’t for the next. . . six minutes.”

  * * *

  Ian Stackwell was off shift, so Nick got his address from the security office and went to see him at home.

  Stackwell lived in a modest five-story apartment building at the edge of town. The voice that answered the buzzer was female and sounded half-asleep. “Yes? Whuzzit?”

  “Sorry to disturb you, ma’am. I’m with the Las Vegas Crime Lab, and I need to speak to Ian. Is he there?”

  “He’s sleeping.”

  “Can you get him up? It’s important.”

  “Yeah, yeah, okay. Come on up.”

  The door buzzed and unlocked. Nick took the creaking elevator up to the fourth floor, where a five-year-old in a cowboy hat tried to shoot him repeatedly with a stick. “Bang! Bang! Bang!”

  “Bulletproof vest, pardner.” Nick tapped his chest. “Better luck next time.”

  “But I shot you in the head,” the boy said with implacable logic.

  “Uh—bulletproof head?”

  “Nuh-uh,” the boy said, then ran down the hall and around the corner.

  Nick knocked on Stackwell’s door. A sleepy-eyed woman in a nightshirt opened it and asked to see his ID before letting him in. “He’s getting dressed,” she said, stifling a yawn. “You want some coffee?”

  “I’m good, thanks.”

  Ian Stackwell walked out a moment later, barefoot but wearing jeans and a black T-shirt. “Mr. Stokes,” he said, offering his hand. Nick shook it. “What can I help you with?”

  “Sorry to bother you at home, but I was hoping you could take a look at a photo for me.” Nick pulled out a publicity still he’d pulled off the Web. “Does this guy look familiar?”

  Stackwell took the picture and studied it. “Yeah. This is the guy who vouched for the man in the wheelchair and his nurse.”

  “The one in the bathrobe, right?”

  “Yeah. Who is he?”

  “Someone who went to a lot of trouble to go for a swim,” said Nick.

  Nick wasn’t gone long. Back at the lab, he’d gone straight to a computer terminal and begun working, and it had been another twenty minutes before he’d even talk to Greg—who was now regarding his fellow CSI skeptically.

  “Let
me get this straight,” said Greg. “You’re saying this guy cannonballed into a rooftop pool. Literally cannonballed.”

  “I know how crazy it sounds. But the guard ID’d him—and the research I’ve done says it’s possible.”

  Greg crossed his arms. “Convince me.”

  “All right. The world record for being fired from a cannon is a hundred and eighty-five feet. Usually the cannonballer lands in a net, but sometimes he lands in water.”

  “I’m guessing that the water usually isn’t in a pool twenty stories up.”

  “There’s a new casino being built right beside the Panhandle, but construction’s been suspended because of financing problems. Want to guess how tall it is?”

  “Just a little taller than the Panhandle—I noticed it when we were on the roof.”

  “You happen to notice how far away its roof was?”

  Greg thought about it. “I’d say around a hundred and fifty feet.”

  “Within firing range.”

  “But it’s still twenty stories up. How do you get a cannon up there in the first place?”

  “I don’t know,” said Nick, “but maybe we should go have a look.”

  There was no guard at the gate surrounding the casino construction site, but the chain on the padlocked gate had been cut and then draped back in place.

  “Doesn’t seem to be any security around,” said Greg.

  “Hard to justify guarding a half-finished shell when you can’t pay the construction crew.” Nick pulled the chain aside and opened the gate. He and Greg walked in.

  Other than some fast-food garbage blowing around, the place seemed devoid of any human activity. The only piece of heavy equipment still present was a crane, perched on the roof like a gigantic yellow praying mantis. A tangle of steel girders lay rusting in the sun, while a small mountain of stacked concrete blocks rose beside the fence. Bits of cast-off lumber and PVC piping littered the ground.

  “I think I’ve got something,” said Greg. He nudged a large, curving piece of plastic with his foot.

  Nick walked over and joined him. “Looks like pieces of a pipe.”

  “Yeah, a big pipe. From the arc of this piece, I’d say that when it was intact, it would have to have a diameter of at least two and a half, three feet.”

  Nick studied the ground around the shard. “Look at this—the pieces are scattered in a circle radiating out from this point.”

  “Impact crater?” Greg looked up. Twenty stories above them, the hook of the crane dangled at the end of a thick steel cable.

  “Could be. The cannon is basically just a big cylinder of compressed air with a single piston, right? Pretty easy to fabricate. You could even charge it somewhere else, haul it out here on the back of a truck, then use the crane to hoist it into position.”

  “Okay, then—how do you aim?”

  Nick rubbed the back of his neck. “It’d be tricky, but it could be done—especially if you had years of experience in doing the same thing over and over. Know how they get the range just right for a real human cannonball? They fire a test dummy that weighs exactly the same as the flesh-and-blood payload.”

  “I guess it would be pretty easy to set up once you had it on the roof.”

  “Sure. Use a sighting laser to get an accurate distance reading . . .”

  Nick trailed off. He and Greg looked at each other.

  “We are so doing a simulation of this,” said Greg.

  Nick grinned.

  * * *

  A search of the abandoned construction site produced something else of interest: several empty gas cylinders on the roof.

  “I think we’ve found the launch site for the dirigible,” said Nick. He glanced around. “Makes sense—plenty of space up here to inflate the envelope and less of a chance anyone will notice when you take off.”

  “Then all you have to do,” said Greg, “is make it a hundred and fifty feet straight across to the party. The dirigible itself is black, which lessens the chance anyone will see it from the street. And once everyone’s watching one act—”

  “—act number two steps onto the stage.”

  “Except nobody’s supposed to notice his entrance. While the entire party is watching an inflatable clown go down in flames, this guy is making a water landing in the pool.”

  Nick shook his head. “After which he climbs out, grabs a robe and a towel from poolside, and saunters up to the guard watching the elevator—just in time to vouch for his two friends downstairs.”

  “One hell of a way to crash a party, you gotta admit.”

  “Sure—but why? So far, there doesn’t seem to be any reason to go to all this trouble. Nothing was stolen, nobody was hurt.”

  “The casino’s rep took a hit,” Greg pointed out. “Maybe that’s what this is all about.”

  “I don’t know. The bear attack, maybe. But this was all done just to get three people—four if you count the missing security guard—on the roof of the Panhandle.”

  “Where they apparently did nothing but a little freelance acrobatic work.”

  Nick nodded, a frown on his face. “I think I know what the remote we found in the pool was for. It was the trigger for the cannon.”

  “So he had it in his hand the whole way, then dropped it on impact?” Greg thought about it. “Having the cannonball launch himself probably means our little troupe was running low on manpower. We’ve got four people so far, plus whoever was controlling the dirigible.”

  “Who’d need line of sight for the aircraft. The controller would have to be in a place to see both the launch site and the far side of the hotel.”

  “There’s another hotel right across the street. The controller could have been in any of the rooms facing this way, with a joystick in one hand and a pair of binoculars in the other.”

  Nick nodded. “Obviously this is getting more insane by the moment. Let’s process this site—maybe we can get a print from one of the cylinders or the chain they cut. I’ll check out the crane, too. They had to have used it to hoist the cannon into position.”

  “I’ll take a closer look at the impact site, if you don’t mind.” said Greg. “Frankly, I’m getting kinda tired of rooftops.”

  There were certain things you just shouldn’t do when you were drunk, Sara thought as she pulled into the parking lot of the strip mall. Driving was at the top of the list—as she’d learned, to her own regret—cleaning your gun was a close second, and calling an ex was probably number three. It said a lot about Vegas that besides the almost unlimited opportunities for alcohol abuse, you could also rent an exotic vehicle or drop by a shooting range to fire an AK-47. Nobody had come up with a reliable way to make money off number three, but it was probably only a matter of time.

  She wasn’t sure where getting a tattoo ranked on that list, but it had to be in the top ten—which was undoubtedly why Vegas had more than its fair share of tattoo parlors.

  The storefront she parked in front of was called Grinning Bastard Ink. The sign was elaborate and colorful, no doubt painted by the resident artist, and featured many skulls, roses, crosses, and red-skinned, horned devil-women. But that wasn’t what caught Sara’s eye; at one end of the sign was a small representation of a church with three steeples, and at the opposite end was a pirate with an eye patch.

  When she pulled the glass door open, the wave of cold air that met her was almost like walking into a freezer; the owner apparently didn’t care for Nevada temperatures. Or maybe, she thought as she stepped inside, he just preferred working on frozen meat.

  The shop was long and narrow, the walls lined with tattoo designs that ranged from cute to grim, from prosaic to exotic. An autoclave stood on a stainless-steel table at the back, next to a sharps container with a decal identifying it as medical waste. There was a tattoo bed and two tattoo chairs, one of which was occupied; several bright lights on tall, adjustable stands stood guard over the single customer, a scrawny-chested man with his shirt off and a nervous expression on his face. His hair was
ginger flecked with gray, a prominent bald spot on top, and he looked as if he was having second thoughts about what he was doing there.

  “Hi,” said Sara. “Is the owner around?”

  “Uh, he just went into the back to get something,” the man said. “He’ll be right back. Can I ask you a question?”

  “Usually, that’s my line. What about?”

  The man handed her a piece of paper with a design on it. “Do you think this will look good on my chest? I mean, is it me?”

  She took the paper and studied it. “Hmmm.”

  “Well?”

  “I think it might be a little much.”

  “Really?”

  “No offense. I just met you, so maybe I’m way off base. Just my gut reaction.”

  The man nodded, the worried look on his face now deeper. “Yeah. Yeah, no problem, thanks for being honest.”

  “Maybe you should give it a little more thought?”

  “I think you’re right.” The man got to his feet and grabbed his shirt from a nearby hook. “Thanks. Uh, when he comes back, can you tell him—”

  “I’ll handle it, no problem.”

  The man practically ran out the door. Sara smiled, shook her head, and put the picture down on a table crowded with gleaming equipment.

  A door at the back opened. A man with long, shaggy black hair, three chins, and a double-wide build squeezed himself through the doorway, carrying a bottle of ink in one hand; Sara guessed he must weigh close to three hundred and fifty pounds. He shuffled forward, frowning when he saw that his customer was no longer in sight. “Dammit,” he said, his voice deep and scratchy. “I knew he was a rabbit when I laid eyes on him. Spends forty-five minutes trying to pick a design, then bolts when my back is turned. I should be able to use anesthesia, like a dentist. Or maybe leather straps on the chair.”

  “You can blame me. I’m afraid I didn’t have a high opinion of his choice.”

  The man smiled at her. “Yeah, me neither. Didn’t think he had the style to pull it off, but once he finally settled on something, I wasn’t gonna argue.”