The Casino Switcheroo

by Michael P. King

Sanchez shook his head.

  “No,” Raymond said.

  “Then there’s no reason to panic. We’re all safe right where we are. Get the money counter and run all these bills. We need to know how much we really have and if any of it is counterfeit. And Sanchez, just to be on the safe side, take these duffels across town and dump them somewhere.”

  “We already found the transmitters,” Raymond said.

  “But they weren’t turned on. So there could be one you missed,” Koenig said. “We’re getting rid of the bags.”

  Sanchez dumped the rubber-banded bundles of cash onto the dining room table and left with the empty duffels. Raymond and the two men who’d stayed back with Koenig started running the money through the money counter and rebanding it in bundles of one hundred bills. While they were working, Hernandez came back with his two men.

  “Where you been?” Raymond asked.

  “Running an errand for the boss,” Hernandez replied. He and his men crowded up to the dining room table and looked over the money like dogs eyeing a steak. “Wow. So this is what two million looks like.”

  The man working the money counter smiled slyly. The other men murmured and nodded like the team that had won the championship.

  “Where’s the boss?” Hernandez asked.

  “In his bedroom,” Raymond replied.

  Hernandez went down the hall and knocked on the door.

  “Yeah?”

  He went in. Koenig lay on the bed. He had a magazine in his hand. “How did it go?”

  “They lost their tail at the parking deck, stopped in an alley but didn’t get out of the car, and then swapped out to the Prius.”

  Koenig nodded. “What did the tail look like?”

  “A man and a woman, good looking; they moved like they knew what they were doing.”

  “But Raymond lost them at the parking deck?”

  “Yes. We never saw them again.”

  “Keep an eye out for that couple. They are definitely trouble.”

  Meanwhile, Detectives Gower and Johnson sat on a sofa in the living room in the Smithson mansion, facing Jeffrey Smithson and his son, Tim. “Let me review what you’ve told us,” Gower said. “You got a call. You went to the old Bon Jest carpet mill. Two employees and your son were with you. There were two masked men in a black Explorer. They had assault rifles. You paid the ransom and got your grandson back.”

  “Exactly,” Smithson said.

  “You should have called us,” Johnson said.

  “Getting my grandson back was the only thing that mattered.”

  Gower turned to Tim. “Do you have anything to add?”

  “It’s just like my pop said.”

  “How much did you pay?” Johnson asked Smithson.

  “I’m not getting into that.”

  “You’re not going to tell us what you paid?”

  “As far as I’m concerned, this incident is closed.”

  “There was a kidnapping and attempted robbery. Men died. This case isn’t closed until we say it’s closed,” Johnson replied.

  Gower continued. “What are the names of the employees who were with you?”

  “David Ninovich and Mario Guzman.”

  “We’re going to need to talk to them and your grandson.”

  “You can talk to them, but you won’t hear anything different.”

  “And you’re not talking to my son,” Tim said. “He’s been through a lot. Besides, he didn’t see anything. He was blindfolded or they were masked the whole time. He was kept in a room with no windows.”

  “He must have seen something.”

  “He’s just a kid. His mother is never going to agree.”

  “Look, I understand your concern. Don’t you want these guys caught? How about if we get Dr. Wingate to talk with him?” Gower asked.

  “Who’s he?”

  “She’s a psychologist who works with us sometimes. She’d be the only one in the room. You or his mom can be with him.”

  “How would that work?”

  “You’d sign a waiver that she could tell us about anything that could help us with the case.”

  Tim thought for a moment. “Okay. If Myrna agrees, we could do that.”

  “We’ll contact Dr. Wingate. She’ll be in touch to set up an appointment.”

  Gower turned to Smithson. “We’re going to find those kidnappers. But we won’t tolerate any street justice. You break the law, you’ll be arrested.”

  “Like I said, we got Mikey back. As far as I’m concerned, this incident is over.”

  A bodyguard escorted the detectives out to the street. They stood on the sidewalk looking back at the house. “Awfully smug, isn’t he?” Johnson asked.

  “He’s got the kid, so the payback can begin in earnest. But I don’t think he knows that we stopped the van last night.”

  “No, but this definitely puts Ninovich in the middle of this.”

  “Well, we knew it wouldn’t be O’Brian. He’s strictly money,” Gower said.

  “We going to waste the time to talk to Ninovich and Mario?”

  “Not yet. We need more people on surveillance. If we had been on Ninovich today, we’d have been at the meet.”

  “Five bodies and a man and a woman that they let go. I’d like to know who they are.”

  “I’ve got a feeling that they’re going to be around.”

  They got into their car. “Pulling in Wingate. What made you think of that?” Johnson asked.

  “The kid wasn’t going to talk to us anyway. Or tell us anything useful. This way, we’re not arguing with the parents, and we might find out something.”

  The sun was going down by the time Max and Kelly Jo pulled to the curb within sight of a duplex in a neighborhood of small, rundown houses. Overflowing trashcans sat at the curbs in front of some of the houses. Others had children’s toys scattered across the yards or grass that needed to be mowed. A banged-up Ford Focus sat in the driveway on the near side of the duplex.

  “Is that the address?” Max asked.

  Kelly scanned the email Billy had sent her. “Yeah. And the license plate matches. That’s the car that dropped the Subaru at the parking deck.”

  “Knock on the door or kick it in?”

  “I’ll smooth-talk them.”

  Just then, a man came out the front door, middle-aged, dark hair, a boyish face. He got in the Ford Focus in the driveway. Kelly Jo scrolled down the email to a driver’s license picture. “That’s Teddy Daniels—the guy who owns the car.”

  “Do you think anyone else lives in that house?” Max asked.

  “Look at him. He’s definitely single.”

  When Daniels backed out onto the street, they followed. He drove six blocks to The Side Pocket, a neighborhood bar at a busy intersection, and pulled into the pot-holed parking lot behind the building. They parked at the outer edge of the lot just as he got out of his car and went into the back door of the bar.

  “I’ll go in and get him,” Kelly Jo said. “But I’m going to put on something a little more casual first.” She reached into the back seat for her bag. She changed into black leggings, a long, loose top, and black flats, and untied her hair to let it hang down her back.

  “That’s a good look,” Max said. “I’ll get into position.”

  Kelly Jo strolled into the dimly lit tavern. Two pool tables took up the center of the space, a long bar ran down one wall. There were eight people playing pool. Seven men in jeans and T-shirts and a woman wearing a skirt so short that it was no contest to determine that her preferred underwear was a black thong. Everyone gave Kelly Jo a glance before they turned back to the pool tables, but she had her game on. She was just a mom from the neighborhood. Never been here before. A little lonely, a little needy, not used to drinking. She sat down at a stool one stool away from Daniels. The bartender, black golf shirt stretched over his beer belly and silver hair slicked back from his face, stepped over to her. “What you having?”

  “Gosh,” she said, “I don’t kno
w. A white wine, I guess.”

  Daniels glanced at her. She smiled. He turned back to his beer.

  She peered around nervously. The bartender brought her wine. “Thank you,” she said.

  Daniels glanced at her again. “Haven’t seen you around here before.”

  “I’ve never been here before. I don’t go out much.”

  “I’m Teddy.”

  “I’m Mandy.”

  He looked at his beer.

  Kelly Jo smiled. “Tell me, Teddy, is this place usually this quiet?”

  “Friday, Saturday night, happy hour, otherwise it’s about like this. That’s why I like to come here.”

  “Not too loud.”

  “That’s right.”

  “You can carry on a conversation.”

  “Yep.”

  “What do you do for a living?”

  “I’m a heating and cooling technician.”

  “You like it?”

  “Yeah, yeah, I do.” He sipped his beer. “What do you do?”

  “I’m in a call center. Part-time.”

  “Part-time. You a mom?”

  “Yes, I am. Two daughters. You?”

  “No kids.” He pointed at her wedding ring.

  “Don’t mind that,” she said.

  Max was waiting around the corner of the building with a Taser in his hand, standing in the weeds by the air-conditioning compressor, when they came out the back door. He heard Kelly Jo do her drunken giggle. “I hope you don’t think I’m too easy,” she said.

  “No,” Daniels replied. “No, I don’t. I know how it is. Sometimes a person is just lonely.”

  Max stepped out from the side of the building. There was no one in the parking lot beside the three of them. He slipped up behind Daniels and zapped him with the Taser. Daniels crumpled to the asphalt. They picked him up by his arms and dragged him to the Camry, where they zip-tied his hands behind his back and loaded him into the trunk.

  “Took you a little while,” Max said.

  “Had to do it right.”

  He pulled Daniels’s keys out of his front pocket. “You take his car.”

  They drove back to Daniels’s duplex. Max pulled up in the driveway. Kelly Jo parked Daniels’s Ford Focus on the street. Even though the duplex was dark, Kelly Jo knocked on the door before she used the key to open it. She turned on the light in the living room. It was the usual bachelor untidiness: dirty glasses on the end tables, dust, carpet in need of a good vacuuming. Max was waiting at the trunk of the car. They opened it. Daniels’s eyes were open.

  “We don’t want to hurt you,” Max said. “You tell us what we need to know, we’ll be on our way.”

  “My wife gets off work soon.”

  “There’s no woman here,” Kelly Jo said.

  They helped him out of the trunk and walked him into the house, one on each side of him. Kelly Jo shut the door behind them. “It’s just like my partner says. You tell us what we need to know, and we’re gone.”

  Max pointed to the sofa. “Sit.”

  Daniels sat on the sofa. He glanced from one to the other, back and forth, and then suspicion turned into comprehension. “That fucking Bruce. This is about that car, isn’t it?”

  “Keep talking,” Max said.

  “Bruce gave me a hundred bucks to pick him up from the parking garage where he left the Subaru.”

  “How good of friends are you?”

  “I don’t have nothing to do with whatever this is. I knew the hundred was too much for what he asked me to do, so I figured the money was for keeping my mouth shut. But I don’t owe him anything.”

  “What’s his address?”

  “890 Broken Tree Lane, number 214.”

  “Don’t make us come back.”

  “That’s the truth.”

  Max nodded. “What kind of man is he?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Is he a hard guy?”

  “Thinks he is. Used to box when he was a kid.”

  “He run with a crew?”

  “I don’t know. He does this and that. Works construction.”

  Max turned to Kelly Jo. “What do you think?”

  “Cut him loose.”

  “Lean up.” Max cut the zip tie with his lockback knife. Daniels sprang up from the sofa and stood with his back to the wall.

  “Relax,” Max said. “We’re out of here.”

  “You did the right thing,” Kelly Jo said.

  Daniels slammed the door behind them. After they got in the Camry, Kelly Jo got out her phone, opened her map app, and input the Broken Tree Lane address. “Back at the boulevard, take a left,” she said.

  Mario, Sally, and Rita sat in tan minivan down the street from Daniels’s duplex. They had been following Max and Kelly Jo all day. Sally was tiny, less than five feet tall in flats, and dressed like a teenage girl, with her blonde hair in bunches at the side of her head. Rita was tall and dark, dressed in black jeans and purple sweater. After they watched the white Camry drive away, Mario pulled into Daniels’s driveway without turning on his headlights. Sally hopped out of the van. She knocked on the door. Daniels opened it, a confused look on his face. “Yeah?”

  She sprang up, punched him in the throat, and pushed her way into the house. Mario and Rita hurried in behind her. They dragged Daniels up onto the sofa.

  “We don’t have time to play fuck around,” Mario said. “What did you tell the other two?”

  “What the hell?”

  “The other two. What did you tell them?”

  “What is this? A fucking bad movie? Bruce’s address. 890 Broken Tree Lane, number 214.”

  “Who’s he?”

  “He’s the guy who planted the Subaru at the parking garage.”

  Rita pushed a pistol up under his chin. “Where’s the money? Where’s the guys who kidnapped the kid?”

  “I don’t know. I don’t know anything.”

  Mario patted his cheek. “I believe you.”

  Rita and Sally gripped Daniels’s arms. Mario pushed his knee into Daniels’s chest and pulled a plastic bag over his head. Daniels kicked and bucked for a few minutes, gasping into the plastic, but they held him down until he stopped moving. Mario checked Daniels’s throat for a pulse. Dead. The women let go of him.

  Mario rolled up the bag and put it back in his pocket. “Let’s get out of here.”

  Max and Kelly Jo parked in the visitor parking of the Broken Tree Apartments outside building 892, and walked down the sidewalk to building 890. There was no one on foot, no one in the parking lot, no one driving by. Max had his hands in his jacket pockets, his right hand around the butt of his gun. “What do you think? Missionaries? We haven’t done that one in a while. Just in case Daniels didn’t know what he was talking about.”

  “Have you heard the good news?” she replied.

  Max picked the lock on the outer door to building 890. They took the stairs up to the second floor. Noise from the apartments seeped into the hall: unintelligible voices, music, TV. The paint was fresh and the carpet was clean. At apartment 214, Kelly Jo knocked on the door. No answer. She knocked again. No answer, no barking. Max picked the lock, pushed the door open and flipped the light switch with the back of his hand. The living room was sparsely furnished. Two chairs and a TV. A kitchen table with four chairs sat near the galley kitchen. Kelly Jo pushed the door shut behind them with her foot. They walked down the hall. The bathroom was empty. In the bedroom, a man was lying on the bed, dressed only in a pair of jeans, the needle still in his arm, a bag of white powder on the night table.

  “I’m guessing that’s Bruce,” Max said.

  “Way too convenient,” Kelly Jo replied.

  “Have you touched anything?”

  She shook her head.

  “Let’s get out of here.”

  On their way out, Max wiped the front door with a dishtowel. They didn’t speak until they were back in their car. “We were lucky no one saw us coming or going,” Max said.

  “You think
it was Koenig tidying up?”

  “Most likely.”

  “What now?”

  “We’re back to the Subaru. Koenig’s guys used it, so it must have been stolen. But where was it stolen, and where was it found?” He started the car. “Give Billy a call. See what he can turn up. We’ll start fresh tomorrow.”

  Back at the Charming Cove condo, Koenig was in his room with the ransom money, the other men were watching mixed martial arts on the pay-per-view, and Raymond and Hernandez were back in the far corner of the kitchen, whispering.

  “It’s a shame we missed our chance today,” Raymond said.

  “There was no chance. The boss had me following you.”

  “Then it was a good thing that I don’t trust Sanchez. What did you see?”

  “You were tailed to the parking deck,” Hernandez said.

  “Let me guess. A man and a woman, the man forgettable, the woman remarkable.”

  “That was them.”

  “The boss pulled them into this job to be part of our patsy team. We left them behind on the island to take the fall,” Raymond said. “Smithson was supposed to waste his time interrogating them.”

  “Then they wriggled out somehow.”

  “They must be chasing the money.”

  “Just like the rest of us,” Hernandez said. “So when’s our next chance?”

  “The boss will create a diversion, probably more than one, to execute his final exit strategy. That’ll be our next opportunity.”

  9

  Tit for Tat

  A little before 9:00 a.m., O’Brian stood in the lobby of the Solomon Island Hotel, talking with the general contractor hired to oversee the repairs. The concrete rubble from the explosion had been cleared away and scaffolding with drop cloths hung around the work area. A forklift moved a pallet of concrete blocks to the masons who were repairing the wall.

  “How soon?” O’Brian asked.

  The contractor pointed toward the damage. “We caught a break. The engineers determined the surrounding structure was solid, so on our expedited schedule, we’ll be putting the finishes on the wall next week.”

  “What about the dust?”

  “Every step of the way gets cleaner from here.”