Running Scared

by Elizabeth Lowell

  Eyes closed, Cherelle fought down the scream that kept wanting to climb up the clenched darkness of her throat. Each time she came here, it was worse. Now she felt like she was two people, one of them watching in amusement and the other one a terrified child wanting to run to Mommy. But there was no Mommy. There never had been. There was only darkness and fear and the kind of trapped-animal rage that made her want to—

  A piece of metal so cold that it burned smacked down across her palm. Light and dark exploded into something that was both and neither. It was everything.

  And then it was nothing.

  She was nothing.

  Chapter 9

  Sedona

  Very early morning

  Cherelle was still screaming when Tim backhanded her hard enough to send her staggering out of the shadow of the three leaning stones. She stumbled and went to her knees. Shaking, bent over, she bit back the bile that was clawing up her throat along with all the screams she had spent a lifetime throttling.

  “When you finally lose it, you really lose it,” Tim said, eyeing her warily. He bent over, picked up the thick gold neckring Virgil had given to Cherelle, shoved it in the wooden box, and slammed on the lid. “C’mon. We gotta get out of here before it’s light enough for people to see us.”

  “What . . . ?” She looked up, shook her head sharply, and glanced around. “Where’s Virgil?”

  “Where do you think? You hit him hard enough to knock him halfway down the trail.” He dragged her upright. “Why’d you do it?”

  She shook her head again, but nothing made sense. “Do what?”

  “Kill him.”

  “I didn’t!”

  “Hell you didn’t. I saw it. He handed you that chunk of gold, and you knocked him ass over teakettle.”

  “Chunk of gold? What the hell are you talking about?”

  Impatiently Tim reached beneath the wooden lid and jerked out a thick circle of gold. The light of dawn flowed over the braided chains of metal, light flowed around gold, into it.

  And it glowed.

  “This,” he said, shoving the gold under her nose.

  Slowly Cherelle focused on the neckring. Her eyes widened. She had seen pictures of jewelry kind of like this in one of Virgil’s old books. It was the sort of stuff museums loved, which meant it was worth money.

  Maybe a lot of it.

  Tim dropped the gold back beneath the wooden lid, put his hand between her shoulder blades, and shoved.

  “C’mon. We gotta get out of here.”

  Together they hurried down the steep, narrow trail. All around them the first spears of daybreak were pushing away the darkness. The sunrise didn’t make Cherelle feel much better. Between the fingers of bright light, stark pools of shadow remained. They were blacker than the bottom of a well.

  “You sure about Virgil?” she asked.

  Tim dragged her off the path, through the brush, and turned on the old man’s pencil light. “What do you think?”

  Pinned by the narrow beam, Virgil lay in a pool of shadow. He was on his back, eyes open, staring at the dawn he would never see. Brush surrounded him.

  “I think he’s dead,” Cherelle said as she edged back toward the path.

  One way or another, Tim had seen enough sudden death to know exactly what it looked like. “Oh, yeah. He’s meat.”

  She blew out a hard breath and forced herself to think. She really had killed Virgil.

  Shit.

  On the other hand, he wasn’t the first. She had skated on that other one. Cops wrote it off to a drug buy gone bad. She would skate on Virgil, too. Besides, she hadn’t meant it, not really, not either time. It had just happened.

  And by the time anyone stumbled over the body, there wouldn’t be much left. Coyotes howled from every ridge and prowled all the shadows for food.

  Oh, yeah. He’s meat.

  “What else is in the box?” Cherelle asked.

  “Nothing. C’mon.”

  “There’s gotta be something else. I know it.”

  “There’s cops, that’s what. You want to be caught with a corpse, you go ahead and hang around. Me, I’m gone.”

  “Wait. There’s gold. Goddamn it, there’s more gold!”

  He started to tell her she was nuts, saw the flat look around her eyes and mouth, and knew she wouldn’t listen to what he said.

  Fine. Fuck her.

  Tim headed off down the rest of the trail without looking back.

  “Boxes,” she muttered to herself. “Virgil said something about boxes. What was it? Think, damn it, think!”

  Not one of them could tell me what was in the boxes under my bed.

  Under his bed.

  Cherelle took off down the trail, passed Tim, and kept going with a speed that left him scrambling. The front door to Virgil’s cabin was unlocked. As far as she knew, it always had been. A man who rode an old bicycle to town and wore clothes a ragpicker wouldn’t own didn’t have any reason to lock his door.

  She shouldered her way through the opening and went straight to the bedroom just off the living room. From the look of the bed, he hadn’t slept in it last night. He wouldn’t tonight either, unless death was another kind of sleep.

  That thought was too close to her nightmares when she was surrounded by black nothing and yet still awake, still aware, screaming. With grim haste she went down on her hands and knees and peered under the bed. Shoes, a tangle of cloth that could have been underwear or a washrag, dust.

  And two wooden boxes.

  She pulled out the first one, opened it just enough to see the gleam of gold, and slammed it closed.

  “What the hell do you think you’re doing?” Tim said from the doorway. All he could see was Cherelle down on her hands and knees with her head under something and her ass sticking up in the air. “I’ve burgled enough places to tell you that you’re wasting your time here. Chrissake, he didn’t even wear a watch.”

  “Wasting my time, huh?” Cherelle asked. She lifted the lid of the second carton, caught her breath, and smiled. “Well, you waste time your way and I’ll waste time my way.”

  She stacked the cartons on top of each other and lifted them. She had to make two tries before she could stand. The boxes of gold weren’t as big as her greed, but they were plenty heavy.

  Throwing back her head, she laughed and staggered toward the door. Finally, finally she had done it.

  The big score.

  Now all she had to do was figure out how to turn hot gold into cold cash without getting burned along the way.

  Chapter 10

  Las Vegas

  November 1

  Very early morning

  With well-concealed impatience—her feet were screaming—Gail Silverado said her good-byes to Mickey Pinsky and John Firenze, French Henkle, and Rich Morrison. When Rich hung back from the other three, she gave him a dazzling smile.

  “Forget something?” she asked.

  “Just to call my wife, and I forgot my cell phone.” He smiled slightly. “Would you mind if I used yours? I don’t know which party to meet her at.”

  “Not at all. Good night, gentlemen. I’d suggest you take separate elevators.”

  She shut the door to her outer office on the other three men and turned to Rich. Saying nothing, she walked to her private office and closed the door after him.

  “Did you really forget your cell phone?” she asked.

  “What do you think?”

  “I think I have some champagne on ice if you have something worth celebrating.”

  He laughed and regretted again that his present wife with her very important political connections had made it clear that if he screwed around, she would cut off his cock and feed it to him. He knew that his cock was safe enough from her threat, but his chance to be head of the Nevada Gaming Control Board wasn’t. He wanted power more than he wanted a piece of ass—even a very talented piece like Gail.

  “I heard from my business associates earlier today,” he said.

  Ga
il kept walking toward the champagne in her office fridge. “Good news?”

  “Golden Boy finally got around to putting in a new firewall.”

  She stopped and looked over her shoulder. Her pose was as elegant as it was unconscious. “Not good.”

  Rich scratched under his obnoxious wig. How women wore the damn things was beyond him. “Not bad, either. They had finished the setup and were just feeding in money from a Shanghai account every day into his hold for the slots and the baccarat tables.”

  “How much did they plant before they were shut down?”

  “Ten million. Maybe fifteen.” Rich shrugged. “Chump change, compared to what they’re waiting to run through our casinos, but it will be enough to hang Tannahill. He probably won’t do jail time, but the Gaming Control Board won’t ever let him into Nevada again.”

  Gail bent, opened the fridge beneath the bar, and pulled out a bottle of Cristal. “You sure they left enough tracks to trace the money back to Red Phoenix accounts?”

  “Hell yes. These boys were trained by the best hackers the U.S. had to offer. Tannahill has been paying state and federal taxes on that triad money for weeks and keeping the rest for himself as pure, sparkling-clean profit.”

  With an expert twist, Gail pulled the cork and inhaled the fragrant mist that rose from the bottle. “Then we have him.” She poured two glasses of the fine champagne and handed one to Rich. “The only question is when we drop the hammer.”

  “I’ve put out a few anonymous feelers to the federal task force on the Red Phoenix triad. It shouldn’t be too long. Eventually even the feds catch on.”

  The glasses met with a musical sound.

  Chapter 11

  Las Vegas

  November 1

  Early morning

  Most of the big hotel/casinos had a focus in their lobby to lure and entertain walk-ins. The least imaginative of the resorts had gigantic floral arrangements. Others had an aquarium twenty feet high and sixty feet wide, or a chlorine-scented river sparkling with coins the guests had tossed in, or glass flowers growing out of a ceiling as long as a football field.

  The Golden Fleece had . . . a golden fleece. A spectacular one. No matter what the time of day or night, there was always a wide-eyed crowd gathered around Shane’s replica of the mythical gold sheepskin that had sent many an ancient treasure hunter on a chase to the ends of the known world.

  With the soul of a poet welded to that of a pragmatist, Shane believed that the myth of the fleece had its roots in ordinary reality. Ancient gold miners had washed gold-bearing gravel in wooden sluice boxes. By the time the gravel reached the end of the sluice, everything heavy had dropped out of the water. Except the gold dust. It would have kept on flowing out with the waste water, and out of the miners’ pockets, but for the sheepskin at the bottom of the sluice. At the end of a day’s or a week’s work, the miners shut down the sluice and shook out the gold dust that the fleece had collected from the rushing water.

  As a centerpiece and crowd magnet for his new mega­resort/casino, Shane had bought the biggest sheepskin available and designed a sluice box such as might have been used for mining gold two thousand years ago. He had stretched the sheepskin crosswise to the water’s flow so that the fleece would comb out the bucket of gold dust he had poured into the clean water. Then he put it all inside a big aquarium, turned on the pumps, and waited.

  Through the minutes, hours, days, weeks, the sheepskin tirelessly filtered the almost invisibly fine gold from the water. When the fleece could hold no more gold in its dense wool, it glittered like a fantastic dream just beyond the reach of man.

  And there it stayed suspended in a cage of clear water, a great shaggy sculpture of gold just waiting to launch new generations of treasure hunters into the Golden Fleece’s casinos.

  “Good morning, Mr. Tannahill.”

  Shane turned toward Susan Chatsworth, one of his four executive assistants. A former police officer, she was his liaison with the security department. Because she had school-age children, she took the day watch at his casino. Her husband, a captain on the Las Vegas police force, worked swing shift, yet somehow they managed a good marriage.

  Susan wasn’t in uniform, unless Las Vegas Casual could be considered a uniform. With her frothy shoulder-length brown hair, silk shirt, jeans, and strappy sandals, she looked like a guest who just happened to carry a big purse along with her big smile. Inside the purse her walkie-talkie, cell phone­computer link, and gun stayed safely out of sight.

  “Morning, Susan,” Shane said. “Have you combed the ice cream out of your rug yet?”

  She laughed and shook her head. “It was quite a party. I’d forgotten how much noise a group of squealing twelve-year-old girls can make. And thank you—Amelia loved the CD you gave her for her birthday. How did you know that every preteen girl’s secret desire is to shriek along with Swivel Jack and the Sweat Rats?”

  “A wild guess.”

  Susan shook her head. She knew better. Her boss was anything but a wild guesser. “She told me to give you a kiss and a hug, so consider yourself kissed and hugged.”

  “Good way to start the day.”

  He began walking. She fell in beside him. Shane’s unpredictable rounds through his huge entertainment complex were famous among the staff. Whether the toilet or VIP lounge, at any time—day or night, holiday or workday—Shane could and did appear. If his stone green eyes missed anything, no one had figured yet what it was.

  “Any urgent problem areas?” He didn’t look at her while he asked the question. All his attention was on the lobby activity, the check-in and check-out lines, the VIP escorts, the crowd around the glittering fleece, and the empty paper cup that better not be on one of the lobby’s coffee tables when he came back.

  “Just one at the moment,” Susan said. “I don’t know if you’ve gone over yesterday’s hold yet.”

  “I have.” Examining the hold—the gross profit the casino earned in twenty-four hours—was the first thing Shane did every morning, even on the mornings when he had been up most of the night.

  “Then you know we had six big jackpots yesterday on the wall of Solid Gold Slots.”

  “Yes.” That was improbable, but not impossible. Gambling was a game of odds. Odds were quirky in the short run and utterly reliable in the long run.

  “I went over the tapes,” she said, referring to the digital record that was made of everything that went on at the casino. “I suspect we’re getting hosed by a techno-team.”

  Shane made a note to look at the recordings himself. “Electronic? Magnetic? Mechanical?”

  “I’d bet on a magnetic reset of the payoff.”

  He grunted. No matter how carefully they shielded the “brain” of a slot machine, some techno-geek could always find a way in—especially one who had worked on the casino’s slot programs in the past.

  He would have to check his personnel files.

  “Did the team come back today?” he asked.

  “I haven’t seen them.”

  “Excerpt their photos and circulate them on the hot line.”

  She nodded. Technically the casinos in Las Vegas were competitors; in reality they cooperated on security matters.

  “No more thefts on the fourth floor?” Shane asked, but his eyes were searching the excited crowd around the craps table. The pit boss was right where he should have been, able to see the craps crew and the crowd. The stickman—who happened to be a woman on this shift—was doing what she was paid for: watching the action in the center of the craps table, making sure the dice weren’t crooked, and rounding up and returning dice to the shooter. Opposite the stickman was the boxman, who told the dealer—two dealers in this case, because the action was hot—who and how much to pay. An excited woman in mussed makeup and a white satin evening dress with drink stains on it was blowing on the dice, whispering to them, praying over them, and finally flinging them down the length of the green felt.

  Les jeux sont faits.

  “Anothe
r snake eyes!” called out the stickman. “The lady is hot!”

  The woman shrieked, jumped up and down, and watched while the dealers doled out chips. The size of the stack of chips in front of her doubled. She let it ride and grabbed the dice as soon as they were swept back to her by the long curved stick.

  The crowd leaned closer in vicarious greed and excitement.

  Shane and Susan kept walking.

  “No, sir,” she said. “You were right. One of the day clerks was copying electronic keys and slipping them to her buddies. Stupid. Whatever they get from a fence won’t begin to pay for the time they’ll spend in jail.”

  “That’s the thing with crooks,” he said. “They always assume they’re too smart to get caught.”

  “Yeah, well this wizard found the cops waiting for her in the employee parking lot.”

  Shane didn’t ask if it had been handled discreetly. He paid his security people very well to make sure that the never-never land aura of the Golden Fleece wasn’t disturbed by something as distasteful as reality. It wasn’t an accident that there were no clocks, no radios, no television screens except in the sports betting lounge, no telephones to remind gamblers to phone home, not even so much as a weather channel on the TVs in the guest rooms to hint at an outside world. The silent message was overwhelming: Everything you need is right here.

  “Anything else?” he asked as they walked down the center of a double row of blackjack tables. Depending on the demand for the tables, the ante varied from five bucks a hand to five thousand dollars. When the demand was high, the price of playing went up. Two of the tables had discreet reserved signs on them. They were for two brothers from Argentina who liked to gamble side by side for three thousand dollars a hand, preferred those two tables and two blond dealers manning them, and lost enough money that Shane was happy to accommodate their whims.

  “Nothing else yet,” she said.