by Chris Ewan
The twin pressed the radio antenna against his bottom lip as he considered my words.
‘Okay. You need to come with us now.’
‘Come with you where?’
‘Just get moving already.’
It seemed like I was all out of options. Stepping down from the closet, I shook the sand from the bottom of my jeans, then squinted at Victoria.
‘I’m really sorry about this. I’ll see you later, okay?’
‘Not so fast,’ the twin told me. ‘She’s coming too. You’re both going to run through every detail of your plan.’
EIGHT
Plan? What plan? I didn’t know of any plan besides the hasty get-away-themed one I’d been working on since I’d found the dead woman in Masters’ bathroom.
Now, don’t get me wrong, plans are mighty useful things and I have a lot of time for a well-developed scheme. But I hadn’t the faintest idea what details our hosts were so intent on hearing. And I was pretty sure that wasn’t something they’d be altogether thrilled about.
Speaking of not being altogether thrilled, I was becoming less and less enamoured with the route we’d been following since we’d left the theatre. To begin with, we’d been taken to a small dressing room so that Victoria could reclaim her handbag, and after that we’d been led through a door marked Restricted Access and down a flight of stairs into a basement level. The endless service corridors we were walking along featured bare concrete floors and whitewashed walls. Dusty pipes ran along the ceiling above our heads. Honestly, it was almost as if all the investment had been spent on the hotel tower and the casino floor.
The Fisher Twins marched in front of us and two male security guards followed from behind. The uniformed guards were Hispanic-looking, and they were of around the same height and build – their height being significant and their build rating somewhere beyond substantial. It occurred to me that Victoria and I must have looked out of place, as if we were on our way to some latterday Noah’s Ark and hadn’t got the memo about coming in pairs.
Eventually, we were instructed to wait outside an unremarkable white door. There was no sign telling us what to expect on the other side. I suppose I could have crossed my fingers (the healthy ones at least) and wished for something cosy and luxurious, but as the twins went in ahead of us and the security guards adopted an open-legged stance outside, it finally dawned on me that we were about to experience a piece of Vegas folklore that few tourists ever get to see. The back room.
The room was plainly decorated. There was a plastic table and four plastic chairs and a flat-screen television fitted to a bracket on the far wall. The remote for the television was on the tabletop. The ceiling was low and made up of square polystyrene tiles. Two spot bulbs pointed towards the back wall and cast the room in a dim yellow light. A grill above the door pumped cold air around, keeping the temperature about perfect for a morgue.
One of the side walls contained a rectangle of tinted glass. Through the glass I could see a second room that looked just like the one we were standing in, only lit more brightly. There was another television and another plastic table. Sitting at the table, squinting beneath the hard electric light, was a man I recognised.
I turned to Victoria and Victoria turned to me. We gave a fine impression of the Fisher Twins but it didn’t clear up my confusion.
The man in question was the acne-scarred croupier from the high-stakes roulette-table. His head was bowed, his bony fists were bunched on the tabletop and he was fidgeting in his seat, jiggling his thighs and tapping his feet. On his pimpled neck, just above the open collar of his white uniform shirt, I could see a blue ink tattoo of a pair of dice. Each die showed a single dot. Snake eyes.
The croupier was nodding fast, almost like he had a nervous tic, and the skin of his neck was moving because of it, making it appear as though the dice were rattling against one another. He seemed to be murmuring continuously but his speech wasn’t a monologue. A second man faced him from across the table.
The man was black-skinned and dressed in a blazer, shirt and tie. He was partially bald and the top of his bullet-shaped skull glistened under the low striplights like a bowling ball. A monkish band of cropped, silver-grey hair ran around his head just above his ears, and a goatee beard of the same shading ringed his mouth. His cheeks and his neck were flirting with the idea of becoming jowly, and he filled his blazer around the shoulders and upper arms in a way that suggested he used to be plenty muscular, and in another ten years might be plenty fat. I placed him in his mid to late fifties.
The black man smoothed the outline of his salt and pepper beard with the fingers of one hand. A cardboard file lay open on the table before him and he scribbled notes on a sheet of paper clipped to the file. From the speed of his writing, it seemed as though the croupier had a lot of talking to do.
I didn’t think they could see us. In fact, I was pretty sure we were looking through a two-way mirror, which explained why the light in our room was so meagre.
As we watched, the black man raised a palm and the croupier quit talking and slowly turned his head in our direction. His eyes didn’t focus but I saw fear in his wavering pupils as he asked himself who might be watching over him. Before he could reach a conclusion, his interrogator finished his notes, closed his folder and exited the room.
It didn’t take long for the man to appear in the doorway behind us. He nodded briefly to the Fisher Twins, and then he squinted through the dimness towards Victoria and me. When he was through gauging the threat we might pose, he kicked the door closed with a dismissive grunt and motioned to the chairs on the far side of the table.
‘How about you folks sit down?’
‘How about you tell us why we’re here?’ Victoria planted her fists on her hips. ‘We’re guests of this hotel – not criminals.’
I almost winced as she said it. True, I didn’t welcome the label, but I had to admit it was somewhat apt.
‘Let’s just sit down and talk this through like adults.’ He pronounced ‘adults’ without a hard ‘a’. Like a dolt.
‘Adults, you say?’
He lifted his shoulders. ‘It’s a start, right?’
He tossed his cardboard folder onto the table without another word and took one of the plastic seats. I smiled crookedly at Victoria and followed suit. She delayed a moment longer before dragging back a chair of her own and sitting rigidly with her arms folded across her chest.
The black man opened the cardboard folder in front of him, carefully laid a fountain pen onto a fresh sheet of paper and exhaled heavily. He clearly paid attention to his grooming. The skin of his face and scalp was smooth and unblemished, and his beard was very neatly trimmed. His blazer was brown in colour, his shirt a crisp Oxford blue, and his tie was yellow with blue diamonds. He smelled of grapefruit. Whether it was his cologne or his shower gel, I couldn’t say.
‘My name is Ricks.’ He opened his palms. ‘I work for Carson Associates.’
‘It’s funny,’ I said. ‘People keep saying names as though we should know what they mean. The Fisher Twins. Carson Associates.’
He smiled readily enough. ‘Carson Associates is a private security firm.’ He reached inside his jacket and removed a business card that he slid across the table towards us. The card was buff in colour with a motif of a watchful eye in one corner. The name Terry Ricks was emboldened in the middle, above an italicised slogan: Ever Watchful. ‘We work alongside a couple other agencies here in Vegas, mainly on behalf of the casinos. My expertise runs to gambling irregularities.’
‘Gambling irregularities? You mean cheating?’
‘You could say.’
I palmed his card, acting as if we were two travelling salesmen about to do business. Alas, I didn’t have a card of my own. Burglars don’t tend to advertise – unless they want to get caught.
I must say I was more than a little confused by his introduction. A guy who specialised in gambling fraud didn’t sound like the type of individual who should be tasked with inv
estigating a murder-suicide.
‘Are you planning to tell us what’s going on here?’ Victoria asked him.
‘Well, ma’am, allow me to show you.’
And with that he gathered up the remote control from the table and pointed it towards the television on the wall. We turned in our seats and peered at the screen through the gloom. A prick of light ballooned out from the centre and I readied myself to be confronted with the evidence of my rather undignified escape from Josh Masters’ suite.
To my surprise, I found myself watching colour footage of the high-stakes roulette-table. I could see Victoria and Josh and a number of other players I recognised, including the elderly woman in the gold lamé jacket. I could also see the back of the croupier’s head.
I watched for a good few minutes without the reason for the footage becoming any clearer. I saw Masters laying chips on the felt, and I saw him hand chips to Victoria. While she considered where to place them, Masters collected together a stack of blue one-hundred-dollar markers and slid them across to the croupier. The croupier traded them for the appropriate number of purple tokens. Then he spun the roulette wheel and sent the tiny white ball whizzing around its circumference until the ball settled in a number and Victoria jumped up and down in celebration. It was strange watching the scene unfold without any sound. The television was as silent as the rest of the room.
I scrutinised Ricks. ‘What are we supposed to be seeing here?’
He studied me coldly before pointing the remote at the television and prodding a button. The footage began to rewind. Ricks paused the recording just as Masters handed Victoria her chips, and then he started it playing again. I watched Victoria place her bet and Masters trade up his blue tokens. I still didn’t get it.
‘I still don’t get it.’
‘Is that so?’
‘Perhaps I’m being thick.’
I glanced at the Fisher Twins. They were standing with their backs to the wall and their hands in their pockets. With their youthful, freckled faces, and their khaki trousers and knitted sweaters, they could have passed for the undernourished stars of a GAP commercial.
‘What am I missing?’
One of the twins whistled and considered his nails. His brother exhaled sharply and shook his head. Ricks stroked his beard some more. After a long moment’s contemplation, during which I could have produced a truly astonishing ECG read-out, Ricks delved inside his trouser pocket and removed something in his bunched fist. He set the item down onto the tabletop and lifted his hand away. A stack of five purple chips had appeared.
‘Those are the casino chips Josh was betting,’ Victoria told him.
‘Is that so?’
‘I’m not colour blind.’
Ricks smiled benignly and contemplated us through hooded eyes. Then he extended his forefinger and thumb and lifted the chips from the table. As if from nowhere, a stack of three silver chips had appeared.
‘How did you do that?’
‘Aw, come on, lady. Enough with the act.’
Victoria’s fingers clenched the leather of her handbag as though she was administering a Vulcan death grip.
‘I’ve had just about enough of this gangland nonsense,’ she said. ‘Now, either you tell us what’s going on here or you let us go. If you plan on detaining us any longer, I’m going to have to insist that you call the police.’
I gulped and held fast to the underside of my chair. The police? What the hell was she trying to do to me?
Ricks pouted and drummed his fingers on the table-edge. He tipped his chair back on its hind legs and casually tossed the purple chips to Victoria. She scrambled to catch them, batting them between her palms, but as soon as she managed to get a proper hold of them, her brow creased.
‘What’s this?’
‘Bottle-top,’ Ricks explained. ‘A cap from a soda bottle, painted up to look like a stack of casino markers. Only the chip glued to the top is genuine.’ He pointed to the television. The screen was still frozen on the image of the croupier sliding Masters’ purple chips back to him. ‘A player cashes up and the croupier hands him his chips – in this case a stack of purple five-hundred-dollar tokens in return for some hundred-dollar markers. The painted bottle-top looks genuine to a casual observer, but really it contains a stack of silver chips. One purple chip on top, three silver chips hidden underneath.’
Victoria’s mouth formed a perfect hole. ‘But why?’
Ricks exhaled and allowed his chair to tip forward again, as if he was deflating. ‘You really want to run with this routine?’
‘The silver chips are worth more,’ I said, my voice catching in my throat. ‘Ten thousand dollars a piece.’
‘But . . . you’re saying Josh was doing this?’
‘Lady, we closed the table when you both quit. It’s down a hundred eighty thousand dollars.’
Victoria’s eyes widened and her face became very nearly as pale as the wall. Maybe it was a good thing. Any paler and the Fisher Twins might have mistaken her for a close relative.
‘But that can’t be right.’
‘Oh, it’s right. Reason we were watching is because he pulled a similar stunt yesterday evening.’
‘Well, that may be.’ She gathered herself and swallowed hard. ‘But I still don’t see what this has to do with us.’
Ricks pointed through the double glass at the croupier next door. The croupier was crouched forward with his face pressed against the table and his arms coiled around his head.
‘It helps if you work a scam like this with a team. You need a guy on the inside, for one. It also helps if you have a distraction. A pretty girl who’s mighty excited about winning, say.’
‘Oh good grief.’ Victoria cast her hand towards the twins. ‘We’ve already explained to these men that we’d never met Josh before tonight. We only arrived in Las Vegas this afternoon. You can contact our airline if you don’t believe me.’
Ricks inhaled very deeply through his nostrils. He stuck out his bottom lip and pointed the remote towards the television.
‘The other thing that helps is if the cheating player can pass the chips off to another team member. That way, if he gets searched, he comes up clean.’
Ricks jabbed the remote and I turned towards the television screen to see just what I’d feared he was driving at. By now, I’d entered the picture and I was talking with Victoria, a bottle of Budweiser in my bad hand. Josh interrupted us and pressed some chips into Victoria’s palm, encouraging her to lay a bet.
Ricks slowed the footage, so that it advanced at half-speed. I watched as Victoria debated where to stake her chips and as Josh leaned over the table. I saw my recorded self edge close to him and my good hand slip inside his trouser pocket. My hand eased out and slid into my own pocket. Ricks freeze-framed the image.
‘Sir, I’d appreciate it if you could stand up and empty your pockets onto the table.’
NINE
I guess I’ve been lucky in life. There haven’t been too many occasions when I’ve been backed into a corner. Sure, as a burglar, I’ve had some close calls. Times when I’ve had to hide and wait for a danger to pass, or scram to avoid getting caught. But usually I’ve had some control over the situation I’ve found myself in, and more often than not, it’s worked out just fine. This time, I was struggling to see a way out of my dilemma.
‘I’d rather not empty my pockets, if you don’t mind.’
‘Oh, we mind.’
‘I’m an intensely private person.’
‘Believe me,’ Ricks said. ‘Nobody outside of this room will ever hear what happens inside of it.’
I glanced through the side window to where the croupier was tapping his feet and clicking his teeth, then up at the Fisher Twins. The twins had their arms folded over their chests and they weren’t saying a word. They hung back like a two-man jury, waiting to pass judgement, and I was beginning to find their silence menacing. Perhaps if there’d been just one of them, the effect would have been less powerful. Doubled up,
it was making me sweat.
‘Charlie,’ Victoria said, in a pointed tone. ‘These men are only interested in those silver chips. I’m quite sure they’re not the least bit interested in anything else they might find on you. Right, gentlemen?’
Ricks rubbed the top of his skull some more. ‘That’s a call we can make when your buddy turns out his pockets.’
I held on for a short while longer but no solution presented itself. I stood up from my chair, feeling light in the head, and removed my wallet from my jeans and tossed it over to him, along with the key card to my hotel room. I added my passport and the plastic disposable gloves from my left pocket, and afterwards I pulled out the lining of both pockets to contribute a haze of fluff and lint.
Ricks lifted my gloves, along with an eyebrow, as he inspected the space where I’d cut two fingers away. He shot a look towards my busted digits, then reached for my wallet and leafed through the various compartments in a fruitless search for chips. He slid out my driving licence and checked it against my passport, then copied down my name, age and stated address. The address wouldn’t be much good to him. The name might create some problems.
‘Happy now?’ I asked.
‘And the jacket.’
I eased my hands inside the front pockets of my jacket and flicked my fingers against the material.
‘Inside pockets too.’
‘I don’t carry anything in them. The jacket doesn’t hang right if I do.’
Ricks slapped my wallet down onto the table and wearily pushed himself upright, scraping the legs of his chair backwards on the concrete floor. He didn’t meet my eyes as he approached, as though he was embarrassed by my behaviour.
At close quarters, he cut an intimidating figure. He was a good few inches taller and broader than me, and there was a calm assurance in the way he carried himself. He gave the impression that he’d handled some serious crooks in his time, and that so far as challenges went, I ranked a shade higher than an old lady diddling the penny slots. He beckoned with one hand for me to raise my arms.
