STATELINE: A Dan Reno Novel

by Dave Stanton

  “Looks clear,” Cody said from the cab as I walked up.

  “Yeah, I didn’t see anyone suspicious.”

  We drove around town, running errands, taking care of business. I stopped at the bank and took out three grand in cash. When we drove off the iced-over curb onto the road, my cell phone tumbled out from under Cody’s passenger seat. I hadn’t seen it since being abducted by Pace, and I had assumed it was gone. The display said I had two messages. The first was from Iverson. He had called that morning, asking I call him back. The second message was from Beverly Howitt. I heard her say her name and leave a number. I jotted it down and folded it carefully away in my pocket.

  On the way back into Nevada, we did what we should have done first, which was to find a sporting goods store and buy gloves for our blistered hands. I also picked up a fancy blue ski jacket, one of the expensive brands I had never been able to afford. Cody chose a heavy-duty green parka, size XXL. Before leaving, I found us some thick wool socks and bought both of us new boots.

  Our next stop was a shooting range and survival shop on the outskirts of Stateline. I had never seen a store carrying such a huge selection of military gear.

  “Hellfire, you could arm a small country,” Cody said as we looked around in awe.

  “What, are the tanks out back?” I asked the guy behind the counter.

  “No, you have to order them through the catalog,” he said with a straight face.

  An hour later we were outfitted with new top-of-the-line flak jackets and firearms. Cody had given me a ration of shit over my preference for the Italian-made Beretta automatic—he was partial to a Smith & Wesson .44 Magnum revolver—but he quieted down after I outshot him at the store’s indoor range. We each picked up three boxes of hollow-point ammunition.

  “Payback’s a bitch,” Cody said, weighing a box of bullets in his hand.

  “What’s Pace’s game?” I said as we climbed into Cody’s truck. “Why’s he so hell-bent on preventing me from investigating Bascom’s murder? What’s his relationship with the Samoan?”

  Cody gave me a hard glance. “Don’t underestimate crooked cops. Once they go down that road, there’s no turning back.”

  “Pace must be involved in something pretty heavy.”

  “Weird for him to have actually taken part in putting the muscle on us. His kind usually don’t like to get their hands dirty.”

  “Pace is different. He enjoyed it,” I said.

  “No shit, huh? I’m gonna enjoy punting my foot up his ass. That’s a promise. I still feel bad about being on the crapper when they snatched you.”

  “Bascom was a rich kid. I wonder what he was involved in.”

  “It’s all just mental masturbation, Dirt. How about a little less talk and a little more action?”

  23

  We were driving through a neighborhood a few blocks from Pistol Pete’s when I spotted the tail. I told Cody to pull over, and I watched a light-blue Subaru turn into a driveway a hundred yards behind us. When we started again, I saw the car back out and slowly follow us.

  “Could be anyone of them, Pace, Perdie, or the Samoan,” I said, feeling my stomach tighten.

  We turned onto Highway 50 and drove east through the tourist traffic. Once we passed the state line, I jumped out at a light and ducked into Harvey’s Casino. I watched the street from behind the dark glass doors as Cody drove on, followed by the blue Subaru three cars later. The driver peered toward Harvey’s as he went by, but he couldn’t see me through the mirrored glass. I looked at him in surprise. “Hello, asshole,” I muttered. It was Raneswich.

  I went out Harvey’s back door, hiking through the ice and mud. I ducked into The Horizon and came out their side exit into the parking lot, then slipped through the double doors of Pistol Pete’s. I took a seat in a comfortable chair in the spacious hotel lobby. Pistol Pete’s was decorated in an exaggerated Old West motif—gunfight murals dominated the walls, and various cowboy paraphernalia—saddles, bullwhips, rifles, and the like—were on display in large glass cases. A life-size bronze sculpture of a cowboy on a rearing mustang overlooked the lobby from a large pedestal.

  I read a local entertainment paper, watching the passersby like a husband waiting for his perpetually late wife. About ten minutes later, Cody walked in, his thick thatch of straw-like hair visible above the masses.

  “You lose him?” I said.

  “Yeah,” he chuckled. “Medium height, stocky, light hair, right?”

  “That’s Raneswich.”

  “I parked behind Harrah’s and sprinted in the back door. I saw him trying to keep up, but he hit an ice slick and did a header into a parked car. I came across on the pedestrian underpass.”

  “Nice work,” I said. “Let’s go.”

  We split up. My goal was to find the Samoan—Samantha Nunez, for what it was worth, said he could be found at Pistol Pete’s. If I saw him, I would try to get him alone and subdue him with my stun gun, then take him to Bascom. As far as plans go, it was thin, but left a lot of room to improvise.

  Cody took the keno area, the sports book, and the surrounding slot floors, while I searched the main card floor, including the adjoining bars and slot machine rows. The casino was crowded, even though it was before noon. The masses were a diverse mixture of old folks, kids, white trash and white collar, rowdy drunks, and intently serious gamblers, with a heavy representation of Asians, blacks, Mexicans, and some people who looked like a mixture of all three. I didn’t find that to be a curiosity; California had become so racially diverse that people with blended ethnicity were commonplace.

  By the end of an hour, I must have looked into a thousand faces. A man in his sixties sitting next to me at a blackjack table lost eight straight ten-dollar hands and finally quit, red faced and muttering “fuck,” “shit,” and “goddamn” in all their possible combinations. Two dudes who looked barely out of their teens caught fire at the craps table; one rolled the dice for twenty minutes before crapping out. He said he was up $900, then he doubled his bets and walked away broke five minutes later. At the roulette wheel a stunning platinum blonde in a low-cut red dress stood next to a short fat man in a black overcoat. He wore sunglasses, a gold derby with a pink feather in the band, and his blond hair went past his shoulders. His hands stayed busy moving three-inch-high stacks of chips around the board.

  Cody and I met at the casino’s Mexican restaurant. Neither of us had had any luck spotting the Samoan. But Cody hit a $200-dollar jackpot on the slots and was anxious to try his luck again. We had lunch and headed back to the casino, trading sections. By midafternoon I was bored stiff and doubting Samantha Nunez’s tip that the Samoan would be at Pistol Pete’s. She’d have every reason to lie; I couldn’t think of a good reason for her to tell the truth.

  I walked across the casino to find Cody, and was passing the show ticket window when the man I knew as the Samoan stepped out from a door marked “EMPLOYEES ONLY.” I froze and watched him speak briefly to a cocktail waitress, who seemed anxious to be on her way. He wore black slacks, a black sports coat, and a gold turtleneck stretched tight across his wide chest. Our eyes met, and I took a step in his direction, my hand reaching inside my coat for my stun gun. He blinked, as if irritated, and his thick lips flattened. I could see his muscles flexing under his coat from ten feet away. I instinctively moved laterally, getting in better position to strike. His knees were bent, his hands moving away from his body, and I felt sure he’d come at me—he looked like a coiled cobra. But instead he turned and calmly went back through the door from which he’d come.

  Within a minute I found Cody wandering the floor. He had lost most of the money he’d won at slots and was grumpy. “I should have quit when I was ahead,” he said.

  “Famous last words. Come on, I found our man.”

  “Where?”

  “This way.” We walked around the casino to the door next to the ticket window. “He came out from here.”

  “He’s an employee, huh? How do you want to play it
?”

  “Let’s stake out the parking lot and take him down when he leaves the building.”

  “I got a better idea,” Cody said. “Let’s go knock his dick in the dirt.”

  “No, wait,” I said, but Cody was already opening the door.

  “Goddammit,” I said, and followed him in.

  The hallway was dingy and cramped. It was so narrow Cody almost had to turn sideways to accommodate the width of his shoulders. The walls were once white, but had faded to a dirty gray and were streaked with black in places.

  We turned the corner into an area where three women were counting money, filling out slips of paper, and handing them through one of a series of teller-style windows. Behind the window a dozen people sat recounting the money and signing slips. At the end of the row a man was banding stacks of cash and placing the bills in a metal rack.

  “So this is where the money goes,” Cody said.

  “The bowels of gambling,” I said. “This is the ass end.”

  We continued through the room to a wider hallway, past a wall of lockers, a lunchroom, and some closed doors. The hallway turned, and at the end of the corridor I could see a glass door leading outside.

  “Hold on,” I said, turning around. We walked back and almost ran into the Samoan as he came around the corner.

  Later, I would remember a particular odor that emanated from his body. He smelled of char and smoke, as if he’d been tending a garbage fire.

  “You work here, where’s your name tag?” Cody said.

  “You’re trespassing,” the Samoan said.

  My hand was on my stun gun, but at that moment the door from the parking lot opened, and Raneswich and Deputy Fingsten walked in.

  I unzipped my jacket to give me access to the Beretta.

  “What are you gonna do, tough guy, draw on us here?” Fingsten said, sneering around a plug of chewing tobacco in his lip.

  “You know, Fingsten, I think you’re in the wrong business,” I said. “I think you’re going to learn that the hard way, very soon.”

  Fingsten glared at me, but his hand went to his ribs and he grimaced.

  Raneswich hadn’t yet acknowledged Cody or me. He stood with his lips pressed and his eyes averted. “These men your guests?” Raneswich finally said to the Samoan. The Samoan shook his head, and Fingsten grabbed Cody by the elbow. “Let’s go,” he said.

  Cody pulled away as if a child were playing with him. “Have you been drinking chocolate milk?” Cody said. “It looks like you got a little mustache. Here, I’ll clean it up.” Cody grabbed Fingsten by the head and roughly ran his finger over Fingsten’s mustache in a scrubbing motion. Fingsten flailed like mad, his feet skittering, his fists hitting Cody ineffectually on the forearms.

  I laughed out loud, and even Raneswich smiled.

  The Samoan watched impassively, his eyes never leaving me.

  Cody finally let Fingsten go, and he immediately drew his service revolver. “Hands on top of your head, now!” Fingsten screamed, his face reddened and his hair a mess. His cap was on the floor—Cody had smashed it flat with his size-thirteen shoe. “Assault on an officer, motherfucker. You are going down!”

  A few feet from us, a door opened and a man stuck his head out. “What the hell is going on out here?”

  “A trespassing and drunk-in-public violation,” Raneswich said.

  “These fucking assholes are looking at serious time!” Fingsten yelled, waving his pistol. A group of casino employees had heard the commotion and were gathering down the hall and watching.

  “Jesus Christ,” the man said. “Let’s resolve this in my office.”

  “Who are you?” I said.

  “I’m Salvador Tuma, manager of this casino.”

  I looked at Cody, who shrugged, and we walked into a big office with paneled walls, tan carpet, a large oak desk, and a number of padded chairs. On the desk was a name stand that read “SALVADOR TUMA, PRESIDENT.”

  The Samoan walked behind the desk and stood to the side. He continued to stare at me, his pupils small, the whites of his eyes opaque and fractured by a network of tiny veins that looked like electrical current. The rest of us sat, except for Fingsten, who paced back and forth, his face a mask of fury and humiliation.

  Salvador Tuma looked about fifty. His hair was graying and his complexion was like coarse sand. He had thick shoulders and good posture. A thin scar ran from the corner of his eye down a cheek.

  “Take a seat, Deputy,” he sighed. Fingsten scowled and sat down.

  “What do we have here?” he said, a man used to dealing with problems, with confrontations.

  “A couple drunks trespassing,” Raneswich replied.

  “How about assault on an officer?” Fingsten yelled, standing and pointing at Cody.

  “Junior, if you point at me again, I’m gonna take your arm off and stick it up your ass,” Cody said.

  Tuma’s eyes flickered impatiently. “What’s your name?” he asked me.

  “I took a wrong turn on my way out. I was gambling at your casino, and I was on my way home.”

  “His name’s Dan Reno,” Fingsten said. “He’s a private eye.”

  “You mean the one who–”

  “That’s right,” Fingsten said. “That’s the asshole.”

  Tuma stared at me with eyes that were almost black, and it wasn’t until then I made the connection between him and Jake Tuma, the whacked-out dude I had fought at the Midnight Tavern.

  “Jake’s your son?” I asked.

  “You’re the one who beat him up?” Tuma said, his voice thick and rising.

  “He was blasted out of his gourd on drugs and booze, harassing women at a bar, and he took a swing at me. He brought it on himself.”

  “That’s not how I heard it,” Tuma said. He started out of his chair but quickly composed himself and sat back down. His expression went blank as stone, and he stared past me at a point on the wall.

  I had no idea if my incident with Jake Tuma could be related to the Samoan stabbing Sylvester Bascom. For that matter, I didn’t know if the fact the Samoan worked for Salvador Tuma had anything to do with the murder. But I had no doubt it was not coincidental that we were all in this room together. Regardless, my goal was to get the Samoan alone and take him down, and it wasn’t going to happen here and now.

  “Well, sorry for the imposition. I’ll watch where I’m going next time.” I rose from my chair. “By the way,” I said, looking at the Samoan, “I enjoyed meeting you the other day, out by that stream. But you forgot to properly introduce yourself.”

  The Samoan stared back at me, not moving, his ugly face watching, his eyes dead and cold, like a shark’s eyes.

  “I don’t think he’s interested in conversing with you,” Tuma said.

  As we left the office, Fingsten jumped up and protested, but Raneswich pulled him back. We went out the back door into the snowy parking lot.

  “Tuma is paying off those cops, no doubt,” Cody said as we walked to his truck. “You see how they acted? It’s obvious. They work for Tuma big time. You can see it in the way he talks to them.”

  “That would explain why Marcus Grier wasn’t interested in busting Jake Tuma,” I mumbled.

  “Huh?”

  I gave Cody a quick run-down on the fight at Zeke’s. “Marcus Grier mentioned Jake was the son of a Pistol Pete’s executive, and it was obvious Jake wasn’t going to be charged.”

  “The whole department’s probably on the take.”

  “Grier doesn’t strike me as corrupt,” I said, then I thought of Mr. 187’s final words: “The sheriff…”

  “Let’s hope not,” Cody said. “It’d be nice to know if there’s a cop or two in this county we can trust.”

  “A casino paying off the police,” I mused. “What’s the point? Aren’t they getting rich enough off gambling?”

  “Get real. It smells like the mob. The goal is always to make more money.”

  “I find it hard to believe any law enforcement agency could
let someone get away with murder,” I said. “I can see them allowing smaller stuff, drugs, prostitution, the usual vices, but not violent crimes.”

  “Greed’s a powerful thing, Dirt. The Samoan didn’t shy away from ramming you off the interstate and blasting away at you with an Uzi. Since he’s working for Tuma, the cops won’t touch him. There’s no telling what he might do.”

  I looked at Cody in silence. Snowflakes were gathering on his head and beard. The creases on his forehead forced his eyebrows into a V, and his mouth was set in a scowl.

  • • •

  We decided to stake out the rear employees’ exit at Pistol Pete’s, hoping the Samoan would eventually leave by that door. Cody drove us around the employee parking area first, searching for a dark, full-size American-made truck, but there were at least two hundred vehicles there, and probably a dozen trucks that fit the description.

  It became a moot point fifteen minutes later, when the Samoan, Raneswich, and Fingsten all came out of the casino’s back door and left together in Raneswich’s Subaru. We followed them to a liquor store, and then south, past the city limits and into Myers. When they went by the last gas station in town, I slowed and hung a U-turn.

  “What are you doing?” Cody said.

  “They’re headed over the pass,” I said. “We’re going to have to wait to get the Samoan alone. But I’ve got a hunch. Hang with me.” Cody glanced at me sharply, then shrugged. “It’s your party.”

  I pulled a crumpled telephone book page out of my back pocket, and in twenty minutes we parked in front of the address for Marcus Grier’s residence. The house was in a quiet neighborhood, about a mile off the main drag. A silver Jeep Cherokee was parked in the plowed driveway under the shadow of a huge old-growth pine, its needles stretching high into the darkening afternoon. Three feet of snow buried the yard, but a neat walkway was carved up to the front door.