"Let me help you with those," she said, and knelt down, tying them quickly.
When she finished she stood. "What do you want to do?"
"About what?"
"The others."
I must have been looking at her like she'd just lost her mind because she said, "We're kind of shorthanded. We could use some help, don't you think?"
"The pallbearers?" I said, astounded she would even suggest such a thing.
"Think about it. We don't have much time if Diamond is really in trouble. Sabas is good backup. Vicki is tough as rhinoceros skin, and Seriana's an Army Ranger. We don't have any jurisdiction in Arizona, let alone on an Indian reservation. Out there you and I are just civilians. Since you don't completely trust Faskin and Westfall, then maybe these guys are our best choice."
I stood and gathered my jacket, keys, and money while I thought about it. I didn't want to take them, but I couldn't quite come up with a good reason why. Was Sabas right? Was I just being selfish? Was I using my cop status as an excuse to shut everybody else out?
"It's what Walt would want," Alexa prodded.
I knew she was right. He'd picked all six of us, not just me. "I'll call them," I said. "While I do that, you need to get us some transportation. The last commercial flights have already left. Unless you can scare us up something from the Air Support Division, we can't leave 'til morning."
Til get the chief's King Air," she said. "He's not using it."
I called all of Sabas's numbers but didn't get an answer. Everything went straight to voicemail. I left a message to call. I wasn't about to give the reason because I still didn't trust him not to take matters into his own hands.
Next, I spoke to Vicki and told her what had happened and what we planned to do. She didn't comment but said that she'd meet us at Van Nuys Airport in forty minutes. I gave her the hangar number for the LAPD Flight Department.
Then I called Seriana. When I finished telling her what had happened, she asked, "What kind of ordnance are you bringing?"
"Not much. Couple of 9s. But we might have to surrender our weapons at the reservation gate. Alexa checked, and they have a strict no-guns rule on resort property."
"I don't think it's smart to surrender your weapon, sir," she said.
"We'll just have to see how it goes when we get there."
While Alexa was on the phone, I went out to her car, opened the glove compartment, and pulled out her little Bobcat .25.
An idea had been festering ever since O'Shea broke my arm and I'd been sitting in that ER, wondering how I could deal with that thug given my growing list of debilitating injuries.
I went back inside the house and into the kitchen. I could hear Alexa still on the phone. It sounded like she had successfully arranged the flight because she was asking about ETAs.
I got a baggie out of a kitchen drawer, then headed into the master bath, where I opened the medicine cabinet and pulled down the cast tape I'd stolen from Dr. Ray's supply shelf in the ER exam room. Next, I turned on the faucet and filled the washbasin, putting the roll of tape into the water.
While it was soaking, I popped the barrel up and checked the breach on the little .25 automatic. Alexa had loaded it before we'd gone into the Hayloft. The clip was full, and there was still one in the breach.
I put the safety on, then stuffed the little palm-sized subcompact into the plastic baggie to protect it from the wet fiberglass. After the gun was in the bag, I palmed it into my right hand so that the barrel didn't go any further than my first row of knuckles. I pulled the wet tape out of the sink and started to wrap my wrist and palm to cover the gun. It was tough going, and I was making a mess.
"What the hell are you doing?" I heard Alexa say. I turned and she was standing in the bathroom door, hands on her hips, staring at me.
"Come give me a hand with this," I said.
She walked over and looked down at my project. "Are you out of your mind? You fire a gun inside an enclosed cast and the gas recoil will blow all your fingers off."
"That's something to bear in mind," I said, then handed her the gauze pad.
"I'm not doing that," she said.
"Honey, as you and everyone else continues to remind me, I've been destroyed by this ape twice in two days. Sad as it is for me to admit, I don't think I can take Rick O'Shea, let alone five more just like him. Especially with this busted wing. You should applaud this. I'm finally choosing guile over guts. It's a first. A sign of emotional growth."
"What a load ofBS."
"Come on, help me out. If what you said is true, we're gonna have trouble packing guns into that resort as it is. Let's just call this my little insurance policy. What's it gonna hurt? Nobody's gonna check a cast for weapons. If it sets off a metal detector, I'll just say I have pins in there holding my bone together."
She cocked her head, looking at me askew.
"Honey, I promise I won't blow off my middle finger. I know how much you like that one."
She threw a wet washcloth at me but moved over and helped me finish the job.
When we were through, the Bobcat was safely hidden in the palm of my right hand. The new extended portion of the cast went down to my first set of knuckles, just the way Dr. Ray had wanted it to in the beginning.
I'd read the spec sheet when Alexa first bought the little Beretta. The seven-shot subcompact automatic was 4.9 inches long, nose to heel. It only weighed 11.5 ounces fully loaded and now fit invisibly under the wet fiberglass.
On my way out of the bedroom, I opened my dresser drawer and retrieved my Swiss Army knife. It had eleven different features. I slid the tool into my pocket, grabbed my Charter Arms Magnum Pug out of the bedside table, and clipped it on the left side of my belt. Then Alexa and I left the house.
When we arrived at the Air Support Division hangar an hour later, Vicki was already waiting. Our pilot was a crew cut in a flight suit named Justin Cooper--Coop, for short. He had flown Alexa before, and they went inside the Air Support Division office to pick a landing field in Tucson and file the flight plan.
Seriana pulled up while Alexa was still inside. She unloaded a medium-sized nylon duffel from her green van. There was a suspicious-looking sharp object poking the fabric on one side as she slung the bag over her shoulder and approached us, then put the duffel in the luggage compartment, which Coop had left open in the nose of the King Air.
"Whats in there?" Vicki asked her.
"Toys for boys," Seriana replied without humor.
Coop and Alexa came out of the FBO. He closed and latched the luggage bay as he said, "I've filed a flight plan for Tucson International Airport. With this southeast tailwind, we should be there in about an hour and thirty-six."
Ten minutes later, we were racing down the runway. The wheels came up, and we banked east into the cold night sky.
Chapter 51
I slept on the short flight because I've learned when you get to the end of a case, sleep is the one thing you can't plan for and never get enough of.
My eyes snapped open after a little over an hour, when the prop engine changed pitch and the King Air started to lose altitude for our gradual descent into Tucson.
I looked at my watch. If Coop's timetable was right, we had twenty minutes until touchdown.
The new portion of my cast was finally dry. I looked around the plane. Everybody was asleep, so I pulled out the Swiss Army knife, opened its little saber-tooth saw-blade, and began scoring the cast. I sawed a cut that was a quarter-inch deep from the knuckle of mv right middle finger straight down across the palm where the Bobcat was hiding. I ended the cut at the heel of my hand, making certain it didn't go all the way through. Next I did the same thing at my wrist as I scored the fiberglass all the way around. When I was finished, the cast was substantially weakened, but still intact.
We touched down on the runway at Tucson International. Coop taxied up to the executive air FBO. Then he shut down the twin-engine prop, climbed out of the pilots seat, and lowered the cabin door.
<
br /> "I ordered up a car for you, Lieutenant," he told Alexa.
The four of us got off the airplane as our Lincoln Town Car pulled up. While Alexa was thanking Coop for the ride, Seriana walked to the luggage compartment in the nose of the plane, opened it up, and pulled out her duffel. Then she headed toward the terminal, where a young man wearing blue jeans and a polo shirt was standing next to the door, waiting. He had a crew cut and military bearing. Seriana embraced him briefly, then handed him the backpack. They spoke for a moment before she returned. Vicki had been watching this operation with a smile.
"What's she got in there? IEDs?"
"I'm trying not to ask," I replied.
"Interesting woman," she commented.
Like most of us, Alexa's strong link is connected to her weak one. Her strength is she values organization and rules. She believes in order. It was one of the reasons she had risen so fast in the department. However, her weak link was that same Girl Scout mentality. My strong link is a creative, loose working style that sometimes has me skirting the edges of the rule book. Obviously that's my weak link as well.
Technically, since I didn't know what was in Seriana s duffel, why make a public guess and draw a complaint?
Alexa told our pilot we wouldn't be needing him further and he could return to L. A. Then we entered the waiting Lincoln Town Car, with Alexa taking the front seat next to the chauffeur. Seriana, Vicki, and I all sat in back.
Our driver was a big African-American guy who had a neck and shoulders that said ex-jock. He introduced himself as Arthur. As we chatted, it turned out he'd been a defensive end at Arizona State.
"You know where the Talking Stick Casino is on the Tohono O'odham reservation?" I asked him.
"Yes, sir." He was talking to me, but I noticed when his eyes were in the rearview mirror, they rarely left Seriana.
We turned onto the Nogales Highway heading toward a chain of mountains, which Arthur told us was the Quinlan range, where the Kitt Peak National Observatory and its telescope were located.
The engine of the town car purred noiselessly, the headlights cutting through the desert darkness. Cactus and sand flashed past the side window as we raced along.
Alexa said to our driver, "I understand the reservation is very poor."
"It is," Arthur replied. "They have big problems out there. The diet these people eat is horrible. Half the tribe has diabetes. The average male life span is fifty-two years. Our governor is trying to do something to help them, but except for the casino, it's hard to find a way to get enough money to raise their standard of living."
"So what's the casino like?" I was expecting the worst.
"Brand new. You're gonna like it. 'Bout a thousand or fifteen hundred rooms. World-class golf course, tennis, pool right in the middle of a hundred square miles of desolate poverty. It's like somebody plopped a Ritz Carlton down in Honduras."
We entered the Tohono O'odham reservation a little past three in the morning. The road in from the highway was a wide four lane, which led us past run-down trailer parks and broken adobe houses, junk was strewn everywhere. I could see the ghostlike hulks of rusting trucks parked on dead patches of dusty ground from which they would never move.
Then we arrived at the Talking Stick Casino property. The adobe barrier around the resort was nine feet high with decorative but lethal-looking wall spikes located at close intervals along the top. There was an elaborate guard shack at the entrance with a large computer check-in manned by several Tohono Nation security police officers.
We told our Indian gate guard we were going to rent hotel rooms and had to show our IDs and be put on the computer list. Since Alexa and I had creds that said we were police officers, the guard asked if we were carrying sidearms.
"We are," Alexa said.
"Sorry, but Til have to collect your weapons," the guard said. Til give you a receipt and keep them in a gun locker right here. You can retrieve them when you exit."
"I've never been asked to surrender my weapon to a sister police department anywhere in the U. S.," I told him.
"You aren't in the U. S.," the guard replied. "This is the Tohono O'odham Indian Nation, a sovereign territory."
We all surrendered our weapons, including Vicki. Alexa glanced at my cast but said nothing.
Then we were passed onto the grounds.
As we drove on I saw an expansive eighteen-hole golf course off to the right and a lighted tennis center on the left. We drove past an aquatic park with water rides, then a riding stable and archery range, all of it new and beautifully maintained. This resort had it all. Up ahead the Talking Stick Casino came into view.
It was a big, artfully lit building with a huge five-story center section that was designed in a modern pueblo theme. Two large hotel wings stretched out on each side of the main structure and contained the thousand or more rooms our driver, Arthur, had mentioned.
The hotel casino was modern with clean lines, but along the roof of the main building were architectural cement parapets with decorative wooden poles extending from them, reminiscent of an Indian sweat lodge. The resort was modern and aesthetically pleasing but with a definite tribal flavor.
In the center of the circular drive by the front entrance was a fountain with a large lit statue of an Indian chieftain holding a crooked talking stick high above his war bonnet as water cascaded down, splashing on his bronzed head and shoulders.
A billboard nearby announced, THE MAGIC OF CHRISS ANGEL IN THE TOHONO ROOM-MONDAY THROUGH FRIDAY AND
THE RAGE IN THE CAGE AT THE TALKING STICK EVENT CENTER
8:00 P. M. SATURDAY
We pulled to a stop and got out. While we were standing under the huge porte cochere waiting for Alexa to pay Arthur, an overly polite, heavyset man in a dark suit with Indian features approached.
"Welcome to the Talking Stick Hotel and Casino," he said. 'Tin Graham, your casino host. May I direct you inside or help you to find anything?"
"I think we'll just check in and get to bed," I said.
Alexa moved up to join us, and Graham led us to the registration desk.
The lobby was almost deserted at this hour, with only a few tables working in the adjoining casino.
There were four of us, so it was cheaper to rent a two-bedroom suite instead of three separate rooms. In order to avoid detection, we had already decided to take the suite under Seriana's name. She showed her ID, we were registered, and Alexa paid for one night in cash.
Because we had no luggage other than briefcases and purses, we followed a bellman, carrying our own gear down a first-floor hallway carpeted with a new, Indian-style patterned rug. We stopped in front of 1477, which had a brass plaque that read:
THE PINTQ SUITE
The bellman opened the room and showed us inside. I tipped him, then closed the door as he left.
The two-bedroom, ground-floor suite was done in desert-sand colors and furnished with expensive, plushly upholstered, Italian reproduction furniture.
"Not bad," Vicki said.
The others trooped out onto the patio, which adjoined the beautiful, semilit golf course, while I called the front desk and asked for Rick O'Shea's room. He wasn't registered. Neither was Diamond Peterson.
They refused to give me any information about Team Ultima, saying I should talk to the event center in the morning.
After I hung up, I went out on the patio to join the others.
I said, "It's almost four. We're not going to learn anything tonight. Let's get a few hours' sleep and start working on it at eight tomorrow."
"What about Diamond?" Vicki said.
Alexa said, "We won't find out anything tonight. Nobody's even up to talk to."
We selected our rooms, and I went to the writing desk, picked up the cordless phone, and set the wake-up call for 8:00 A. M.
After I finished, I replaced the phone next to the heavy leather folder that held the room-service menu and hotel literature.
On the folder's front cover, embossed in gold, I saw
the same little logo of a mesa with a circle around it that I'd seen on the roof of the building on Wilshire Boulevard.
I picked up a brochure.
The Talking Stick Hotel and Casino was a Eugene C. Mesa resort.
Chapter 52
It suddenly made a lot more sense. I now knew why Mesa brought this challenge match all the way out here. He was also getting a casino cut of the action.
After I showed the others, Seriana said we were bivouaced in enemy territory. There was nothing we could do to change it, so we went to bed.
I couldn't sleep. I was churned up with worry about Diamond, and the fact that E. C. Mesa was popping up everywhere.
I decided to wait until everybody else was asleep and go on a scouting mission. I wanted to get a better feel for this place.
Alexa and I had the main bedroom. Seriana shared the suite's second room with Vicki. When I finally heard Alexa's even, steady breathing, I got carefully out of bed, grabbed my clothes, and quietly dressed in the darkened living room.
I started by going back to the main desk. According to the room clerk, nobody named Sabas Vargas was registered. After the call from Jack telling me he was living in a reservation trailer, I didn't expect him to be registered either. He wasn't.
As long as I was up, I decided to take a look at the Talking Stick Event Center. To get there, I had to walk through the almost-empty casino. I made a slow tour of that glitzy gambling oasis, looking at the few people who were still playing, but saw no familiar faces.
The event center was on the west side of the casino, located in a large new annex. A big sign by the main entrance announced "The Rage in the Cage" later that night.
Six fighters from Team Spartacus were billed with their pictures along with six from Team Ultima. Rick O'Shea was not among them. Brian Bravo was listed in his place.
Since Alexa told me Brian was being cut from the fight club, it seemed strange he would be here, unless he was just acting as a placeholder for O'Shea.
The massive room was at least twice the size of two basketball courts, and at this time of night was completely empty. It was outfitted with fixed overhead lighting, a Jumbotron, and had state-of-the-art metal detectors at each entrance.
the Pallbearers (2010) Page 20
