CASINO SHUFFLE (13 page)

“Max isn’t there anymore?
 
I was just talking to him.”

“I’m afraid he was called away.
 
The tournament.”

“Right.
 
He doesn’t like me, does he?”

“Of course he does.”

“Can you put me through to his cell phone maybe?”

Antonio paused.
 
“You didn’t have a request?”

“I was just talking to him about being our butler this weekend.”

“Ah, I see.
 
We haven’t had a chance to discuss that internally.”

“I trust Max.”

“I’ll pass that along, Miss Moon.”

“I have a good instinct for people.
 
It’s from being around a lot of scumbags.”

“I can see where that might hone ones perceptions.”

“He didn’t set off my scumbag detector.”

“That’s most reassuring.”

Sigh.
 
“Can you have him call me later?”

“Absolutely.”

“He’s standing right there, isn’t he?”

“There is only myself and a butler named Sonny Wu.
 
We are the only butlers in the near vicinity, I assure you.”

“Okay, okay.
 
So you’ll be by soon to arrange the dinner tonight?”

“I’ve already contacted my favorite in-house chef.
 
He’s preparing an initial menu for your approval as we speak.”

“You’re the best.”

“I’ll call your suite before I arrive.
 
Until then, have a nice evening, Miss Moon.”

He replaced the receiver and checked his watch.
 
“Time to go to the tournament, Max.”

Max and Sonny followed Antonio as he strode toward the office door.

“What did we decide?”
 
Max looked toward Sonny.
 
“Did we decide anything?”

Sonny frowned.
 
“I don’t feel closure.”

Antonio rested his hand on the doorknob.
 
“We have to move ahead with the final option.
 
I feel it’s our only recourse.”

“Final option,” said Sonny.

“Which one was that?”
 
Max asked.

“The one I didn’t want to mention,” said Antonio.

Chapter Eight

Ang Wang knew from experience that most casino surveillance didn’t pay attention to hotel cameras.
 
But they were probably looking for him so maybe they
were
paying attention.

Big whoop.

He had spent fifteen minutes by the elevators with his duffel bag; head bowed over a casino brochure about jogging trails, waiting for someone to come off the elevator and walk in the direction he needed to go.
 
If security was watching for him they were looking for a single Asian male with no luggage hustling down the hallways.
 
He had already scouted out the tinted security camera bubbles in the ceiling of the elevator landing and stood in a spot that was more likely out of their field of view.
 
Unless they had hidden cameras somewhere, which he doubted, but hey, sometimes he was surprised by security measures.
 
Not usually.
 

Finally the elevators dinged open just as he was reading about how long it took to jog to Lantern Hill at a moderate pace.
 
A Vietnamese family expelled themselves and their luggage from the elevator, chattering in their stupid language and sounding like a flock of gargling turkey vultures.

He thought,
Ha.
 
I blend in great.
 
Dumb security don’t know Vietnamese from Chinese.
 
All look alike.

He shook his head.
 
He was even thinking in the fake accent now.

Snatching up his bag Ang caught up to the family that choked the narrow hotel corridor.
 
The pack leader, a white-haired old fart the height and weight of a ten-year-old, was holding his room key card in the air like a winning lottery ticket, comparing it to every room number plaque they swarmed past.
 
He would grunt if the number didn’t match and that was the signal for everybody to keep moving.
 
One of the kids in the back of the blabbering group, all of them
dee-dong-fing-fong
-ing each other, looked around at Ang and said something in Vietnamese.

Ang poked his finger up his nose and stuck his teeth out over his bottom lip.
 
“Dong dong dong,” he said.
 
He didn’t speak any of their dumb dialects.

The kid frowned and turned away from him.

Ang was American.
 
Grew up in
Boston
.
 
He liked big tits and bare ass.
 
Pot and beer.
 
Red Sox and ultimate fighting.
 
Watched pay-per-view porn.
 
Tailgated hybrids with his SUV.
 
He didn’t rock the vote.
 

In fact the only thing he liked that was Chinese was the #17 lunch special at the chink take-out joint down the block from his apartment.
 
He didn’t know squat about General Tso or what war he was in, but damn, that guy made good chicken.

Never having met his parents, Ang was adopted as a toddler by a couple of rich Internet investors looking to save a foreign kid to get them into Heaven.
 
They bought him toys and gelled his hair and dressed him in cashmere and Reeboks.
 
Sent him to private schools and enrolled him in photojournalism classes, probably because they figured all Chinese kids liked cameras.
 
He used his newfound skills to sneak pics of the neighbor’s teenage daughter trying on her training bra and developed them in the darkroom Mom and Dad had built for him, which turned out to also be a great place to masturbate.
 
They never came in there, so he did, frequently.

He grew up loaded and spoiled and was still pretty loaded and spoiled, even with the dope and the hookers and the gambling.
 
Every picture was worth a thousand words and about ten thousand bucks, if it was the right kind of picture.
 
And most of his pictures were the right kind, even the first one he ever sold.
 
He was seventeen and wandering a private beach in the
Hamptons
, avoiding his parents and sneaking shots of hot chicks napping in the sun.
 
All of sudden he spotted Shayla Cole.
 
She was wearing shades and a baseball cap and a bikini, but he knew it was the girl from the popular TV show his parents watched every week.
 
He followed her, camera at his side but lens pointing at her rear end, pressing the button over and over.
 
Then she jogged up the beach and ducked into the clubhouse restrooms.
 
Without even thinking about it he went right in after her.
 
Her stall door was closing.
 
There was a fat lady primping herself in the mirror and she didn’t even turn around.
 
He ducked into the stall next to Shayla Cole.
 
Waited until he heard her peeing.
 
Stood on his toilet, stuck the camera over the connecting wall, snapped a picture, jumped down, opened the door, and ran the hell out of there.
 
He sprinted down the beach, heart pounding, grinning like an idiot.
 
He ran all the way to back to their rented beach house and went into the bathroom and looked at the picture.
 
She was sitting on the toilet, legs open, bikini bottoms around her ankles.
 
He masturbated four times in a row.
 
A month later he sold the picture to a website called
Celebritease
and got a check in the mail for a thousand bucks.
 
After that he never did anything else.

He was no dumb chink, he just acted like it.
 
Using the no-speaky-English routine had gotten him out of ten arrests in five different countries (none of them
China
) and fourteen lawsuits.
 
He had an outstanding warrant here and there that would catch up with him eventually, but with a big payday he could buy off whoever he wanted.
 
Being the infamous internet paparazzo the Kamikaze Cam made him a target for every celebrity lawyer in
Hollywood
trying to kill the freedom of the press.
 
They want their
celebutantes
pictures kept out of the magazines they should tell them to stop getting out of limos with no panties and attacking innocent bystanders after an all-night bender.

The brat was staring at him again.
 
Probably wondering why he was following them.
 
Ang tugged down his baseball cap and flipped the kid off.

Rude gestures were his only second language.

 
The Vietnamese army huddled around a door at the end of the hall as they tried to figure out how to work the key card.
 
Ang hung around a second or two, playing with his cell phone to look like he was doing something.
 
He scanned the hallway.
 
No other guests and his newly adopted family were ignoring him.
 
He put the phone to his ear, faking a call, and casually walked towards a door marked
Employees Only.
 
He pushed through it, ripped the matchbook out of the doorjamb bolt plate, stuffed his cell in his pocket and waited ten minutes.
 
If anybody from security barged in on him he would make dong-dong noises and play dumb Chinese guy.
 
He waited another ten minutes.
 
A couple doors in the hall opened and closed.
 
Nobody came to get him.

So far the hunt for a good Shanndon shot had been one long waste of time.
 
First he’d spent all that time and energy getting into their suite only to be attacked by a maid with a spray bottle.
 
He didn’t know how much water he’d splashed onto his eyeballs but they still burned and his mouth tasted like tangerine.
 
Then after that he’d checked his pockets and found his hotel receipt missing, which meant it was in the suite where the jerk in the tuxedo probably found it.
 
He’d taken a last ditch effort at the limo arrival, hoping for a nice up-skirt shot of
Shannon
with no panties or a thong, and gotten locked into the stretch by the tuxedo again, who was quickly turning into his arch nemesis.
 
He’d spent forty-five minutes in that limo while he had banged on the partition and just kept circling the casino until he’d had to piss so bad he’d threatened to do it on the leather interior.
 
Finally the guy had dumped him off at a gas station three miles up the road and he’d had to walk all the way back through the woods.
 
Gave him time to think, though.
 
Come up with a plan.

So far it was working out.
 
Nobody had seen him come through the
Employees Only
door.
 
Surveillance was probably zooming in to look down girls’ blouses on the casino floor.
 
He knew a guy in Vegas who worked the cameras.
 
They really did that.

He hit the lights.
 
Steel girders sprayed with heat retardant framed in a high-ceilinged storage area.
 
Desk chairs, end tables, coffee tables, armoires, nightstands, side tables, dining room chairs, mattresses, bed frames, headboards, and bubble-wrapped artwork filled the room.
 
This was the place the hotel staff referred to as
the attic
, a furniture storage room, even though it wasn’t on the top floor of the hotel.

He walked down the cramped makeshift aisles and saw the storage cage that was outfitted with metal tool cabinets, long work tables, and busted furniture in various stages of repair, all clamped, glued or varnished.
 
He saw the broken chair from his own room waiting by the door with a note card taped to it.
 
Broken by guest, Rm. 1823.