The Good Thief's Guide to Vegas (12 page)

‘What gives with the wire?’

‘Just some litter I found.’ I shrugged. ‘Don’t want anyone tripping.’

He studied me with glassy eyes.

‘You know, I’m pretty sure I have the wrong room.’ I gazed beyond him towards the number on his door.

‘What do you got on the table?’

‘Er, it’s meatloaf and pasta with meat sauce. But I’m sure this is the wrong room.’

The man looked towards the trolley, then back at me. He licked his lips.

‘Nah. That’s us, all right.’

My eyes fairly bugged out of my head. ‘Um, are you sure, sir?’

‘Sure I’m sure. Bring it in.’

He backed up and held his door open with a stubbed toe. I peered inside at the mess of clothes and bedcovers on the floor. The widescreen television on the facing wall was screening a NASCAR motor race.

‘What are you waiting for? You want it to get cold?’

He didn’t know the half of it, and I didn’t feel as though I had any alternative. I let off the brake and wheeled the trolley into his room, and a few minutes later I shuffled back out with a dud receipt and a dollar tip for my trouble. The guy had just swiped my cover, not to mention my evening meal, and I had to ask myself: could things get any worse?

SIXTEEN

Things were certainly about to get worse for the two women from Bolton. Now that my trolley was gone, I had to find a new excuse to be knocking on doors, and their suitcases struck me as the neatest solution. Letting myself back into their room, I gathered up the two cases from the floor and emptied their contents into the closet. Then I tossed my coat hanger inside one of the cases and made good my escape.

My escape was mighty timely. As I turned the corner at the end of the corridor, I walked into a haze of perfume, hair spray and coarse northern language. It seemed the women’s passport images hadn’t been as unkind as I might have believed, at least not when they were steaming drunk and leaning heavily on one another for balance.

Luckily for me, there was nothing the least bit noteworthy about their suitcases. Looking at the women now, I was surprised that they hadn’t favoured bright pink plastic or fake Burberry prints. Not that I was complaining. Their drunkenness and my uniform seemed to combine to render me invisible, and when they lurched right, I swerved left and passed without comment.

I headed straight for the service elevator. I had high hopes that the folks on Floor 12 would be far more honourable than the deviant who’d nabbed my trolley, and I also hoped that they stayed out a little later than the Bolton Babes. Time was moving on, nudging towards one-thirty in the morning, and every break-in I attempted was beginning to carry more risk. Before too long, I’d have to call it quits and make my way to the casino floor to see how Victoria was faring. And at some point, we’d need to sleep. Yes, we’d been in the States for close to a week already, and we were working to a pressing deadline, but I still hadn’t adjusted to the time difference completely, and Vegas had added another few hours to the burden. In Europe, dawn had been and gone, and I was feeling badly fatigued. My eyes ached and my limbs were weary, and all the nicotine patches in the world couldn’t make up for a well-timed doze.

I tell you, just thinking about it made my head loll, and the laundry carts outside the service elevator suddenly looked mighty appealing. If it hadn’t been for the risk that I might wake in the middle of a fast-spin cycle in an industrial washing machine, I could very well have climbed inside and closed my eyes for a short while. But ever the professional, I resisted, and meanwhile I allowed my good friend the service elevator to save my legs the trouble of climbing four flights of stairs.

The guest corridors on Floor 12 looked just like the ones down on Floor 8, and I only wished the same rooms would be empty too. Yes, there were a bunch of
Privacy Please
signs, and they definitely helped, but so far as the other doors went, it still felt as though I was playing a large game of Russian Roulette.

I passed beyond the guest elevators before slowing to look for opportunities. There was a store cupboard on my right and I poked my head inside, but since I didn’t plan on making my fortune by hawking vacuum cleaners, there wasn’t anything to delay me. Further along the corridor were a couple of doors with signs hanging from them requesting a room service breakfast, and they were followed by three doors featuring no signs whatsoever.

I paused outside the middle door and tried listening for any noise – a toilet gurgling or a television blaring or a fat man inhaling chicken wings – but I couldn’t hear a thing. Dropping the empty suitcases beside my feet, I freed a crick in my neck and flexed my fingers and finally used my good knuckles in the way God had intended. And when nobody came to answer my call, I removed the coat hanger from my suitcase and used my fingers in the way I had intended, until I was inside yet another darkened hotel room where I had no right to be.

I cast my penlight around the space and discovered that the room looked just like the ones downstairs. The bathroom was on my left as I entered, and while it was by no means as plush as the bathrooms at the Fifty-Fifty, it was perfectly respectable. There was the usual toilet and sink and shower and tub, and mercifully, there was no trace whatsoever of a floating corpse.

Beyond the bathroom was the bed-sitting area. This particular suite only had one bed, though admittedly it was king-sized. Facing the bed was the customary flat-screen television, and the mini-bar, and an easy chair positioned close to a desk. The curtains hadn’t been drawn but a gauzy net hung over the window glass and I set the suitcases down on the floor and used an electric control panel on the wall to draw the net aside. The view wasn’t anything to write home about. The window looked out onto another hotel window that belonged to the Paris-Las Vegas resort across the street. And since this isn’t a Hitchcock movie and I don’t run into murder scenes quite as often as Victoria would have you believe, there was no beautiful blonde being throttled in front of me. There was just a blank window, no light, like a hundred others around it.

I turned, and the beam of my penlight settled on a briefcase on the desk. The briefcase was upholstered in a supple black leather and it featured a pair of three-dial rotary combination locks. I sat in the easy chair and rested the briefcase on my knees and tried the double latches. No joy. Undeterred, I rolled the dials until every single one was set to the number nine and then I killed my penlight so that I could focus on my sense of touch.

I applied sideways tension to the left-hand latch and pressed my gloved index finger down hard over the first dial, rolling it slowly upwards. Spinning the dial in the other direction was no good, because every number would seem to click and tense up. But by rotating upwards, and by being careful about it, I could feel the dial stiffen and the latch twitch when I hit upon the correct number. Once I had it, I repeated the process on the next two dials. The technique was one I’d practised many times in the past and it took barely a minute until I was done.

I reached for my flash and read the code – 545. I turned the second pair of dials to the same sequence, tweaked both latches, and hey presto (as Josh Masters wouldn’t have said), the little beauty opened.

Sadly for me, it wasn’t stuffed with casino markers. Instead, there were a good deal of business papers and a wide selection of cheap pens, as well as a pocket calculator and a BlackBerry device. I unhitched the strap shelf in the lid of the case and took a peek. I found notepads and highlighter pens and a Dictaphone. Oh, and a laptop. The laptop was one of those dreary, grey machines that weighed about the same as a truck and was a smidgen less aerodynamic. It was worth perhaps a couple of hundred dollars in the dark recesses of a parking garage, but I wasn’t inclined to sell it. I was, however, happy to open it up and see if it had any battery power.

No, I wasn’t planning on writing the opening section of the short story Victoria had mentioned. All I wanted was to connect to the internet, and to my surprise and delight, it turned out that the owner of the laptop had already paid to access the hotel’s Wi-Fi service. It wouldn’t save me any cash, because naturally I’d been intending to charge my web time to one of the credit cards in Josh’s wallet, but it did save me a precious few minutes setting up an account. The laptop had one of those archaic red nipples instead of a track pad, and I moved the screen arrow to the address bar in the web browser before calling up YouTube.

I wasn’t sure what to search for exactly, but in the end I tried the following collection of words:
Josh Masters Vegas Show Vanishing Holiday Cabinet
. Right away, I scored a bunch of hits for the self-same magician, and top of the list was the very thing I’d been looking for. Setting the speaker volume to low, I clicked Play on the video clip.

The footage had been shot from the rear of the Fifty-Fifty theatre and it was poorly focused and unsteady, and quite obviously illegal. The back of somebody’s head blocked the bottom left of the screen, at least until the camera zoomed into the stage, and I could barely hear the music, let alone what Masters was saying into his microphone bud. Even so, the routine was recognisable as the one Victoria had been involved in, the only difference being that Masters’ flame-haired assistant was on stage too.

Dressed in a short, gossamer-thin, babydoll negligée, she wore very high heels and showed an awful lot of leg. Something glittered in her hair – a tiara, perhaps – but it was nowhere near as bright as her stage smile. She fixed the audience with her teeth as she gestured towards the open cabinet, waving her hands at the blackened interior.

I increased the volume on the laptop but I still couldn’t hear what Masters was saying. Not that it mattered. I was fairly certain that his patter wouldn’t change much between performances and I was far more interested in what the redhead was up to. Currently, she was lowering a hula-hoop down over the cabinet, presumably to show that there was nothing attached to it. And now she had hold of a long white ribbon, and was prancing around and around the cabinet with the ribbon floating behind her, binding the cabinet in such a way that any attempt to open the doors would cause the ribbon to tear. The low res video gave her movements a mechanical quality, as though she was a clockwork ballerina in a musical jewellery box.

As Masters kept up his monologue, the redhead raised a finger to her pursed lips and bunched her shoulders theatrically before tiptoeing in an exaggerated fashion around to the back of the cabinet. It was only a matter of seconds before Masters caught up with her disappearance and went in search of his girl. When he couldn’t find her, he scratched his head and tapped his feet, acting completely bamboozled. He even interrogated the front row of the audience without success.

He shrugged and spun the cabinet around in a half-turn to check the reverse. No sign of her. Then he turned the cabinet frontwards, revealing the redhead’s mischievous face poking out through the circular porthole in the double doors.

The moment he saw her, Masters clicked his fingers as if she’d outwitted him one time too many, and then he smiled wickedly and danced across to the wings, returning to centre-stage with a pair of steel blades. He slapped the blades together and held them above his head. He contemplated his reflection in the mirrored surface and he kissed the cold steel. Then he turned quite abruptly, spun the cabinet around so that the redhead’s face was hidden from view, and rammed both blades through the side.

The audience gulped and turned to face one another, but before my mystery cameraman had fainted in his seat, Masters twirled the cabinet back around to a crescendo of music that made the laptop thrum. I peered hard at the screen and waited for the stage-lights to dip until I could see that the redhead was still grinning through the circular hole in the front of the cabinet.

The audience howled with laughter, to Masters’ evident disgust. He stamped his foot and shook his head, wagging his finger at this pesky young upstart. She wiggled her nose and rolled her eyes, goading the master magician until he could take no more.

Masters turned back to the crowd, sneering and snarling like an utter ham, and then he rubbed his hands with glee before bending down to the stage and lifting a large black cape for all to see. He turned the cape in his hands, showing us the front and the reverse. He wafted it before his beautiful assistant. Then he snapped his wrists and flicked the cape up into the air, allowing it to fall down over the cabinet. Quickly now, he twirled the cabinet around and around on its castors at a dizzying pace, and while the audience were suitably distracted, he stepped behind.

I watched closely, waiting for Masters to re-emerge, but to my genuine surprise, he wasn’t the one to do so. The cabinet had barely quit spinning when the redhead skipped out, sporting a rather eye-catching bikini and straw sunhat, and sipping gamely from the pink daiquiri in her hand. Before the audience had even begun to applaud, she whipped the black cape away to reveal Josh Masters trapped in her stead. Playfully, cheekily, she snapped the white ribbon with a long, outstretched finger, withdrew the steel blades, and finally threw open the wooden doors to reveal the colourful beach mural. And then good old Josh leaped out, his jeans, white T-shirt and leather jacket replaced with Bermuda shorts and a floral Hawaiian shirt, golden sand spilling from around his feet, and that million-dollar grin fixed smack in the middle of his stupid, fake-tanned face.

The video clip stopped just as Masters and the girl took their bow. I rewound the footage, trying to see how they’d done it, but it was hopeless. Even if it might have been possible to catch a glimpse of the secrets behind the trick, the images available to me were far too grainy to help. But I had at least learned something – I hadn’t been completely nuts to think there was a hidden way in and out of the cabinet.

Now obviously, Josh hadn’t got as far as discussing any of that with Victoria, or she would have told me about it. After all, I didn’t believe she was a paid-up member of the Magic Circle, and I liked to think she would have trusted me with the information even if she was. And besides, it was quite clear that Josh had reworked the cabinet trick to make it a lot less ambitious with Victoria involved.

The thing that really puzzled me was whether Josh had always planned to vanish during his show. On balance, I didn’t buy it, because it would have been a hell of a lot simpler to walk away from his dressing room before he got up on stage. It seemed to me that the appearance of the Fisher Twins was what had caused him to run, and the only question that remained was: where had he gone?

Well, that wasn’t the
only
question, but it was the most pertinent one from my point of view, and it was certainly something to ponder. And ponder it was just what I intended to do, once I’d slipped the laptop away and finished the task at hand.

Before closing the laptop, I called up the browser history. The history showed the YouTube video I’d just watched, and to be prudent, I thought I’d better delete it. Perhaps there was a way to delete just that one record, but since I didn’t know how to set about it, I ended up wiping the entire history instead. Mind you, I didn’t think the owner of the laptop would be inclined to complain, since the majority of his links related to the kind of material he could have watched on the flat-screen television, if only he’d been prepared to opt for the pay-per-view channels.