The Good Thief's Guide to Vegas (13 page)

With the evidence of my web activity deleted, I powered down the laptop and returned it to the briefcase. Then I closed the briefcase and spun the dials at random and set the case back down on the desk.

There was a suitcase next to the bed and it was half-full of clothes. The clothes belonged to a man (or a seriously butch female). I sorted through Y-fronts and ankle-length socks, khaki trousers and pastel polo-shirts, round-neck sweaters and handkerchiefs. There was a charging device that most probably fitted the BlackBerry or the laptop, and a battery-operated razor and a pack of travel tissues.

Leaving the suitcase as I’d found it, I approached the closet on the other side of the bed. I slid the louvred door to one side and passed my torch beam over a couple of creased business shirts hanging from the rail before focusing in on the safe.

The safe was the same make and model as the one on Floor 8, and it was every bit as susceptible to the same approach. Armed with my tools, I opened the thing up and had a good look inside. And almost immediately I was prepared to forgive the guy his porn habit because the only thing in the safe was a brown, padded envelope, and the only thing inside the padded envelope was good old-fashioned cash. The bundle of crisp notes had been secured together with a bulldog clip, and since the note on top happened to be a fifty, and the bundle was at least an inch thick, I had a very good feeling about it.

Of course, time was getting on, and despite the sudden urge I had to count how much money I’d just found, the most important thing was for me to get out of the room while the getting was still good. So I tossed the padded envelope down onto the cabinet beside the bed, gripped my penlight in my teeth and set about securing the safe. Before very long, I was done with the battery and the paperclip, and after screwing the manufacturer’s badge back into position, I put my gear away in my spectacles case and fairly glided across the room to gather up my empty suitcases. I was just in the process of unzipping one of them to place the padded envelope inside when I heard a sudden noise of the kind that members of my profession are inclined to heed.

The noise was the high, wheezy snigger of a man’s laugh, and the raucous counterpoint of a woman’s cackle, and it was coming from just outside in the corridor. Now, on any other night I’d have taken house odds that they couldn’t possibly be heading for the one room I happened to be inside. But somehow, given everything that had already befallen me in Vegas, I just knew that they were. I knew before I heard a thud against the door, and before I heard the bark of the woman’s laugh again, and before I heard the sound of a key card being slid home. And I sure as hell knew before the door burst open and the man tumbled inside and fell hard onto the floor, because I’d long since grabbed my suitcases, ducked inside the closet and slid the louvred door closed behind me.

SEVENTEEN

The lights came on, bright and startling, and I watched through the slatted bars in the closet as a skinny man crawled on his hands and knees towards the foot of the bed. He hauled himself up onto the mattress, rolled onto his side and laughed a high, giddy laugh. He was dressed in a cheap brown suit with a tie that had been loosened off at the collar and a yellowing shirt with the top button undone. His left foot was missing a shoe and there was a ragged, wet graze on the side of his face that looked as though he had fallen on gravel.

‘Sit up, Harry,’ drawled a brassy, full-bodied voice.

The voice wasn’t the only thing that was full-bodied. So was the woman who tottered into view. She was a brunette, with coils of thick hair that fell down from a severe centre parting and framed a face that reminded me of a moderately famous television wrestler. She had an ample waist and an even more ample bosom, barely contained by a blouse that appeared to have been styled on the coat of a Dalmatian. Her stockings were fishnet, her skirt was unseasonably short, and if any doubts lingered as to what her profession happened to be, it wouldn’t be long before she dispelled them.

‘You don’t look like a Harry,’ she growled, and snatched at the man’s tie to hoist him upright. ‘That really your name?’

He swayed and gurgled before slumping forwards into her voluminous chest.

‘Hey.’ She yanked his head back by the roots of his hair. ‘Money first, doll.’

Harry didn’t seem capable of reaching inside his pocket, so she took it upon herself to assist. Evidently, she wasn’t a practitioner of the light-fingered approach I’d favoured with Josh Masters. I’d seen cops frisk suspects with more care, and she was equally brazen about counting his money. Not a single note found its way back to his wallet, and I watched with some amazement as she removed a high-heeled shoe and poked the bundle of dollars down towards the toe.

I glanced at the envelope full of cash on the bedside cabinet. So far, it had gone unnoticed, and I just hoped things would stay that way.

‘Now take off your pants.’

The man fumbled listlessly at his belt buckle, blowing bubbles from his lips.

‘You want me to do it?’

‘Yessss . . . ma’am,’ he slurred.

‘So lay back, why don’t you?’

She pushed him so hard that he almost went clean through the bed and wound up on Floor 11. Loosening his belt, she then unzipped his fly, braced her foot against the end of the mattress and heaved at his trousers. Once she had his underwear down as far as his shins, she hitched up her skirt and straddled his chest, pinning his lean arms with her knees while she unbuttoned her blouse.

I suppose I could go on, but titillating you with details of their coupling really isn’t my style. For starters, it’s tricky for a hack like myself not to sound like a pervert when describing a big sex scene (and believe me, they really couldn’t get much bigger than the one I was being compelled to witness). But there are plenty of other pitfalls too. Do you try for a romantic vibe, and risk using a whole bunch of clichéd metaphors? Do you aim for graphic realism, at the cost of alienating readers of a more chaste disposition? Or do you opt for summing it all up in a few neat lines, and run the danger of sounding like a medical textbook?

I’ve never been able to settle on a particular technique, and as a result, I tend to avoid writing love scenes in my mystery novels. As I recall, the very most that Michael Faulks has ever experienced is a smouldering look, followed by a snappy stage direction and a sudden break in the text. Like this.

Now granted, the carnal intricacies that an educated reader such as yourself might impose on that white space are anyone’s to guess, but I’ve always thought it must be seriously frustrating for poor Faulks. Until now. Because let me tell you, if there was any way that I could have blanked out the sights and sounds of the beguiling coitus I was forced to endure, I would have gladly done whatever it took.

True, to begin with I watched with an avid, if somewhat mortified, curiosity. But as their thrusting and grunting and groaning and clutching dragged on, my interest soon began to wane. Sadly, they showed no sign of following suit. I had a feeling that had a lot to do with how drunk the skinny guy happened to be, and I suspected his partner’s engagement list wasn’t as full as perhaps she would have liked. During a particularly loud and energetic phase I took the opportunity to sit down on one of the suitcases and rest my head against the wall. I’d heard of people feeling like a spare part in a threesome, but this was plain ridiculous.

I closed my eyes and did my best to block the lovebirds out. To begin with, I focused on how I might extricate myself from the closet and grab the envelope full of cash, soon concluding that it would be a hell of a lot simpler if the closet was gimmicked like the cabinet in Masters’ show. That got me thinking of Josh again – of his performance and his disappearance and his possible next moves. I asked myself where he could have gone, and if there was a clue to his whereabouts that I’d missed, and then I thought of the redhead in his bath, of the way she’d smiled and joked on the internet video, and of how she wouldn’t be doing that again in a hurry. I thought of Victoria sharing the stage with a murderer, and of our interrogation by Terry Ricks of Carson Associates, and of the borderline psychotic behaviour of the Fisher Twins, and of the oddball partnership of the high-pitched little chap and the Eastern European giant. I asked myself whether they’d been involved in the murder and the gambling scam, and the gambling angle got me wondering how Victoria was doing at blackjack. For all I knew, she might have enjoyed a run of good fortune that would balance out all of my bum luck. She might even have won enough to pay off the Fisher Twins and enable us to leave Vegas in one piece, in which case I’d owe her much more than a dumb short story.

Maybe, I thought, I’d wind up writing her a story based on some of the things that had happened to us. Maybe I’d use my exact predicament in the closet, or maybe I’d do something with the illusionist angle. My Faulks novel with the magician in it had received some favourable write-ups when it first came out, so perhaps there was more mileage to be had from the character. I could picture myself crowded over my laptop writing about him again, and as so often in the past, the version of me doing the typing appeared to have a cigarette in his hand. Damn. I shouldn’t have thought about cigarettes. Now I couldn’t get my mind off the pack in my pocket. I could feel the edge of the carton poking into my thigh. Would it be so bad to try and smoke one? The way Dirty Harry and his gal were carrying on, they might not even notice. Then again, maybe the cigarettes were my way out. Perhaps I could wait for them to conclude their lovemaking and emerge from the closet to offer them a smoke?

I smirked in the darkness, readjusted my weight on the suitcase and checked the time on my digital watch. Almost 2 a.m. I thought of the watch on my other wrist, and to be honest I felt pretty good that I’d stolen it from Josh. It was a nice timepiece, and maybe it held some sentimental value for him, and maybe I didn’t altogether care if he never saw it again.

Thinking of the watch made me think of Josh’s wallet. I felt plenty smug about that too. Without his credit cards, he might find it harder to run. Was there anything else in his wallet that could make things difficult for him? Well, there was the signed colour photograph, and the key card, and the torn napkin with the telephone number scrawled on it.

Hang on a minute.
The torn napkin with the telephone number scrawled on it
. The note the little guy had left in Masters’ room had told him to call someone called Maurice. Could the number on the napkin belong to the same person? And if it did, how long would it be until I could do anything about it?

I felt for Masters’ wallet inside my pocket, but there was really no sense in removing the napkin because I couldn’t risk being heard by either of my naked playmates over on the bed. The bed. Hmm. That made me think of my own bed back at the Fifty-Fifty. The mattress was well-sprung, the cotton sheets were luxurious, the feather pillows were plump and soft and inviting . . .

Boy, was I tired. So tired, in fact, that my head was beginning to loll and my thoughts were becoming vague and confused. My eyes fairly burned with fatigue and my lids were drooping. I blinked once. I blinked twice. I blinked three times and finally allowed my eyes to rest for just a few pleasant seconds.

Curious visions began to form in my mind. I saw Josh lying dead in a bath tub filled with casino chips. I saw the redhead dancing nude on the theatre stage while the Fisher Twins were locked inside the magic cabinet. I saw the tiny man smoking a cigarette inside a hotel room safe that his giant pal carried under his arm. I saw Victoria writing a story on my laptop while Terry Ricks made notes from behind a two-way mirror.

And before very long, I was no longer conscious of what I was seeing, because I’d been just dumb enough to fall fast asleep.

EIGHTEEN

I awoke into a haze of darkness and silence. At first, I couldn’t remember where I was staying, or even which city I happened to be in. Then my brain slowly registered that there was a wall behind my head instead of a pillow, and a suitcase beneath my buttocks rather than a mattress, and as realisation gradually dawned, I felt a painful contraction in my chest, and my skin began to tingle.

Grabbing for the clothes rail above me, I heaved myself upright. I pressed my forehead against the louvred doors of the closet and cupped my hands around my eyes. With the lights turned off and the curtains drawn, it was like staring into the depths of a cave, but after a short while I was able to make out a hump under the bedcovers. There was a digital clock on the television across the way, and it cast the form on the bed in a greenish glow. I wasn’t sure if it was one person or two. I couldn’t tell if they were fast asleep, or if they were simply lying very still, waiting for me to make my move.

The time on the television read a quarter to six in the morning. So I’d slept for more than three hours, cooped up in a closet with a set of burglary tools in my pocket, sitting upon a suitcase that didn’t belong to me, wearing a stolen tunic and carrying another man’s wallet. Talk about dumb. I mean, talk about flat-out stupid. What the hell had I been thinking? Was I so eager to get caught that I was prepared to lock myself up and just wait to be found?

If I could have smacked myself over the head without making the slightest sound, I would have done it without delay. I simply couldn’t believe the jeopardy I’d placed myself in, and it only got worse when I considered the time pressures I was working under. Because who knew how long ago Harry and his girl had concluded their lovemaking? It could be that I would have had the chance to escape many hours earlier, and that I’d be walking around as a free man, if only I’d had the sense and the self-control necessary to stay awake.

The form on the bed grunted and snorted and kicked out a leg from under the bedcovers. Judging by its lean hairiness, I was pretty sure it didn’t belong to the tubby hooker. I guessed that made sense. After all, she wouldn’t have been likely to hang around once she’d fulfilled her side of the bargain, not least because of the cash she’d taken from Harry’s wallet and pushed down inside her shoe.

I eased up from the suitcase and straightened my knees. My feet buzzed with pins and needles, but that was the least of my concerns. My most pressing conundrum was how to slide back the closet door without making too much noise. Did I go for quick and sudden, or slow and steady? I chose slow and steady, easing the door aside and just praying that the mechanism wouldn’t squeal. I tested the gap with my hands. I’m kind of a slim fellow, and as I hadn’t eaten all that many hamburgers since I’d arrived in the States, I was able to suck in my belly and edge out through the space between door and wall.

As soon as I was free, I pursed my lips and let go of a soundless whistle. I even wiped the back of my gloved hand across my brow. For once, it seemed that things were turning in my favour. In fact, it seemed that things were going altogether swimmingly. Or rather, they were, until the moment I reached a tentative hand out towards the money-filled envelope that I’d so conveniently left on the bedside cabinet.

Funny. It didn’t appear to be there.

I frowned, as if that might help, and then I used both hands to feel around the top of the cabinet. Still nothing. It occurred to me that perhaps the envelope had fallen down onto the floor during all the bedroom gymnastics, so I dropped to my knees and passed my hands over the carpet. I didn’t find anything with my first sweep, or my second. On my third sweep, my busted knuckles struck the cabinet.

I snatched my hand away and bit hard on my bottom lip to stop myself from yelping. Harry stirred and groaned and pulled the covers tight around his shoulders. He farted. I tried not to let my pain or his stench get the better of me, and meanwhile I reached inside my jacket with the fingers of my good hand until they touched upon my penlight. I pointed the lens down against the floor, then twisted the dimpled shaft so that the bulb came on. Using my palm to shield the light, I tilted the lens and angled the glow across the carpet. All I saw was more carpet. I checked around the side of the cabinet and under the bed. I even skimmed the light across the top of the cabinet. The envelope was gone.

I didn’t believe Harry had tidied the envelope away. He’d been too drunk earlier and he was too comatose now. So it seemed to me there was only one place the envelope could be – it must have vacated the scene along with Harry’s date.

Could I blame her for taking it? Not really. Did I blame her for taking it all the same? Hell, yes.

I was the one who’d faced the risks and deployed the necessary skills to open Harry’s safe. I was the one who’d chanced upon the envelope and the cash. And what’s more, I really needed the damn money. Without it, I had two empty suitcases, a staff uniform and a little over four hundred dollars to my name. So it seemed to me singularly unjust that a woman of low morals should have stooped a shade further and added thievery to her criminal repertoire. And if she’d been there just then, I’d have given her a piece of my mind, and perhaps even a kick in the shin to boot. But she wasn’t there. She was long gone. And she made me a good example.

I inched backwards towards the door. Given how things stood, it seemed way too ambitious to attempt to remove the suitcases from the closet and take them with me. So as it happened, I was leaving with even less than I’d had when I’d first broken in. And I guess that explains why, despite all my years of training, and my dedication to the noble art of inconspicuous access and egress, I felt compelled to bang the door closed behind me as I left. Because hell, I may not have been capable of ripping the poor sap off, but at least I could introduce him to what I sincerely hoped would be the mother of all hangovers.