The Good Thief's Guide to Vegas (2 page)

TWO

So all right, I didn’t disappear. I went down five floors. But as far as the elegant blonde was concerned, there wasn’t a marked distinction.

Floor 35 of the Fifty-Fifty was very nicely appointed. The area outside of the elevator doors was lit by an ornate chandelier, the walls were papered an agreeable shade of blue, and there was a good deal more of the lush nylon carpet with the low-level electricity running through it. But most appealing of all, there was no concierge desk.

Setting off along the carpet, feeling a lot like a balloon being rubbed against a woollen jumper, I walked for something like the distance of a half-marathon before I came to a door marked
Emergency Use Only
. I checked both ways and then I pushed through the door onto the service stairs beyond.

No alarm sounded, though perhaps a small one is going off in the back of your mind. It could be you’re thinking about security cameras. Because security is what Vegas is renowned for, right? The countless fish-eye lenses covering your every move, the teams of finely drilled security staff watching over colour monitors and analysing your skin temperature and pupil dilation? Well sure, all of that is true, and more besides. But 99 per cent of the surveillance is focused on the casino floor.

Yes, the mega-resorts along the Strip offer five-star accommodation, and naturally, every room is stocked with flat-screen televisions, gold-plated taps and walk-in power showers. But that’s just the backdrop to where the real money is made – the gaming tables. And while the management would like you to have a good vacation and come back for more, they’re not going to waste time monitoring your route through the hotel hallways to your bed. They’d rather watch you gamble.

So I felt pretty confident as I climbed the service stairs that my movements weren’t being tracked and that I wasn’t about to run into a team of security guards. I also didn’t expect to meet any guests, since a city that features a replica of the Rialto Bridge with an escalator running up it isn’t somewhere that fitness fanatics come on holiday. And hell, even if I bumped into a member of staff, there wasn’t a great deal they could do. After all, I was a paying guest and I had my own room card to prove it.

As luck would have it, I didn’t run into anyone, and after tackling five flights of stairs and poking my head out into the rarefied atmosphere of the fortieth floor once more, I was relieved to find that there wasn’t a soul to be seen or a sound to be heard. Some 200 metres ahead of me, the corridor kinked right, and if my calculations were correct it would kink right once again before the alluring prospect of the blonde’s rear profile would come into view. But I could only speculate, because the door to Suite H turned out to be located just before the end of the first stretch of corridor.

Loitering outside, I removed a pair of disposable plastic gloves from my pocket. There was nothing unusual about the glove I slipped onto my left hand, and it fitted nice and snug. The glove for my right hand was a little different. I’d snipped two of the fingers clean away, and I had to be careful the plastic didn’t disintegrate as I eased it on. I needed the customised glove because my middle and fourth fingers were bound to one another with surgical tape. I suffer from sporadic attacks of arthritis, and just lately it had gone to work on my knuckles. Finger number four was especially bad. It had curled to the left, hooking over its buddy, and since it was more than a little painful, I’d taken the decision to tape them together. The upside was that my index finger and thumb were unaffected, and with the tips of my dud digits wrapped in tape, there wasn’t much danger of my leaving any prints.

Since my index finger and thumb were still willing to participate in my felonious activities, I put them to work by sliding Masters’ key card into the electronic reader on the door to his suite. After a beat, I removed it. A green bulb shone briefly and I heard a clunk as the electronic lock disengaged. Drawing a cautious breath, I reached for the handle and—

Zzzzzzz
. . . A blue spark snaked between the metal and my ungloved fingers. I gritted my teeth and growled, and then I leaned some weight onto the handle, swung the door open and stepped inside.

The moment I crossed the threshold, I experienced a buzz of electricity 100 times more powerful than anything the hotel carpets could conjure. It’s always been that way for me. I guess if I spoke to a psychologist about it, I might learn some ugly truths about myself. Then again, perhaps if I broke into that same psychologist’s office after hours and ripped the good doctor off, I might enjoy the biggest thrill of my life.

Analysis aside, I nudged the door closed and stood in the tiled entrance hall to the suite, whistling at the sight before me. Let me tell you, my own room had been plenty impressive when I first checked in, but this guy’s suite was a whole different story.

Ahead of me was a compact kitchen with sleek, illuminated

glass cupboards, a sizeable American fridge-freezer and a granite breakfast bar. Beyond the kitchen was a sunken area that featured a glass dining-table capable of seating twelve people, a large L-shaped couch in black leather, a wall-mounted television not a great deal smaller than the dining-table, a corner wet bar and a sturdy writing desk with a telephone and a fax machine. The desk was positioned beneath a brightly lit standing lamp and in front of some floor-to-ceiling windows that looked out over the rear of the hotel complex, the cross-streets and highways running behind the Strip and the red-hued mountain peaks beyond. A lighted passenger jet was coming in over the mountain ridge to land at McCarran International Airport.

The room was still and silent, save for the rumble of the air-conditioning unit. I shook my head in wonder and moved down onto the thick carpet of the living area. I shook it even more when it occurred to me that I was yet to see a bed.

I snuck across to a pair of double doors on my right and tried the handles. The doors were locked, and I got the impression they connected with a neighbouring suite. There was another door on the opposite side of the room, just beyond the desk, and I breezed right through until I found myself gawping at a super-king-sized bed adorned with fine cotton sheets, quilted eiderdowns and woollen throws, not to mention enough pillows to stock the home-ware section of a strip mall Macy’s.

A pair of teak cabinets flanked the bed, and on the nearest one a lamp with a fringed shade cast its light upon an alarm clock, a paperback book, and a spiral notepad and pen. A water glass was positioned beside the notepad, its rim covered with a paper disc bearing the casino’s logo.

Behind me was a double closet, and I threw open the doors, quickly discovering just how many leather jackets and pairs of stonewashed jeans one man could possess. An entire shelf was stacked with neatly folded white T-shirts, and another with grey. Masters’ briefs were arranged just so, and his socks, I noticed with a shudder, were embroidered with his initials.

I must say I felt a good deal happier when I looked towards the bottom of the closet and found the room-safe. That may sound curious, but a safe can save me a lot of time. Without it, a guest might hide their possessions among their clothes, or their shoes or their luggage. They might find an obscure spot in their dresser or under their bed. They might even keep their valuables with them when they go out for the day. But more often than not, a safe eliminates those dangers, because most people think that it’s a secure place to store their belongings.

It’s not. Hotel safes are susceptible to the charms of most burglars, and that includes absolute beginners. They tend to be guarded by a simple electronic code, and it’s often quite easy to guess the code a stranger has selected. If you don’t believe me, try letting yourself into somebody else’s hotel room and entering one of the following sequences – 999, 911, 000, 1234 . . . You take my point. Oh, and if that doesn’t work, try the number of the guest room itself. That baby’s a frequent flyer.

But here’s the really neat part. In certain American hotels, the safes are even more accommodating. For your own personal gratification, they offer you a choice. Sure, you can enter a good old-fashioned code, but if you’re wise to the risks and you want a little more protection, you can opt to swipe your credit card through an electronic reader on the fascia of the safe. Secure, right? Well yes, unless the scoundrel who broke into your room happened to do it by lifting your wallet. Because if he has your wallet, then chances are he has your credit card too.

I had Josh Masters’ credit cards and it was his platinum American Express that did the trick. As soon as I’d swiped it, I heard the whir and whiz of the locking motor, and the word
OPEN
flashed across the red electronic screen. Being a sucker for commands, I did exactly as I was told, and eased back the door to the safe before letting go of a variety of sigh that I usually reserve for somewhat more intimate moments.

The base of the safe was lined with a cushioned foam mat, and balanced on top of the mat were stack upon stack of some delightful casino chips. Most of the chips were purple, with flecks of lilac and mauve around their edges, but a few were painted plain, old-fashioned silver. Each purple chip was worth five hundred dollars in the Fifty-Fifty casino, and there were ten to a stack, six stacks in all. The silver chips were worth ten thousand dollars each, and there were three of those. Even my maths was capable of running that sum. Sixty thousand dollars. It seemed to me like karma. No doubt it would seem to Josh Masters like an outrage. But to be perfectly honest, I didn’t care, because I was more than happy for this to be one vanishing act that he’d never forget.

I filled my hands and had started to fill my pockets before I realised the error of my ways. The last thing I wanted was to lose a chip or to have them click against one another as I walked around the casino, and now that I considered the matter in more detail, I thought that one of the cringe-worthy socks bearing Masters’ initials might make an ideal chip-holder. I reached for a sock and stuffed it appropriately, then tied off the end and gave it a shake. The sock worked beautifully, muffling the chips. I congratulated myself on an elegant solution, slipped the sock inside my jacket and pondered what to do next.

I weighed Masters’ wallet in my palm. It was tempting to take the thing with me and try to return it to his pocket without being caught. All things considered, it would be the neatest outcome imaginable, and I felt pretty confident that I could pull the move off. But it was risky. A more sensible option was to dump the wallet in a litterbin elsewhere in the hotel. Yup, that was the clever play. Which probably explains why I decided to be a smartarse and toss his wallet into the safe.

Of course, I couldn’t lock the safe with one of his credit cards, because then the card in question would be separated from his wallet. So in the end I used a code. And since I considered the code I’d selected to be mighty clever, I had a sizeable grin on my face as I closed the closet doors and made my way back through the magnificent sitting room to the kitchen.

Helpfully, there was a peephole in the middle of the front door, so I could check that the coast was clear before making my exit. And making my exit was just what I was in the process of doing when I happened to glance to my left and spot something that prompted my brow to furrow.

Another key card.

The card in question was inserted in a plastic receptacle on the wall, and a tiny green light was shining beside it. Come to think of it, a good many lights had been on in the suite – the ones in the kitchen cupboards, the standing lamp over the desk, even the bedside lamps.

Hmm. I knew from my own room downstairs that unless a card was fitted in the slot, the lights couldn’t work and the climate control couldn’t function. But the lights were on in Masters’ suite and the temperature was uniformly chill.

Now, it could be that Masters had two room cards, and if he was as environmentally concerned as the rest of Las Vegas, it wasn’t too outlandish to suppose that he liked his air-con to be running while he was out and his lights to be on when he returned.

Or it could be that somebody else was inside his suite.

But I tended to believe that I’d have noticed if someone was watching television or taking a nap on the oversized bed while I ransacked the safe. And then it hit me.

I hadn’t checked the bathroom
.

All right, if you want to be picky, I hadn’t even seen the bathroom. But there had to be one, and in all likelihood it was annexed to the bedroom. I hadn’t noticed a door when I’d been in there, but then again, my attention had been focused on the safe.

I backed away from the peephole and drummed my fingernails on my teeth. Thinking logically, I was confident that if I found my way to the bathroom, there wouldn’t be anybody inside. I mean, if there had been somebody there, I would have heard them moving about or they would have heard me and said something, because they would have assumed that I was Masters. The other alternative, the notion that somebody could have heard me enter the suite and had hidden in the bathroom, was too crazy to even consider.

So why was I considering it? And why was I dithering? Even assuming there was somebody in there (which there patently wasn’t), there was absolutely no sense in me hanging around for a moment longer. I had the chips and my getaway was clear. The bathroom really shouldn’t have bothered me in the slightest.

But the sad truth is, it did.

Call me a perfectionist. Call me obsessive compulsive. Call me an utter bloody fool. Either way, I had to know that the bathroom was empty. I had to prove to myself that I hadn’t slipped up. It would bug me all night if I didn’t make sure – just as it bugs a lot of misguided folk if they don’t check that they’ve locked their front door before heading out for the day.

So I returned to the bedroom and I immediately saw the door that I’d missed. It was white and bevelled and located on the far side of the bed. I approached it and set my ear to the wood – and there wasn’t even the faintest murmur of a sound. And that
definitely
should have been enough.