The Good Thief's Guide to Vegas (24 page)

Ricks crumpled and let go of a croaking gasp. The item he’d been holding onto slipped free and arced through the air. It landed near to the black velvet curtains at the rear of the stage and before Ricks could react, I dived for it and gathered it into my hands.

I uncurled my fingers. In the middle of my palm was a computer memory stick, coated in soft rubber and rounded off at each end, like a rather eye-watering suppository. There were no markings on it whatsoever, aside from a few grains of sand, but I was as sure as I could be that I finally had a hold of the juice list.

I swivelled to see the security guards lumbering across the stage, forming themselves into a semi-circle and closing in on me, eyes dark and chests heaving, like a pack of low-rent zombies.

‘You’ve got the wrong guy,’ I said, and cringed at the line. ‘
He’s
the one you should cuff.’

They glanced at Ricks, unsure what to do. Ricks cupped his temple and glared at me the way a boxer glares at an opponent shortly before he removes his head from his shoulders.

‘Throw that punk in a back room,’ he snarled.

‘Throw them both in, why don’t you?’

The security guards turned, and I squinted out into the darkness between their legs, watching in some confusion until the Fisher Twins moved into the light at the front of the stage.

‘Yeah, do it already,’ the one on the left said. ‘They both have some explaining to do.’

THIRTY-EIGHT

I found myself in the back room Jared Hall had occupied only a day before. It was just like the room where I’d been questioned with Victoria – same putty-coloured walls, same plastic table screwed to the floor, same uncomfortable plastic chairs – the only difference being that I was on the mirrored side of the two-way glass. I guessed Ricks was in the room next door. Maybe he was even looking at me through the glass partition. I raised my cuffed hands to wave at him and my battered reflection waved back.

I sighed and paced the room. I smelled of the beer the cocktail waitress had spilled on me and I was still one shoe down, so I moved with a limp. While I paced, I stretched my arms up above my head, testing the sore spot on my ribs and scratching the polystyrene ceiling tiles with my fingernails.

I was on my third circuit of the room when the door was unlocked and the Fisher Twins walked in. They stood with their backs against the wall and their hands in the pockets of their khaki trousers.

‘Sit down,’ one of them said, with a nod of his ginger hair and freckled face.

I studied him for a moment before doing as he asked. ‘Did Ricks confess?’

‘To what?’

‘Killing Josh.’

The twin held my eye. He didn’t answer in a hurry and I got a bad feeling about the delay. His brother cleared his stringy throat.

‘He figures you for it.’

‘He’s really playing that game?’

‘You deny it?’

‘Of course I deny it. I didn’t kill Josh.’

‘Then how about the juice list? Ricks says you were the one who put it under the sand.’

I spread my cuffed hands on the table and let go of a long sigh.

‘You do remember that you caught me in your office? You do remember that I hadn’t accessed your safe?’

‘Then how’d the juice list get out?’

‘I told you. It was Josh.’

The twins shared a look. They offered me the same troubled expression.

‘Ricks figures you hid the memory stick someplace when he searched you upstairs. Says you took us to the theatre and planted the stick under the sand, so you could return for it later.’

‘Well, that’s pretty dumb.’

‘Yeah? How else did it get there?’

I blew air through my lips. ‘If you want me to speculate, I’d say Josh was the one who broke into your safe, some time in the last couple of days. When you came to his show, he must have thought you were on to him.’

‘So?’

‘So he must have been holding the memory stick at the time. At first, I guessed he’d hidden inside the cabinet and that he’d become stuck there. I was wrong about that, but not as wrong as I could have been. My thinking is that before he vanished, he lifted the gimmicked hatch in the back of the cabinet and hid the memory stick inside. Then, when the sand spilled out, the memory stick came with it.’

‘Why would he do that?’

‘Same reason Ricks suggested I might have. So he could return for it later. Say his disappearing act hadn’t worked. He wouldn’t have wanted to be stopped with the memory stick on him.’

‘Yeah? Then how’d he wind up dead?’

‘You’d have to ask Ricks that question.’

The twin on the left approached the table and leaned his weight on his clenched fists.

‘I’m asking you.’

I stared at him, not wanting to glance away and have him interpret it as a sign that I was lying. ‘Maybe Ricks found out that Josh was ripping you off. Maybe he was watching Josh’s show from the wings and saw him bolt. Then he confronted him.’

‘Why?’

‘The list is valuable, right? Ricks would have known that. I understand he helped compile parts of it. He could have made a lot of money if he delivered it to the right hands.’

The second twin left the wall and moved alongside his brother, stroking his chin.

‘Maybe you were the guy waiting for Josh.’

‘Duh. I was sitting in the front row of the theatre. And I was on stage just a couple of minutes after Josh vanished. You spoke to me. Then you locked me up with my friend next door.’

The twins exchanged another look. They still didn’t seem convinced.

One of them said, ‘Ricks was in here questioning the croup.’

‘The whole time?’

They didn’t offer me a response. It seemed likely they didn’t know for sure.

‘What about cameras?’ I asked.

They looked at me with question marks in their eyes.

‘Surveillance cameras,’ I went on. ‘If there are cameras where Josh’s car was parked, they might prove who killed him.’

The twin on the right pushed up from his fists.

‘Don’t try anything smart while we’re gone.’

I scraped back my chair and lifted my shoeless foot onto the table. ‘Do I look like the type who could?’

Not long after the twins had left, I turned my back on the mirror-glass partition and reached inside my shirt pocket for the biro Victoria had palmed me. Gripping the metal nib, I pulled the plastic casing away. Then, holding onto the flexible plastic tube containing the biro ink, I fed the nib down into the ratchet mechanism on my tie-cuffs. Once I was free, I dropped the cuffs and the biro parts under the table and sat rubbing my skin, luxuriating in the novelty of being able to move my hands freely again.

After a time, I stood and approached the door to the room. I tried the handle and found that it was locked. There wasn’t a lot I could do about that. I didn’t have my picks on me and the biro and plastic tie-cuffs weren’t up to the job. And besides, I was pretty sure there was a security guard stationed outside, just waiting to beautify my face with his nightstick if I happened to cause any trouble.

I crossed to the mirror and pressed my face to the glass, cupping my hands around my eyes. If I focused right, I could just make out a dim murkiness beyond.

I returned to the plastic chair. A half-hour went by, and my head was just beginning to loll and my eyelids starting to droop when I was roused by the sound of the door being unlocked. The Fisher Twins walked back in.

‘Well?’ I asked. ‘Did you find anything on the surveillance footage?’

‘Come on, smart guy. Why don’t you just tell us why you did it?’

‘Huh?’

‘Don’t play dumb with us.’

‘You’ve lost me, I’m afraid.’

The twin nearest the door exhaled and rubbed at his eye with the heel of his palm, as though he’d just concluded a lengthy business meeting and was feeling especially jaded. ‘There is no footage.’

‘The recordings for the past day have been erased,’ his brother added. ‘The cameras in the parking lot were powered down.’

I gulped. It wasn’t what I’d been expecting to hear, but I wasn’t about to give up that easily.

‘Well, there you go,’ I told them. ‘Ricks is high up in your security detail. I’m guessing he must have had access to the recordings and that he deleted them to destroy the evidence. Case closed.’

‘Funny. He said the same thing about you.’

‘Given you’re a burglar, and all.’

I swallowed. My ears popped. ‘I didn’t erase that footage. I wouldn’t have known where to look or how to delete it.’

‘You knew where to look for the juice list, all right.’

‘Because Josh told me.’

‘So you say.’ The twin jabbed a finger at me. ‘Hey, where are your cuffs?’

I looked down at my hands, suddenly conscious that I’d been rubbing at my wrists.

‘They were starting to chafe.’

‘They do that. How’d you get ’em off?’

It didn’t strike me as the most opportune moment to draw attention to my ingenuity with locks and bindings.

‘I rubbed them on the table leg.’

The twin frowned at me. His brother frowned at the table.

‘Is that so?’

‘I’m afraid it is.’

The twin on the right checked the time on his watch. He turned and made as if to leave the room. I spoke up before he’d got too far, saying, ‘What about Josh’s body?’

‘What about it?’ he asked the wall.

‘Why don’t you have someone on your security team examine him – maybe take a look at the stab wounds more closely. It might give you a link to his killer.’

The twin flexed his hands. ‘You think this is
CSI
?’

‘I’m not suggesting an autopsy. But surely it’s worth a try?’

He looked back over his shoulder and summoned a flinty glare. ‘Maybe we should leave it to the cops.’

‘If you were planning to leave any of this to the cops, I wouldn’t be sitting here right now.’

He glanced towards the mirrored partition and found his brother’s eyes in the glass. ‘Man has a point.’

The twins nodded at one another and moved towards the door.

‘Can I use the bathroom?’ I asked.

Three security guards accompanied me as far as the door to the bathroom, and one of them followed me inside. There was no door to close for my privacy and no window to prise open to make my escape. I unzipped my fly and peed. The guard watched me do it. He didn’t comment on my technique and I didn’t ask him for any assistance. I took my time washing my hands, smoothing the soapy water over the sore spots on my wrists. Then I was transported back to my room.

Just before I was locked inside again, a fourth security guard came along the corridor and handed me coffee in a Styrofoam cup. I turned to the security guard who’d watched me pee.

‘Loan me a cigarette, Mac?’

It seemed like a Mac moment, on account of his period cop uniform.

‘I don’t smoke.’

‘How about your buddies?’

‘They don’t smoke, either.’

He locked the door behind me and left me alone in the room, drinking my lukewarm coffee and thinking about the cigarette I wasn’t smoking. Two hours went by. I counted them off on my digital watch, since Josh’s watch had quit working again. I tore the Styrofoam cup into pieces. I became so hungry that I started to wonder if I should eat some of it. I’d got as far as tasting a piece by the time Ricks walked in.

THIRTY-NINE

Ricks entered the room holding an ice pack against his forehead. The ice pack was pale blue in colour, complementing his navy blazer and crisp white shirt. He grunted a greeting, then stepped forward and sat down in the plastic chair across the table from me. He lifted the ice pack away from his face and revealed a dark, swollen lump just above his left eye. It looked as if a crazed plastic surgeon had implanted a golf ball beneath his skin.

‘I hope you’re not expecting an apology,’ I told him, and spat a mulched piece of Styrofoam onto the remains of my cup.

‘Doc tells me I have a concussion,’ he said. ‘That accounts for the nausea. And the dizzy spells.’

‘And the compulsive lying?’

Ricks barely smiled as he covered the lump with the ice pack once more. He used his spare hand to reach inside his blazer.

‘Guess you figured you were mighty smart.’

‘You’ll have to be more specific than that, I’m afraid.’

He removed his hand and I saw that he had a playing card pinched between his forefinger and thumb. The reverse of the playing card was pointed towards me.

‘Aren’t you supposed to shuffle the deck and invite me to select my own?’

A smirk flirted with his lips and the greying bristles of his goatee beard stiffened and stretched, like the fronds of a sea anemone. He held the card in front of his nose and turned it slowly. Two of Hearts.

‘You want me to memorise it?’ I asked.

‘Like it’s the first time you’ve seen this playing card.’

‘What do you want me to say?’

Ricks exhaled audibly. My response obviously didn’t please him. I don’t suppose the playing card had pleased him a great deal either. There was blood on the waxed surface, and I was confident that a forensic test would demonstrate that it belonged to Josh Masters. There was also a single word scrawled across the face of the card in a faint blue ink.
RICKS
.

‘Seems you recommended the Fisher Twins had somebody take a look at Josh’s body. Seems you suggested they might find something to identify the killer.’

‘Just trying to be helpful. I thought the slash wounds might give them a lead.’

‘Kind of clever, I guess. Laying the plant.’

‘Me?’

‘Yeah. You.’

He was right, of course – I had done it. The moment everything had fallen into place for me, when the twins had pushed me clear of the boot of the Lexus and I’d first noticed that Ricks was nowhere to be seen, I’d used the biro Victoria had palmed me to write his name onto one of the playing cards from the deck in my pocket. Then, when the twins had backed off and I’d stepped up to look down over Josh the second time around, I’d slipped the card into his hand before tugging the black cape up to cover his face.

I have to confess that I liked the symmetry of the move. When I’d first met Josh, I’d wanted to show him a trick that involved writing a name on a playing card. And once it had occurred to me that Ricks was the killer, I couldn’t see the harm in doing something similar to give justice a nudge in the right direction – especially if it would take the heat off me.

‘Odd, ain’t it,’ Ricks said, turning the playing card in his hand and showing me the reverse. The words
CIRCUS CIRCUS
had been printed over and over on the flipside, in a slanted brown font. ‘I seem to recall you had a pack of cards just like this when I searched you upstairs.’

‘Coincidence is a funny thing.’

‘Huh. And how would you rate the coincidence if I asked you to count out that same deck of cards onto this table and show me the Two of Hearts you’re carrying?’

I didn’t say anything to that. There wasn’t anything to be said.

‘Or maybe we should arrange for a specialist to compare the name on this playing card with a sample of your handwriting?’

‘Sounds complicated,’ I told him. ‘And more than a little unnecessary.’

‘Oh, it’s unnecessary, all right. But not for the reasons you have in mind.’

Ricks spread his right hand on the table, fingers arched, like he was about to play piano. He drummed his fingers and I watched him at it. The tune didn’t strike me as anything Liberace would have rated.

‘You have a screwy notion,’ he said. ‘Figuring me for the guy who killed Josh.’

‘Makes sense to me.’

‘Is that so?’ His fingers tickled the missing ivories some more. ‘Then I don’t guess I’ll be buying one of your mystery novels anytime soon.’

‘Not to worry. I hear they have excellent lending libraries in the prisons over here.’

Ricks curled his lip and pushed up from the table, wincing as his balance shifted and the pain flared in his forehead. He gripped the table edge to steady himself, then paced stiffly behind me. I waited for him to lean in close to my ear and treat me to a dose of halitosis. Instead, I heard him punch the power button on the television fixed to the wall.

‘Turn around, why don’t you?’

Why didn’t I, I thought, and so I turned in my seat and leaned an elbow on the backrest of my chair. Ricks motioned towards the television screen with the remote.

‘This here is your killer.’

The picture on the television was of a hunched figure sitting in a room much like the one I was sitting in, behind a table much like the one I’d just turned my back upon. He had lank, tangled hair and a smudged tattoo of a pair of dice on his neck. He wore a Yankees baseball shirt, his right hand was heavily bandaged and he was nibbling at the fabric of the dressing with his teeth. If Jared Hall had really planned on leaving Vegas, he was taking one hell of a circuitous route.

‘Casino security picked him up a couple hours ago,’ Ricks told me. ‘Fool sent some kid in to cash a stack of ten k markers at the high-stakes cage. Dumb move. Security red-flagged the kid and hauled him inside for questioning. Gave our friend up right away. Guy was parked in a breakdown truck outside of a Fat Burger two blocks from here.’

‘The fact he had some silver chips doesn’t make him a murderer,’ I told Ricks. ‘He might have lied to the twins yesterday. He could have had the chips all along. He could have been willing to risk his health to hold onto them.’

Ricks lowered the ice pack from his forehead and weighed it in his hand along with my words. The weighing took a few moments and it led him to suck on his lips in contemplation. Once he was through sucking and thinking, he dropped back into his chair and slapped the television remote and the ice pack onto the table before me. I willed myself not to fixate on the colourful swelling above his temple as he delved inside the front, left-hand pocket on his blazer.

‘They didn’t only find your playing card when they checked on Josh’s body. They found the man’s cellphone too.’

He pulled a clear, Ziploc bag from his pocket. Inside the bag was an expensive-looking mobile phone – the kind with a touch-sensitive screen. He frowned as he prodded at it with his thumbs. After some considerable time, his face relaxed and he showed me the lit screen.

‘Text message. Sent at one-seventeen this afternoon.’

I took the phone from him and stretched the plastic bag so that I could read the message clearly.

Am stuck in trunk of Lexus in staff parking lot. Have your roulette cut. Can you come free me?

I offered Ricks a puzzled look. ‘How does this connect Josh to Jared? Did you trace the number this message was sent to?’

‘Better than that.’ Ricks slipped a hand into the pocket on the right of his blazer. He removed another plastic bag and another mobile telephone. This time, Ricks negotiated the operating system with relative ease before passing me the bagged phone.

‘Found this on the croup,’ he explained.

I compared the two messages and confirmed that they were identical. Then I scrolled down and found that Jared’s telephone had received the message at 13.17. That was around the time I’d been in his apartment, and it seemed reasonable to believe that this was the text that had prompted him to leave me by myself.

‘I can see that the messages match,’ I said. ‘But that doesn’t prove that Jared is responsible for Josh’s death.’

‘The dressing on the man’s hand has blood all over it.’

I shrugged. ‘Unless you can demonstrate that the blood belongs to Josh, that doesn’t mean anything. His fingers were mashed with a metal bar only yesterday. I’d say a little bleeding is to be expected.’

‘The blood is on the outside.’

I shrugged some more. ‘Even if what you say is true, it looked to me as if Josh had been stabbed to death. Your man there couldn’t lift a pen right now.’

‘So he used his left hand. That would explain why the wounds were spread around so much. The blood on the bandage would rate as splatter.’

I supposed that was possible. And I couldn’t deny that Jared had a plausible motive. Josh had screwed him out of his cut from the roulette scam, sure. But factor in the damage to his hand and his banishment from Vegas, and who knew what he was capable of. Hell, I knew only too well that he had a tendency to lash out.

I slid the phones back across the table to Ricks.

‘It would help if you had the knife he used,’ I told him. ‘Or better still, a confession.’

‘Oh, we’ll get a confession.’

‘Without breaking his hand this time?’

‘Relax. I have enough evidence to work the guy. The text message is good, but one of my team searched the dumpsters out back of the parking lot. We found a crowbar he used to force open the trunk – it has paint fragments that match with the finish on the Lexus. We also found the weapon. It has a lot of blood on it. Prints too, I’m guessing.’

‘You have the knife?’

Ricks shook his head. ‘No knife. Whack job used a barbecue fork.’

I exhaled hard and turned to look up at the television screen. Jared was still gnawing on a thread from his bandage, as if it was a stubborn hangnail.

‘Then I guess you do have your killer,’ I said. ‘But that still leaves one matter unresolved.’

I fixed on Jared, chewing hard, and I allowed my mind to do the same thing on the knotted logic I was struggling to untangle.

‘I didn’t like Josh Masters a great deal,’ I told Ricks, ‘but he didn’t strike me as completely stupid. So I don’t see him climbing inside the boot of his Lexus and waiting more than half a day to send Jared the text message you found. Then there’s the fact that somebody erased the footage from the cameras in the parking lot. I don’t imagine Jared was capable of it, and you haven’t suggested as much. Which means someone else was involved.’

‘You think so, huh?’

‘Absolutely. And when you put all that together, you’re really only left with one question that matters.’

‘Oh yeah? And what’s that?’

‘
Who shut Josh in the trunk of his car?
’