Loaded Dice (28 page)

At 12:16, he put the waters on the counter, and Earl rang them up. From his wallet he removed a hundred-dollar bill and saw Earl frown.

“It’s the smallest I have,” Amin said.

Earl snapped the bill, then held it up to the fluorescent light. Amin tried not to act insulted. He stared down at the stack of Sunday newspapers next to his feet. A headline caught his eye. He put the newspaper on the counter.

“This, too,” he said.

At 12:17, he got back in the car. He’d parked near the car wash. There was a pay phone on the back of the building. Seven minutes was plenty of time, he thought. He handed Pash a water. His brother unscrewed the top and took a long swallow. Amin indicated the trunk with a tilt of his neck. “Did Gerry give you any trouble?”

“No,” Pash said. “He was quiet.”

“Good.” Amin started the engine. Then he stared at his younger brother. Pash looked very nervous.
He did it,
Amin thought. But he had to ask. Just to be sure.

“Did you call them?” Amin asked.

Pash’s head snapped. “Who?”

“You know.”

“No, I don’t.”

“The police.”

“What are you talking about?”

“Did you call the police while I was in the store?”

“Come on, be serious,” Pash said.

Amin grabbed him by the arm and squeezed his younger brother’s biceps so hard that it made his eyes bulge. “The charade is over. I know what you did.”

“What are you talking about?”

“You called the police in New Orleans and Biloxi and Detroit and the other cities, and told them where the explosives were hidden. It wasn’t someone in the network, like I first suspected. It was you.”

“I didn’t—”

Amin grabbed the back of Pash’s head and banged it into the dashboard.

“Don’t lie to me, or I’ll break your fucking neck.”

Pash pushed away, his eyes wide with fear. “Is that what you think? That I betrayed you?”

“Yes! You called the FBI and used some kind of code to tip them off. Somehow you made them know each time that the threat was real. Didn’t you?”

Pash took several deep breaths. “I only told them about the explosives. Never you.”

Amin raised his hand to strike him. Pash grabbed his hand. For a moment, they wrestled in the front seat of the car.

“Why must you kill innocent people?” Pash said. “What will it prove?”

Amin stopped fighting and glared at him. With his head, he pointed at the newspaper lying on the seat between them.
“Read it,”
he said.

Still holding his brother’s wrists, Pash stared at the front page. The headline was about six baseball players who’d gotten caught cheating, but were still being allowed to play in a big game. “So?” he replied.

“Yesterday, a young Palestinian couple were killed by Israeli gunfire in the Gaza Strip. In Iraq, a family was shot in their car when the father didn’t stop at a checkpoint. Those stories aren’t in the newspaper. Take a look if you don’t believe me.”

Pash let go of his wrists. “If they’re not in the newspaper, how do you know they actually happened?”

“I saw them on the Internet.”

Pash stared at the headline. He shook his head.

“It is wrong,” he said. “But killing innocent people solves nothing.”

“Did you, or did you not, call the police while I was in the store?”

Pash gave him an exasperated look.

“Yes,” he said.

“Did you tell them about the explosives in the suitcase in the rental car?”

“Yes.”

“Did you tell them anything else?”

“I told them the waiters were going to Los Angeles.”

“Good,” Amin said.

Out on the highway, a police cruiser raced past, its siren blaring. Another followed, then another. The sirens pierced the Sunday-morning quiet, only to be drowned out by a squadron of air force helicopters passing overhead. Like the police cruisers, they were following I-15 toward Los Angeles.

“You . . . wanted me to call them?” Pash asked.

Amin looked sadly at him. He had tried to make Pash understand that by coming to the United States, he was part of the jihad. Only Pash had never accepted his reasoning.

“Yes,” Amin said.

“Why?”

Amin grabbed the paneling on his door and pulled it away, revealing the bags of TATP lining the interior. The deception hit Pash like a punch in the stomach, and he recoiled in horror.

Pulling out of the gas station’s lot, Amin drove the car back toward Las Vegas.

47

V
alentine followed the cruisers down I-15 doing a hundred miles an hour. Whiskey Pete’s was an old-fashioned casino about a mile from the state line. Gerry had said the gas station was twenty miles before Whiskey Pete’s. By his estimation, that put the gas station twenty miles from Las Vegas.

He watched the miles fly by on his odometer. The desert landscape was flat and unforgiving, and he looked for any break on the horizon. Then he saw a Shell station sitting off the road. It had a car wash and a convenience store, and he made his brakes screech pulling up to the front door. Through the front window he saw a big guy behind the register give him a mean look.

He ran inside. There was a line at the checkout, and everyone on it was staring at him. For the first time, he became conscious of how he looked. Unshaven, his shirt stained, his mouth hanging open.

“You can’t park there,” the guy at the register said.

He took the picture of Amin out of his pocket, unfolded it, and held it up between his hands. He showed it to the guy, and those on line.

“Any of you seen him?”

“Earl, ain’t that the guy gave you the hunnert?” a man on line asked.

Earl reached across the counter, took the photograph out of Valentine’s hands, looked it over, handed it back. “Yeah. He was just in here. You looking for him?”

Valentine felt his heart going faster than the engine of his car. Outside, another police cruiser passed, and he said, “Yes. So is everyone else. Including the helicopters.”

Earl gave him a no-nonsense stare. “Who is he?”

“He’s a terrorist,” Valentine said.

Earl came around the register. Normally, guys who stood behind registers stood on phone books to make themselves look taller. Earl didn’t need a phone book. He placed a giant paw on Valentine’s shoulder.

“You ain’t bullshitting me, are you? I got a brother over in Iraq.”

“I’m not bullshitting you,” Valentine said.

Earl led him outside, pointed at I-15. “Guy pulled out a few minutes before you pulled in. Green car, I think it was a Taurus. Went thataway.”

Earl was pointing east, back toward Las Vegas.

“Are you sure?” Valentine asked.

“Positive. You probably passed him on the road.”

The police cruisers and army helicopters were going the wrong way, and Amin had been sitting here, watching them pass by. Valentine thought about the crowds of tourists he’d seen walking the Strip earlier. Men, women, and kids. Thousands of them. He grabbed Earl by the arm.

“I need a gun,” he said.

Earl had a hunting rifle and a four-ton pickup truck. He drove like a bat out of hell down I-15 toward town. Valentine sat in the passenger’s seat with the rifle in his lap. He tried 911 on his cell phone and got a frantic busy signal. In disgust, he threw the phone on the floor and examined the rifle. It was a Remington Model 700 .270 with a Leupold scope. He’d gone hunting once in the Catskills and used the same gun. It was a good open-range weapon, known for long-distance, flat-trajectory hits. Half a mile up ahead, he saw a police roadblock made up of several cruisers, and guessed the police were doing the smart thing and cordoning off the city. Earl slowed the truck.

“You see the car?” Valentine asked.

The big man looked in both directions. “Nope.”

“If they wanted to get to downtown, is there another way?”

“Not on pavement,” Earl said.

“How about dirt roads?”

“Sure. They could take a dirt road and loop around.”

“Show me.”

Earl got on a street with a
DEAD END
sign, and Valentine saw him flip a switch that put the pickup into four-wheel drive. At the street’s end, he jumped the curb, crossed someone’s private property, and was soon driving across the bumpy desert.

The midday sun was blinding, and Valentine strained his eyes looking for the vehicle Earl had described to him. He remembered Bill saying that the explosives found in New Orleans were fitted inside a car.
The car
is
the bomb,
he thought. Earl pointed at a distant bluff and said, “I think we can see them from up there. If this is the way they came.”

Earl was asking him a question, wanting confirmation.

“Is that the way you’d go?” Valentine asked him.

“Yeah, it’s the quickest.”

“Then take it.”

Earl floored the accelerator, and the pickup shot into the air like an animal released from a cage. They hurtled across the desert, Valentine grabbing the oh-shit bar by his head and holding on for dear life. A bad thought flashed through his head. He had not asked Earl if the rifle was loaded.

The Model 700 had an internal box magazine and could hold four bullets, plus one in the chamber. If the gun was fully loaded, that gave him five chances to take Amin down.

As they neared the bluff, Earl slowed down, and Valentine pulled the bolt back and checked. Only three bullets in the magazine, none in the chamber. He felt his body lurch forward as Earl slammed on the brakes.

They both jumped out of the pickup. The elevation was no more than thirty feet. Nothing but sagebrush and half-ugly land that would someday probably hold lots of identical-looking houses. Earl grabbed him by the arm and pointed.

“There. Over there.”

Valentine cupped his hand over his eyes. A quarter mile away, a car matching Earl’s description was driving through a half-finished housing development. The car’s wheels were caked in brownish red dirt. He lifted the Model 700 to shoulder height and got the occupants in the crosshairs of the rifle’s telescopic lenses.

“That’s them?” Earl asked breathlessly.

Valentine stared at the driver, then his passenger. Both Middle Eastern males. He lowered his line of vision and looked at the trunk. He imagined Gerry lying in back.

“Is it?” Earl demanded.

“Yes.”

Earl banged the side of the pickup with his fist. “Shoot the bastard!”

Valentine found the back of Amin’s head. He knew that the rifle’s bullet was going to do more than kill Amin. It would go straight through him and hit the engine or, worse, hit the plastic explosives lining the interior. The bullet was going to make the car explode, killing his son. He lowered the rifle.

“What the hell you doing?” Earl bellowed. “You’re letting them get away.”

“My son’s in the trunk,” he whispered.

Earl wrestled the rifle from his hands, aimed, and let off a round.

“Fucking shit,” he screamed.

The gun’s retort echoed across the desert. Amin veered off the road and jumped a curb. He knew he was being hunted, and drove the Taurus toward a finished development filled with prefab houses and Japanese imports in the driveways.

Earl let off another round. Dirt flew up around the Taurus.

“Shit,” he screamed.

Valentine thought of Yolanda back in Tampa, about to give birth, and remembered it like it was yesterday, his son’s head popping out of his wife’s womb, screaming at the world. The greatest moment in his life, for sure.

“I love you, Gerry,” he whispered.

Then he grabbed the rifle out of Earl’s hands, aimed at the back of Amin’s head through the telescopic lenses, and fired the last bullet.

48

N
ick sat in his office in the Acropolis, staring at the casino’s ledgers lying on his desk. He had come to Las Vegas in 1965, and opened the Acropolis two years later. It had been a helluva run.

He heard a delicate cough and looked up. Wanda was standing in the doorway, dressed in a red leather mini skirt and stiletto heels, his favorite outfit.

“Hey, baby,” he said.

He hadn’t seen her since yesterday. Too busy figuring out how much Albert Moss had screwed him out of. Good old Al had run him right into the ground. His cash reserves were gone, his credit allowance at the bank depleted.

“Can I come in?” Wanda asked.

“Of course, baby.”

Wanda didn’t walk into a room: She made an entrance. Nick rose from his chair and watched her come around the desk. Taking his hand, she led him across the office.

“Where are we going?”

“To the big picture window. I have something wonderful to tell you.”

He needed some good news. She picked up a remote and pushed the button that automatically drew back the picture window’s blinds. Sunlight streamed into the room.

It was a gorgeous day. Down below, one of the last of his employees was standing on a ladder, scrubbing his ex-wives with a mop. He was going to leave the fountains on for as long as he could, just to piss everyone in town off.

“Hold my hands,” Wanda said.

Nick obliged her. An ancient gold coin hung around her neck, and he smiled. He’d given it to Wanda the night he’d proposed. It was the only coin that hadn’t disappeared when his employee had hidden his treasure.

“Remember when you gave me this coin,” she said, “and told me how you believed it was magic. Do you?”

Nick smiled. “Yeah, baby.”

“Well, it really is. I’m pregnant.”

He gulped hard, then lowered his eyes and stared at her wonderfully flat stomach. “I thought . . . you couldn’t have a kid.”

“That’s what the doctors said. My first husband and I tried everything—in vitro, artificial insemination—and they kept coming back saying it was me, I couldn’t be a mommy. Well, they were wrong, Nicky.” She touched the coin dangling above her magnificent breasts. “The coin was magic. I’m going to have a baby.”

Nick stared at the coin. His father and grandfather had been sponge divers in a town called Tarpon Springs. Some nights they would come home and give Nick coins they had plucked off the ocean floor.
They’re magic,
they had told him.

He put his arms around her waist. “You sure?”