Loaded Dice (29 page)

“Yeah. You’re not . . . mad, are you?”

He shook his head.

“I thought . . . maybe you wouldn’t want a baby.”

“Your baby I want,” he said.

She squealed and jumped up and down and kissed him all at the same time. She was acting like it was the greatest day in her life, and he decided to wait, and tell her later that he’d lost the casino. Holding her in his arms, he felt a tremendous explosion rip the air.

“Oh, my God, Nicky! Oh, my God!”

The whole building was shaking, and they watched the picture window bow like it was made of putty. Amazingly, it did not break, and they stared at the enormous black cloud rising in the western sky.

The cloud quickly blocked out the sun. Down on the street, terrified tourists were running for cover, with people being trampled and hurt. Nick wanted to do something, but wasn’t sure what he was supposed to do. He looked at Wanda. She was crying.

“Nicky—what’s happening?”

He wished he knew. Going to his desk, he picked up the phone and began punching in numbers. He knew everyone in the Metro LVPD who was important. All the police lines were busy, and he slammed down the phone.

“I want you to go home,” he said. “Stay in the house, and don’t come out until I call you.”

Wanda’s face was pressed to the window. She wasn’t moving.

“Did you hear me?”

She turned from the window. “Oh, Nicky,” she cried.

“What’s wrong?”

“It’s . . . it’s . . .”

“What?” he said.

“Magic,” she said.

Nick hurried over to where she stood. Down below, the employee on the ladder had fallen onto the statue of Bambi, his second wife. The statue had broken at the waist, and hundreds of shimmering gold coins now lay in the fountain’s turquoise water.

49

V
alentine blinked awake. He was lying in the pickup’s shadow, and Earl was standing over him, holding the Remington with one hand. Earl’s lips moved, but he couldn’t hear what he was saying.

“Can’t hear you,” he said.

Earl knelt down and put his mouth to Valentine’s ear. “Mister, what the hell was in that car?”

Valentine pushed himself into a sitting position. The last thing he remembered was shooting Amin in the back of the head. The Taurus had banged against an embankment and flipped over. He’d started to run, believing he could still save Gerry. Then a brilliant white light had enveloped him.

He stood on shaky legs, staring at the deserted lot where he’d last seen the Taurus. It was gone, replaced by a black, smoldering crater as wide as two football fields. His eyes shifted to the housing development Amin had been heading for. The windows on every house were gone. Many of the closer houses had lost their roofs. The destruction looked horrific, and he saw a line of neighborhood people standing at a fence, gaping at the crater. Earl’s massive hand touched his shoulder.

“I’m sorry about your boy,” Earl said in his ear.

Valentine went and leaned against the pickup. Stared at the ground for a long while and listened to himself breathe. He’d done what he had to do.

“You going to be okay?” Earl asked loudly.

“No,” he replied.

Earl got on his cell phone and tried to dial 911. All the lines were busy, and Valentine heard him call his gas station. Suddenly, he acted excited, made Valentine get in the pickup, and gunned it across the desert. Valentine knew he should stay—the police would eventually show up, and want to ask a thousand questions—but Earl was having none of it.

Soon they were back at the gas station. One of Earl’s employees was standing by the front door. Earl jumped out. Valentine’s hearing had come back, and he heard Earl say, “Where is he?”

The employee pointed at the car wash on the other side of the station. Earl came over and opened up Valentine’s door. Grabbing Valentine by the arm, he said, “Come on.”

Valentine followed him, feeling like he was in a dream that he was never going to wake up from. They walked around the car wash, and Valentine saw two men he recognized from earlier, on line at the cash register. They were standing over another man, who lay on the ground. Valentine felt his heart leap into his throat. His son.

Valentine pushed the two men aside without thinking, got on his knees, and saw that Gerry was breathing. He told God right then that he was going back to church again, and he cradled his son’s head in his arms and heard him groan.

“Something’s wrong with his shoulders,” one of the men said.

The other man had put his jacket beneath Gerry’s head, and Valentine lowered his son’s head onto it. There was a mean-looking bruise on his temple, and his eyes were cloudy, but otherwise he looked absolutely beautiful.

“Hey, Pop,” his son whispered. “You stop them?”

Valentine told his boy that he had. Gerry smiled.

“Way to go.”

“How did you end up here,” Valentine asked.

“Pash . . . pulled me out of the trunk,” his son said.

Gerry was having trouble speaking, and one of the men ran to the convenience store, got a bottled water, and soon had it beneath Gerry’s lips. His son thanked him.

“Was Pash the other one in the car?” Valentine asked.

Gerry nodded. “Yeah. Amin’s brother. He pulled me out of the trunk while Amin was inside the store. Told me he was sorry, and conked me in the head.”

“What’s wrong with your shoulders?”

“Popped them out of their sockets freeing my arms,” Gerry said.

“They hurt?”

“Like a son-of-a-bitch.”

Valentine heard the sound of approaching sirens. Earl walked around the car wash, and Valentine heard him calling to the driver of the police car that had just pulled into the gas station. He saw his son grimace, and realized it had nothing to do with how he was feeling. It was time for Gerry to tell the police everything that had happened.

His son motioned to him, and Valentine knelt down in the dirt.

“Closer,” his son said.

Valentine realized Gerry didn’t want the other men hearing what he was about to say. He lowered his head, and brought his ear next to Gerry’s lips.

“I know this is going to sound stupid,” he said.

“What’s that?”

“I really liked Pash. I’m sorry you had to kill him.”

Valentine felt himself shudder. He saw a blue uniform come around the car wash, heading straight toward them. In a whisper he said, “You’d better not tell the police that.”

50

E
xcept for Amin and Pash, no one had died in the blast.

The bomb had ripped a hole in the earth worthy of a falling meteor, the explosion strong enough to be felt as far away as Los Angeles, and now the newspapers and TV stations and Internet news services were calling it a miracle.

Several thousand windows were shattered—including those in casinos over five miles away—and a hundred houses within the blast’s immediate radius were damaged, their gas and water lines rupturing, forcing the immediate evacuation of their occupants. The cost was estimated at twenty million dollars, not including the loss of revenue the casinos experienced from being temporarily shut down.

Even the two Pakistani waiters whom Amin had tricked into driving to Los Angeles were spared. They had pulled off at a truck strop on I-15, and were inside the building relieving themselves when the Apache helicopters swooped down and riddled their rental car with over a thousand rounds of ammunition.

An elderly lady named Alice Sweet was found dead in her house several miles away from the blast, but the Clark County coroner quickly determined that she’d passed away peacefully in her sleep the night before, and had died from natural causes.

But many could have died. The media brought in their experts and showed what the bomb would have done had Amin made it into the city, and detonated seventy-five pounds of TATP in a closed space. Besides killing thousands of pedestrians, the explosion would have taken down a block’s worth of buildings. The estimated loss of life was put at over fifty thousand people.

It was the theme of Mayor Oscar Goodman’s speech during a news conference that afternoon. Standing before a room packed with reporters, he had called Las Vegas the luckiest city on earth, and praised the military, police and firemen who’d responded to the emergency so quickly. Then, he’d taken off his glasses, and thanked a retired cop named Tony Valentine.

“I’ve been told that this man has single-handedly saved the city’s casinos millions of dollars over the years from cheaters and thieves,” the mayor said. “And now, he’s saved the city itself. How do we thank him? I don’t honestly know. Maybe we should all go out and place a bet in his name.”

Valentine had listened to the mayor’s speech in Gerry’s hospital room at University Medical Center, and had wanted to throw something at the television. Placing a bet in his name was the last thing he wanted people to do. Gerry, who had just woken up, stared at the TV and started laughing.

“Maybe they’ll name a street after you,” he said. “Or a slot machine.”

“Very funny,” Valentine replied.

A pair of stern-faced uniformed cops stood outside the door. Once Gerry was feeling better, they were going to formally arrest him. He was tied to everything Amin had done in the past week, and was facing multiple criminal charges that could put him in prison for the next thirty years of his life.

In desperation, Valentine had called everyone he knew in Las Vegas. So far, only one person had offered to help him.

“You talk to Mabel?” Gerry asked expectantly.

“Ten minutes ago,” he said.

“Any news?”

“Yolanda’s still in labor. It’s going to be a girl.”

“How does she know?”

“Yolanda had a dream with red apples in it.”

They sat in silence for a while and stared out the window at the beautiful afternoon. It was not hard to imagine what might have been, and more than once, Valentine saw his son wipe a tear away from his eye.

“I always wanted a girl,” he said quietly.

51

N
ick did not believe in wasting time. He had his lost treasure appraised that afternoon, showed the appraisal to his bank, and was granted a line of credit that allowed him to open the Acropolis that night. Then he called Chance Newman and demanded a meeting with him, Shelly Michael, and Rags Richardson for the next day.

“Your office, ten sharp,” Nick said. “No lawyers.”

“Why should I meet with you?” Chance replied.

“I’ve got something that belongs to you,” Nick said.

Nick appeared in Chance’s office the next morning with Wanda draped on his arm. He wore basic hoodlum attire: black slacks and shirt, silver necktie, and a black sports jacket with silver buttons. Wanda wore a Nancy Sinatra–vintage pink jumpsuit. As she was introduced, Chance, Shelly, and Rags rose from their chairs. Each wore a pin-striped suit and carried a sullen expression on his face.

“My pleasure,” she purred.

The men returned to their chairs. Nick reached into his pocket and removed the Deadlock cheating device Valentine had given him over breakfast that morning. It hit Chance’s desk with a loud thud.

“Being our casinos are next door to each other, it’s not surprising that I sometimes get deliveries for you,” Nick said. “I got that little baby in a package from Japan. I believe it’s called Deadlock.”

The three casino executives looked stricken. Each had gone through a rigorous examination when applying for his casino license. No criminal activity of any kind was allowed. Owning a sophisticated cheating device could get their licenses taken away.

“Now, I suppose you could argue that you purchased Deadlock in order to educate your surveillance techs,” Nick went on. “Only there’s this little problem called Frank Fontaine. The FBI picked him up this morning and threw him back in jail. If I tell the FBI about Deadlock, and they ask Fontaine what he knows, well, you boys could be royally screwed.”

“Nick!” Wanda said disapprovingly.

“Sorry, baby.”

“I should hope so,” she said.

Nick smiled at his bride. He’d promised Wanda to stop swearing. Wanda believed the baby could hear him, and would develop bad habits.

Shelly Michael cleared his throat. “Let me guess. You want to make a deal.”

Nick’s smile grew. “Let’s call it a business arrangement.”

Rags shook his head. To his partners, he said, “I’d rather take my chances in court than get fucked by this clown.”

Nick wanted to belt him. Hadn’t Rags seen how sensitive Wanda was to vulgarity? He decided to hit him where it hurt, and said, “What’s the name of your company? BE BOP SHABAM Records?”

“That’s right,” Rags said.

“Or is it BE BOP SCAM Records?”

Rags glared menacingly at him. “What did you say?”

“You heard me,” Nick said, puffing out his chest. “You got this great thing going, don’t you? You take these ghetto rappers, release their CDs to other ghetto kids, and they go gold in two weeks. You go to the chains, show them the sales figures, and they order a million copies for their stores. That’s the game, isn’t it?”

Rags said, “Yeah, so what’s your point?”

“The point is, those kids aren’t buying music CDs. They’re buying Hershey bars with altered bar codes. The sales numbers are faked. You’re a fake. You want to take me to court? Do you?”

Rags shrank in his chair, his bluster gone. “No.”

“I didn’t think so. Maybe while I’m at it, I’ll tell everybody how Chance bankrupted his software company in Silicon Valley, and how Shelly’s law firm struck a secret deal with the feds so none of the partners had to go to jail.”

Shelly and Chance both closed their eyes.

“You boys think I lasted thirty-nine years in this town by being a dummy?” Nick said, his voice rising. “I know everything about everybody. So we can deal, or we can fight. It’s up to you.”

Chance opened his eyes. “What do you want?”

Nick held up two fingers. “Two things,” he said.

“Name them.”

Nick clicked his fingers, and Wanda removed a rolled sheet of paper from her handbag with the aplomb of a game show hostess. Nick unfurled the paper. It was a crude rendering of a pedestrian walkway connecting the Acropolis to the three men’s casinos. The sketch included stick people and a smiling sun. Wanda had even signed it.