Nobody Dies in a Casino (7 page)

Tell me about it.

But she opened her eyes. They couldn't be more than twenty feet off the ground. Which was fine if the ground stayed flat. The ground did not stay flat. Charlie lost it. Not the lunch, but her control. “What are you guys, fucking nuts? Flying this low—don't tell me about going under radar. They can pick us off with a BB gun from here.”

Then she lost her lunch. Mercifully into a plastic bag Mel held under her mouth and closed quickly afterward. The cockpit still smelled awful.

“Reminds me of flying Vomit Airlines over the ditch.” Caryl sounded almost nostalgic.

Here was Charlie Greene, scudding along the uneven ground with a bunch of loons.

“Everybody keep watch for roads, installations, stray vehicles, and buildings to avoid,” their pilot instructed, taking over the command. “I've got all I can do to keep an eye on the landscape and the wind. This could get serious here.”

Charlie could see the plane's shadow whipping over gullies and sagebrush and scratchy-looking bushes. Charlie was not fond of deserts in general, but southern Nevada was the meanest, ugliest of them all. The sand looked more abrasive, the rock more scoured. Even the mountains were deserts.

They almost crawled up the side of a low, sullen mountain range and dove down the other side, along a valley, and then up and out and over again.

Charlie closed her eyes. Had Pat Thompson been murdered for doing just what she was doing now?

“Almost there,” Caryl said.

Charlie opened her eyes without meaning to.

“How much time can you give us?” Evan asked the pilot, and swung back to his monitor.

“Not much.”

“We don't need much, got good stuff last time. Ready, Mel?”

“Loaded and ready.”

“Start your cameras, boys.” Caryl took them over a rise, barely, and Charlie caught a glimpse of runways wider and longer than anything she'd seen at Denver International, and immense shedlike buildings.

Then an orange light flooded the cabin. It didn't seem to bother the others. Charlie couldn't figure out why.

*   *   *

“Charlie, open your eyes. This is stupid.”

“You sure she isn't dead?”

“She's not dead. She's warm. Feel her.”

“We're all warm, with that fire. Doesn't mean she's not dead.”

“First piece of civilization we meet, we get some food in her. She lost all her Yolie's. At least it didn't go to her thighs.”

Charlie lay flat out on the hard sand, except for her head, which rested on Evan's lap. A scratchy bush next to them waved its branches in the wind stirred up by the burning plane. Mel gathered tumbleweed and threw it into the flames. The smoke went straight up, leaving most of the sky dazzling with stars—a few of them shooting. Burning plane? “Did we crash? Am I hurt?”

“I don't think so. Try to sit up. No, we didn't crash.” Evan sounded high, hyperexcited.

Charlie made it to her hands and knees. “Did we all make it out?”

But he had left her to help Mel throw tumbleweeds on the blaze. Its warmth felt good in front. Her behind felt frigid. Nothing felt injured. She made it to a wobbly standing position. “Where's Caryl?”

“Right here.” The pilot walked past with armloads of dried tumbleweed. “Thanks for caring, Charlie.”

Charlie stumbled closer to the fire's warmth. “If we didn't crash, why is the plane burning? Are you trying to make a beacon so search parties can find us?”

“No, we're destroying evidence,” Mel explained with glee.

This guy needed help.

“And here's our second-unit gofer with the van now,” Evan said, just as happy.

Distant headlights bobbed toward them.

“God, let's pray that's Toby.” Caryl sketched a sign of the cross between her nipples.

“Women are so damned negative,” Evan told Mel. “Why is that?”

“Damned if I know. But here's the cameras and Charlie's purse. Better get them and our asses out of here. Our trackers have to have seen this fire by now.”

“What if everything doesn't burn?” Caryl insisted as the men rushed her and Charlie toward the approaching lights.

“Too late to worry it now. Life's a gamble, right?” Evan did his victory whoop again.

Charlie was glad to be alive. But she could do without that whoop.

*   *   *

“See how easy conspiracy is to manufacture, Charlie?” Evan bit into his Big Mac while she stuffed a bite of Ronald's Filet-o-fish into her mouth. The van sat in a far corner of a McDonald's parking lot.

The ride had seemed forever. The driver, Toby, remained cheerful even though Mel and Evan teased him endlessly about his lowly gofer status and about all his uncles. He'd dowsed the headlights, but the farther they got from the burning plane, the more the starry night illuminated the landscape around them. And probably them to anyone looking for them.

“How did you manufacture the orange light?” Charlie asked. That had impressed her.

“What orange light? Anybody else see an orange light?”

“Stop making fun of me, Evan.”

“I don't know about any orange light. I do think you got a little overexcited.”

“Overexcited, hell—she blacked out on us,” Mel said.

“I saw an orange light,” Charlie insisted.

“She's remembering the plane burning.”

“That didn't look orange to me.”

“Don't let these jerks get to you.” Toby had a lopsided grin and dark curly hair cut short in back and on the sides, but curls tumbled down over his forehead. He sucked the last of his cola through the straw and started up the van.

“Hey, Tobias,” Mel said, “what's your uncle Louie going to say about tonight?”

“Why should he even know? He doesn't have anything to do with this.”

“You tell him everything, don't you?” Evan did his boisterous guy laugh.

“Is he in for a surprise tonight.” Mel joined his boss in the hilarity. “Isn't that right, Charlie?”

“Planes can't just disappear.” Charlie didn't know what was going on, but she didn't find the whole thing a bit funny. “They'll have search planes out looking for it when it doesn't come back.”

“All records have mysteriously disappeared, right, Toby? And all records of my ownership too. Damnedest thing.”

Toby apparently had this friend who worked at the little airstrip in North Vegas.

“Yeah, our gofer here's got friends in high places and too many uncles.”

“What I got, Goodall, is contacts. You're just envious.”

“Clear as the skies were out there, some airliner will spot that fire, and radio it in,” Charlie persisted. She'd gotten involved in real trouble here. “You can't walk off and leave a whole plane. They'll find some identifying thing in the ashes, some metal gadget that won't burn. And they'll come after you, Evan. Why burn your own plane? Why not just fly off with it?”

“Because then they'd have had time to scramble and blow us out of the air. This way, they know where the plane is and all trace of any of us better be burned off what's left of it.”

“Why are you so hot to involve me in this?”

“I wanted your take, as a conspiracy freak, on Groom Lake. And I wanted you to be able to tell Mitch Hilsten what you saw firsthand. Simple, right?”

“Wrong, Evan. Serial numbers and things like that don't burn. The original owner at least has got to be on file somewhere.”

“What can I say? Life's a gamble, Charlie.” But everyone had grown suddenly somber. “All we really need is a little time and some magic will happen—won't it, Toby? And everything, including you, will be safe as grass, Charlie.”

The van turned onto a heavily lighted parkway, and for a second a teardrop glinted in a free fall from Caryl's face before it was lost in her dark clothing. She hadn't joined in the teasing and laughter. More tears formed on her lashes, but her voice came more vengeful than sad. “The plane was listed originally in my brother's name. Nobody can go after Pat now.”

CHAPTER
8

C
HARLIE STILL FELT
strange as she stepped up to the Hilton's glittering entrance. For once, it wasn't her stomach. The McFood seemed to have settled peacefully. More her head—not an ache exactly. Maybe it was just her anger at how Evan Black thought he could use her. It would take more than magic to get them out of this.

“Holy shit,” a man said behind Charlie, and she turned at the door, to see him stepping out of a cab. The inside light and the cab's headlights sat in a sea of night under the immense marquee. All the lights and the razzamatazz at the fountain and the rows of lights under the marquee had gone out.

A bell captain passed her on his way to the luggage the cabbie was unloading. “Talk about blinding night, huh?”

It was spectacular. Charlie had an errant thought: If all the lights went out in Vegas, would it still exist? Like, if a tree falls in the forest and nobody sees it …

Get thee to bed, Charlie G, you're all done.

For once, we agree.

The elevator quit on her a floor below hers, but at least the door had already opened to let her out. None of the elevators seemed to be working up or down, so she took the stairs one flight to her room, flicked on the lights, flicked off her clothes, and stepped into the shower just as the lights went out. She showered by feel and managed to find her nightshirt and the bed by the light of the Vegas night outside the window.

But then she couldn't sleep. It had been one hell of an unvacation day. And the room was stuffy without the ventilation fan blowing canned air into it.

Finally, Charlie took her frustration to the wall of window and, kneeling on the couch to face it, reassured herself that life was indeed still normal, fully aware of the irony in that. She had no idea which direction Yucca Mountain and Area 51 and the smoldering ruins of a claustrophobic little airplane might be—but she was alive, warm, fed, and well. And she decided she must have imagined the orange light, a vestigial smear of which she imagined still lurked somewhere at the back of her eyeballs. Which didn't mean the United States government was collecting her DNA from a portion of the plane that hadn't burned.

The electricity might be out in her room and parts of the hotel, but the lights of the Strip drowned out the star show that played over Area 51. Closer in, the immense Hilton sign still had juice. It flashed alternate messages across the night—
WELCOME AMA
and
MOST CASH BACK
and
TWENTY-FOURTH CENTURY IS NOW
.

Across the street,
BOYZ R US
. A block up the street, the spindle of the Stratosphere's Tower was lighted from below and above, the restaurant on top looking like a spaceship with the crazy roller-coaster lights crawling around its top. Below, a string of Metro Police cars, lights flashing, sirens ominously stilled, pulled into the winding drive of the Hilton. You rarely heard emergency sirens here, peculiar for a city this large and busy. Maybe warning sirens would nullify the party ambience. Had they come for Charlie already?

She waited as long as she could and then crawled back into bed and slept through to noon, like someone on vacation should, the ventilation fan and all the lights on when she woke. And no authority at the door to arrest her. She dressed in front of the TV and Barry and Terry on
Live at Noon.

Nothing new on the hit-and-run murder of Officer Graden. The man guilty of trying to jaywalk Las Vegas Boulevard had been identified as Patrick Thompson, a local pilot employed by a small “undisclosed local airline.” No apology for their having blamed his rash decision to cross a gridlocked street during volcano rush hour on his status as a stupid tourist.

And a mysterious power outage at the Las Vegas Hilton.

“So far, Nevada Power has not identified the cause,” Barry told Charlie. “But it affected only certain areas in the hotel and casino—not the entire building.”

“Yes, Barry, but people were trapped in elevators, some up to ten minutes. Bets on the casino floor had to be put on hold until emergency generators kicked in, and the probable cause was an apparently successful robbery.

“With the lights out and surveillance cameras temporarily out of commission, clever robbers either took advantage of the outage or planned it to rob the cage at the Las Vegas Hilton's casino. The Hilton has not disclosed how much was taken, but the thieves were gone by the time police arrived. Hotel security is still checking for possible clues, but all guests are assured the building is safe and the casino remains open.

“Sources hint that this was unlike the recent rash of casinocage robberies by Los Angeles gang members. It appears to have been a far more sophisticated bunch of thieves. Only slight injuries were reported.

“Never fear though—Captain Kirk and Mr. Spock were not affected by the outage.”

“Right, they don't operate on electricity. They operate on warp drive or something.”

Charlie decided against room service. She wanted to get downstairs, where there would be people. She was in the bathroom doing her face and hair when the TV couple went on to the next story.

This one about a downed aircraft located on the perimeters of the undisclosed Area 51.

“There were no survivors,” Terry announced sadly, as well she might.

“Yes, Terry, the plane was incinerated in the crash. Officials are searching local and area-wide airports for clues to the aircraft's point of origin, and they ask anyone missing relatives or friends who might have been flying a Mooney 201 aircraft yesterday to contact local police or the Clark or Lincoln County Sheriff's Department.”

“The air force has no comment,” Terry added unnecessarily. “And for you UFO buffs, the word from Rachel is that there were no disturbing incidents in the night sky out that way last night.”