The Good Thief's Guide to Vegas (11 page)

FOURTEEN

We returned to our rooms, and while I set about changing into some unremarkable black trousers, ditching my jacket and arming myself with a few choice pieces of equipment, Victoria slipped into something a little less comfortable.

‘Tra la!’

I glanced up from my holdall to find her performing a dinky curtsey in the doorway between our suites. Gone were the loose-fitting clothes that she’d selected as burglar-chic, replaced by a midnight-blue cocktail dress, a matching clutch purse and a pair of high heels. She also appeared to have acquired a plunging neckline and a nicely proportioned pair of legs, though I refrained from saying as much.

‘How do I look?’ She clasped her hands together, lowered her eyelids and worked an expression that beat the hell out of bashful.

‘You look fine.’

‘Just fine?’

I stepped into a pair of polished black shoes and ducked down to tie my laces, hiding my face. ‘What did you expect me to say?’

‘Oh, never mind.’ She slapped her hands against her thighs. ‘So, are you going to show me the Strip?’

The Strip hit me like a blow to the face. The night air was warm, spiked with engine fumes and the odour of suncream on burned skin. It was late already, just gone midnight, but the sidewalks were awash with light – a mixture of garish neon, coloured marquee bulbs, flashing video screens, car headlamps and traffic signals. I swayed at the ankles, dizzied by the unexpected heat and the glare. Terrific, I thought. As if my body clock wasn’t messed up enough with jetlag, now I was adding perpetual twilight to the mix.

Vehicle traffic on the multi-lane Strip was constant. High-end sports cars, bling SUVs, stretch limos and blacked-out Hummers competed for tarmac and attention, their paintwork glimmering like liquid beneath the lights. Crammed Deuce buses groped for the kerb outside the hotel, and low-slung taxis weaved between lanes. A flat-bed truck crawled along, towing a double-height advertising hoarding that featured a bikini-clad goddess and a slogan for some variety of strip club. I tried not to gawp, but I didn’t try all that hard.

‘Look.’ I pointed out the shapely beauty with the words
Girls, Girls, Girls!
scrawled above her raised derrière. ‘We have twenty-two hours left. You want to catch a show?’

‘Pig,’ Victoria shouted, above the noise. ‘Don’t these people know what time it is?’

‘Look on the bright side. At least they’re not in their hotel rooms.’

Just as I finished speaking, we were jostled by a group of college girls drinking alcoholic slushies from novelty glasses shaped like the Statue of Liberty. The girls were pursued by a line of frat boys in pressed khakis, smelling of cologne, with plastic beer kegs strapped to their chests. They barged between us, and I stumbled into a suit and tie conventioneer slurring cellphone greetings to his wife, then apologised and stepped aside just as an old lady in a motorised wheelchair very nearly amputated my toes.

‘Come on.’ I reached out and grabbed Victoria’s hand. ‘Let’s get moving.’

I led her south towards the toxic-pink glow of the Flamingo Casino Hotel, forcing our way through revellers and around palm trees and concession stands and yellow fire hydrants, darting beneath the upraised arms of drunken co-eds and skirting the crowds of people waiting for the pedestrian lights to change so that they could experience the pleasures of Caesars Palace. In the shadows, dusty men and women wearing coloured bibs riffled flyers and pressed cards offering call girl services into unsuspecting hands. The spent cards littered the sidewalk like sordid confetti.

We passed over a cross street on a skybridge and were almost parallel with the elegant façade of the Bellagio, nearing the illuminated Eiffel Tower outside Paris-Las Vegas, when I dragged Victoria up the curving pavement towards the entrance of Space Station One.

We’d just missed the final performance of the casino’s big low-roller draw – a simulation of a space-shuttle launch. The shuttle was juddering back down a crane-like structure that extended way up into the night sky, and dry ice billowed out from the fiery hole in the ground from which it had emerged. Based on the disgruntled mumblings of the few onlookers, I wasn’t altogether sorry we’d missed the spectacle. And judging from the crowds of revellers across the street, singing along to Elvis Presley’s ‘Viva Las Vegas’, it certainly wasn’t as popular as the Bellagio fountains.

The main entrance to Space Station One was a hangar-like structure that protruded outwards in a glossy white arc, like the front end of the Starship
Enterprise
. Coloured laser beams trawled the perforated metal walkway in front of the doors, and dry ice snaked around our ankles. Oversized robots that already looked a decade behind the times moved their arms and heads in a jerky fashion, while casino staff in tired alien outfits and latex masks posed for photographs with middle-aged housewives and Japanese pre-teens.

The revolving casino doors twirled around to a sound effect straight out of
Doctor Who
, and one of the robots offered us a computerised greeting in a voice I recognised from my old ZX Spectrum.

‘Welcome to Space Station One, earthlings.’

I wondered if it said the same thing on the way back out.

The interior was like nothing I’d ever seen, and yet at the same time it was eerily familiar. It was as though every sci-fi movie that had ever been made had been cut up, swallowed down and spewed out onto the space before us. Key characters, scenes and props were everywhere, ranging from
Star Wars
through to
Alien
,
E.T.
to
Buck Rogers
,
Blade Runner
to
Independence Day
. Most curious of all was how many guests were walking around in costume. The croupiers and pit bosses were all dressed in white, NASA-style jumpsuits, but among the everyday folk at their tables I could see several Flash Gordons, numerous Darth Vaders, two Spocks, a handful of Princess Leias and at least one Chewbacca.

‘Now I know what hell looks like,’ Victoria grumbled.

‘Bet you’re glad you got dressed up.’

‘To tell you the truth, I feel a little under-dressed. What on earth possessed you to bring us here?’

‘The geek quota.’

‘Excuse me?’

‘It’s a well-known fact that sci-fi fans are nocturnal. So I figured if we came here, I’d have a better chance of finding empty hotel rooms.’

‘Not too empty, I hope.’ Victoria scanned the tables in front of us. ‘It’s hardly the classiest venue. Do you think you’ll find much cash?’

‘Hope so. But hey, look at it this way – at least our stake money won’t be sneered at.’

I directed Victoria towards an ATM that was positioned alongside a bank of
Battlestar Galactica
slot machines. We withdrew as much cash as we possibly could, and after adding a little extra that Victoria had been carrying in her purse and the bundle of notes I’d taken from the room safe in the Fifty-Fifty, we approached a nearby blackjack table.

Victoria took a seat on a raised metal stool beside a pair of Stormtroopers. The croupier was a young guy, mid-twenties at most, with a blond crew cut and a glint in his eye that went along with the name on his staff badge.
Randy
.

‘Welcome to Deep Space, ma’am. Table minimum is twenty-five Earth bucks.’

Victoria laid three hundred dollars on the plush grey felt. While she waited to receive her chips, she popped the clasps on her handbag and reached inside. I glimpsed the cover of the Houdini biography, which made me smile, and then something metal caught the light. Victoria pulled out a signet ring made from polished silver and slipped it onto her finger.

‘This belonged to my father,’ she said, to her new friends around the table. ‘A lucky charm.’

The Stormtrooper nearest to Victoria raised his bottled beer at the news. His beer had a drinking straw poking out of it.

‘Sure could use some luck tonight,’ he said, and lowered his masked face towards the straw.

‘Amen,’ his friend added, and slapped his gloved fingers against his buddy’s armour plating.

‘Well, let’s see what I can do,’ Victoria told them.

As it happened, she couldn’t do all that much. She drew a five and a seven on her first hand, while Randy had a Jack of Spades face up. Victoria hit, playing the odds, but she caught a ten and bust out. Randy turned over his hole card. The Queen of Diamonds. The Stormtroopers lost too.

‘You might want to take the ring off,’ I advised Victoria. ‘Maybe your dad’s take on gambling is stopping it from working.’

Victoria swivelled on her stool and hoicked her eyebrows towards the BacoFoil mock-up of Apollo 11 suspended above our heads. ‘Don’t you have something to take care of?’

‘Just offering a little moral support.’

‘I think I can cope without it.’

I leaned towards her ear. ‘Well, be careful. I’m beginning to suspect that your two friends here work for the dark side of the Force.’

Victoria introduced me to the back of her head and pushed another twenty-five-dollar chip into the betting circle on the grey felt. The Stormtroopers followed suit. I only hoped they weren’t gambling on duty – I’d heard the Galactic Empire took a dim view of such behaviour.

The casino floor was every bit as confusing as I’d come to expect, though it was quieter than the Fifty-Fifty and the tables were more spaced out (if you’ll excuse the pun). Sure, the aliens and astronauts milling around made the entire place seem utterly surreal, but at least the information signs were in American English rather than Klingon. One of them even told me where the food hall was located, and after following a path that seemed to take me via every conceivable gaming-table and gambling machine in the known universe (and beyond), I eventually found myself on a downward escalator that led me to the Officer’s Mess.

It didn’t look like the type of canteen you might find on a spaceship. In point of fact, it was just like every other food hall on the Strip, offering the usual pizza and pasta, Chinese food, hamburgers and fries, and coffees and pastries. I didn’t mind. Truth was, I was simply hoping to find a route into the service corridors that might eventually lead me to the main hotel kitchens, and after locating a likely door to the side of the pizza outlet, I’m pleased to report that I found just that.

FIFTEEN

I had on a dark red, collarless tunic with polished brass buttons and a plastic name badge. The badge told me that the tunic belonged to a gentleman by the name of
Gerry
, who’d been considerate enough to leave it on a hook in a staff cloakroom not too far from the hotel kitchen. Fortunately for me, it didn’t seem as though Gerry was particularly well-known, because when I stepped inside the kitchen and tried my best to look as though I knew exactly where I was going and precisely what I was doing, nobody stopped me to ask why the hell I was wearing Gerry’s uniform.

Nobody asked me where I was taking the room service trolley I’d acquired, either. The trolley was draped with a white linen cloth and it was stocked with a coffee pot, a wine cooler with a bottle of white wine inside it, a carafe of iced water and the customary crockery, cutlery and napkins. Underneath the table was a small warming oven where the hot meals were to be found.

I wheeled the trolley into a service elevator, dragged the wire cage across and pressed the button for Floor 8. There was a mirror inside the elevator and I took a moment to straighten my tunic and clear a spot of dirt from my black trousers. Ask any con man and he’ll tell you how effective the right costume can be. Go for something like a security guard’s outfit, and you have instant authority. Opt for a janitor’s get-up, and you can go almost anyplace you please. And while Gerry’s tunic was a couple of sizes too big and a little loose around the hips, it certainly helped to create the illusion that I belonged.

As an added bonus, I’d found a pair of white cotton gloves in the pockets of the tunic. The gloves would be just as effective as my plastic disposables, and since they complemented the uniform, they’d be an awful lot less conspicuous. So as the elevator climbed, I used one of the serrated table knives to saw away fingers three and four on the right-hand glove, and then I slipped the little beauties on.

At Floor 8, the elevator pinged, the doors parted and I wheeled the trolley out into the guest corridors, searching for a likely suite. I’d selected the eighth floor for good reason. My theory was that the lowest floors contained the most basic rooms and the guests with the least disposable income. By going just a little higher, I figured I’d improve my chances of finding cash without running the risks associated with a concierge desk, or having to contend with the class of wealthier guest who might be inclined to deposit their valuables in the hotel’s main safe storage facility.

Obviously, any door that had a
Privacy Please
sign hanging from it was one to avoid. There were quite a few doors featuring privacy signs, as it happened, not to mention one or two with dirty food trolleys outside, and it took me a good few minutes to select a possible candidate. Suite 844 seemed to fit my criteria, and so I rested my trolley against the wall, straightened my shoulders and knocked on the door. No answer. I checked the corridor around me, and once I was sure the coast was clear, I reached inside the sleeve of Gerry’s tunic and removed my coat hanger.

Now, either my technique was improving or the door handles inside Space Station One were unusually large, because I had the thing hooked in close to no time at all, and then I yanked the wire down, poked the door open and scrambled inside.

And a few minutes later I scrambled back out.

Turned out there was a flaw in my plan. True, there was nobody inside the room, but there was nobody checked into it either. Just my luck. I’d eaten into something like forty minutes already, and I’d drawn a complete blank. Worse still, I had no way of improving my odds. All I could do was try elsewhere until I found a suite that happened to be empty of people but not of their possessions. And I had to hurry up about it, too.

I hauled the trolley on down the corridor, passing two men in lounge suits and a woman in a bulging, XL
Star Trek
uniform. I kept going until I was out of earshot of anyone who might already have heard my routine and within sight of another possible target.

Suite 858.

Ah, I have such fond memories of the place. Not only did my coat hanger key work even quicker than before, but the first thing I spied upon wheeling my trolley inside was an open suitcase on the nearest of the twin beds.

I closed the door to the corridor behind me and immediately swung the beam from my penlight around the darkened bathroom and the rest of the suite. Once I was sure that I was alone, I gripped my penlight in my teeth, cracked the knuckles on my left hand and approached the suitcase.

The suitcase was filled with women’s clothes. There were another two suitcases down on the floor and the same was true of them. If I had a shoe fetish, there would have been plenty to excite me, and if I’d had the desire to dress in women’s underwear, I could have quite readily satisfied the urge. But so far as money or casino chips or gold bullion were concerned, there wasn’t anything to get giddy about.

There was, however, still the room safe to consider, and it would have been remiss of me not to seek it out. A built-in closet with louvred doors was positioned alongside the first of the beds, and I slid the left-hand door open and shone my penlight over a clothes rail, a hotel laundry bag, an ironing board and a fold-out suitcase stand. I tried the right-hand side. More empty hanging rail. Oh, and the safe. It was on a shelf above the rail, at around eye-level.

This particular safe didn’t have a credit-card reader but it did have a numbered keypad. The exterior had been fashioned from a cream, hardwearing plastic, with a sculpted handle built in, and it had one feature that especially pleased me – a small enamel badge bearing the manufacturer’s name. The lozenge-shaped badge was held in place by two screws, and I had no trouble removing them with one of my screwdrivers while I held my penlight between my teeth.

Behind the badge was a modest hole. The hole in question functions as a back-up, of sorts, because it allows a qualified locksmith to open the safe without the code. Mind you, it also permits a trained monkey to do much the same thing.

The hole, you see, grants access to an electric motor that drives the components that do the physical locking and unlocking. And clearly, if you can operate the motor quite independently of any code, why, then Robert’s your mother’s brother, and you have an easy way in.

Now, you might imagine that independently driving the motor requires some pretty complicated kit. And you’d be wrong. It takes a paperclip, a 9-volt battery and two short lengths of electrical wire.

Naturally, I always carry a paperclip – it’s a dim thief indeed who doesn’t arm himself with the most universal picking tool known to man. But my spectacles case can only carry so many items, and until I’d returned to my room earlier at the Fifty-Fifty, it hadn’t been stocked with the 9-volt battery and the electrical wire. Now that it was, I gleefully removed the ingredients for my classic safe-cracking recipe and set to work.

First, I unbent the paperclip and poked one end inside the hole. I jiggled it towards the reverse of the keypad, where the motor wiring was located, until it wouldn’t budge any further, then I attached one strand of electrical wire to the negative terminal on the battery and another strand to the positive terminal. I connected both ends to the paperclip, running a charge through to the motor wiring on the safe. And you know what? A wonderful four-letter word flashed up on the digital display above the keypad, the motor buzzed and the door popped open.

I stood on tiptoes and flashed my penlight inside. There’s not much you can fit inside a hotel safe and it certainly wasn’t stuffed with casino chips. Thankfully, there was some cash, and I pulled it out and counted it. Four hundred and twenty dollars. Given my predicament, it wasn’t to be sniffed at, so I gratefully slipped the bundle into my pocket. Alongside the notes was a bottle of perfume, which I suppose
was
to be sniffed at, though I didn’t bother to sample the odour for fear it might make me sneeze. Next to the perfume were two passports. I reached for them and had a quick peek. It was sheer curiosity that made me look, though it never hurts to check these things.

It hurt on this occasion. The passports belonged to two British women from Bolton. They’d been born within a year of one another, and their dates of birth put them somewhere in their early forties. And while passport photos are terrible things and very rarely flattering, these photos didn’t make the women appear altogether wealthy.

I felt a pang of guilt. How often, I asked myself, did the women get to take a holiday like the one they were currently enjoying, and would the robbery I was committing ruin it for them?

Now I really wished I hadn’t looked at their passports. Stealing from my compatriots was one thing, but being able to picture the expression on their faces when they opened their safe was quite another. I tightened my fingers around the cash in my pocket, unsure what to do. Ordinarily, I liked to think of myself as a gentleman thief, a pretty classy kind of crook. But what I was involved in right now was petty theft, and they call it petty for a reason.

Then again, I wasn’t sure I could afford to be all that decent. Victoria needed stake money if we were to have even the slightest chance of raising the cash the Fisher Twins were demanding. And anyway, I told myself, the women were bound to have travel insurance. Hell, they might even finesse their claim and compensate themselves for any money they’d lost at the casino tables.

Before I could tussle with the rights and very wrongs of my actions any longer, I left the money in my pocket and put the passports back where I’d found them. Then I reached up and grabbed the final item from the very back of the safe. A packet of cigarettes.

Boy, this was going to be harder than I’d thought. I checked the time on my watch. Then I checked the time on Josh Masters’ watch. They both agreed. It was three days, six hours and thirty-four minutes since my last cigarette.

For some reason, the exact merits of which still escape me, on my final day in Paris, I’d had the very dumb idea of kicking my smoking habit. And during a haze of early optimism, I’d had the even dumber idea of mentioning it to Victoria. Unsurprisingly, Victoria had made me promise to follow through, and while I’d slipped a number of times since, if there was one good thing to say about the peril I was facing in Las Vegas (and believe me, there really was only
one
good thing), it was that it had at least distracted me from my cravings. I guess that should come as no surprise. Finding a dead woman in the middle of a break-in, and then having your life threatened unless you can somehow pull together an inordinate sum of cash in just over twenty-four hours, tends to focus the mind somewhat. But now cigarettes were in front of me again. And I wanted one. Badly.

One lousy cigarette. Was that really so much to ask? It might calm my nerves, make me feel more alert. And that had to be a good thing. Right?

I got as far as locating an ashtray on the television cabinet before I finally got a hold of myself. Yes, it was a smoking room, but if the two women returned soon after I’d left, then in all likelihood they’d smell the fresh smoke. If they had any sense, they’d check their safe and they’d find that their money had gone. And then they’d report the theft, and my night of larceny would need to be cut very short indeed. I’d have to whisk Victoria off to a new hotel, and find a new way to access the guest rooms, and all the while it would be getting later and more people would be going to bed. And, well, those were enough reasons for me to show a little willpower and hold off from lighting up in the middle of a damn heist. So I did, although I have to confess that I also pocketed a free box of smokes.

Re-locking the safe was easy enough. I simply closed the door and ran another charge through the paper clip until the word
OPEN
flashed up. Open? Well yes, that was an odd quirk of the technique, but the safe was locked solid. And even better, the code hadn’t been altered in the slightest. So whenever the women decided to check on their belongings, the same code they’d used to lock the safe would be fully capable of opening it again. Admittedly, once they discovered that their cash had gone walkabout, it might not strike them as the greatest consolation, but hey, at least it was something.

I slid the closet door across and made sure that I’d put the suitcases back where I’d found them, and then I dragged my trolley out into the corridor. The corridor was empty again, and after the darkness of the hotel room, it seemed startlingly bright.

Out of curiosity, I lifted the tablecloth on the trolley and opened up the warming oven I’d been wheeling around. There were two plates inside, both covered with metal warmers. I used my gloved fingers to take a peek at what was on offer. Meatloaf and mashed potatoes, or spaghetti bolognese. I prodded the spaghetti with my finger. I was beginning to feel a little hungry, but I thought it would stay warm for a little while yet.

Up ahead, another door seemed to be calling to me, and I pushed the trolley close before applying the brake and knocking confidently. When nobody responded, I slid my coat hanger out from where I’d hidden it beneath the tablecloth and dropped to my knees. I was just about to feed the coat hanger under the door when all of a sudden the damn thing swung open and I almost rolled forwards into the room.

Ten hairy toes confronted me. I looked up and discovered that the toes belonged to an overweight type in Daffy Duck boxer shorts and a wife-beater vest. I whipped the coat hanger behind my back and scrambled to my feet.

‘Whaddaya want?’ he asked.

The man was chewing on a chicken drumstick, with a bucket of wings tucked under his arm. Grease shimmered around his lips, and his cheeks and forehead were flushed. Tufts of dark chest hair poked out from around his vest, and his belly protruded from below the hem, weighed down like a balloon (a pink, hairy balloon) filled with motor oil.

‘R-r-room service?’ I stammered, and nodded towards the trolley.

The man dropped his drumstick into his bucket and wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. He jabbed a slick finger towards my back.