Vegas Knights (9 page)

  "Go for it!" I said.

  "We'll go together," said Bill.

  I shook my head. "My shoe is the only thing holding these two back. Get in there, and I'll make a dive for it when the doors start to close."

  I just hoped the service elevator didn't have an electric eye for safety. If it did, the doors would open up again as soon as I crossed the threshold, just to make sure I didn't get crushed. On any other day, I wouldn't have minded that, but right now it would give Gaviota and Misha another chance to grab us instead.

  Bill patted me on the back, then shoved himself off the door and into the elevator.

  "Come on!" he said. "I've got the Close Door button ready to roll."

  Before I could respond, Gaviota's face appeared through the door. He'd stuck his head through it, right up to his neck, leaving the rest of him on the other side. I almost leaped out of my new clothes, and if my shoe hadn't been wedged under the door, I might have managed it.

  "Do you boys really think you can get out of here like that?" Gaviota said. "This is our casino. We own every inch of it."

  I tore my foot out of my shoe, spun around, and fired three shots from Gaviota's pistol into his face. I'd figured out how he'd protected himself from the bullets. Magic can do a lot of amazing things, but it's all about rearranging reality. It still obeys the laws of physics on a macro if not a quantum level.

  Gaviota couldn't just make the bullets vanish. He had to exchange the bullets for air someplace else nearby. However, just because he'd swapped out materials didn't mean he'd done anything with their momentum. The air hit him just as hard as a bullet, which is why it had stopped him in mid-stride when I'd shot him in the leg.

  A concentrated burst of air like that wasn't going to put any holes in Gaviota's skin, but it could still leave a hell of a bruise. It was one thing to get hit with that sort of blow to the leg, and something else entirely to take it three times between the eyes.

  Gaviota tumbled forward through the door, stunned. When he hit the ground, I reached down and shoved him up against the door. Then I dashed into the elevator and shouted at Bill to "Go! Go! Go!"

  As the doors to the elevator closed, Gaviota struggled to his knees and moved toward us. For a moment, I thought he was going to be able to stop us, and I readied the silenced pistol again. He reached for the door as it was shutting, but it moved just a hair too fast for him and closed before he could stop it.

  An instant later, the elevator began its descent. Gaviota's hand shoved through the doors, but it then zipped up and away through the elevator car's roof as we left the fortieth floor – and Gaviota and Misha – behind.

  "We're screwed," Bill said. "They'll have security on us the moment we step out of the elevator. We'll never get out of here."

  I looked at the elevator's control panel. The light marked "L" glowed, but the others were all dead. Glancing around, I found a list of locations on each floor, including Big Al's Chicago Steakhouse and Pub on three. I stabbed the buttons marked "3" and "2."

  "Are we going to stop to eat?" An edge of hysteria tinged Bill's voice.

  "If we get off in the lobby, security will be waiting for us," I said. "We need to throw them off a bit to give us some breathing room. We'll get off on the third floor. The stop at the second floor might confuse them."

  "You're a hell of an optimist."

  "I just ain't quite ready to give up yet, brother."

  I held up my hands, each with a gun in them. I stuffed the silenced one in my pocket, where it chinked against the pile of chips in there. I looked at Misha's revolver and wondered what to do with it. Even if I could fit it in a pocket, it felt heavy enough to pull down my pants.

  "Give me that," Bill said. "I'll put it with mine."

  I handed the revolver over, happy to be rid of it. "How are you doing that? Hiding the guns, I mean?"

  Bill grinned, glad to have a chance to explain how clever he was. "I built my own pocket dimension and attached the portal to the inside rim of this rubber bracelet I keep in my pocket."

  "I wondered why you weren't wearing that."

  "It's great. I can carry whatever I want in it, and it doesn't weigh a thing. Best of all, it's entirely undetectable. I can carry anything–"

  The elevator's bell rang as we came to a stop a floor earlier than we had planned. "Did you press four?" Bill asked.

  I shook my head. He stuffed the guns into the pocket of his jacket. They shouldn't have both fit, but instead they didn't take up any space in there at all. I held the silenced pistol in my pocket, ready to draw it and start firing right away if I had to. As the doors slid open, I braced myself for a standoff with a squad of armed security agents.

  Instead, a housekeeper pushing a large cart of bedding eased her way onto the elevator. I sighed with relief. Once the woman and her cart were in, I reached out with my hand to stop the door from closing.

  "I think this is our floor," I said to Bill. "Excuse us, miss."

  The woman shrugged as we filed out of the elevator. She probably should have been concerned about a pair of customers using the service elevator and disembarking on a floor in the middle of the hotel, but it was a matter too high above her pay grade for her to care.

  Once in the service hallway, I followed my nose to the right, down a hallway that led toward the scents and sounds of an active kitchen. Bill stopped me with a hand on my shoulder. He pointed at a security camera aimed at the kitchen's back door. If we went in, we'd be spotted for sure.

  "There has to be a better way out of here," he said.

  I nodded. "Did you see what Gaviota did upstairs?"

  Bill raised his eyebrows. "You mean before you shot him in the face? How could I have missed it?"

  "Think you could pull that off?"

  Bill shivered. "Walking through walls? I don't know. I've never done it before, and that's one trick that looks like it has a lot of painful ways to blow."

  "It's ought to be easier than moving around ink on a card," I said. "You don't have to move anything. Just phase one set of molecules through another at the subatomic level."

  "Just?" Bill gawked at me. "You are too damned funny."

  "You got a better idea?"

  "Yeah, I prefer not getting killed when the wall I'm phasing through decides to become solid while I'm partway through it."

  "Professor Ultman told us how it works."

  "He also said that we were, under no uncertain terms, not ready for it yet."

  I shrugged. "He also would have told us to avoid Vegas."

  Bill hung his head. "And yet here we are." He looked up at me again. "We're not quite that desperate. Let's give reality a try before we go messing with it too much."

  "Lead on," I said. "But as soon as we pass that camera, we're done."

  "I could just take out the camera."

  "Then they'd know something's wrong and send someone up here to check it out either way." I glanced around and saw another cart like the one the woman had pushed into the elevator.

  I reached into the cart and pulled out a chef's uniform, including a white jacket and hat, each liberally stained with colored streaks of food. I tossed it at Bill.

  "Hey!" He started to protest, then figured out what I had planned.

  While he threw the coat and hat on, I dug out one for myself and struggled into it. It was a little small. We looked at each other and couldn't help but laugh.

  "I went to college to avoid having to work in a kitchen," I said.

  "Let's move it," Bill said, "or we'll wind up working in the prison kitchen instead – if we're lucky."

  We pushed our way into the kitchen, keeping our heads down. The place was packed with cooks and their helpers working hard and rushing about. They didn't pay any attention to us.

  We walked straight through the kitchen from one end to the other, and we found ourselves at the back end of a darkened steakhouse decorated like an Italian restaurant in 1920s Chicago. Dozens of people ate at tables and booths scattered throughout the place, many of them along the wide line of floor-to-ceiling windows that looked out toward the south side of the Strip and the glittering array of lights that blotted out the stars in the clear night sky beyond.

  "How are we going to get out of here?" Bill said. "We can't just wander around in these uniforms and walk out the front door?"

  "Don't the employees do that?"

  "How do you think we found a bin full of dirty uniforms in the back hall?"

  "Good point."

  I froze for a moment, unsure of what to do. I knew the clock was ticking. The elevator would have reached the first floor by now, which meant security would know that we weren't in it. They had to be searching for us everywhere, and with the number of cameras installed in a casino, it wouldn't take them long to find us.

  I knew the best way to disappear was in a crowd, but the casino security teams in Vegas worked with crowds all the time. If anyone could find a needle in a haystack, it would be them – especially if they had some magical help. We needed to find a way to tip the odds in our favor, and fast.

  "There they are!" a voice shouted just as I'd spotted a solution – or at least part of it.

  Bill grabbed my shoulder and turned me toward the restaurant's front door, where the maitre d' stood stabbing a bony finger at us as he spoke to a team of five burly men in cheap suits. I swore, then reached back to the wall next to swinging doors that led into the kitchen. A fire alarm hung there. I took off my chef's hat, put it on my hand, and pulled the T-shaped lever.

  The alarm blared loud enough to make me want to cover my ears. A few people screamed in surprise, but most of the diners got up in a so-called orderly fashion and began hustling toward the marked exits. This sent a lot of them straight into the path of the security detail heading our way.

  "Come on," I said to Bill. I dashed toward the window, weaving my way through the diners heading the other way.

  "Where the hell are you going?" he asked. "The fire exit's off to the right."

  "That's just going to lead us right into another team of security guards," I said. "We need to try something else."

  I looked out the window and saw that my mental map of the place had been right. The restaurant's windows overlooked a broad stretch of rooftop punctured by large swathes of skylights. It was a short drop down to the rooftop, only about ten feet.

  "All right," I said. "We can do this."

  Bill gaped at the windows. "You're out of your mind."

  "Maybe," I said, "but that doesn't mean this isn't our only chance."

  I grabbed him by his shoulder. "You were worried about getting stuck inside of something, but look, it's just a window. We can see straight through it. It's not even solid. It's a supercooled liquid, right?"

  "It's solid enough to cut us to ribbons if we smash it."

  "Nah." I shook my head. "We'll probably just bounce right back off it."

  "Hey!" one of the security guards shouted. "Hold it right there! Don't move!"

  "Now or never," I said to Bill.

  "All right." He blew out a breath and nodded, his eyes huge with fear. "Let's do it."

 
 

CHAPTER TEN
 

We both started hollering at the top of our lungs and sprinted right for the glass. Despite the fire alarm, the guards shouting at us, and the oncoming sheet of plate glass, I tried to focus on making myself as insubstantial as possible. I thought of myself as the wind blowing though a screen and coming out the other side unharmed.

  I only hoped it wouldn't instead leave me in lots of little pieces.

  When we reached the glass, both Bill and I passed right through it as if it wasn't there. I glanced back to see a guard who'd been racing up behind us slam right into the window and bounce back.

  Then I realized that even though Bill and I had moved through the glass, we were still falling. I put out my hands to brace myself for the impact, but instead I fell right through the rooftop in front of me. I zipped right through the coal tar roof – not one of the skylights – and found myself high in the air over Bootleggers' massive indoor pool.

  For an instant, I panicked. I bellowed in fear and windmilled my arms and legs as I hurtled through the air. The thought that I might not be able to stop falling terrified me. Would I pass through the bottom of the pool and into the foundation and bedrock beneath it? Would gravity pull me straight down to the center of the earth? Would I face the choice of either suffocating down there or dying of thirst?

  When I hit the water, though, I discovered I'd once again become as substantial as ever. I smacked into it hard and unprepared, and it stung like hell. I'd forgotten to hold my breath as I went in too, and by the time I reached the bottom of the pool I was already struggling for air. I kicked off hard from the blue-painted bottom and emerged into the warm, humid room, gasping for oxygen.

  I swam to the nearest edge of the pool and hauled myself out. The few people hanging out in the pool at that time of night, stared at me in astonishment. A young couple came over to see if I was okay. Despite the fall, the difficult landing, and the blood still leaking from the gunshot wound in my arm, I waved them off.

  Then I realized that I'd lost Bill somewhere.

  "Did anyone land next to me?" I asked no one in particular.

  I pulled myself to my knees and stared into the water, fearing that I might find Bill staring up at me from the bottom of the pool with unseeing eyes. He wasn't there, but if he hadn't come through the rooftop with me, where was he?

  I leaned back and craned my neck to see Bill staring down at me from one of the skylights above. I waved for him to come on down.