Nobody Dies in a Casino

  They didn’t turn off the way they’d come on the road to the black mailbox, now white, connected to the paved highway leading into Rachel. Instead, they headed straight on the gravel road until it reached the pavement on its own, putting them much closer to the road to Alamo. Charlie’s inner ears tickled unbearably from the vibration of their washboard journey.

  “What makes you think we’re going to get away with this?” Charlie asked Toby.

  “All we got to watch for now is the Lincoln County Sheriff’s Department, which Merlin says is getting fed up with having to use manpower to back up a government installation that’s not there. That Merlin, he’s really something, I tell you.”

  “Wouldn’t it be simply lovely,” Bradone said, “if that Merlin were in the captured caravan back there?”

  “He’s got to be nuts if he thinks they’re going to let him continue to run a scam like this. How could he invest in all these Cherokees knowing they’d be half-ruined by going off the road and he’d be closed down in a week or less anyway?”

  “Seeing as he’s so smart, Mel and me figure he leases the Cherokees from other dealers.” Something in the gofer’s expression in the mirror reminded Charlie of someone else, but the memory byte was gone before she could nail it. “I mean, hell, he’s renting these out of a tent, probably never planned on being around long.”

  “For what purpose?” Bradone tried to turn around in her seat to look at Toby and groaned. Her ribs had to be bruised from hanging over ledges and Toby’s shoulder.

  “Who knows? Very mysterious, that Merlin. Did I tell you he’s a magician too? Maybe he’s just trying to annoy the nice people at Area Fifty-one. Maybe it’s a scam we haven’t figured out yet.”

  “That’s a lot of effort and money just to annoy someone. How long has he been in business?”

  “Couple days. I’d be willing to bet, we get back to Merlin’s, there’s no Merlin. Checks cashed to a drop somewhere, he and the cash disappeared already. I just hope we won’t be turning this sucker in to the police.”

  “How is it you know so much about Merlin?” Bradone asked.

  If Bradone ever caught up with her mentor, Charlie figured he’d be left holding a whole bunch of regret.

  “Me and Mel checked him out for Evan.” Toby opened the back windows, that almost goofy delight with life everywhere on his battered face, except for the deadly serious look in the one eye remaining open. “He was into astrology, voodoo, and this deal where you could get credit cards good all over the world, no matter your credit rating.”

  “Why would Evan check out Merlin? Bradone, when you were here before, did you come in white Cherokees?”

  “Two of them. I never questioned where Merlin got them.”

  “Hell, he’s probably into all kinds of other stuff too. Reminds me of Mel and Evan, and damn near all of Hollywood, for that matter.”

  “If you knew this about him, why did you rent from him?”

  “Hey, we do fiction, you know? It’s all grist, babe.”

  Bradone seemed to have forgotten her exceptionally personal close encounter of the orange kind. She leaned toward Charlie to watch Toby in the rearview mirror. “Have we met before?”

  “Saw you at Evan’s the night of the screening. We weren’t introduced. I’m just a gofer—Jesus, what’s that?”

  Charlie, still flooring the poor machine down the road, pumped the brake and the windshield washer to see whatever it was, praying it was not a great huge stupid bull standing on the center line. She just wasn’t up to cattle mutilation.

  A machine of some kind, an aircraft, flying lower than a crop duster, streaked down the center line toward them. It tipped a nose with a hummingbird proboscis straight into the air at the absolute final moment, soaring over them with a sucking sound instead of a roar.

  Charlie and the Cherokee fought each other and her heartbeat all over the road and off it and back onto it and then off it again before coming to a phenomenally abrupt halt.

  “Get us out of here,” Bradone shouted. The second unit gofer, who had not been belted in, grunted in the backseat and Charlie sat there, stunned to find the engine still running.

  Her contacts were dry and gritty, there was grit between her teeth. Buzzy from lack of enough sleep, coffee, water, eggs, and vacation, Charlie wanted a hot shower to quell the itches in the most private of her parts. She wanted to tell the whole world to go to hell, beginning with the inhabitants of this car.

  But Charlemagne Catherine sat tall and pulled back onto the two-lane highway that was in good repair but seemed to have more cattle and airplanes on it than it did cars.

  She mashed the pedal. At least she wasn’t falling asleep like she had on the way in. “We are going to make it to Alamo.”

  It couldn’t have been ten minutes before her passengers were screaming at her again and Charlie mashed the brake instead. The Cherokee screeched and zagged all over the pavement and shoulders on both sides. This time, they came to a stop up against a poor Joshua tree with a rock behind it.

  The rock won.

  The lumbering animal that had caused this event stopped lumbering and began to trot toward them, testicles and such swinging in the wind.

  “God, that’s a lot of beefsteak,” Toby murmured.

  Merlin’s white Jeep Cherokee eeeeked, sputtered, and died.

  “Toby, find the eyedrops in my purse. My contacts are killing me.” Charlie turned back to her task of restarting the engine, to find eyes much larger than hers and just as bloodshot staring in her open window. The beefsteak snorted, lowered his head, and farted.

  “Punch your window up.” The stargazer coughed.

  The big red bull with the big curved horns pawed the desert floor, lifted his head and then his tail, and, before Charlie could get her wits and the window under control, squirted out two days’ graze.

  “What purse?” Now the gofer was coughing.

  “Mine’s up here.” Bradone pointed to the floor at her feet with the hand not covering her nose.

  The engine eeeked, growled, and purred into being.

  “It was in my backpack.”

  The bull, apparently satisfied with his statement, lumbered off to the middle of the road, where he seemed more at home.

  Charlie backed the bruised Cherokee in the same direction, her eyes watering from that portion of the bull’s statement that had joined them. Tears floated her artificial lenses. She opened all the windows from her center console to clear the air.

  “I got no pack, no purse. I got a big canvas thing. I got a grocery bag with one apple—”

  “What do you mean, no pack? There were two.” Charlie drove more sedately now. “Keep looking.”

  “Oh, Charlie.” Bradone had tears in her voice, if not in her eyes. “We left the packs and your purse with your identification back at—”

  “Merlin’s Ridge,” Toby finished for her, sounding like doom incarnate.

  CHAPTER 34

  CHARLIE AND HER companions made it to Alamo, with a sheriff’s car in not very hot pursuit. They bought gas and snacks and water and a pint of whole milk for Charlie’s ulcer. The sheriff’s car roared past as if the deputy didn’t see them. Toby cleaned up his wounds in the men’s room.

  “My purse had my identification, lots of cash, and an extra metal stud on the bottom, which probably turned the lights out at the Hilton. Not too incriminating.”

  Bradone had left her purse, too large to fit in the pack, in the Jeep in the mine tunnel. Charlie certainly wished she had. “When Toby abandoned me, I put what I thought I needed to walk to the base in one pack. I’m sure not going back for it.”

  Toby came out of the little convenience store all smiles, hair dripping where he’d washed the blood out. They remembered to turn the license plates but never saw the representative of the Lincoln County Sheriff’s Department again.

  Merlin’s tent office on 1-15, just outside of Vegas, resembled a fireworks stand, striped with red, white, and blue. They turned the Chero
kee in to a kid, maybe Libby’s age, who kept glancing at Toby with suspicion but would give out no information on Merlin. He didn’t even charge Bradone for the dents and scrapes that driving off the road in Area 51 had put on the Jeep.

  Charlie should have suspected something right then, but she just wanted a shower.

  They called a cab to get back to town, then looked at one another, undecided, when the driver wanted to know, “Where to?”

  “Well, don’t look at me.” Charlie had no plan, no money, no credit cards, no plane ticket, no clean clothes, no ID to retrieve her belongings, which had probably been removed from her room at the Hilton. She might well lose her job and her freedom when that stud was found on her purse. And her eyesight. Her contacts were scratching again.

  And her government, which she stoutly supported, could even now be tracing her life’s history on the Internet using the information on credit cards, phone numbers, and the driver’s license in her billfold. She wouldn’t be hard to find. She’d have to rat on Evan to explain the stud.

  Bradone suggested they try to retrieve Charlie’s luggage anyway. “I expect the paparazzi have followed your Mitch Hilsten elsewhere.”

  But she sent Toby into the Hilton to use a house phone to see if Charlie still had a room and to do the same with Richard Morse. “I’ve got a card key to Richard’s room. We’ll see if we can’t jimmy the connecting door.”

  Toby returned to say Charlie and her boss, still registered, did not answer their phones.

  “Maybe we can move your luggage to Loopy Louie’s until we think of something better. I’m not registered under my own name.”

  “Louie Deloese knows who you are by sight,” Charlie pointed out, “and why wouldn’t your paparazzi have followed Mitch to Loopy’s? That’s where he was staying.”

  “We’ll go in the back way both places.”

  They rode up the Hilton’s glass elevator on the outside of the building to avoid the lobby, Charlie wondering why the stargazer trusted the gofer, since she was so paranoid.

  Charlie studied the interplay between Toby and Bradone. She kept slicing glances his way. He kept pretending he didn’t notice. Charlie kept trying to remember who he resembled.

  But they were all startled at the ease with which Toby triggered the dead bolt of the connecting door to Charlie’s room. He looked at them and shrugged. “What can I say? I’m a magician.”

  Richard’s room was a suite with a separate bedroom and a dressing room. Charlie’s room was the extra bedroom to the suite. She checked the closet and found Richard’s clothes still hanging there. In her own closet, the safe still held Charlie’s computer, the wardrobe drawers all her panties. Her companions helped her cram everything into her luggage.

  * * *

  Showered, shampooed, shaved, deodorized, teeth brushed, contacts soaking, and wearing her glasses, which she never let anyone see her in but Libby and her neighbors in the condo complex. Clean jeans and soft gauze bandages, purchased in Alamo, under her shirt. And not arrested yet. Charlie savored the moment.

  Nothing rotated here in Bradone’s room at Loopy Louie’s. No scimitars. The bed square, the TV on a corner table. This room was not as exotic as Mitch’s, but the wallpaper featured endless lines of camels parading between endless palm-filled oases and rolling sand dunes.

  Toby, showered and wearing one of Charlie’s sleeping shirts and a pair of Bradone’s shorts, opened the door to the room-service bedouin. Charlie could smell the coffee.

  Bradone, dressed in two skimpy towels, one on her hair and the other wrapped around her body, barely, signed the tab, paraded to her purse and pulled out a bill that pleased the bedouin as much as her attire. “I know you aren’t housekeeping, but could you see that we get more bath towels, soap, glasses, and whatever? And the evening newspaper? There’s another one of these for you if they are all here in under ten minutes.”

  Everything was there before Charlie got her second sip of coffee. Rich people know how to get things done. Must have something to do with compounding.

  Charlie had a creamy Allah omelette without camel fries. She and her stomach had begun to settle in when Bradone passed her a section of the newspaper and pointed out a small article at the bottom of a page.

  LONGTIME LAS VEGAS RESIDENT KILLED IN ROBBERY.

  Hilton Hotel food server, Ardith Miller, shot at bus stop, apparently for her tip money, authorities say.

  “I told you so.”

  “Now listen to me, girl.” Bradone shook a disciplinary finger at Charlie. “You had nothing to do with that death. People are robbed all the time, and sometimes it gets violent. She waited on thousands of people, who have no more reason to feel responsible for it than you do.”

  “Probably got killed for that hundred-dollar bill Art Sleem tipped her for my breakfast.”

  “You know how many hundred-dollar bills there are floating around this town? Tips all go in a pool and are divided up at the end of a shift anyway. The busers share in them, and the tax man too.” Bradone’s distress over her extraterrestrial rape had been replaced by an angry control.

  “Shut up. Listen to this,” Toby shouted, pointing at the TV.

  “Metro spokeswoman, Camilla Hardy, has finally released some information on the triple murders at the home of filmmaker Evan Black.” Different news team, different channel. Two guys this time, but they followed two identical replays of the Depends commercial, seen on Barry and Terry’s channel.

  “Police are now disclosing that the three victims, Matthew Tooney, Arthur Sleem, and Joseph Boyles were all murdered at different places in the house and then moved to one location in the family room.”

  “They have confirmed that not all three were killed with the same weapon,” the other guy added. Both late forties, one in a blue blazer, one in a tan. “Sources say two were killed by the same gun and one, rumored to be Tooney, by a different-caliber weapon. Matthew Tooney has been identified as an investigator for the insurance company covering the casino at the Las Vegas Hilton.” This was the tan blazer with the homey smile. So Tooney wasn’t IRS. Maybe that’s why he let Charlie keep the money.

  The blue blazer had a squint that gave him a more serious demeanor. “The other two victims of last Thursday’s shooting spree, Boyles and Sleem, had been employed as security for several casinos on the Strip, most recently, Loopy Louie’s.”

  “Also, sources close to the Metro Police Department say that only a few thousand dollars of the money, stolen in the daring raid on the Las Vegas Hilton’s cage in the wee hours of Wednesday morning, was missing.”

  “The money from the casino robbery, found near the door of the separate security building behind the hotel yesterday morning, had been stuffed into black plastic garbage bags.”

  “That’s why all the reporters and TV trucks pulling up to the Hilton when I came to get you, Charlie. I thought it was you and Mitch that attracted them.”

  “There’s Ardith, the waitperson.” Charlie pointed at the stilled frame of black plastic bags lying up against a metal grate and several people walking away. One bag had bills spilling out of a tear in its side. “The one with the thick ankles. She’d come to work after all, but left with a stash.” Poor Ardith. If Charlie had been her age in her job, she’d have grabbed extra cash too.

  “Now you know it’s not your fault,” Bradone told Charlie.

  “The real mystery to all this is why steal money and then return it?” The blue blazer tightened his squint on this one.

  But Charlie knew. “Because Evan and crew made more money for the conspiracy project by collecting on a bet that you couldn’t pull off the robbery than if you’d kept the money, huh, Toby? You guys never planned to keep it, did you?”

  The second-unit gofer gave her a bland smile and raised his eyebrows in a way that reminded Charlie of Bob, the limo driver.

  “That’s why that phony screening before Mitch got here. All those people were in on the bet or represented others who were, right? That’s why the cash, only?
??Evan’s going to fund the conspiracy project with bet money, he won’t have to pay back from profits—it’s free money, not a loan. It’s probably all under the table, so no taxes either.”

  “They don’t call the guy a genius for nothing. Nobody thought he could pull it off without hurting anybody. The odds were something else.” He shook his curls. “It was beautiful. Even I was impressed.”

  “Is that why it hardly made the headlines?” Bradone asked.

  “Word was out on the street for anybody tuned in. But nobody thought it would be the Hilton. It’s got the tightest security. Most of the betting favored Loopy’s or one of the casinos on Fremont. I didn’t know until the last minute. They didn’t let me in on anything much because of my uncle Louie. I figured they had you pegged to douse the lights for them, Charlie. Maybe they picked the Hilton because you had a room there. Only in Vegas, man.”

  “… no new leads in the disappearance of heartthrob Mitch Hilsten and girlfriend, Hollywood agent Charlie Greene, who have been missing for over twenty-four hours.

  “Friends say the two have been estranged recently and may simply be off making up in private.”

  “What friends? If Libby sees this, I’m dead. If Edwina’s been saying that, she’s dead.”

  “And now here’s Greg Torpor with sports. Hey, Greg, how about those Atlantic No Doz, huh?”

  “Yeah, Don,” Greg wore a sports shirt, with hair trying to grow out of the open collar, “it was a great weekend for football and the No Doz too. You know?”

  Just as the music and all these huge black guys in helmets revved up, Bradone hit the mute.

  “What is it with women?” Toby Johnson complained, and went back to his lamb curry something.

  There’d been no news of Merlin’s Caravan on the local newscast, but there certainly was on the national.

  “Yes!” Toby raised his fork at the screen when their hostess unmuted the set. “Way to go, Merlin.”

  This segment made much of the fact that the supersecret air base was simply not acknowledged by the United States government and then showed the signs forbidding photography of this or any part of “this installation.”