Bad Luck and Trouble Page 22

  They arrived in Las Vegas at midnight, which Reacher figured was exactly when the place looked its absolute best. He had been there before. In daylight, Vegas looked absurd. Inexplicable, trivial, tawdry, revealed, exposed. But at night with the lights full on, it looked like a gorgeous fantasy. They approached from the bad end of the Strip and Reacher saw a plain cement bar with peeled paint and no windows and an unpunctuated four-word sign: Cheap Beer Dirty Girls. Opposite was a knot of dusty swaybacked motels and a single faded high-rise hotel. That kind of neighborhood was where he would have started hunting for rooms, but Dixon drove on without a word, toward the glittering palaces a half-mile ahead. She pulled in at one with an Italian name, and a swarm of valets and bellmen came straight at them and grabbed their bags and drove their car away. The lobby was full of tile and pools and fountains and loud with the chatter of slot machines. Neagley headed to the desk and paid for four rooms. Reacher watched over her shoulder.

  “Expensive,” he said, reflexively.

  “But a possible shortcut,” Neagley said back. “Maybe they knew Orozco and Sanchez here. Maybe they even gave them their security contract.”

  Reacher nodded. From the big green machine to this. In which case, this had been a huge step up, at least in terms of potential salary. The whole place dripped money, literally. The pools and the fountains were symbolic. So much water in the middle of the desert spoke of breathtaking extravagance. The capital investment must have been gigantic. The cash flow must have been immense. It had been quite something if Sanchez and Orozco had been in the middle of it all, safeguarding this kind of massive enterprise. He realized he was intensely proud of his old buddies. But simultaneously puzzled by them. When he had quit the army he had been fully aware that what faced him was the beginning of the rest of his life, but he had seen ahead no further than one day at a time. He had made no plans and formed no visions.

  The others had.

  How?

  Why?

  Neagley handed out the key cards and they arranged to freshen up and meet again in ten minutes to start work. It was after midnight, but Vegas was a true twenty-four-hour town. Time had no relevance. There were famous clichés about the lack of windows and clocks in the casinos, and they were all true, as far as Reacher knew. Nothing was allowed to slow down the cash flow. Certainly nothing as mundane as a player’s bedtime. There was nothing better than a tired guy who kept on losing all night long.

  Reacher’s room was on the seventeenth floor. It was a dark concrete cube tricked out to look like a centuries-old salon in Venice. Altogether it was fairly unconvincing. Reacher had been to Venice, too. He opened his folding toothbrush and stood it upright in a glass in the bathroom. That was the sum total of his unpacking. He splashed water on his face and ran a palm across his bristly head and went back downstairs to take a preliminary look around.

  Even in such an upmarket joint, most of the first-floor real estate was devoted to slot machines. Patient, tireless, microprocessor-controlled, they skimmed a small but relentless percentage off the torrent of cash fed into them, twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. Bells were ringing and beepers were sounding. Plenty of people were winning, but slightly more were losing. There was very light security in the room. No real opportunity to steal or cheat either way around, given a slot’s mechanistic nature and the Nevada Gaming Board’s close scrutiny. Reacher made only two people as staff out of hundreds in the room. A man and a woman, dressed like everyone else, as bored as everyone else, but without the manic gleam of hope in their eyes.

  He figured Sanchez and Orozco hadn’t spent much energy on slots.

  He moved onward, to huge rooms in back where roulette and poker and blackjack were being played. He looked up, and saw cameras. Looked left and right and ahead, and saw high rollers and security guards and hookers in increasing concentrations.

  He stopped at a roulette table. The way he understood it, roulette was really no different than a slot. Assuming the wheel was honest. Customers supplied money, the wheel distributed it straight back to other customers, except for an in-built house percentage as relentless and reliable as a slot machine’s microprocessor.

  He figured Sanchez and Orozco hadn’t spent much energy on roulette.

  He moved on to the card tables, which was where he figured the real action was. Card games were the only casino components where human intelligence could be truly engaged. And where human intelligence was engaged, crime came soon after. But major crime would need more than a player’s input. A player with self-discipline and a great memory and a rudimentary grasp of statistics could beat the odds. But beating the odds wasn’t a crime. And beating the odds didn’t earn a guy sixty-five million dollars in four months. The margin just wasn’t there. Not unless the original stake was the size of a small country’s GDP. Sixty-five million dollars over four months would need a dealer’s involvement. But a dealer who lost so heavily would be fired within a week. Within a day or an hour, maybe. So a four-month winning streak would need some kind of a huge scam. Collusion. Conspiracy. Dozens of dealers, dozens of players. Maybe hundreds of each.

  Maybe the whole house was playing against its investors.

  Maybe the whole town was.

  That would be a big enough deal for people to get killed over.

  There was plenty of security in the room. There were cameras aimed at the players and the dealers. Some of the cameras were big and obvious, some were small and discreet. Probably there were others that were invisible. There were men and women patrolling in evening wear, with earpieces and wrist microphones, like Secret Service agents. There were others, undercover, in plain clothes. Reacher made five of them within a minute, and assumed there were many more that he was missing.

  He threaded his way back to the lobby. Found Karla Dixon waiting by the fountains. She had showered and changed out of her jeans and leather jacket into a black pant suit. Her hair was wet and slicked back. Her suit coat was buttoned and she had no blouse under it. She looked pretty good.

  “Vegas was settled by the Mormons,” she said. “Did you know that?”

  “No,” Reacher said.

  “Now it’s growing so fast they print the phone book twice a year.”

  “I didn’t know that, either.”

  “Seven hundred new houses a month.”

  “They’re going to run out of water.”

  “No question about that. But they’ll make hay until they do. Gambling revenues alone are close to seven billion dollars a year.”

  “Sounds like you’ve been reading a guide book.”

  Dixon nodded. “There was one in my room. They get thirty million visitors a year. That means each one of them is losing an average of more than two hundred bucks per visit.”

  “Two hundred thirty-three dollars and thirty-three cents,” Reacher said, automatically. “The definition of irrational behavior.”

  “The definition of being human,” Dixon said. “Everybody thinks they’re going to be the one.”

  Then O’Donnell showed up. Same suit, different tie, maybe a fresh shirt. His shoes shone in the lights. Maybe he had found a polishing cloth in his bathroom.

  “Thirty million visitors a year,” he said.

  Reacher said, “Dixon already told me. She read the same book.”

  “That’s ten percent of the whole population. And look at this place.”

  “You like it?”

  “It’s making me see Sanchez and Orozco in a whole new light.”

  Reacher nodded. “Like I said before. You all moved onward and upward.”

  Then Neagley stepped out of the elevator. She was dressed the same as Dixon, in a severe black suit. Her hair was wet and combed.

  “We’re swapping guide book facts,” Reacher said.

  “I didn’t read mine,” Neagley said. “I called Diana Bond instead. She got there and waited an hour and went back again.”

  “Was she pissed at us?”

  “She’s worried. She doesn’t like Little
Wing’s name out there. I said I’d get back to her.”

  “Why?”

  “She’s making me curious. I like to know things.”

  “Me too,” Reacher said. “Right now I’d like to know if someone scammed sixty-five million bucks in this town. And how.”

  “It would be a big scam,” Dixon said. “Prorated across a whole year, it would be close to three percent of the total revenue stream.”

  “Two point seven eight,” Reacher said, automatically.

  “Let’s make a start,” O’Donnell said.

  43

  They started at the concierge desk, where they asked to see the duty security manager. The concierge asked if there was a problem, and Reacher said, “We think we have mutual friends.”

  There was a long wait before the duty security manager showed up. Clearly social visits were low on his agenda. Eventually a medium-sized man in Italian shoes and a thousand-dollar suit walked over. He was about fifty years old, still trim and fit, in command, relaxed, but the lines around his eyes showed he must have done at least twenty years in a previous career. A harder career. He disguised his impatience well and introduced himself and shook hands all around. He said his name was Wright and suggested they talk in a quiet corner. Pure reflex, Reacher thought. His instincts and his training told him to move potential trouble well out of the way. Nothing could be allowed to slow down the cash flow.

  They found a quiet corner. No chairs, of course. No Vegas casino would give guests a comfortable place to sit away from the action. For the same reason, the lights in the bedrooms had been dim. A guest upstairs reading was no use to anyone. They stood in a neat circle and O’Donnell showed his D.C. PI license and some kind of an accreditation note from the Metro PD. Dixon matched it with her license and a card from the NYPD. Neagley had a card from the FBI. Reacher produced nothing. Just tugged his shirts down over the shape of the gun in his pocket.

  Wright said to Neagley, “I was with the FBI, once upon a time.”

  Reacher asked him, “Did you know Manuel Orozco and Jorge Sanchez?”

  “Did I?” Wright said. “Or do I?”

  “Did you,” Reacher said. “Orozco’s dead for sure, and we figure Sanchez is, too.”

  “Friends of yours?”

  “From the army.”

  “I’m very sorry.”

  “We are, too.”

  “Dead when?”

  “Three, four weeks ago.”

  “Dead how?”

  “We don’t know. That’s why we’re here.”

  “I knew them,” Wright said. “I knew them pretty well. Everyone in the business knew them.”

  “Did you use them? Professionally?”

  “Not here. We don’t contract out. We’re too big. Same with all the larger places.”

  “Everything’s in-house?”

  Wright nodded. “This is where FBI agents and police lieutenants come to die. We get the pick of the litter. The salaries on offer here, they’re lining up out the door. Not a day goes by that I don’t interview at least two of them, on their last vacation before retirement.”

  “So how did you know Orozco and Sanchez?”

  “Because the places they look after are like training camps. Someone gets a new idea, they don’t try it out here. That would be crazy. They perfect it someplace else first. So we keep people like Orozco and Sanchez sweet because we need their advance information. We all hook up once in a while, we talk, conferences, dinners, casual drinks.”

  “Were they busy? Are you busy?”

  “Like one-armed paperhangers.”

  “You ever heard the name Azhari Mahmoud?”

  “No. Who is he?”

  “We don’t know. But we think he’s here under an alias.”

  “Here?”

  “Somewhere in Vegas. Can you check hotel registrations?”

  “I can check ours, obviously. And I can call around.”

  “Try Andrew MacBride and Anthony Matthews.”

  “Subtle.”

  Dixon asked, “How do you guys know if a card player is cheating?”

  Wright said, “If he’s winning.”

  “People have to win.”

  “They win as much as we let them. Any more than that, they’re cheating. It’s a question of statistics. Numbers don’t lie. It’s about how, not if.”

  O’Donnell said, “Sanchez had a piece of paper with a number written on it. Sixty-five million dollars. A hundred grand, times six hundred and fifty separate occasions, over a four-month period, to be precise.”

  “So?”

  “Are those the kind of numbers you would recognize?”

  “As what?”

  “As a rip-off.”

  “What’s that in a year? Almost two hundred million?”

  “Hundred and ninety-five,” Reacher said.

  “Conceivable,” Wright said. “We try to keep wastage below eight percent. That’s like an industry target. So we lose way more than two hundred million in a year. But having said that, two hundred million in one specific scam would be a hell of a large proportion all in one go. Unless it was something new, over and above. In which case our eight percent target is shot all to hell. In which case you’re starting to worry me.”

  “It worried them,” Reacher said. “We think it killed them.”

  “It would be a very big deal,” Wright said. “Sixty-five million in four months? They’d need to recruit dealers and pit bosses and security people. They’d need to jinx cameras and erase tapes. They’d have to keep the cashiers quiet. It would be industrial-scale scamming.”

  “It might have happened.”

  “So why aren’t the cops talking to me?”

  “We’re a little ways ahead of them.”

  “The Vegas PD? The Gaming Board?”

  Reacher shook his head. “Our guys died across the line, in LA County. Couple of sheriffs out there are dealing with it.”

  “And you’re ahead of them? What does that mean?”

  Reacher said nothing. Wright was quiet for a beat. Then he looked at each face in turn. First Neagley, then Dixon, then O’Donnell, then Reacher.

  “Wait,” he said. “Don’t tell me. The army? You’re the special investigators. Their old unit. They talked about it all the time.”

  Reacher said, “In which case you understand our interest. You worked with people.”

  “If you find something, will you cut me in?”

  “Earn it,” Reacher said.

  “There’s a girl,” Wright said. “She works in some awful place with a fire pit. A bar, near where the Riviera used to be. She’s tight with Sanchez.”

  “His girlfriend?”

  “Not exactly. Maybe once. But they’re close. She’ll know more than I do.”

  44

  Wright went back to work and Reacher checked with the concierge as to where the Riviera had been. He got directions back to the cheap end of the Strip. They walked. It was a warm dry desert night. The stars were out, on the far horizon, beyond the pall of smog and the wash of the streetlights. The sidewalks were matted with discarded full-color postcards advertising prostitutes. It seemed like the free market had driven the base price down to a penny under fifty bucks. Although Reacher had no doubt that sum would inflate pretty fast once some hapless punter actually got a girl to his room. The women in the pictures were pretty, although Reacher had no doubt they weren’t real. They were probably library shots of innocent swimsuit models from Rio or Miami. Vegas was a city of scams. Sanchez and Orozco must have been permanently busy. Like one-armed paperhangers, Wright had said, and Reacher was completely ready to believe him.