Authors: Thomas Perry
He'd had enough imagination to foresee the possibility that if he kept making money through criminal acts, he might someday have to run. Maybe when he was with Susan Shelby, he had seen in her whatever quality it was that ultimately had made him kill her, and prepared. Maybe she was a talker, who might reveal his business. It might have been as simple as Susan getting irritating, and Martel beginning to think about what beginning a future without her might require. Jane was aware that Martel was psychologically sophisticated. His simple booby trap had been dangerous because it displayed acute attention to how the human mind worked.
But he was still a novice at running. He had not had time to think through the predicament of a runner and invent strategies for each obstacle. He would drive to Las Vegas-almost certainly, he had done so as soon as he'd realized his hired men must be dead-and collect whatever he thought he needed. The Las Vegas condominium would be another place for Jane to learn more about him.
She rechecked the two Beretta pistols she was carrying, put one in her jacket, and put the other under the seat. She drove as fast as she could without attracting the police. The drive to Las Vegas was a long roller coaster-an incline that rose five thousand feet to the Cajon Pass, then a descent into the edge of Death Valley at sea level again, then a couple of smaller ups and downs, ending at two thousand feet on the Las Vegas Strip. She was driving outside the fence past the taxiway at McCarron Airport when the sun rose. The look of everything-blinding and sun-bleached with a promise of cruel heat just outside the car window-reminded her of the morning only a few weeks ago when she'd been wounded, alone on foot with no money, no food, no water, no name. Things were so different now that as the two impressions merged, she felt stronger and more determined.
She knew approximately where Daniel Martel's condominium was. The address included the name Silverstrike Club, and she remembered seeing a building with that name on it just east of the Strip. She looked it up on her laptop and saw that it was between a midsize hotel and a nightclub. There were a couple of pools and a nine-hole golf course behind it.
The problem was going to be getting inside to the upper floors where the condominiums were. Las Vegas was an island in a river of cash, so it was full of people who had come to steal. It was, consequently, also heavily populated with security technicians, guards, rent-a-cops, and others whose job it was to prevent incursions by the thieves. It would be best to assume she was always under surveillance.
There was little time for the things she would have to accomplish here, so she started immediately. She drove to the hotel beside the Silverstrike Club, checked in wearing her short blond wig, and then went out shopping for a dress. The Forum at Caesar's was close, and at its heart was a collection of high-end stores for women. She spent an hour finding the right dress, purse, and shoes, and returned to her hotel with enough time to take extraordinary pains with her hair, makeup, and accessories.
She was a bit thinner than she had been when she'd gone to get Jim Shelby out of the courthouse, so she supposed she looked more appealing by Las Vegas standards than she had before she'd been shot and starved. Before she left the room, she made sure the marks that Wylie and his friends had made on her were hidden by her long sleeves and high neckline.
As she walked the two hundred feet to the front entrance of the Silverstrike Club, she could feel the drying and tightening as the surface moisture of her skin was seared away by the sun. The white building was about twenty stories high with a broad, roofed-over drive in front like the gigantic hotels on the Strip. Jane stepped inside, heard the automatic door swing closed behind her, and felt the refrigerated air embrace her. The lobby was an empty marble cavern except for a wide concierge desk with a woman in a man's sport coat standing behind it. Jane approached and said, "Hello."
"Good afternoon." The girl was as well trained and disciplined as an acrobat. Her smile was an artful blend of dental bleaching techniques and willpower. "How can I help you this afternoon"
"I'm supposed to meet Mr. Martel for lunch at one. Can you please call him for me"
"Of course." The voice was lilting. There was nothing in the range of human activities that she would rather do. She punched numbers with a fingernail manicured by a nameless artist. Next came the moment when the eagerness was replaced by uncertainty. She hung up. "He's not answering." She had already filed this incident in the archives of thoughtless errors men commit. Her left eyebrow gave a twitch of commiseration. "Would you like to wait for him in the bar"
Jane looked only mildly surprised by his absence, but certainly not ready to disregard the slight. She glanced at her watch with the eye of a prosecutor silently building a case: the time was now entered into the official record. "Well, all right," she said, as though the outcome had been anything but sure.
"I'll take you there." The girl was around the counter and gliding across the marble floor, so Jane had to move quickly to keep up. The girl reached the door a half step ahead so she could push it open before Jane's progress could be impeded. They entered a space with a large dining room on the left, and a long bar on the right with a liveried bartender wielding a cocktail shaker before a couple of men in polo shirts and shorts.
Just inside the door was another perfected young woman at a lectern. The concierge whispered something about "Mr. Martel" and "bar." The hostess was launched a few steps toward the bar, turned her head only, and held her hand out to Jane. "I'll watch for him and let him know where you are."
"Thank you," Jane said. She sat at a small metal table in the bar and took her phone out. She pretended to look down into the display at e-mails or text messages, but she had pressed the button for "camera" and was using the viewer to study the men in the vicinity. There were only about a dozen in the bar, but all of them had taken a moment to watch the concierge, the hostess, and Jane. That was fairly promising.
As she studied the room through her phone, she thought about what she should do if it all went wrong-if Daniel Martel suddenly walked in. There was no chance he could get across the lobby without being reminded by the concierge that he had a date waiting. The ladies' room was at the end of the space, to the right of the bar. She would probably be able to head into that hallway and follow it all the way to the other side, where the restrooms would be accessible to the dining room. The door to the kitchen was in the same direction, a little farther on. She could slip in, go down the long aisle that was always in the center for waiters to pick up orders, and be out the back door before he had any idea what to do.
The waiter appeared at her table, and Jane looked up and said, "May I have an iced tea, please"
He had barely had time to step away before a new man replaced him, standing above her. "Hi," he said. "Are you waiting for somebody"
He didn't appear to have been out golfing or swimming. His summer-weight sport coat and jeans could have been work attire in an informal office, but his T-shirt and sandals could not, and his Patek Philippe watch raised the question of whether work was necessary. He was handsome, but in a way that was too old for the way he dressed. She decided to take a chance rather than wait for another one. "Well, I have been waiting, but I'm beginning to wonder whether I should. Being late is manipulative. If I put in the time and effort to wait much longer, I'll have to persuade myself that he was worth it. Then I'll have to be willing to devote more time and effort to him."
"He sounds very sophisticated."
"It's not working. I'm just getting irritated."
He shrugged. "Anger is a passion, and it makes your blood circulate and starts you thinking about him. That's much better than indifference."
"Not if you want to get laid this year instead of next."
He threw his head back and laughed. "Good point." He took a fake step away, then stopped, as they both had known he would. He looked back. "If you'd prefer some company while you wait, you might make him jealous."
"I may as well inflict whatever pain I can. Have a seat."
He sat at the small table with her, gave a half wave to the waiter, and, while the waiter approached, said, "Is that iced tea"
She nodded.
"Two Long Island iced teas." To Jane he said, "You like to trade up, don't you"
Jane said, "Thanks, but four kinds of liquor and sweet and sour mix"
"It's just your iced tea's more fun-loving sister."
"No alcohol."
He nodded, and the waiter disappeared. "So what's your name"
"Tina Guilford. And you"
"Rick Chambers." He held his hand out, and when she shook it, he held on a half second too long.
She freed her hand. "Pleased to meet you. Do you golf here"
"Not often," he said. "And never in the summer. It's a hundred and six out there. By three it'll be a hundred and ten. I mostly just live here."
"Do you like it"
"Sure. It's a block from the Strip. It's got all the amenities, and the view in every direction is fantastic. It's safe from random people wandering in and out whenever they please. Not like the big hotels."
"I never got the idea they were unsafe."
"They're not, actually. But do you want all the people you see walk in their doors to walk into yours"
"I suppose not." She looked at her watch.
"Are you hungry"
"Well, to be honest with you, he did ask me here for lunch."
"It's getting to be mid-afternoon. Come on. Let's get a table." He leaned forward, his hands on the table as though he were about to push off.
"No, I don't want to impose. I'll just finish my tea and order lunch for myself."
"You're out of luck, Tina, honey. This is a private club. You can't pay for your iced tea, let alone lunch. We're too snobby to use money. It goes on a tab. Please. I'm hungry, too. I'll sit here and suffer with you if you want, just because you're beautiful. But it would be much nicer to watch you eat lunch."
She looked at the hostess, visibly uncomfortable. Then she smiled at him. "I'll take you up on your kind offer. You're a true gentleman."
"It's just my upbringing, and when I find a beautiful woman at my mercy I overcome that pretty quickly." He waved at the waiter and said, "We'd like a table in the dining room, please."
They went into the dining room, which was still well populated, and ordered. They ate and had a pleasant, unhurried conversation. Jane kept steering the conversation away from the way she looked, and moved her arm twice because he had the habit of laying his hand on it for emphasis. When they'd been there for nearly an hour, she said, "Well, I guess he's not going to show up at all, and he lives here."
"What's his name"
"Today, it's Fool. But he'll still be calling himself David Cavendish."
"If he comes in now, please don't make a scene. I'm too much of a coward for a fistfight."
"Do you know him"
"I don't think so. But he sounds Scottish. Probably throws the caber and drinks his single malt neat, and all that."
"Pretty close. I'm picturing him in a kilt now. This would be a better climate for a kilt than Scotland."
"Too much wind off the desert. It's the only show in town nobody would pay to see."
A few minutes later, she determined it was time to force him to decide whether to commit himself. "This was a lot of fun, Rick. I really enjoyed our lunch. You turned what started as a horrible day into a nice one."
"Oh, we can't just end it here. You were curious about the club. Let me show you around."
"I don't want to waste your afternoon."
"Afternoon is nothing. Half the people in town are asleep waiting for night. Come on." He came around behind her to pull out her chair, then led her out the far door that led to the residential part of the building. There was another door, and he used a key card to open it. Jane felt a blast of heat, but stepped into it after him.
"Out here is the pool I like best. Over here, by the jungle." There was a thick barrier of sago palms, elephant ears, and flowering plants. The pool was a complicated shape with waterfalls and grottoes that opened onto some other part of the pool she didn't see. The impression was of a place apart, somewhere other than the desert. "Very pretty."
"The golf course is up that way, and the tennis courts are over there. You can follow the ambulances picking up the sunstroke cases."
He opened the door again with his key card, and stepped to the elevator. He pressed the "up" button.
"Where to now"
"You've got to see the view from the upper floors." When the doors slid aside he stepped in, pushed "18," and swiped his card on the reader beside the panel. The elevator rose. Jane followed him out on the eighteenth floor to a door marked 1829. "Here," he said. "Look the other way, and prepare for a sight."
Jane covered her face with her hands and looked up and down the corridor to spot the security cameras. She didn't see any. He pushed the door open, then said, "Now look."
She stepped across a symbolic expanse of marble into the large living room. In the floor-to-ceiling windows were the backs and sides of the hotels on the east side of the Strip-MGM and Venetian, Paris-and on the west side she saw the facades of Mandalay Bay Luxor, Caesar's Palace, Bellagio, Mirage. "This is absolutely breathtaking," she said.
"I love it. I'm glad I got to show it to you."
"I am, too."
"Now take a look on this side." He opened a door and they walked into a room that was a sort of den, but had a desk with papers on it. The big window in this one was on the other side, and looked out onto the dry hardpan and distant mountains.
"That's incredible, too," she said. "But it doesn't look any more real than the other side."
"Let's have a drink," he said. "You have to keep hydrated around here, or you fall over and get stepped on."
"What do you have"
"Nonalcoholic"
"Not necessarily."
"How about a nice, icy vodka martini"