Private Vegas (37 page)

Bobby Petino had left my name at the front desk. I picked up an escort, Officer Eugene Calhoun, who kept his own counsel, escorted me to an elevator, and took me up to the sixth floor, where I glimpsed the tier of overstuffed pods jam-packed with desperate, unwashed humanity. The sickening sight of this hellhole brought back memories of a wretched time I wanted to forget.

Calhoun and I passed through a series of steel-barred gates, arriving at last at a cubicle divided by a wall of glass that is generally used by prisoners and their attorneys.

The room was furnished with a shelf in front of the glass, a telephone, an aluminum chair, and a caged light overhead. I took my seat, drummed my fingers until I heard footfalls in the hallway.

Calhoun unlocked the door, showed Hal Archer into his side of the bisected room, and locked the door. He came back to me and said, “You’ve got ten minutes.”

“Stick around, Officer,” I said. “We won’t be that long.”

Archer had been incarcerated in this medieval snake pit for a week and had lost a few pounds. His skin sagged, and his knuckles were abraded. He was doing pretty well, considering.

He sat down heavily, gave me a scathing look; he picked up the receiver on his side of the Plexiglas wall and I picked up mine.

“It’s about fucking time you got here, Morgan. I’d be on a yacht right now if your father were still alive.”

Hal Archer was a heinous prick as well as a conscienceless murderer.

“My father’s dead and I think you’ve been on your last yacht. This is a courtesy call, Hal. I came to say that there’s nothing I can do for you. Good luck in the joint.”

I hung up the phone, took the elevator downstairs to the IRC. I made a couple of calls from the lobby to check that Petino had made good on his promise, and then I walked out the doors of the prison and around to the back of the jail.

I didn’t have to wait long.

Rick came through the doors of the prison wearing jeans and an ugly green shirt. A guard opened the gate for him and he came through, his face lighting up when he saw me. He extended his hand. We shook, embraced, broke apart still smiling. He smelled bad but he looked good.

“Hungry?” I asked him.

“How come I’m out?”

“Dexter Lewis had more important things to do than try you for punching him in the nose.”

“So you leaned on Bobby Petino.”

I grinned.

“Good,” Rick said. “Once I’ve had a shower and a shave, order will be restored to the universe.”

“I’ll run you by your house.”

“You were saying something about lunch, Jack? Where are we going?”

“Feel like having lobster with a mobster?”

“If the lobster doesn’t mind, it’s okay with me,” said Rick. “Where’d you park the car?”

RICK AND I sat at a table on the open deck at the back of the Lobster, a charming old eatery on Ocean Avenue at the head of the Santa Monica Pier.

From where we sat, I could see the Pacific Wheel, the Carousel Building, and the red awnings over a paved walkway that zigzags down toward the pier and water.

Rick was leaning over a bowl of clam chowder, shoveling it in. He hadn’t had a meal worthy of a human being in two days, and I didn’t see why he should wait for Ray Noccia.

I sat back in my seat, tried to enjoy the pretty scene, but the truth was, I was worried.

Last year, despite my wanting nothing to do with organized crime, Ray’s oldest son, Carmine, coerced me into recovering millions in stolen pharmaceuticals belonging to the Noccia family.

We did the job perfectly. The Noccias got screwed without knowing it. Private was kept out of sight and I was sure that we’d left no trace of what we’d done.

Now I was having doubts.

About half a year ago, Carmine Noccia had teamed up with Tommy to blackmail me. Carmine suspected I’d double-crossed the Noccia family with the pharmaceutical case—but I got him off my back easily enough. Ray Noccia was a different story. He had the power that Carmine didn’t.

If Ray Noccia had found me out, he might be looking at me to pick up the ten-million-dollar tab. Actually, people had been killed for much less.

Rick finished his soup, mopped up the remains with his bread. He burped and was going for the last of his wine when a gray-complexioned, gray-haired man in a gray sports jacket came up the stairs with a couple of goons at his heels. They stood in the entrance as a smiling Ray Noccia approached our table.

“Good to see you, Jack,” Noccia said to me. “Don’t get up. You too, Rick. Sit.”

Noccia reached for the back of a chair and at the same time turned his head toward the stairs. Looking past his protection, he said, “Oh, here he comes now. I asked Tommy to join us for lunch.”

My brother, Tommy?

My unease turned to dread when I saw my twin coming into the restaurant. Ray Noccia had more notches in his gun belt than Clint Eastwood in a spaghetti western. Tommy lived to take me down and he had history with Ray Noccia through our father. An alliance between these two could not be good for me.

“Hey, Jack,” Tommy said, closing in on our table. “I’m really glad to see you, bro.”

Tom sat down. Noccia sat down. The waiter came over with menus, and the don ordered Pellegrino for the table.

After the waiter walked away, Noccia said to me, “I really didn’t have to be here, Jack. I just wanted to see your face when Tommy said his piece. Tommy?”

Tommy accepted the handoff with a gracious nod, looked as pleased as if he’d won the trifecta at Santa Anita.

“Let me give you the short version,” he said.

“Take all the time you want,” I said.

“Thanks, Jack. It’s like this,” Tommy said. “And I’m going to use the legal term for it, okay? You ‘improperly influenced’ Dad so that he would leave Private to you. He had long promised Private to
me
. You
duped
him and that’s a fact. Now, Jack, I offered to buy you out, and my offer was pretty generous. You blew me off and left me no choice. So I’m taking you to court—”

“Let’s go, Rick,” I said. I stood up, opened my wallet, dropped a few bills on the table. “Lunch is on me,” I said.

“You can run, but you can’t run far,” Tommy said. “I’ve got witnesses who will swear Dad was leaving Private to me until you visited him at Corcoran. He changed his will just before he died. So I’m going to sue you, Jack. And I’m going to win.”

Del Rio and I went out to the car. I said, “He’s full of crap. No jury is going to take the word of Ray Noccia.”

My best bud, Del Rio, agreed.

But I didn’t convince myself. Ray Noccia could buy off any number of jailhouse rats for pocket change. If he got twenty mugs to say that my father was leaving Private to Tommy before I talked to him, that much testimony could add up to a preponderance of evidence.

It might persuade a jury, and if Dad’s last will was overturned, the prior will would be enforced.

Tommy could try, and I knew he would use every angle and maybe come up with a few new ones. But I wasn’t going to let my brother steal Private from me. I couldn’t let that happen.

No fucking way.

IT WAS CASUAL Friday, Lori’s favorite day of the week, because the office closed at one.

Lori made sure that the boss was good and gone. Then she grabbed her handbag, jogged down the stairs to the underground garage, and got into her platinum-colored Infiniti, her silver bullet, her wonder car.

She strapped in, checked her mirrors, and felt for the timer on the cord around her neck. Then she turned the ignition, and, as the gates rolled up, she gunned the engine and zoomed up the parking-garage ramp. As soon as the front tires hit the street, she pressed the timer’s start button. She drove a speedy half mile through light traffic, then peeled out onto the ramp taking her to the 110.

Lori had a good feeling about the upcoming twelve minutes. Like, maybe she could knock a few seconds off her best time, like she’d been trying to do for a couple of weeks. She was in a wide-open lane now, moving at seventy-three, the roadway rolling out in front of her like a satin ribbon. She spun the steering wheel with her wrist and took the Infiniti into the inside lane, accelerated, and got up to seventy-six, now eighty, easy-breezy.

As Lori sped toward her own personal finish line, a god-damned paneled van up ahead wandered across the center lanes in some kind of trance. She had her rules: no horns allowed, no
brakes
, so Lori stepped on the gas and kept to the inside lane, flying so close to the van, she brushed its side panels.

She glanced into her mirror, saw with supreme satisfaction that the van was already a dot behind her—and that she’d gained four seconds on her previous best time for this point in the race. OMG.

Lori was flying through the Figueroa tunnels, and now traffic was merging onto I-5 North. She was passing the Glendale exit on her right at a cool eighty-five, heading toward Griffith Park and her exit onto the 134, when it hit her.

Today. Right now, she was going to break her all-time record by more than twenty seconds.

The exit was coming up and Lori was doing beautifully, all open road and smooth sailing, until a big orange-and-white box-store tractor-trailer began edging her out of her lane, mindlessly sending her away from her turnoff to her right and toward the median strip to her left, giving her no room to maneuver and no time to fade back.

This was just wrong.

Lori had no choice. She gunned the engine, shot into the sliver of lane between the sixteen-wheeler and the median strip. Her left rear tire bumped up against the low concrete wall, climbed it, and spun the Infiniti into a right-handed yaw toward the semi.

Instinctively, Lori wrenched the wheel hard left against the turn, felt the car buck, jump the center strip entirely, and clear it, sending her into oncoming traffic at ninety miles an hour. Her elation was gone, replaced by anger, fear, and then horror as the blue Bentley barreled toward her, looming large. She saw the fear on the face of the driver. He turned his wheel and hit the brakes as the distance between them closed.

Rubber burned, and despite Lori standing on the brakes, using every muscle she had to stop her car, there was nowhere to go, no way out.

“Jesus Christ,” she screamed a split second before the cars collided, before the fireball bloomed, before she died.

“Noooooo.”