Bitter End (Seychelle Sullivan #3) (23 page)

XVIII

Thompson’s note had said 11:00 a.m. It was now 11:15—and there was still no sign of her. I was sitting on a concrete bench under a white gazebo-style roof beneath the high ramparts of the Seventeenth Street Bridge. The bench was hard and the cold passed through my jeans with little problem. It was warm out in the sunlight, but here in the shade, my ass was freezing.

Numbness could be a good thing considering the way my body had felt when I had rolled out of bed this morning. I hadn’t slept much at all, both from the pain and from my jumpiness. Every time the wind blew a branch against my cottage or I heard some noise I couldn’t identify, I jumped. That happens when somebody tries to kill you. And every time my body tensed, the pain increased. The bump on the head wasn’t bothering me nearly as much as the bruising down my right side and my sore ribs. I thought about lying down on the bench and pressing the cold concrete against my side.

This little park had been put up when they built the new, higher Seventeenth Street Bridge with a fifty-five-foot clearance, thinking this would allow more yachts to pass under the closed drawbridge and decrease the number of times it had to open. What the city fathers hadn’t planned on was the way the yachts would grow—bigger masts, higher decks, greater numbers. Today the citizenry seemed to spend just as much time sitting in their overheating cars waiting for the yachts of the rich and famous to pass through the open span.

Across the way, one of the bigger harbor tugs nudged a freighter into her berth in Port Everglades, and the small VHF radio I wore in a holster on my belt crackled to life as a fisherman called his buddy on the hailing frequency. Most of the big freighter traffic now went down to Southport, where they off-loaded the containers, but ships with bulk loads of concrete or the like still berthed in Midport, between the two cruise ship docks. Many of the smaller container ships that serviced the Caribbean Islands still docked there, too. These weren’t the gigantic boxy-looking steel monstrosities that had given up all pretense of maritime beauty. They were smaller older ships with exotic names like
El Morro
and
El Junke
, and some of them had been docking at this port since those days, way back when, back when my father used to lift me in his arms, pointing out the offices of Port Everglades Towing as we motored past in
Gorda
.

Small-boat traffic was heavy even for a Saturday morning, mostly small open fishing boats loaded with guys playing hooky from wives and weekend chores. I figured the weather made them do it. It was one of those clear February mornings where the sunlight prettied up the port and made Lauderdale look like she was wearing a blue sequined dress.

It was the weekend—already. Nick was shot on Monday morning, and here it was Saturday, and whoever
really
shot Nick was growing safer and safer with each passing day. Molly, meanwhile, was starting day number three in the county jail.

Along the seawall in front of where I sat, a bright yellow Water Bus pulled up and disgorged a young tourist couple who had apparently taken the best form of public transportation down to Bahia Mar and walked across to the beach for a morning swim. As they walked past me, towels draped over their shoulders, I heard them speaking German—and then it made sense. European tourists and French Canadians were about the only ones who would go in the water here in winter.

“Good morning.”

I turned around and saw Thompson climbing the steps to the gazebo. “Sorry I’m late.” She squinted her eyes in the bright morning sunlight. “I get lazy on my days off. Got on the computer this morning and lost track of time. When I realized how late it was, I dropped everything and trotted right over.” When she’d settled on the concrete bench, she took a closer look at the lump on my head just at my hairline. “What happened to you?”
 

“It’s a long story,” I said. She was wearing loose-fitting gray stretch pants and a simple black long-sleeved top. The thin straps of a tiny backpack looped over her shoulders. The clothes were not meant to be provocative, but there was nothing this girl could do to hide her curves. The fur-lined moccasins on her feet looked more like slippers. “You live close by?”

She nodded and pointed behind the little park to the slightly run-down three-story brick-and-glass hotel overlooking the small marina and the port. “Right there. A couple of years ago when my gramma died, Nick offered to rent me a room there for a really good price. It suits me and I’ve just stayed. I like watching the ships out my window, the sea air.” Those huge brown eyes sparkled with humor. “Even us geeks like to get outside, sometimes.”

I patted the bench next to me. “Have a seat.”

“Do you mind if we head over to the other side of the park?”

“No, I don’t care,” I said, although in truth, I didn’t feel like getting up and walking anywhere.

“Good. The Pontus offices are right over there,” she said, indicating the large parking lot behind us, “and I don’t think we should be seen talking together.”

She led the way to the matching gazebo at the opposite end of the deserted park. On the other side of the chain-link fence that bordered the park, I could see the maintenance facilities for the Pier Sixty-six Hotel and Marina. If her goal was to find a secluded place where we wouldn’t be seen or heard, she’d picked a pretty good spot.

I turned off the radio on my waistband as I sat down. For people who don’t live in the world of boats, it’s too difficult to hold a conversation over the constant chatter on channel 16. I tried to monitor the radio most of the time on the odd chance I’d pick up a job, but right now Molly took priority.

“So you live in the hotel that the company plans to tear down?”

“Yeah. This place is about the cheapest thing you’ll find on this side of the Intracoastal, and it’s still never full. Well, look at it.” She lifted her hands palms up as though offering me the hotel. “It’s a place not even a mama could love. And the marina?” She exhaled with disgust.

LaShon was right. The marina was even worse than the hotel. The concrete walkways were riddled with wide cracks, and weedy grass grew out of most of them. Rust stains trailed down the seawall where iron fittings had turned to corroded knobs of flaking metal. Some of the pilings had been replaced, but others were so eaten away at the waterline that they narrowed to half their original diameter. I’d picked up tows in that marina before, and I was always leery of tying my tug up to their docks. None of it looked very secure. The current marina tenants were typical of their clientele. There was a rust-bucket schooner that belonged to some missionary group, a research vessel of dubious origins whose owners were probably more interested in treasure hunting than in any real research, and somebody’s brilliant idea of a new and faster way to get tourists to the Bahamas— a hydroplane vessel that broke down on its third trip, rolled so badly in the Gulf Stream that all the passengers puked their guts out, and it hadn’t moved since.

“How’s Molly doing?” she asked.

“I don’t really know. I haven’t been to see her. I do plan on going this afternoon, though.”

“She’s no killer.”

“Of course not. But
who
then? It’s just too easy to laugh and say the guy was an asshole and everybody wanted him dead. Somebody must know something, but the cops have stopped looking, stopped asking. That’s why I wanted to talk to you. I’m trying to come up with something I can take to them. I thought if I talked to people Nick was close to, I might come up with something that would interest them.”

She tucked her hands under her thighs and rocked back and forth for several seconds, staring up at the huge concrete buttresses on the underside of the bridge.

“This can’t get back to anybody at TropiCruz. Not what I’m about to tell you, not even that we talked.”

“I understand.”

“No, that’s not good enough,” she said. “You’ve got to promise me.”

I tried to suppress my smile. It reminded me of something Molly and I might have said as kids. There was something about LaShon Thompson that was at the same time both streetwise and sweet. “I promise, then. Not a word to anyone.”

“Okay.” She slapped her palms on her thighs and exhaled. “I started working on the boat about three years ago. I keep my eyes open, but I don’t say much. Around a year ago, I noticed that they changed maintenance companies for the machines. The tech guys come in all the time and fix the ones that have broken down. Like I was telling you last night, they’re all computers. I got on the Internet and did a little research. Have you ever heard the term ‘loose slots’?”

“Yeah. My brother Maddy has said that. I don’t really know what it means, though.”

“Gamblers use that term to mean a machine that pays off more often. Some people will tell you that it’s purely gamblers’ superstition, but it isn’t. The casinos can and do program their machines to pay off a given percentage of the time. They can even set how often it will pay off the big jackpots. Video slots have chips in them that are programmed to select what will appear in the window. They’re called random number generators, and they basically use an algorithm to select a series of numbers in a fraction of a second, and these numbers are used to designate—”

“Whoa. You can stop with that kind of stuff right there. I’ll take your word for it that they can do it. The
why
part I’m not going to understand. Math and computers are not my thing.”

“All right. Well, on top of the new tech guys, I also noticed that some of our regulars started winning on the slots. Now, we’ve got lots of regulars. They don’t dress up or make a party out of going out on the boat. They’re just there to gamble. A lot of them are older people, retirees, and some are just addicts. I’m used to watching these people gamble away everything they’ve got. When they do win, they just stay at it until they throw it all away again. Some of these folks have been getting lucky lately. I’m talking big-time lucky. Like a couple of thirty-thousand-dollar jackpots a week. Lots of smaller ones, too, where they might be going home with ten grand or so.”

“When did this start?”

“It’s hard to say, exactly. I might not have noticed it right off. I know it’s been happening for about six months, probably longer. I’d say it’s a group of maybe ten regulars who are winning way more than average. You do the math and these folks have made several hundred grand each, and yet they aren’t dressing any better, they aren’t driving flashy cars. But here’s the thing that makes me sure it’s a fix. I told you that Nick had hired this new tech crew. Well, sometimes I’d get to the boat early for my shift and I’d notice them working on certain machines. Then those were the machines that paid off that night. They must be swapping out the computer chips on certain machines, switching it around like, so it doesn’t look like the same machines are paying out all the time.

“Everybody who works in casinos knows that really the only way to cheat them is to work with a customer. We get searched at the end of every shift. We can’t take any money out with us. And to tell you the truth, I think security’s got to be in on this, too. If I noticed it, they’ve got to have noticed it.”

“That skinny guy with the walkie-talkie. Is he the head of security?”

“Yeah, that’s Sarnov.”

“That sounds Russian.”

“Yeah, he is—a nasty, mean Russian.”

“How so?”

“He’s a sadist. He really likes to hurt people—I mean really likes it. Sometimes he just hits people for the fun of it.”

“I think I saw—or heard that last night.” I told her about what I’d witnessed from the top deck.

“Yeah. Sounds like Sarnov,” she said.

I wanted to ask her if she thought he was capable of tossing someone overboard, but I really didn’t think he would have had time to get from the lower to the upper deck in time to lift me over.

“LaShon, back to this slots thing. How long ago did Nick sell TropiCruz? Was it before or after this business with the slot machines started?”

“Like I said, I can only tell you when I noticed it. That was after Nick sold the business. It could have been going on before, I’m not sure.”

“Okay, so the security chief is part of the Russian group. Why would the Russians be stealing from themselves? That doesn’t make any sense.”

“It might. When Nick sold out to them, he remained a partner. He was supposed to be getting ten percent of the business.”

“So he wouldn’t be getting his ten percent of what’s going out the door through this little scam. How much do you think it is? You mentioned hundreds of thousands?”

She nodded. “Altogether? It’s been more than a million since I started noticing it. Maybe two. There are lots of people involved in the scam, lots of partners, but the payoff has been pretty good, too.”

“Maybe Nick found out that Kagan was ripping him off. Maybe he was threatening to do something about it and they had him killed.”

She nodded. “That’s what I was thinking. That’s why I wanted to talk to you.”

“LaShon, you’ve got to tell this to the police.”

She put her hands up in front of her like she was trying to ward off evil spirits. “Oh no. Not me. I said that’s why I wanted to talk to you. You can tell the police.”
 

“But it’s not the same if I tell them that I heard this from somebody. They are going to want to know who said what, and who saw what. They’ll want to talk to you.”

“Un-uhn. No cops.”

The constant low hum of the outboard traffic on the Intracoastal Waterway was interrupted by the deep rumbling of a larger ship’s engines. LaShon had been sitting with her back to the port, but now she turned as she saw the look on my face. The
TropiCruz IV
was about a thousand yards from us, using her bow thrusters to pivot the ship in front of the hotel’s marina. The way the ship was angled now, beam on to the Seventeenth Street Bridge, I could see the captain through the open door to the bridge. The big head with its crown of tightly curled hair was unmistakable.

LaShon whipped around and ducked her head into her hands. She slid sideways so one of the concrete pillars that held up the gazebo would shield her from the ship’s view. “This can’t be happening,” she said. “Do you think they can see us?”