Cool Heat (7 page)

“What is your thing?” she challenged.

“I want that shooter who put bullet holes in my car, messed up my day, and put me on the run. Once I settle that, I’m done. And you need to get the hell out of here. I mean now. Tonight.”

“No. I’m not going anywhere until I find out who shot me. I need to know that more than you do.”

They stared at each other. On some level, he understood that if he took a step in that direction, his involvement was going to get sticky. But she was a big, added problem. Still, she had a point. If the shooter was some rummy, that might change things for her. She could maybe get out without being tracked down if she was no longer seen as a threat. Still, she wasn’t in good shape and might be a drag. He liked to move fast.

“You know where we can find Gary Gatts? This Mountain View restaurant of his?” he asked.

“Yes. Up past Markleeville,” she said. “I don’t know where he actually lives. I just know that’s the rumored transition point for party drugs. I also know he’s got connections and would be hard to bring down.”

“I like to move fast,” Marco said. “Maybe you can stay at the Shaw house while I’ll go up tonight, have a little talk.”

“We’ll discuss it when we get back. You have a trust in your uncle, and I understand that. But it’s a trust built a long time ago. Things change. You uncle is probably not the man you thought you once knew.”

“Maybe. That’ll be my problem.”

“No, it’ll be our problem, at least until we find out who the shooter is. Look, I know this world better than you do. I’ve worked it for three years with the sheriff’s department and two with the DA. I know every scumbag, every would-be mogul, and the current affairs. It’s a very beautiful world until you pull up the covers and look beneath. We’ll talk.”

Marco sat back and she headed out deep into the lake, then north. He didn’t know exactly how to react to her. She was pushy and authoritative and that was okay, but she had an agenda, and he had to steer very clear of that.

14

Sydney felt Marco had made some kind of decision and wasn’t telling her about it. They drifted up the lake toward the Shaw house.

“Cillo knows what’s going on, doesn’t he?” she asked, really hoping for a different answer, and also hoping she could get to know this guy. If they were going to end up working together—and she had no idea if they would—she needed to understand him better. And part of her really wanted to, which surprised the hell out of her.

“Like I said, he’s maintaining he’s in the dark.”

She wanted to know every detail of what Cillo had said, but she sensed Marco was struggling, in a dilemma. “Look, you can walk, but I need to know where I am in all this. Did Cillo really have no idea who the shooter was?”

“It seems to me you have something in mind or you wouldn’t be here. We need to be straight with each other.”

“Two-way street.”

Marco nodded and said, “Tell me again why you’re still hanging around in harm’s way?”

“I already told you.”

“Not really,” Marco said. “You have some kind of plan. You aren’t that naive, idealistic girl in Mexico. You’re a hard-nosed investigator. You’re shot up and still you’re in a boat on the lake with somebody out there looking to finish the job. What’s going on? What aren’t you telling me?”

She looked off for a moment, then turned back to Marco. Time to come clean if she expected him to trust her at all. “You’re right. I have something in mind.”

“It involve me now?”

“I don’t know yet and, right now, neither do you.”

“Try me. Because this is going to deteriorate fast. I’m not a happy puppy.”

Sydney took a deep breath and let it out. “Thorp and his lawyer, Richard Rouse, live next to each other on the waterfront at Incline Village. The lawyer—Tricky Dick is how he’s better known—is rumored to be the power behind the throne. My witness, Karen Orland, the girl who drowned, she was in the party circuit for a time and one of his favorites. She knew a lot. All about the sex and drugs, the videotapes of important people having fun, the garbage. But those Incline estates are over the border on the Nevada side of the lake. I worked for the DA in South Lake, in California, and couldn’t get any cooperation from Nevada where those guys were concerned.”

“Get to where you are now, what you think you can do about this.”

“Rouse has this office that’s built to withstand anything short of an atomic bomb. Karen thought the way they manipulated people—got support for what they were doing—was because of the dirt Tricky Dick has on just about everybody who matters. And that he keeps it in that office in a safe. Since we could never get any Nevada authority interested, I wanted to get associates on the California side. Those parties that Thorp has are drug and sex festivals, but nobody’s ever attempted to bust one of them. In fact, the local police and sheriff’s departments on both sides of the lake provide much of the security.”

“Sounds a little like Mexico. A place I left and am in no hurry to go back to. I see where you’re headed, and I’m not interested.”

“I know.” She paused a moment, then said, “But while we’re being open, I’m curious about what you did in Mexico that got your records sanitized.”

“It won’t matter.”

“Satisfy my curiosity.”

“I had a partner who got ambushed and killed. I went after the guys who did it. End of story.”

“I hardly think that’s the end of the story. I didn’t ask about that. I asked about how you managed to get out of prison and then home free with a new lease on life.”

“It’s the end as far as I’m willing to talk about it. Look, I have a very good idea where you’re headed, and there’s no way in hell I’m getting into your crusade against these guys, justified as it may be. You’re way over your head. Not happening. Here’s where I am with all of this: I picked you up; the guy who shot you came after not just you, but me.”

“Shot your Shelby,” she added, with a touch of sarcasm.

“That’s right. So I’m real unhappy about that. I’m not going to be happy until I settle it with him. I’m in this for that and that alone. And it doesn’t sound like it’s connected to your vendetta against Thorp. It sounds like some lone guy you pissed off. You accept where I’m at, we can work together. If not, we need to part ways.”

“What if he didn’t act on his own? What if he’s part of a bigger thing, whether it’s Thorp or someone else?”

She steered toward the Shaw house from deep out in the lake. They were cruising at a slow speed, lights still out. The moon was partially covered by some thin clouds.

Marco studied her a moment. “That isn’t my problem. He wasn’t coming after me, per se. He was after you, and I got in the way. I’ll settle with him for that.”

“How did you handle it in Mexico?”

“You don’t give up.” He shook his head, then said, “I had plenty of contacts. I took a leave. Slipped into Mexico. Part of my family is down there. I got some help, tracked the killers, settled the issue. The troubles I got into later weren’t directly connected to that. I can tell you that I spent some very bad months in a prison near Mexico City. I wouldn’t have survived if a relative hadn’t made contact with friends in the prison. I got protection from a powerful clique. Then, well, I got out.”

“That the part you can’t talk about.”

“Yes.”

“Okay,” she said. “I’m good with getting the shooter. I’ll deal with the other part once I find out who he’s connected to, or if he’s on his own.”

They pulled into the boathouse and were just starting to talk about going up to Markleeville, getting a room, and then seeing Gatts in the morning, when she fell—her leg buckled getting out, and she missed her step. She went down against the side of the boat and the ladder. Had he not grabbed her, she would have gone into the water. He helped her to her feet.

“Muscles cramped up,” Sydney said. She massaged her leg and headed up to the house slowly, with Marco’s hand on her arm for support.

“Hey,” he said, “you need to rest everything for a while.”

When she realized she wasn’t really doing as well as she had thought, that the pain meds had fooled her a little, she acceded to the necessity of settling down, maybe getting a little sleep.

“I want to go with you to see Gatts,” she said. “Let me get some rest for a couple hours.”

He did a perimeter check, then, in the dark, they ate peanut butter sandwiches with blueberry spread and drank some milk with it, thanks to what he’d taken from the doc.

She grew very tired around midnight and took the guest room on the main floor. He chose a recliner in the living room. It gave him the best surveillance of the grounds and the house.

***

Marco was up every hour checking the grounds, worried that more people knew about her relationship with the Shaws than her doctor friend. For a time, he sat out on the deck and stared at the darkness of the lake, trying to get a clear understanding of the mess he was in and where it might go.

He could go up and try and find Gatts without her, but he didn’t much like the idea of leaving her in the condition she was in. Plus, if she found him gone, what would she do? Then there was the issue of whether he would take the Shaws’ vehicle. He didn’t want to drive his around. Adding to it all was the problem of his uncle—if Marco couldn’t respond positively, and soon, what would he do? Questions and no immediate answers.

We’ve got to talk to Gatts,
he thought, getting up. He went into the bedroom to see how Sydney was doing, and she was in a deep sleep. Marco frowned. It was almost midnight. He went back outside to check the perimeter again. He started wondering if her fall had been faked.

But then he thought that was a stretch. She could have really hurt herself, hit her head, and that would have pretty much put her out of business. He knew she wouldn’t have risked it.

15

That Sunday night, four hundred sixty miles southeast of Tahoe in a penthouse suite at the Desert Towers high above the Vegas Strip, Ogden Thorp ignored his lawyer, who was at the back of the room trying to get his attention.

Thorp was busy displaying his investment dream to a small gathering of wealthy investors, some of the richest and most powerful men in gaming and hotels. Two of them were CEOs of Silicon Valley tech behemoths. Also in the mix was a Chinese billionaire who claimed he had relatives who helped build the transcontinental railroad’s western section, and that many who died had been dumped into Lake Tahoe.

Thorp stood before an eighty-two-inch screen that displayed the mockup of his vision. He was selling them on the grand Regal Tahoe and its venues. He led them with a toast to great dreams and grand designs. “Bad recessions provide great opportunities for those positioned to take advantage.”

Never before had Vegas been hit this hard and the opportunities here, like Tahoe, were big.

“Lake Tahoe’s North is the next big thing,” Ogden Thorp said. “This is Tahoe now…” They stared at the big screen. The picture zoomed in on the Cal-Neva and the other old, ready-to-be-torn-down casinos. Then the picture moved around to the mountains on the east side of the lake, the undeveloped forty-two thousand acres that once belong to George Whittell.

For Thorp, this was his moment. He’d arrived. These men, the big movers and shakers whose money had helped build Macau into the gambling capital of the world, were looking to get into something new, and he had what he thought would entice them. It had been five long years in the planning. These were the men who were going to make him king of the Sierras.

“The new design…including the outlying ski resort and the main casino hotel that will replace everything on the Cal-Neva highlands…”

With a click, there it was in close-up detail. And it was beyond spectacular. He watched the expressions on the men as their eyes widened.

“This will be the eighth wonder of the world,” Thorp said. “And it’s just the beginning.”

He moved the scene to the famous landmark, Thunderbird Lodge, on the Nevada side of the North Shore. “Here’s the big prize. We’re making some serious progress. We’ll have the ban lifted on enough land for this. This was once the dream of George Whittell. He owned the forty-two thousand acres—you heard me right—forty-two thousand acres that are now wasted parkland. The entire eastern side of Tahoe is waiting for us.”

He loved talking about George Whittell, his idol in many ways. “All that’s there is his home, which is now the Thunderbird Lodge. Before he died in nineteen sixty-seven, George changed his mind about building his great resort. I’m not sure who or what got to him. But we’re going to rectify that. Tahoe needs it and needs it now.

“George Whittell was the king of playboys in his day, and I admit to copying as much of him as my system can handle. He made Charlie Win Win look like a choirboy.”

They laughed, knowing well that he meant the famous parties—right down to the tunnels, the lion’s cage, the speedboat, and the girls. Thorp even had the stonework at his place fashioned by Paiute and Washo Indian masons and ironworkers just as Whittell had done at the Thunderbird Lodge. He didn’t import any Venetian ironworkers as Whittell had but came close. Nor could he bring in honest-to-God Cornish miners to build the tunnels. But Mexicans, well supervised, did a very nice job.

“It true,” one of the men asked, “that you have a lion in some underground cage under your house like Whittell had?”

“That will only be revealed to those who end up there. Back in Whittell’s day—as it happened to Errol Flynn—they’d wake up after a drunk and find the fucking lion licking their faces. People heard that macho swashbuckler Flynn’s scream clear across the lake.”

The men roared. He went on regaling his audience with Whittell’s life back in the day when he had those big parties, the gambling, Hollywood stars including Howard Hughes.

Thorp’s smile filled his smug face. “Next weekend, I’ll be hosting the party of the year, the Great Gatsby Gala, and I want all of you to be there. All expenses for all the pleasures will be free, of course. And if you aren’t interested in talking to me, you’ll have on hand movie stars, politicians, and, in the poker room—modeled after the famous one in Tombstone—the world’s greatest poker players will be in the world’s biggest cash game.”