Take Down (6 page)

TEN

The scary black dudes knocked Billy’s glasses off dragging him across the lobby. He was thrown into a service elevator and taken to the basement, his final destination a claustrophobic room with a single plastic chair and a security camera bolted to the ceiling.

Billy had been back-roomed before and knew the drill. For the next hour, he’d be slapped around and threatened before the police were called, the casino wishing to impress upon him that he should never step foot on the premises again.

The black dudes took a moment to introduce themselves. Their names were Ike Spears and Terrell Bird, T-Bird for short. Both wore lots of gold jewelry and too much cologne. Ike had the larger vocabulary and appeared to be the leader of the two. T-Bird was shorter, with pretty dreadlocks that bounced on his shoulders. They’d both played defensive end for the Pittsburgh Steelers and sported glittering Super Bowl rings.

They took turns smacking Billy around. They were punishers and were paid by the casino to inflict pain upon unwanted guests, just as cocktail waitresses were paid to act nice. Being mean was their job, but they still didn’t have to hit Billy as hard as they did.

Soon Billy’s ears were ringing.
Somebody answer the phone.
Tasting his own blood, he spit some onto his palm and held his arm out as if directing traffic. The beating stopped.

“Keep hitting him,” Shaz ordered them.

“I don’t want his blood on me. Little fucker might have AIDS,” Ike said.

“Or ebola,” T-Bird said.

“You’re both pathetic.” Looking into the ceiling camera, Shaz raised her arms as if to say,
What now?
Scant seconds later, her cell phone rang.

“Follow me, girls,” she said.

She went into the hall to take the call. The punishers dutifully followed.

Billy sank into the plastic chair. He’d taken a few hits to the jaw, and he ran the tip of his finger across his teeth to see if they were still intact. To his surprise, they were all there.

So much for small favors.

Although his body hurt, he wasn’t scared. Soon the Metro LVPD would be summoned, and he’d be taken to the Clark County Detention Center and booked. There he’d be allowed to call his lawyer and post bail. He’d be a free man by morning, and he’d go home to his condo to lick his wounds and figure out how he was going to beat this rap.

Cheating cases were hard to prove. Nevada juries would not convict unless there was clear videotape evidence of the crime. Billy was always aware of the cameras when he was making a play, and hid his actions. As a result, the times he’d been busted he’d always plea-bargained out and had to pay fines to the court. It was a small price to pay for all the money he’d stolen from the casinos.

From the hallway came the sound of Shaz talking. He needed to find out how she’d made him for a cheater. His disguises had flown by the best security people in town, and it was going to bug him until he learned how she’d done it.

The unholy trio returned. A smelly towel was thrown in his face. He wiped away the blood, thinking the storm had passed.

A minute later, he learned otherwise.

They took an elevator to an unfinished fourteenth floor of the hotel’s first tower. He felt a hand on his shoulder and followed Shaz down a hallway with no carpet, their feet echoing off harsh concrete. She unlocked a door to a suite with a
“
D
O
N
OT
E
NTER
”
sign hanging on the knob.

“This is where we bring cheaters,” she said.

The suite had colored wires springing from holes in the walls. The dead bolt was thrown and the breath caught in Billy’s throat. He was about to die. There was no other reason for them to bring him here. Old-timers called it getting eighty-sixed. Eight miles out in the desert, six feet down in the ground.

“You with us, Billy?” Shaz asked.

“How did you know my name?”

“Haven’t figured it out yet? You will. Walk with me.”

“Come on. I didn’t even steal any money from you,” he pleaded.

“Shut up.”

A hallway led to the master bedroom. She took a tube of Vicks VapoRub from her pocket and rubbed the ointment beneath each nostril, then passed the tube to the punishers.

“What are you doing?” His voice cracked.

She let out a hideous laugh and entered the bedroom. A violent push sent him stumbling behind her. The stench knocked him sideways; then the visuals took over. Blood splatters on the fancy bedspread, the wallpaper, sprayed across the ceiling like a Jackson Pollock painting and across the carpeted floor. Someone had died here, and had not gone quietly.

Positioned beside the bed was a tripod with a video camera; next to it, a director’s chair. It took a moment for the significance to sink in. When it did, he nearly got ill.

The sick bastards had filmed it.

Shaz’s fingernails dug into his flesh. She pulled him across the bedroom, the smell growing worse as they neared the closet. Something dead was hanging inside the closet. Bringing his hand to his mouth, he tried not to puke the onion rings he’d eaten earlier.

“Why don’t you just get it over with?” he said.

She drew close to him. “What did you say?”

“You heard me. Shoot me, and get it over with.”

“Do you want to die?”

“Do I have a choice?”

She pressed herself against his body. She was getting aroused on his fear, and he desperately wanted to get away from her.

“You don’t have to die, but you have to look first,” she said.

“Why do I have to look?”

“Because I want you to.”

She sprung open the closet door. Inside a poor stiff hung from the clothing rack. Death robbed you of life and of dignity as well. The stiff had lost both. Short and skinny, with short dark hair, he was wrapped in plastic and had a thick rope tied around his neck, the other end tied to the rack. The right side of his skull had been shattered, the blow so severe that it had caused his left eye to break free of its orbit. The eye hung loosely on his discolored cheek like a displaced Christmas ornament, his other eye shut in permanent sleep. Something was wrong with his hand, and Billy realized two fingers were missing. Then he noticed the stiff’s toes. Someone had worked them over with a hammer until they didn’t look like toes anymore.

He asked himself, why? Why beat the poor guy to death, when putting a bullet in his head and plopping him in the ground would accomplish the same thing? Why go to the trouble?

“Recognize him?” she asked.

Billy shook his head. He didn’t think the poor guy’s mother would recognize him. Shaz picked up the stiff’s wallet from the night table. Pulling a California driver’s license from the billfold, she shoved it in Billy’s face.

“How about now?”

He studied the photograph and name on the license.

“Never heard of him.”

“Stop fucking with me.”

“I’m not fucking with you. I don’t know him.”

She turned the license around. A hideous laugh escaped her throat.

“Silly me. I’m showing you the wrong license.”

Digging in the billfold, she pulled out a second driver’s license.

“How about now?”

He read the information on the second license. Richard “Ricky” Boswell, 1824 Rodale Circle Drive, Sacramento, CA. Age twenty-two, five feet three inches tall, one hundred thirty-two pounds. It took a moment for the name to register. The stiff was a member of the Boswell clan. Descendants from a tribe of Romanian Gypsies, the Boswells had started scamming Vegas in the 1990s and were still going strong. They were so skilled in the art of scamming that other cheaters simply referred to them as the Gypsies. They were the mountain that Billy one day aspired to climb, and he felt bad that one of their group had gone out the hard way.

He handed the license back.

“Yeah, I know him. He’s part of a family of cheaters called the Gypsies.”

“We know that. We caught him walking around the casino taking pictures on his cell phone. His family sent him here to scope the place out.”

“He told you that?”

“Yes. Little Ricky also told us that his family was going to take our casino down, and there wasn’t a fucking thing we could do about it.”

“He bragged about it?”

“That’s right, the little asshole.”

Which was why the punishers had tortured the poor kid and eventually murdered him. The picture was getting clearer now, and Billy said, “You want me to figure out what the Gypsies’ scam is. That’s why you brought me here, isn’t it?”

“You catch on fast. Can you do it?”

The Gypsies had fooled the best brains in the business with their intricate casino scams, including the enforcement division of the Nevada Gaming Control Board. Trying to figure out how they planned to rip off Galaxy’s casino was a tall order, but he was willing to give it a try, for no other reason than to buy himself precious time.

“I need to look at his personal belongings, see if he took down any notes,” he said. “That should point me in the right direction.”

“You think you can dope out the scam by looking at his things?” she asked.

“You bet.”

She shoved the director’s chair in front of him.

“Let’s get started,” she said.

ELEVEN

The Gypsies’ story was known to every cheater in Vegas. They’d immigrated to the Midwest in the 1960s, where they’d made their living boosting furniture from department stores in the Chicago area. Boosting furniture wasn’t easy, and the Gypsies had used a ploy called the Dazzle to get the job done.

The family would enter a department store and stand next to the desired item. Dad would give a signal, and the kids would start moving around the floor as if doing a square dance, their movements choreographed to mesmerize any onlookers into looking the wrong way. At the same time, two sons would pick up the item and brazenly walk out the front door.

All scams eventually ran their course. Seeking greener pastures, the Gypsies had moved to Nevada in the 1990s and hit the casinos. Using the same ploys, they’d attacked the blackjack tables and switched the dealing shoes with dealing shoes containing stacked decks of cards. Other scams involving dice, roulette, and rigging slot machines soon followed.

Decades later, they were still going strong.

Billy sat in the director’s chair and tried to avoid looking at Ricky’s corpse. Shaz handed him three items off the night table: an iPhone, a light meter, and a small notepad.

“Those are his things,” she said. “Now tell me what the little fucker was up to.”

He examined the iPhone first. There were no text or voice messages, just an e-mail from JetBlue confirming a flight out of town departing Saturday night. He now knew something important: the Gypsies were planning to scam Galaxy’s casino on Saturday afternoon. Cheaters always left town a few hours after ripping off a casino.

The notepad was next, its pages filled with cryptic notations and measurements. When he looked up, Shaz was burning a hole in him.

“Explain the notes,” she said.

“Ricky was measuring the distances to the exits, in case his family needed to beat an escape. Later, he was going to draw everything out, like a blueprint.”

“A blueprint for what?”

“His family practices their scams in a fake casino. They try to duplicate the conditions inside your casino to see what problems might come up.”

“How does the light meter play into this?”

“Ricky was measuring the light inside the casino so his family could duplicate it inside the fake casino. The family videotapes their practice sessions, and later critiques the tapes. It lets them see what the surveillance cameras see.”

The answer seemed to satisfy her. She pulled up a chair, and sat in it backward so she faced him. “You’re a clever guy, aren’t you?”

“If I was so clever, you wouldn’t have caught me.”

“I hear you went to MIT and blew everyone out of the water.”

He stiffened, not knowing what to say.

“I also hear you’ve banged half the beautiful women in Las Vegas. You’re a regular love machine, is what I hear.”

The punishers laughed under their breath.

“It’s why you’re so successful,” she went on. “The girls you recruit won’t give you up, even if they get caught. They’re in love with you.”

The things she had said only a handful of people knew. No one had ever ratted him out before, and he didn’t have a clue who was behind this betrayal.

“So what’s the Gypsies’ scam? You must have figured it out by now,” she said.

She was right. He had figured it out, or at least enough to catch them.

The scam would occur between 3:55 p.m. and 4:05 p.m. Saturday afternoon, right as the day shift ended and the swing shift began. Employees going home, new employees taking over their spots, the casino in a state of flux, no one in surveillance paying attention to the monitors, just the way cheaters liked it.

He also knew what they’d be wearing. Clothes whose colors matched. This was true for every scam the Gypsies had pulled and would be no different come Saturday. Perhaps they’d be posing as a family on vacation, or a group of zany conventioneers who dressed alike.

He also knew that it was an outside job, and that no casino employees would be involved. The Gypsies were a tight-knit group and avoided using outside agents whenever possible.

It was enough information to nail them. But if he told Shaz what he knew, the punishers would ice him. They really didn’t have a choice. He’d seen the stiff in the closet and was now a witness. Witnesses talked, so they had to kill him. The best he could do was buy more time.

“I’m waiting,” she said impatiently.

“I don’t know exactly what the scam is. But I can catch them.”

“How are you going to do that?”

“It takes one to know one.”

“Instincts, huh?”

“I know how they think.”

“You’d better not be fucking with me.”

“I’m not fucking with you.”

Shaz made a call on her cell phone. “Hey, Marcus. He wants to cut a deal with us.” She listened intently before ending the call.

“Marcus wants him to see the film,” she told the punishers. “Hold him down.”

T-Bird dropped to the floor behind Billy’s chair, and put their prisoner into a half nelson. Shaz powered up the room’s flat-screen TV. A snuff film of Ricky Boswell began to play. She grabbed Billy by the hair and pulled his head back, forcing his eyes to stay open.

“Watch this. Learn,” she said.

Billy didn’t think he could learn anything from watching a poor guy get beaten to death, but he was wrong. The punishers were nothing more than bit players, while Shaz was the real star in the horror show. With cold sweat pouring down his face, he watched her break Ricky’s toes and snip off his fingers and finally swing the baseball bat that popped Ricky’s eye out of his head.

The poor kid was alive for all of it. To his credit, Ricky stuck to the code of never betraying the people he ran with. His family would have been proud of him for doing that.

The beating finally ended. Ricky had taken everything a man could possibly take. He was laid on the bed and started to die, his body a quivering mass of ticks and tremors as his life seeped away. His good eye blinked like the emergency blinker on a car, then grew frozen.

Billy could not help it and started to cry.

“Let him go,” Shaz said.

T-Bird released Billy. The young hustler wiped away his tears.

“Get up,” she said. “We’re going upstairs to see Marcus.”

He rose on shaky legs. He was never going to forget this for as long as he lived. He started to follow her out of the bedroom, then froze. On the TV screen, a stranger had entered the picture and moved next to the bed. The stranger brought his hand to his chin, as if trying to decide how to dispose of the body, and offered his profile to the camera.

The breath caught in Billy’s throat. It was his old pal Crunchie.