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Chapter One
I checked the tape holding the belt holster to the wall one last time. It was fine, or would be, if I could get myself to stop fooling with it. I picked up the tray of sandwiches I'd laid on the floor and rang the bell for the Grand Suite.
The door opened without prologue--no footsteps, no challenge, no fussing with the locks--and I was facing a man shorter than I was but broader by half. I saw black eyes, razor stubble as heavy as Fred Flintstone's, and a bony brow that glistened with sweat in the cool, conditioned air. Dillon, according to my briefing.
I wanted to size him up, but that wouldn't have gone so well with the part I was playing. So I stood there while he sized me up. He patted me down for good measure, checked the sandwiches on my tray, felt under the tray. Then he poked his head out into the hallway, shoving me backward a step to do it. I forced myself not to look to my right to see how well the doorframe's molding hid the gun. It hid it well enough. Dillon grunted and waved me into the suite.
It was nice. I already knew the layout by heart, but the little plan I'd studied--front hall leading to living room with desert view, bedrooms to the left, kitchen and dinette to the right--hadn't captured the atmosphere of the place. In an example of the detached way your mind can work when your sweat glands have taken over, I fell into a meditation on the decor. The muted grays of the carpeting and wallpaper, the inoffensive abstract art, the clean lines of the space-age furniture all reflected a civilization that was--like the year, 1962--in its high summer. I even had time to glimpse the irony of this: that all this style and refinement had gone into the creation of a town in the wilderness where the jaded rich could gamble their money away.
I glimpsed the irony, but didn't work out what it said about the world. I was in the little dining room by then, facing another irony. With a brand-new casino ready and waiting downstairs, the group of businessmen before me had chosen to do their gambling in the penthouse. As their common business was this casino or another like it, they probably knew their chances were better in a private game.
I ignored all but one of the half-dozen faces around the table. As far as my job was concerned, there was only one man in the room. His name was John Remlinger, and he was seated, as I'd expected, at the table's head. Remlinger was thin and boyish, if you could call a guy with dead eyes boyish. It was chiefly the black hair that created the impression. He wore it long and brushed back in an open imitation of President Kennedy.
"Finally," Remlinger said, cutting short my examination. Dillon nudged me toward a buffet table. I moved a very nice collection of bottles and a silver ice bucket and set the tray down. I was still there, bent forward at the waist, when Remlinger froze me with a question.
"Don't I know you?"
It was as much an accusation as an inquiry. The only answer I could make was to straighten my back and turn to face him. I kept my expression blank, which took some doing when he stood and circled the table. He didn't stop coming until we were toe-to-toe. I was suddenly remembering boot-camp inspections, and I put the memory to work for me, squaring my shoulders and looking straight ahead.
"A little old to be bellhopping, aren't we?" Remlinger asked.
I was. He was about the right age, twenty-five or so; nobody seemed to know for sure. He was about right in the aptitude department, too, though I was too polite to say so.
He had his face stuck right into mine. I could see one blue eye, perfectly clear and just as empty, an unmemorable nose, and the faint scars left by some middle-tier plastic surgeon. "Let's see a hand."
I held my right one up, palm raised. He turned it over and examined the knuckles.
"You've been a fighter, right?"
"Now and then," I said.
"I thought so." He turned to the table. "It's what I always say. The fight game's for suckers. A couple of decent paydays and you end up a flunky who has to look down on the front of his uniform shirt to remember his own name."
The other players laughed--one or two of them genuinely--and Dillon nudged me in the fibs. I was dismissed.
On our way back across the living room, I let my eyes stray to the hallway opposite the poker game, the one that led to the suite's two bedrooms.
Dillon noticed the glance and grunted: "Eyes front."
Another ex-G.I., I thought. Well, there were a lot of us kicking around.
We reentered the suite's front hall. It wasn't much more than an alcove, formed by a closet to the right of the entry and a powder room to the left. As I opened the front door, Dillon said, "Wait a minute."
I didn't wait. I took a step out into the hotel hallway. Then I half turned with my right hand on the molding next to the gun. Dillon had his right in his pocket. It came out with a money clip, and he dropped his eyes to it. When he looked up again, I was pointing the gun at his stomach.
"We'll go back in," I said.
He shrugged and turned around. I hit him as he took his first step. I put more into it than I normally did, because the thirty-two was a lighter gun than I usually carried and because, with a customer like Dillon, it was better to err on the generous side. He went down in a noiseless heap on the expensive carpet.
I stepped over him and paused at the threshold to the living room. The dining room's louvered doors were partially closed. Only one man at the table had a clear view of the space I had to cross. He was a little guy who resembled the politician Hubert Humphrey. He'd laughed the loudest at Remlinger's fight-game joke, and I was counting on his host to distract him now. Sure enough, when Remlinger began to reminisce about some killing he'd made in a poker game back East, Humphrey all but turned his back to the living room. I was across the open ground in three steps and into the hallway.
The second door I came to was locked, which made it the one I wanted. I used the passkey that had come with my uniform to open it.
Beyond the door was a king-size bed that had been made up for the day. The young woman stretched out on the bed hadn't been made up, but she wasn't the worse for that. Her short hair was golden blond and all the skin I could see was darkly tanned. That was quite a bit of skin, as she was wearing only panties and a bra. I would have known her without a briefing; she was a Hollywood starlet named Beverly Brooks.
Brooks didn't know me. When I slipped inside the room, she took in a breath that might have gotten us both killed. Before she could use it, I said, "Marcus Pioline sent me."
Brooks slid her long legs off the bed and stood up, less self-conscious than I was about how she was dressed.
"Do you want out of here?" I asked.
"What do you think?" she whispered, her voice saw-toothed.
"Where are your clothes?"
"I don't know. They took them."
There was no time for a search. I slipped out of my uniform blouse and handed it to her. The jacket covered her from her neck to her thighs. She reminded me of the dancers who'd advertised cigarettes in the early days of television, the ones who'd tapped away in boxy costumes painted to look like cigarette packs, with only their legs showing. Or maybe I remembered those dancers just then because I was desperate for a cigarette.
I led Brooks by the hand into the hallway. Time had taken a break while I'd been in the bedroom; Remlinger was still telling his story. We crossed the living room and squeezed into the first two feet of the alcove. The prone Dillon was using the rest. I stepped over him and held my hand out to Brooks, who hesitated.
"He's not dead," I whispered.
"Too bad," she said, and stepped across.
I shut the suite door behind us, peeled my holster off the wall, and stopped Brooks just before she hit the elevator's call button.
"The operator's not on the payroll," I said.
I led her to the far end of the hallway, to an unnumbered door that I opened with another passkey. Beyond that was the service elevator, open and ready. On the same ring as my passkeys was a smaller one, as brassy as Brooks's hair. I inserted it in the elevator's panel, turned it, and hit the button for the underground garage.
Standing in the back of the car was some castoff furniture: a dresser missing a leg and a couple of chairs, each minus an arm. On the trip down, Brooks looked herself over in the dresser's mirror, pulling at the dark skin under her eyes. "Damn," she said. "What's Marc going to say?"
"Worry about that when we're out of here," I said, killing the chitchat. Brooks drew the unbuttoned jacket tight abound her like a beltless robe.
A little bell signaled our arrival in the basement. I raised my gun as the doors opened, ready to scare Mr. and Mrs. Tourist of Omaha, Nebraska, to death. They weren't there; no one was. I glanced around the dark concrete bunker and stuck the thirty-two in my belt. It was the first mistake I'd made.
We'd gone about three cars down the first row when a voice behind us barked, "Hands up." I felt a sharp poke in the back as my gun was yanked from my belt. Then the man in charge said, "Turn around."
Brooks and I did our turning toward one another. Like me, she was holding her hands up in the approved cowboy-movie fashion. The pose made her look like a little girl, helped by the fit of my coat and the size of her hazel eyes.
We ended up facing a little man holding a big gun. He looked as scared as Brooks had, but that was only a trick of the light. He laughed easily and said, "What do you know, bank night."
A house phone hung on the bare concrete wall of the garage. The little gunman limped over to it, lifted the receiver, and jiggled the switch hook. "Grand Suite," he said.
"Let's talk first," I said, but not as a serious opening for negotiations. Someone had stepped from the shadows behind a concrete upright. He was a big man in a straw fedora, and he was coming up on the gunman's blind side.
Brooks saw him, too, and drew in another of her fatal breaths. She held this one in all by herself. Better than that, she spread her arms a little wider, which caused the front of her coat to swing open like the doors of a barn.
The man holding the phone would have been lost in that landscape for ten minutes at least, if someone hadn't picked up on the other end of the line. "Right," the gunman said. "It's me. Down in the garage. Your little birdie's flown--"
He folded up then as thoroughly as Dillon had, but with a little more noise. The man in the panama hat, whose name was Paddy Maguire, was swinging a leather sap back and forth contemplatively. "What a way to earn a buck," he said. "Howdy Doody's got more dignity."
I collected my thirty-two and slid the little man's cannon under the nearest ear. I straightened up in time to hear Paddy speaking on the phone.
"The weed of crime bears bitter fruit," he was saying. "Or didn't your folks have a radio?" I took the handset from him and hung it up. "Sorry, Scotty," he said. "I couldn't resist. Where'd we park the chariot?"
Our chariot was a rented Chevy Impala. It was a boxy, non-descript sedan, but it had a 327-cubic-inch V-8. I was using every bit of that displacement by the time we'd traded the parking lot's ramp for the blinding light of the street. It being early afternoon in Las Vegas, the street was all but deserted. A block later, it turned into dusty highway, and I gave the car its head. I didn't touch the brakes until we reached the turn for a private airstrip, ten miles west of town.
A plane sat on the tarmac, a red, white, and blue number whose twin props were turning so slowly you could almost see the blades. I pulled the Chevy up close, left the keys in the ignition, and collected Brooks and my bag from the backseat. Paddy was holding the plane's door open for us. He grabbed his hat with his free hand as the engines revved up.
"Not a moment too soon," he said. He gestured toward the highway with the unlit cigar he held clamped in his teeth. Two black sedans were flying toward us above the shimmering asphalt.
I was the last one aboard. The plane was moving before I'd gotten the door latched. A minute later, we were away.
Excerpted from RAISE THE DEVIL by TERENCE FAHERTY. Copyright © 2000 by Terence Faherty. Excerpted by permission. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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