Michael Connelly - Murder in Vegas

DANGER DO NOT OPEN

MEDICAL WASTE

CONTAMINATED CADAVER TISSUE

He sealed the containers, placed them into three small, black suitcases, then loaded them into the car’s rear seat. Then he grabbed a utility knife, a roll of silver duct tape, and a small box. His eyes met Scout’s. “Ready?”

She nodded and climbed into the back of the truck. He taped her ankles together, then her knees, then her wrists, avoiding the rubber gloves, then her mouth. Again he looked in her eyes and stroked her hair.

She was prepared. Scout rolled onto her stomach.

Two Knives pulled her Glock from her holster. Examined it. He removed the safety, chambered a round, placed the muzzle against Scout’s back, laying it nearly flat while pressing it slightly into the fleshy part of her hip. The bullet would graze her. His finger slid around the trigger. Two Knives saw Scout’s pretty half-turned face, blinking in anticipation.

Just enough to bleed, he instructed himself.

She nodded.

He fired the gun. Scout lurched, grunting. A small tear, edges blackened with powder appeared on her uniform. Blood soaked the wound. He examined it. A small charred gash. Her skin was ragged and torn. He cut the tape from Scout’s mouth and wrists, making sure some blood was on the remnants. The used tape with her blood, hair and fibers from her uniform would be left in the truck.

“Ok?”

“It burns a little, but I’m fine.”

“I’ll patch it up.”

Two Knives opened the first aid kit. Scout removed her shirt. She jerked when he dabbed iodine in her wound, more so than when she was shot. He dressed her wound.

“We’re almost through. Stand up.”

Scout undid her utility belt, letting it drop to the floor. Two Knives dropped the Glock in the truck. Scout undid her pants, handing them to him. He ripped them near the zipper.

“We’re coming up on half an hour,” he said, scooping up the knife, tape and kit, dropping them in the trash as he rushed to the small office. Scout, now stripped down to her bra and panties, gathered her hair as she hurried to the garage’s washroom.

In the office, Two Knives changed into new, pressed slacks, pin-striped shirt, Gucci shoes, and a conservative jacket. He combed his neatly trimmed silver hair, then slipped on a pair of wire-rimmed glasses.

Taped to the bottom of the desk was a brown envelope with several passports, driver’s licenses, credit cards, cash. He tucked it into his breast pocket. Then he gathered everything from the worktable and tossed it in the trash, except the radio scanner. That went in the car. He left a window down so he could still hear it. He opened the trunk. A wheelchair was folded inside. Next, he inventoried the entire garage, nothing was left. Nothing. He closed the doors of the Forged truck then unfurled a white nylon sheet that he cast over the van, pulling it down at spots where it was uneven. He checked the printed note he had taped earlier to the window of the front door.

Closed Indefinitely Due to Death in Family.

“Ready,” said the old woman who’d stepped from the washroom. She was wearing a light-knit knee-length sweater over a flower print caftan, flat-soled shoes. An emerald scarf hid her neck, her gray hair reached to her shoulders, framing her face, which was sallow and frowning under large, dark glasses. She was wearing rubber gloves and clutching her brown purse. She was hunched as if she were ill or enduring pain as she walked to the car’s front passenger seat.

Two Knives grabbed the trash from the washroom, then tied three large garbage bags from the garage and tossed them in the car’s trunk. He hit the switch for the electronic door, drove the car outside, stopping to close the garage door before they drove off down the rear alley.

Several blocks away, he stopped to drop the trash bags in a warehouse dumpster. He knew the schedule. This dumpster would be emptied the next morning.

They were well along Interstate 15 southbound, which paralleled the Strip, by the time their portable scanner crackled with the first dispatch of an armored car heist at a casino on Las Vegas Boulevard.

“So far, so good,” he said, tossing the scanner out the window as they neared the Exec Air Terminal at McCarran.

Scout said nothing. She was looking west to the mountains.

The clerk at Desert Airstream Services moved from behind her counter to greet the old woman in the wheelchair and her physician.

“Dr. Hegel. Everything’s ready. That’s a pretty scarf, Mrs. Duggan,” the clerk said after summoning the ground crew. They assisted Hegel getting his patient, Heather Duggan, comfortably aboard her chartered jet, for her one-way flight to Orange County.

Duggan, a reclusive casino heiress, had a terminal condition, her doctor had explained a few weeks earlier. It was her wish to die in California where she was born. Hegel had arranged the trip, paying cash in advance. He’d included large gratuities for respecting the eccentric woman’s privacy.

The fresh-cut roses in the jet were a nice touch, Two Knivesthought as the small Cessna Citation shot over the Spring Mountains, about ninety minutes after Scout had driven off with $3.7 million in unmarked cash.

That evening after dinner in the restaurant of the Ramada in Santa Ana, Two Knives told Scout that he wanted to do something he’d dreamed of doing all his life and they drove to Newport Beach where they watched the sun set on the ocean.

“I never really knew you Jessie,” he said as they walked near the surf. “I was angry at Angela for being with a white man. I’d thought, how could my sister betray her people, her blood. I was consumed with anger. I’d lost my way in the world and ended up in a cell.”

Gulls cried above them.

“I never meant for that man, the armored car guard, to die like that in San Diego. It was a terrible mistake. A terrible thing and I paid for it with twenty-five years of my life.” The sun painted the creases of his sad, weary face with gold as he searched the horizon. “I did a lot of thinking in those twenty-five years, thinking how I could set things right.”

“My mother was angry that I’d written to you in prison. She said you were no good, Joe.”

“She has a right to her opinion of me. Especially now. I heard she has less than three months with her illness.”

Scout nodded.

“Jessie, your letters kept me alive during my darkest times. Gave me a reason to want to make up for deserting my own blood when they needed me.”

“You’re the only one who knows the truth about all the things that happened when I was young.”

“It hurt me more than you’ll ever know, to read of your pain. I knew in my heart you did nothing to deserve it. I believe you were owed a life, and that I could help you get it.”

Scout took her uncle’s hand and squeezed it.

“Remember, you must never call your mother, or see her. Once the FBI puts everything together, they’ll watch. If you’re going to survive you must let her spend her last days thinking you are dead. It’s better this way. You’ll see her in the next world.”

Scout brushed a tear from her cheek.

As if reading her mind, he said: “Not even a letter, Jessie.”

She nodded. They’d gone over every detail.

“This looks like a good spot.” He stopped, pulled a hotel towel from his bag and began to undress. Jessie was surprised. He was wearing swimming trunks. “I’ve always dreamed of swimming in the ocean,” he said.

At fifty-four, he had the firm muscular body of a man thirty years younger, a dividend of keeping in shape during his time in Folsom. Scout noticed a small tattoo over his shoulder that looked like a storm over mountains.

“What’s this mean?”

“Ah, that,” he said. “I got it from an old chief I met on C-Yard the second year I was inside,” he said. “Funny. I wanted an eagle. But he was very insistent that I have this one.”