Donald Westlake - What's The Worst That Could Happen?

The air room looked a lot like a television studio’s control room, being a long narrow space with a lot of equipment along one wall and a few chairs at tables facing the equipment. The four people in the room barely looked up when their fellow worker and the two security guards and the burly guy in the blue coveralls with the canister on the dolly joined them, but then Jim O’Hara said, “Gents, could I have your attention for a second?”

They all turned away from their dials and meters, eyebrows raised, polite.

“Thanks, gents,” Jim said. “What I have to tell you is, the hotel is being robbed.”

They all reacted. One of them even jumped to his feet. A different one cried, “Robbed! Where? Who?”

Jim showed them his sidearm. “Us,” he said.

Gus showed them his sidearm. Calmly, he said, “We are dangerous and desperate criminals here, and almost anything is likely to set us off into a frenzy of bloodletting, so I’d keep a tight asshole if I was you boys.”

One by one, the technicians—for that’s what they were, technicians, not cops or commandos or kamikaze pilots—raised their hands. One by one, Tiny had them lower their hands to be cuffed behind their backs. Then Tiny helped them into seated positions along the rear wall, and stood over them to say, “I don’t see any reason to tie up your ankles or put gags on you or shoot you dead or give you concussions or nothing like that, do you?”

They all shook their heads, and Tiny gave them an approving smile, which they didn’t seem to find all that encouraging.

There was an oxygen canister hooked up to the equipment at the far end of the room, but since it was now barely 11:30 at night, that part of the equipment wasn’t switched on. So Jim made sure the valve on that canister was screwed down shut and then he unscrewed the connector from the hose to the canister, and he and Gus wrestled the canister out of the way so Tiny could put the new one in its place.

One of the technicians, sounding very scared, said, “What is that? Is that oxygen? What is that?”

Gus looked at him, briefly. “What do you care?”

The technician couldn’t think of an answer, so Gus went back to what he was doing, which was putting the old canister on the dolly.

“Be back,” Tiny said, and wheeled the old canister out, planning to return with another of the new ones.

Gus looked up at the clock on the wall above the dials and meters; still not 11:30. “What the heck,” he said. “Let’s give everybody an early treat.” Then, having learned all about this stuff in a heating and air-conditioning course in prison, he turned on the oxygen equipment, adding it to the mix. “A special treat,” he said, and turned the regulator all the way up.

Through the system the new mix began to make its way. Through the ducts, the pipes, inside the walls, silently breezing out of the modest registers and inhaling just as silently through the returns, circulating through all the sections of the casino, circulating through the cashier’s cage and the counting room behind the cashier’s cage and the money room behind the counting room, not circulating through management’s offices or security’s offices or the kitchens or the lobby or any of the basement areas, but certainly circulating through the rest rooms off the casino, and through the lounge, and even moving upstairs to circulate in the dark room where the spotters sit, hired to look down through the one-way glass in the casino ceiling, to watch for cheats, for larcenous employees and card counters and all those other misguided individuals who have not grasped the central concept that the casino is supposed to take it all.

Through all those spaces the new richer mix of air circulated, silent and persistent. Richer now, not with the oxygen normally laced into the mix, but with something chemically not that much different, a combination of oxygen and nitrogen called nitrous oxide. Or, to give it its familiar name, laughing gas.

Just around the time the mixture of cooled air and laughing gas began to fill the public areas of the Gaiety Hotel, Battle-Lake and Casino, the last airplane for the day from the east was coming in to a landing out at McCarran International Airport. A pair of Las Vegas policemen, in uniform, had driven out especially to meet that flight, and they stood patiently to one side until they saw their man. They’d never seen him before, and he hadn’t waved at them or done anything else to identify himself, and he was dressed in ordinary civilian clothes, and he was in a crowd of two hundred deplaning passengers, but there was no doubt in their minds. He was their man, all right. A cop can always tell a cop.

They approached him, where he was walking along with that stiff-legged weariness that follows long plane rides, carrying his battered black soft suitcase, and one of them said, “Detective Klematsky?”

“Bernard Klematsky,” he told them. “Nice of you to come out to pick me up.”

“Our pleasure,” one of the cops said. “I’m Pete Rogers, and this is Fred Bannerman.”

There was a round of handshakes, and Bannerman said, “So how’s New York?”

“Not much worse,” Klematsky said, and they all chuckled.

Rogers said, “You wanna go pick him up?”

“Nah,” Klematsky said. “He isn’t going anywhere. My flight back isn’t till nine-thirty in the morning. Let him have a good night’s sleep, and let me have a good night’s sleep, too. We can go over, oh, I don’t know, say about seven in the morning.”

“You’ll have a different escort, in that case,” Rogers said. “Me and Bannerman will be sound asleep in each other’s arms at seven in the morning.”

Klematsky blinked, but then he nodded and said, “Uh huh.”

Bannerman said, “We’ll drive you to your hotel.”

“Thanks,” Klematsky said.

Max prowled his prison. It was a prison, complete with guards, and he didn’t like it at all, even though he’d sentenced himself to this plush incarceration, and even though the term of imprisonment was to be very short; by tomorrow evening, he’d be out of here, one way or the other.

Not the other, please. One way, and one way only: With the burglar in custody, in jail, or in the morgue. The fellow had to make his move while Max was still here in Las Vegas, he just had to.

In the meantime, Max prowled, from the large L-shaped living room to the big square bedroom with its big square king-size bed to the slightly smaller second bedroom with its own compact bathroom and with, at the moment, Earl Radburn napping as neatly as a corpse atop the bedspread; and on to the completely furnished gleaming white-and-chrome kitchen with its sink currently full of dirty glasses and cups, and around to the pleasingly pink large bathroom with all the mirrors and all the little bottles and boxes of sundries: shampoo, hand and body lotion, bath gel, hair conditioner, shoe polish, shower cap, toothpaste . . .

Irritated, Max slapped the tiny bath gel bottle back onto the bathroom counter, and glowered at himself in the wall-length mirror. In his boredom, he was reading the little bottles’ labels again. Again!

The business meetings he’d scheduled here had gone well, better than might have been expected under the circumstances, but now they were done, and he was still here, and there was nothing to do, nothing to do. Fuming, restless, struck livid by ennui, Max paced back out to the living room, where the four uniformed guards continued to sit murmuring together in the conversation area, and the drapes remained resolutely closed against the outside world.

Max hated that, the shut drapes. He’d argued against it, pointing out that the idea here was to let the burglar know he was actually present in this cottage. So why not let him see that Max was present? But Earl Radburn had said, “I’ve been thinking about this problem, Mr. Fairbanks, and I’ve been thinking what I might do, if I was the fella we’re looking for. It’s always a good idea to put yourself in that other fella’s place. And it seemed to me, if what I wanted was that ring on your finger there, and if I could see you through a plate-glass window, I just might decide to fire a high-powered rifle through that window, and put a bullet in your head, and count on stripping that ring off your finger in the subsequent confusion.” While Max had blanched at this idea—the bullet in the head was just too graphic an image—Earl had gone on, “Now, I’m not saying this fella’s the kind that might do such a thing, or not. I’m just saying, if I was that fella, that’s one of the possibilities I’d consider.”