James Swain - Take Down

Reading her text, he knew he’d made the right decision. The money orders were safe.

He returned to the casino and sat down with a group of slot queens who didn’t seem fazed that the joint was being raided. Slot queens came from all walks of life and all social strata. What joined them at the hip was the fact that they’d all won a jackpot the very first time they’d played a slot machine, and believed that Lady Luck smiled down upon them.

He tapped one of the ladies on the shoulder. She had dyed-red hair and wore a crushed-velvet jumpsuit, and refused to make eye contact, her eyes glued to her machine.

“Do you smell that?” he asked.

“Smell what?” the slot queen replied.

“Smoke. I think it’s coming out of the air vents.”

The slot queen faced him. “Do you think there’s a fire in the hotel?”

“Could be. I just wanted to warn you.”

“Oh my God, I do smell it. Girls, the hotel is burning down!”

The slot queens abandoned their machines and made a mass exodus to the lobby. Decades before, a flash fire at the MGM had taken so many lives that the city’s leaders had been shamed into changing the town’s fire code. Now there were fire alarms inside every casino. One such alarm was in the hallway leading to the lobby. One of the slot queens beat him to the punch and pulled away the steel mesh and jerked the handle. A piercing alarm went off.

The lobby was a zoo, with patrons being screened by gaming agents before being allowed to leave. Grimes was running the show and checked faces against a piece of paper clutched in his hand. Mags was nowhere to be seen, and Billy guessed she’d been carted off to jail.

There was a lot of noise, and it drowned out the alarm. The MacGregor family reunion took up the end of the line, recognizable by their matching lime-green polo shirts and Irish mugs. He got the attention of an elderly woman that appeared to be the family matriarch.

“Did you hear that?” he shouted.

“Excuse me? Are you talking to me?” the elderly woman shouted back.

“That sound. I think it’s a fire alarm.”

“I do hear it! Oh my God! Fire! ”

The elderly woman had a voice like a longshoreman and it carried across the lobby. With all the force of a tidal wave, the patrons rushed the doors and pushed Grimes and the gaming agents aside. The doors popped open, and the patrons flooded outside.

Billy became one with the surge and was soon in the valet area. He calculated the length of hotel sidewalk to the Strip at one hundred yards. If he could reach the Strip, he’d blend in with the crowds and be home free. A hand gripped his sleeve. A man wearing a rumpled tux with the collar undone had latched onto him. It took a moment for the face to register. It was dear old Papa, the head of the Gypsy clan. He had gotten separated from his clan, and looked lost.

“Let’s go for a walk,” Billy said.

“I’m with you,” Papa said.

“Stay right next to me, and don’t slow down.”

“You got it, kid.”

With Papa glued to his side, Billy sifted his way through the swirling crowd toward the sidewalk that would take them to freedom.

“ Freeze, Cunningham! ”

He shot a glance over his shoulder but did not stop. Grimes was framed in the hotel entrance, his suit jacket ripped, aiming his sidearm. Couldn’t the dumb bastard have come up with an original line? Billy started to trot, as did his partner.

“ I said freeze, you little shit! ”

Grimes went into a marksman’s crouch. Only a damn fool would shoot into a crowd.

“Who’s that dickhead?” Papa asked.

“Gaming agent.”

“Figures.”

They kept moving. Suddenly, a shot rang out, scattering the crowd. A geyser of bright red blood gushed out of a bullet hole in Papa’s tuxedo pants, the bullet hitting an artery. Papa groaned and melted to the pavement. Billy’s instincts told him to run. It was the only chance he had. He gazed down at the older man, saw the helplessness in his eyes. He’d seen that same helplessness in his father’s eyes right before he’d checked out, but it had been too late to do anything about it. Now things were different. Now he could do something and give the reaper a kick in the shins. He went to his knees and pressed the palms of his hands onto the wound to halt the blood.

The world turned quiet. The patrons had run away, and the fire alarm inside the hotel was no longer ringing. The noise from the Strip was muted, almost inconsequential. He could not remember it ever being this way-not even on a Sunday.

He heard the sounds of a struggle by the entrance. Grimes was being wrestled to the ground by two gaming agents wearing NV Energy uniforms. They were trying to take away his gun, which appeared glued to his hand. And they were trying to reason with him.

“Goddamn it, Frank, get a hold of yourself,” one agent said.

Grimes was having none of it and continued to struggle. He wanted to take Billy out and erase the humiliation from their encounter at the Hard Rock, the wound having never healed. Having no choice, the gaming agents cuffed Grimes’s hands behind his back. Billy wondered how this was going to play out. There was no doubt in his mind that he was heading to prison for a long stretch, but with that thought came the knowledge that Grimes’s career was over.

Papa groaned, his eyelids fluttering. Billy wanted to shake him so that he’d stay conscious, but was fearful of taking his hands away from the wound. Bending forward at the waist, he spoke quietly to the older man.

“Don’t go to sleep on me.”

Papa struggled to respond. His face had turned ashen and he started to slip away. Billy knew he had to jolt the old guy back to life. But how? Then he had an idea.

“What did your daughter do with the earth magnet?” he asked.

Papa’s eyes snapped open and stayed that way until the ambulance arrived.

It was late when Billy ended his tale. Except for the short lunch break, he’d talked for nearly fourteen hours straight and his voice had turned brittle. It had to be some kind of Guinness World Record, even for a bullshit artist like him. LaBadie, Zander, and Tricaricco sat across the table, their out-of-shape bodies having morphed with their chairs. Except for a few details better not shared, the tale he’d told them was 98 percent true. The 2 percent he’d omitted would hopefully spare him from going to prison, but that was just a guess on his part.

“I’m not clear about something,” LaBadie said. “You said that Doucette hired you and your crew to sniff out a family of Gypsy scammers. What exactly happened there?”

“Come on, man. I already told you, I don’t have a crew,” he said.

“My mistake. You and your friends were hired by Doucette. So what went down?”

“We never found the Gypsies. It was a dead end.”

LaBadie took out a pack of gum and offered him a stick. It was an old cop trick to offer a suspect gum or a cigarette before going for the kill, and he declined with a shake of the head. The gaming agent jammed a stick into his mouth and chewed vigorously.

“What about this wedding party you mentioned? What was their names?”

“Torch-Allaire.”

“Right. Could they have been the ones?”

“No.”

“But you suspected them.”

“I was wrong. Check the surveillance tapes if you don’t believe me.”

“We did.”

“And?”

LaBadie did not reply. It was at that moment that Billy knew the Gypsies’ rigging of the Money Vault machine had gone undetected by the casino’s surveillance cameras. If the scam had been spotted, LaBadie would have puffed up his chest and said so and taken credit for the collar.