“Hey, Kris, it’s me. They stop serving breakfast at nine. We need to hurry.”
Still no answer. Probably in the bathroom, doing her hair. Kris looked like a cheerleader when she wasn’t stripping. She was a stickler about keeping the place clean, and he slipped off his shoes and padded silently into the living room.
Right away he knew something was wrong. The air smelled funny, and he spied a half-smoked cigarette lying on the glass coffee table. Kris had flown in the night before and called him from the club. Said she was going to dance until three AM, then go to the townhouse. He was to pick her up at eight thirty for breakfast. A simple plan, although he now realized that someone had come home with her.
Lifting his eyes, he stared at the hallway that led to her bedroom. Were they in there, sound asleep?
He took a deep breath. Being a cop twenty years, he’d come to know the seven deadly sins pretty well. Betrayal was the worst. It shattered everything you held to be true, and was as damaging as a bullet to the flesh.
He cracked her bedroom door and peeked inside. Kris lay beneath a leopard-skin blanket, eyes shut, her wheat-gold hair displayed luxuriously on a pillow. His heartbeat quickened. Every time he saw her, he felt like a high school senior with his life stretched out before him, not some fat, forty-five-year-old bozo with two kids and a wife he couldn’t stand.
Longo opened the door fully and stared at the bathroom door. Was her friend with the cigarette in there? His eyes canvassed the room and spotted Kris’s clothes folded neatly on a chair. It was a little ritual she performed whenever they made love. It always made him smile.
“Kris?”
Her eyelids remained shut. He stepped into the room. His instinct told him to check the bathroom first, and his heart told him to check her. His instinct won out, and he kicked the bathroom door open. Empty.
He sat on the edge of the bed. It was a motionless water bed, so comfortable that they’d once slept for ten hours straight. He looked down at her. The color was draining from her face, her exquisite features turning hard.
“Kris?”
He didn’t want to believe she was gone, his heart winning out over his instincts. He lifted the blanket with the tip of his finger and saw where the bullet had entered her body, and taken her life.
Her killer had been kind. He’d shot her through the heart, and he guessed she’d died instantly. Lowering the blanket, he rose from the bed, looked at the ceiling, and tried not to sob.
Only one thing to do. Get in the Explorer and burn rubber. He couldn’t be caught here. He looked down at her a final time.
“I love you so much,” he whispered.
Putting his shoes on in the kitchen, Longo stared at a pair of socks sitting on the table. He’d left the socks here last weekend. In typical Kris-fashion, she’d washed and folded them. As he picked up the socks, the words Oh, no, escaped his mouth.
How many more of his things were in the townhouse? And what about his fingerprints? They were probably on every doorknob and light fixture. And Kris’s phone bills, the investigating detectives would surely look at those. All trails would lead directly back to him.
He pulled a chair out from the table and dropped his massive bulk into it. He was about to become a suspect in a murder investigation. The detectives in charge would not be his friends. They would look at his lifestyle, questioning his expensive vacations and the new cars he bought every year. What was he going to tell them? That he found a bag of money behind a casino?
Or would he tell them about the department’s secret slush fund, and how money was being siphoned from the bank accounts of well-known wise guys. The wise guys weren’t shouting about it, knowing a bribe when they saw one.
He couldn’t do that. That would be suicide.
He would lie about the money.
“Jesus Christ,” he said aloud.
He’d get thrown off the force, and Cindi would surely leave him. His teenage daughters would shun him, and his parents wouldn’t be too thrilled, either. His life was about to be ruined. And all because he’d gone and fallen in love.
Standing, he slid the chair beneath the table. The leg hit something soft, and he looked beneath the table and saw a black gym bag. The bag was open and stuffed with casino chips from several different casinos. He pulled it out and let his fingers run through the chips. Reds, greens, purples, and yellows. There was even a brown chip. You didn’t see those very often.
He blew his cheeks out. There was twenty grand here, easy. This was worse than bad. He couldn’t explain this. And if there was any part of the story the investigators would want explained, it was why twenty grand in casino chips was in Kris’s townhouse.
Zipping the bag closed, he saw a sliver of paper tucked in a side pocket. He pulled it free. It was an embossed business card, and he stared at the raised lettering.
It was a small world. He knew Valentine. A retired Atlantic City detective who helped casinos catch cheaters. Had he blown into town, met Kris, and made her an offer she couldn’t refuse?
Sticking the card into the bag, Longo searched the bag’s other pockets and found a pack of Marlboros. He went into the living room and stared at the filter of the cigarette lying in the ashtray. It was a match.
Back in the kitchen, he grabbed the gym bag off the floor and exited through the back door. He went straight to the community trash area and buried the bag beneath a ton of garbage.
Coming back inside, he dialed the police station on the kitchen phone. An automated message greeted him. While he waited for an operator, he wondered how hard it would be to track Valentine down. Valentine was probably in town on a consulting job, staying at one of the nice joints on the Strip. A few phone calls at most, he decided.
His thoughts shifted to his dead girlfriend. Her memory was going to stay with him for the rest of his life. He was going to make Valentine pay for this, only he wouldn’t be as kind as Valentine had been to her. There was no reason why he should be.
2
Tony Valentine watched a police cruiser race down Maryland Parkway, the morning sunlight beating brightly off its roof. Distances were hard to determine in the desert, and he guessed the cruiser was five miles away. Back home in Florida, the landscape didn’t play tricks with you like it did out here. But that was the appeal of Las Vegas: You didn’t know what was real and what was an illusion.
He turned from the window. He was standing in a penthouse office of Sin, Las Vegas’s newest casino. Three thousand guest rooms and a gaming area as big as an airport terminal. It was Vegas’s second new casino this year, the public’s appetite for throwing away their money knowing no bounds.
Three of the most powerful men in Nevada stood on the other side of the room: Shelly Michael, CEO of Michael Gaming, the country’s largest casino chain, the man the Wall Street Journal called “a barracuda in pinstripes”; Rags Richardson, the African American owner of three Strip casinos and founder of BE BOP SHABAM Records; and California beach boy Chance Newman, owner of Sin, who’d made his fortune in Silicon Valley before the tech bubble burst.
Crossing the room, he stuck out his hand. “Tony Valentine. Nice to meet you.”
They all shook hands. Normally, Valentine didn’t kowtow to anyone. Only these guys had made his day. They’d called yesterday and offered him twenty-five thousand dollars for a private demonstration. Even if he hadn’t already been en route to Las Vegas to check up on his son Gerry, he still would have accepted the job.