“You call me and tell me what you are doing. I mean it. My plate is piled to the clouds right now,” Leigh said with resignation.
Cynthia hung up, and drove out of town. After a few miles, she turned on a gravel road passing through the opened gate, through a hundred yards of trees, and down a dirt road to the massive equipment barn she’d been to on one other occasion. The building and its graveled parking lot were surrounded by tall hurricane fencing. She recognized the white van parked near the personnel door, to the right of the massive retractable doors through which heavy equipment came and went. She parked, leaving her purse in the car, and patted her hair as she walked to the door.
The interior of the building was half the size of a football field and the roof rose to a peak fifty feet above the packed-earth floor. Scores of bulldozers and other pieces of land-clearing equipment were parked shoulder to shoulder in the interior before her, like soldiers preparing for another assault on the land outside. The last time she’d been there, the recently constructed steel building had been empty and their loud lovemaking had echoed eerily.
It was so cold she could see her breath in the still air that reeked of grease and diesel fuel.
“Jaa-ckeee,” she called out, laughing. “I’m hee-ere!”
Cynthia straightened at the sound of someone behind her and turned to the sight of a wholly unattractive stranger with his hands in the pockets of his coat.
“Who are you?” she demanded, remembering that she was trespassing. She didn’t even know the name of the company that owned the structure.
“You can call me Pablo,” he said, smiling. “Jack’s on his way.”
“You don’t look Mexican to me. What are you, like a night watchman? So where is he?” she asked.
“There’s no need to pay anybody to guard this building, is there? I mean, stealing a bulldozer takes real professionals and big trailers,” the man said, staring into her eyes.
Something about the man’s flat delivery and emotionless eyes filled her with dread.
She froze when he took his hands from his pockets and moved at her with animal swiftness. Pinning her wrists behind her, he met her eyes and smiled. “Jack told me you are one delicious young lady.”
Too frightened and shocked to move, she could only close her eyes as his broad and wet tongue ran from her chin up her face to her forehead.
Paulus Styer put the bound and gagged Cynthia facedown on the mattress located in the van outside before he took a tarpaulin and draped it over her still form.
“Cynthia, I have a lot of driving around to do. If you move a muscle without me telling you to do so, I will throw you into the Mississippi River. I want you to understand that, because I do not make idle threats. Just nod if you understand.”
The trembling girl nodded, and Styer took her lover’s cloned cell phone and tossed it into a garbage bag.
He moved out to Cynthia’s Toyota, drove it over to the far side of the barn near the mechanic station, and covered it completely with an old tarp.
Climbing back into the van, Styer cranked it and drove out of the structure into the stark, flat landscape. Now he could get on with his employer’s primary operation, and take the next step in wrapping up his own.
15
Pierce Mulvane eyed the action at the high-stakes blackjack tables the way a farmer surveys a field for signs of sun damage or pest infestation. A dark-haired, clean-cut young man was winning steadily. He was up over forty-five thousand dollars and, despite the fact that the pit boss had changed dealers on him twice every hour, he showed no signs of a reversing fortune. The kid was cocky, and his success had drawn a crowd. It was both good and bad that people were watching him. It was good because it would encourage them to gamble. It was bad because asking him to leave would attract attention and put a damper on the audience. He’d let the boy win and have Albert White deal with it later.
Pierce thought back to the first cheater he’d caught in Atlantic City, a young man with tattoos covering his arms. The backs of his fingers spelled LOVE on the left hand, and HATE on the right. Using a pair of pruning shears, Pierce had edited the tattoo to read, LOVE HAT. The memory always made him chuckle. He hated cheaters.
After five minutes of watching the young man, Pierce turned and walked slowly through the playing floor, shadowed by Tug Murphy. He paused at one of the craps tables to watch a pig farmer from Arkansas named Jason Parr, whose one-hundred-and-fifty-thousand-dollar line of credit Pierce had personally approved. The year before, he had lost sixty thousand and paid it back within a week. Today Parr was dressed in a T-shirt under a tailored leather jacket, faded blue jeans, and shiny black wing-tips. Pierce watched with an inner glow as the farmer placed stacks of twenty-dollar chips on several numbers. He was chasing his losses, which, according to the floor boss, totaled twelve thousand dollars.
The pig farmer spotted Pierce, waved, and yelled, “Hey there, Mr. Mulvane!”
When the dice stopped rolling on seven and the farmer’s chips had been collected, Pierce walked over and rested a hand on Parr’s shoulder. “Nice to see you, Mr. Parr,” Pierce said, turning on his warmest smile. “So nice to have you with us again. How is everything going?”
“Financially speaking, it’s looking grim at the moment, Mr. Mulvane.”
“I hope at least your accommodations are satisfactory.” “Room’s fit for a king. And I thank you for the bottles of bourbon you sent up.”
“Our pleasure. If you need anything, you’ll let us know?”
“I sure will. My only question is, what are y’all gonna do with my hog farm?”
The farmer guffawed, and Pierce laughed right along with him.
Pierce stayed long enough to watch the farmer toss back a glass filled with brown liquor and lose another two thousand dollars. He didn’t want a pig farm, but if Parr lost enough money, the casino’s attorneys would figure out how to liquidate one pretty quickly.
The bottom line was Pierce’s responsibility. When all was said and done, gambling was just a business like any other. Pierce Mulvane was just another CEO working long hours to generate profits for a corporation.
The main gaming tables ran the length of the casino center like a narrow island bordered by an ocean of slot machines, row after row like the cash crop they were. Though they were the main source of casino income, they were just machines, and got only a cursory glance from Pierce. Twenty-eight poker tables were surrounded by a low wall, so people could watch games in progress without interrupting them.
As Pierce and Tug rode the private elevator back upstairs, he couldn’t shake his curiosity about how the young blackjack player was beating the house. He opened his phone and poked in a number.
“Albert, no-limit blackjack, table four. The man in the yellow V-neck. He’s counting, with quite an audience. Let him run his streak. Check the black book and see if he’s in it. Handle it with your customary discretion.”
Pierce closed the phone. He couldn’t allow cheaters to profit and tell their pals that the Roundtable was an easy mark. He knew that White would handle this matter properly. As security director, Albert White received a substantial salary, but the additional enrichment incentives Pierce made available to him here and there ensured results, not to mention the above-and-beyond effort Mulvane expected. And Pierce’s above-and-beyond requests often called for tasks he couldn’t give to people he didn’t trust one hundred and ten percent.
16
The house that Alphonse Jefferson had listed as his address when he’d been arrested three months earlier had long since surrendered to the elements. Several of the paint-starved clapboards were missing and shocks of faded-pink fiberglass shot out from several open spaces like clown hair.
The yard was bare dirt except for scattered clumps of stiff rust-colored weeds, a dead washing machine, a child’s bicycle without wheels, a flattened shoe, and an emaciated and shivering pit bull whose head was much wider than his shoulders. The animal, standing in front of a wood-crate shelter with a floral plastic shower liner weighted down by brickbats on top of it, was anchored to a stake by a short section of swing-set chain. The dog growled as though he was saving his barks for more worthy customers than the two strangers he watched approach his master’s front door.