“Well, I’m gonna tell you something,” Tiny promised. “This place is being robbed.”
The guy continued to frown for a couple seconds, and then he stared at Tiny in horrified understanding. He spun around to the two security men, as though for aid, but when he looked at their faces his understanding grew and became even more horrifying.
Tiny said, “Comere, look at me, we’re the ones having a little talk here.”
The guy turned back to Tiny. Through his fright, he now looked confidential, as though he wanted to convince Tiny, and only Tiny, about some important fact. “I can’t get into the money room,” he whispered. “Honest to God.”
“Don’t you worry about it,” Tiny told him. “I’m here to help, see? My pal’s gonna drive this truck away, and I’m gonna wheel one of them tanks inside, with you and those two guys in uniform over there, and we’re all gonna go to the air room. You with me so far?”
“I don’t know what you—”
“You with me?”
The guy gulped and nodded. “Yes, sir,” he whispered.
“The four of us and one tank,” Tiny went on, “we’re gonna go back to the air room, and nobody’s gonna get hurt or bothered or not a thing like that. Or, plan two, I hit you with a hammer here, and you lay down in the truck, and my partner drives the truck away with you in it, and the two uniforms and me go to the air room without you. Up to you.”
The guy stared at Tiny, fish-eyed. He didn’t seem to know what he was supposed to say.
So Tiny helped: “This is called an option situation,” he explained. “Option one, you cooperate. Option two, you get hit on the head with a hammer. Up to you.”
“Cooperate,” the guy whispered.
“Option one. Very good.”
It was excellent, in fact, and the option they’d been hoping for, since Dortmunder’s research had never managed to show them exactly where the air room was. Certainly, they’d have been able to find it eventually, knowing it couldn’t be far from either the kitchens or the loading dock, but it certainly did make life easier to have cooperation from this bird dog, who obediently preceded Tiny and Jim and Gus into the building and along the maze of basement corridors, Tiny wheeling the canister.
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.
53
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.”