family.”
“Yeah, I know the tune. It’s true, though. Vegas has changed in ten years. When I first made it to the bureau, you could practically take your pick of the casinos and go to work. They all had connections. If it wasn’t the front office, then it was the suppliers, the unions, whatever. Now it’s cleaned up. It’s gone from sin city to fuckin’ Disneyland. We got more water slides than whorehouses now. I think I liked it the old way. Had more of an edge, know what I mean?”
“Yeah, I know what you mean.”
“Anyway, the important thing is we ninety-nine percent have the mob out of the casinos. That’s the good thing. But there’s still a lot of what we call ancillary action around. That’s where Joey fits in. He runs a string of high-rent strip bars, mostly in North Vegas because nudity and alcohol are allowed there and the money is in alcohol. Very hard to watch, that money. We figure he’s siphoning a couple mil a year off the top on the clubs alone. We’ve had the IRS go after his books but he does too good a job.
“Let’s see, we think he also has a piece of some of the brothels up north. Then he’s got the usual, your standard loan-sharking and fencing operations. He runs a book and has the street tax on almost anything that moves in town. You know, the escort services, peep shows, all of that. He’s the king. He can’t go in any of the casinos ’cause he’s in the commission’s black book but it doesn’t matter. He’s the king.”
“How does he have a betting book in a town where you can walk into any casino and bet on any game, any race, anywhere?”
“You gotta have money to do that. Not with Joey. He’ll take your bet. And if you are unlucky enough to lose, then you better come up with the money quick or you’re one sorry motherfucker. Remember how he got his name. Well, suffice it to say his employees carry on the tradition. See, that’s how he gets his hooks into people. He gets them to owe him and then they have to give him a piece of what they have, whether it’s a company that makes paint in Dayton or something else.”
“Maybe a guy who makes cheap movies in L.A.”
“Yeah, like that. That’s how it works. They open up to him or they get two broken knees or worse. People still disappear in Vegas, Bosch. It might look like it’s all volcanoes and pyramids and pirate ships on the outside, but on the inside it’s still dark enough for people to disappear in.”
Bosch reached over and turned the air up a notch. The sun was already all the way up and the desert was beginning to bake.
“This is nothing,” Iverson said. “Wait till about noon. If we’re out here then, forget about it. We’ll be over one- ten easy.”
“What about Joey’s air of legitimacy?”
“Yeah, well, like I said, he’s got holdings all over the country. Pieces of the legitimate world he got through these various scams. He also reinvests. He cleans up all the cash he’s pulling out of his various enterprises and then puts it into legit stuff, even charities. He’s got car dealerships, a country club on the east side, a goddamn wing of a hospital named after one of his kids who died in a swimming pool. His picture gets in the paper at ribbon cuttings, Bosch. I tell you, we’ve either got to fucking take the guy down or give him the key to the city and I don’t know which would be more appropriate.”
Iverson shook his head.
After a few minutes of silence they were there. Iverson pulled into a county fire station and drove around back, where there were several more detective cars and several men standing around them holding paper cups of coffee. One of them was Captain Felton.
Bosch had forgotten to take a bulletproof vest with him from Los Angeles and had to borrow one from Iverson. He was also given a plastic raid jacket that said LVPD in bright yellow letters across the chest when it was zipped closed.
They were standing around Felton’s Taurus, going over the plan and waiting for the uniform backup. Execution of the warrant was going to be done by Vegas rules, the captain said. That meant at least one uniform team had to be there when they kicked the door.
By this time Bosch had already had his “friendly” exchange with Felton. The two had gone into the fire station to get Bosch some coffee, and Bosch had given the police captain an earful for the way he had handled the discovery that the prints Bosch had brought with him belonged to Lucky Luke Goshen. Felton feigned contrition and told Bosch he’d be involved in calling the shots from that moment on. Bosch had to back down after that. He’d gotten what he wanted, at least in the captain’s words. Now he just had to watch that Felton walked the talk.
Besides Felton and Bosch, there were four others standing around the car. They were all from Metro’s Organized Crime Unit. It was Iverson and his partner, Cicarelli, and then another pair, Baxter and Parmelee. The OCU was part of Felton’s domain in the department, but it was Baxter who was running the show. He was a black man who was balding, with gray hair lightly powdered around the sides of his head. He was heavily muscled and had a countenance that said I want no hassles. He seemed to Bosch to be a man accustomed to both the violent and violence. There was a difference.
Luke Goshen’s home was known to them. From their banter Bosch figured that they had watched the place before. It was about a mile further west from the station, and Baxter had already made a drive-by and determined that Goshen’s black Corvette was in the carport.
“What about a warrant?” Bosch asked.
He could just envision the whole thing getting kicked out of court because of a warrantless entry into the suspect’s house.
“The prints were more than enough for a warrant to search the premises and arrest your man,” Felton said. “We took it to a judge first thing this morning. We also had our own information, which I think Iverson told you about.”
“Look, his prints were on the guy but it doesn’t mean he did it. It doesn’t make a case. We’re acting too quickly here. My guy was put down in L.A. I’ve got nothing putting Luke Goshen there. And your own information? That’s a joke. You’ve got an anonymous call, that’s it. It doesn’t mean shit.”
They all looked at Bosch as if he had just belched at the debutante ball.
“Harry, let’s get another cup,” Felton said.
“I’m fine.”
“Let’s get one anyway.”
He put his arm on Bosch’s shoulder and led him back toward the station. Inside at the kitchen counter, where there was a coffee urn, Felton poured himself another cup before speaking.
“Look, Harry, you gotta go with this. This is a major opportunity for us and for you.”
“I know that. I just don’t want to blow it. Can’t we hold off on this until we’re sure of what we’ve got? It’s my case, Captain, and you’re still running the show.”
“I thought we had that all straightened out.”
“I thought we did, too, but I might as well be pissing in the wind.”
“Look, Detective, we’re going to go up the road and take this guy down, search his place and put him in a little room. I guarantee that if he isn’t your man, he’s going to give him to you. And he’s going to give us Joey Marks along the way. Now, come on, get with the program and get happy.”
He cuffed Bosch on the shoulder and headed back out to the lot. Bosch followed in a few moments. He knew that he was whining over nothing. You find somebody’s prints on a body, you bring him in. That’s a given. You sweat the details later. But Bosch didn’t like being a bystander. That was the real rub and he knew it. He wanted to run the show. Only out here in the desert, he was a fish out of water, flopping on the sand. He knew he should call Billets, but it was too late for her to do anything and he didn’t like the idea of telling her he had let this one get away from him.
The patrol car with the two uniforms was there when Bosch stepped out of the fire station and back into the oven.
“All right,” Felton said. “We’re all here. Mount up and let’s go get this fucker.”
They were there in five minutes. Goshen lived in a house that rose out of the scrubland on Desert View Avenue. It was a large house but not one that looked particularly ostentatious. The one thing that looked out of the ordinary was the concrete-block wall and gate that surrounded the half-acre property. The house was in the middle of nowhere but its owner needed to put a security wall around it.
They all stopped their cars on the shoulder of the road and got out. Baxter had come prepared. From the trunk
