Sherry did not share her husband’s considerable people skills. She was a good manager — cool under pressure, efficient, detail-oriented. She possessed plenty of business savvy and a political horse-sense, too. Sherry was adept at
Sherry glanced at the delicate, jeweled Rolex on her wrist. She should have heard from Lev by now.
Jong Lee was supposed to hand off the cash, and Lev was supposed to take it back to his suite, and call her immediately. Once again, Sherry squeezed her tiny handbag to make sure the cell phone was inside, that she hadn’t misplaced it somewhere.
Becoming more concerned by the minute, she turned away from her husband, walked to a line of dining tables along the glass wall. She saw a seating card marked “Mr. Jong Lee,” at a table designated for businessmen concerned with the detrimental effects of the drug epidemic. Though most of the seats were filled with stuffy men and their plump wives, Lee’s chair remained vacant.
If Lev didn’t call her in the next fifteen minutes, Sherry resolved to go searching for him.
Curtis awoke to the smell of flowers. Then he felt the floor bump under him. He tried to open his eyes, but only one eye actually opened. The left side of his face was swollen, the eye glued shut, His head throbbed. He tried to touch the wound and found his wrists were bound together with thin steel wires that bit into his flesh. He felt another bump and realized he was riding on the floor in back of a truck.
Finally Curtis remembered it all — the identical white trucks, the Cuban hit team, the presence of the feared Rojas brothers in Las Vegas, the plot to blow up the anti-drug conference and its VIP guests at the Babylon.
Curtis studied the ferns and flowering plants around him, sniffed again. Underneath the cloying scent of flowers was another ominous smell, one he was familiar with. Curtis was definitely detecting the distinctive lemon- citrus odor given off by the plastic explosive Composition 4. Eyes darting, Curtis’ intense gaze moved beyond those plants, to rows of plastic garbage cans hidden behind them — each one filled with C4 explosives and rigged to a timer with bright blue detonation cords.
This truck had five others just like it. More than enough to bring down one of Las Vegas’ most glittering casinos, and murder everyone inside.
When Stella Hawk shot him in the chest with the police special, the relatively small.38 caliber bullet hadn’t penetrated the Kevlar vest Curtis wore under his jacket, but the impact stunned him, knocking him out cold for a few minutes. He finally came around when Stella kicked him out of her car, onto the floor of Bix’s garage. Fortunately, the wound on his leg and the deep gash in his side caused by a shard of glass, provided enough blood to fool Stella, Hugo Bix, even the Cubans. No one took the trouble to examine him because they all believed he was dead or close to it.
While the conspirators talked over him, Curtis feigned unconsciousness. It hadn’t been easy to remain motionless during repeated jabs from Bix’s cowboy boot, or the rough treatment he’d received from the Cubans, who’d tossed him into the back of this truck and tied him up.
Resorting to a trick of his trade, Curtis had tensed his muscles while his wrists were tied. But he must have seemed too tense, because the hit man became suspicious and used the butt of his Makarov PM to knock Curtis into unconsciousness.
Still disoriented, Curtis wondered how long he’d been out. This truck had not yet arrived at the Babylon, but what about the other five?
Curtis was trussed up and helpless, he’d been chased, dragged, beaten and shot, but he still had a job to do. If he didn’t stop these terrorists, they would blow up a major American hotel and claim untold lives. He had to free himself, stop this truck, and warn the authorities before it was too late…
10. THE FOLLOWING TAKES PLACE BETWEEN THE HOURS OF 9 P.M. AND 10 P.M. PACIFIC DAYLIGHT TIME
“Catch!”
Metro Police Sergeant Philip Locklear tossed the colorful bag at his partner. “Scoot over, Dallas. You eat your Montana burgers. I’ll drive.”
The younger man stepped out from behind the steering wheel, circled the white Metro Police car. Climbing back inside, he opened the bag and rummaged through it.
“Hey, you didn’t get anything for yourself.”
The sergeant shook his head, threw his hat on the dashboard, and ran his knobby fingers through his salt and pepper hair.
“I can’t eat that fast food crap. It bothers my stomach.”
Sergeant Locklear was in his mid-forties, but looked ten years older. Skin like leather, his blue eyes were frozen in a perpetual squint from too many decades of exposure to the desert sun. Though he was never in danger of failing his annual department physical. Locklear had a rounded belly from too much beer and too much couch surfing.
“What bothers your stomach are those ten cups of coffee you drink a shift. That stuff will kill you.”
Officer Brad Dallas was the former second-string quarterback of the Las Vegas High School football team. Ex-military and still sporting the same haircut he had in boot camp, Dallas was too gung-ho for his own good — and his partner’s. Still buff at twenty-nine, he was a health and fitness nut, except for the cholesterol-heavy Montana burgers he ate two at a time.
“What stuff will kill me?” Locklear asked, starting the engine.
“Caffeine, man. Coffee is the devil’s brew.”
The sergeant nodded. “Yeah. I heard that somewhere.”
They rolled out of the Montana Burger parking lot a moment later, swung onto the road that took them to their patrol zone along the Strip.
“How about you take a gander at tonight’s SVR. Shout out anything that catches your eye.”
Chewing a mouthful of burger, Officer Dallas thumbed through the three page printout on blue paper. The Stolen Vehicle Report was information so new it hadn’t reached the LVMP database yet. Such intelligence was the purview of the select few members of Metro’s Repeat Auto Theft Squad, RATS for short. Las Vegas ranked third in total car thefts for the past five years running. The RATS patrol was formed to lower that statistic.
Because a minority of car thieves steal the majority of cars — usually to use the pilfered vehicle to commit yet another crime — the Metro Police RATS was formed to target those nefarious individuals. Of the twenty to thirty Metro Police cars prowling the Strip on a given night, one or two of them belonged to the RATS patrol, though no one but the officers in question were aware of that fact. RATS patrol cars were not specially marked, and the RATS members wore the same uniforms and performed the same duties as other patrolmen. But they were also specially trained to recognize and arrest repeat offending car thieves, and to spot the telltale signs of car-theft related activity.
When the pair began their shift, the big case was a car jacking in North Las Vegas so violent it landed the victim in the morgue. That suspect was captured by the Nevada Highway Patrol an hour ago — the news had just come across their radio when the all-points was called off.
Without a special target for tonight’s patrol, Sergeant Locklear was fishing for an interesting angle.
“Not much here,” Dallas noted. “There was an assault and truck jacking this morning, out at Mesa Canyon, corner of Smoke Ranch Road and North Buffalo. The truck was a late model Dodge Sprinter, white with commercial plates. It was a Fit-Chef delivery van.”
