Loaded Dice

stability, letting Nick spend his afternoons in the arms of his nubile young bride without a worry in the world.

“I’m going to go see Nick, tell him what’s going on,” Valentine said.

Wily hesitated. “You going to tell him I screwed up?”

Valentine whacked him on the shoulder with Moss’s file. “You didn’t screw up. So I won’t say that.”

Wily grinned. “Thanks, man.”

Nick’s office in the Acropolis was like his house: a testimonial to bad taste that had been converted into a Laura Ashley showroom. Nick’s secretary didn’t work on weekends, and Valentine walked unannounced into the great one’s office. It was empty.

He went to the door that led to Nick’s private bedroom. A DO NOT DISTURB sign hung from the knob. Screwing was to Nick what eating was to the rest of the world. If he didn’t get enough, there was no worse person to be around. Valentine tapped lightly on the door.

“Come on,” Nick called out.

He cracked the door open. The room was huge. Nick sat on a bed in his jockeys, clapping like a kid at his first baseball game. Wanda, who was stark naked, was standing on her head on a metal contraption that let her spin with her legs stuck out in opposite directions. Blaring disco music played in the background.

“Come on . . . baby!” Nick exclaimed.

Valentine immediately shut the door. Then it registered in his brain what he’d just seen. It was Wanda’s act from the talent portion of the Miss Nude World competition, the act that had captured Nick’s eye, and stolen his heart.

He made it into the hallway before peals of laughter seeped out of him. It was laughter to make you hurt, and he leaned against a potted plant and held his sides until it subsided.

Valentine waited ten minutes before rapping on the bedroom door again.

“We’re all friends here,” Nick called out.

He opened the door and stuck his head in. Nick lay beneath satin sheets, staring dreamily at his reflection in the mirrored ceiling. The bathroom door on the other side of the room was closed. Behind it, Valentine could hear water running. Nick lifted his head, then sat bolt upright.

“No offense, Tony, but can’t this wait?”

“No. Can I come in?”

“Sure. Make yourself at home. We’re only screwing.”

Nick slipped naked out of bed. His body was covered with black hair and looked like something that had just washed up on the beach. Putting on a monogrammed bathrobe, he met Valentine in the room’s sitting area. Valentine handed him Albert Moss’s file. Nick read through it.

“So, what’s Curly doing?” he asked.

Valentine explained how Nick was being systematically bled by Fontaine’s gang, then said, “The reason you’re not seeing it on your books is because Albert Moss is hiding it from you. Moss has been cooking the books for three to four weeks, which means you’re out a whole bunch of money.”

“How much?”

Valentine had thought about it while waiting in the hallway. He’d done enough work for Nick to know how much money flowed through the Acropolis each day. He also knew there was a limit on how much cheaters could steal before it became obvious.

“Seven to eight million bucks. That might be on the low side.”

Nick shut his eyes. “What’s the high side?”

“Ten to twelve million.”

Nick whistled through his teeth. “Does that put me in the Guinness Book of World Records?”

“It might.” Valentine hesitated, then asked him the question that had been bothering him since he’d done the math. “Can you cover it?”

Nick opened his eyes, and shook his head.

“No way,” he said.

23

Mabel wanted to talk to Tony before calling the police. Only Tony’s cell phone wasn’t on. Damn him!

Hanging up, she stared across the kitchen at Reynolds and Fisher. They were handcuffed together, hanging from a chin-up bar in the kitchen doorway. They looked madder than hell. Yolanda had cuffed them and gone through their pockets while Mabel held the Sig Sauer on them. Their IDs said they were FBI agents, but Mabel wasn’t buying it. There was no reason for them to come barging in the way they had and accuse Tony of being unpatriotic and anti-American. The FBI had worked with Tony on many cases; they knew him.

“Shit,” Mabel swore under her breath. What if they were FBI agents? Then she and Yolanda would be in more trouble than an army of lawyers could handle. If only she hadn’t pulled the gun on them. But Reynolds and Fisher had acted like gestapo, and something inside her had snapped.

“Call him back,” Yolanda said. She’d taken a yogurt out of the refrigerator and was eating it with a spoon. It somehow added normalcy to a picture that had none.

“Okay.” Mabel hit REDIAL, and was immediately put into Tony’s voice mail. “Damn.”

“What’s the matter?”

“His cell phone’s still turned off.”

She hung up and saw Reynolds staring helplessly at her from across the kitchen. He had an embarrassed look on his face. Tony had said that having a gun pointed at you disrupted your bowels, and she wondered if he’d wet his pants.

Yolanda put her spoon in the sink. “I think we’d better call the police. It’s what Tony will tell us to do anyway.”

Yolanda was right. The local cops needed to get involved. Mabel glanced at her watch. Several minutes had passed since she’d pulled the gun from the fridge. The police were going to ask her why she’d waited to call them. She didn’t have a good answer, but figured she’d come up with something by the time they arrived.

She picked up the phone and, while punching in 911, heard the dial tone go flat, then fade away and disappear. She clicked the receiver several times with her finger, but got nothing. Hanging up, she said, “That’s strange.”

Yolanda plucked an apple from the fruit bowl sitting on the counter. “What is?”

“The phone just went dead.”

The kitchen wasn’t terribly big, and from where Mabel stood, she had a clear view of the backyard through the window above the sink. Tony said fences made good neighbors, and a three-board one lined his property. Butting up to it was a phone pole, and Mabel saw a man scurry down it. He cut the line, she thought. She shot a glance at Reynolds and saw him shake his head.

“Is he with you?”

Reynolds licked his lips, hesitated.

“Go ahead and say it,” she told him.

“Yes, he’s with us. Ma’am, you are in so much trouble,” he said.

Mabel felt an icy finger run down her spine. That wasn’t the kind of threat that thieves made. She edged up to the window and watched the man jump off the phone pole, then go running down the narrow alley behind the house. Across the alley was another New England clapboard house constructed by the same builder who had built Tony’s house. On its shingle roof she saw a man hiding behind the chimney. Yolanda bumped into her, munching on her apple and sharing her view.

“What’s that guy doing up there?” she asked.

“I was wondering that myself,” Mabel said. Leaning over the sink, she brought her nose up an inch from the glass and stared. “It looks like he’s holding something.”

Yolanda dropped her half-eaten apple into the sink.