“Oh, my God,” she said.
Mabel kept staring. “What is it? It looks like a shovel . . .”
“Oh, my God,” Yolanda said again.
Mabel pulled away from the window. Yolanda had her hand over her mouth, and the expectant-mother glow had drained from her face. Mabel grabbed her by the wrists.
“What is it? Tell me.”
“He’s holding a rifle,” Yolanda said fearfully.
Nick had owned the Acropolis for more than thirty years, and had experienced a lot of bad times and misfortune along with every other casino owner. What he hadn’t experienced was the widespread looting that Valentine had described to him. Few casino owners had.
“Ohhh, Nicky,” Wanda called from the bathroom.
Nick raised his head. “I’m busy, honey. We’ve got company.”
“But I have something to tell you. Something wonderful.”
“Can’t it wait?”
His bride emerged from the bathroom wearing six-inch heels and a bathing suit made from pink dental floss.
“But Nicky . . . ,” she pouted, standing expectantly in the room’s center.
Nick stared through her, too immersed in his casino’s demise to realize Wanda might have something important to say. Stung, she grabbed a robe from the closet and marched out of the bedroom, slamming the door behind her. Shaking his head, Nick said, “The other day, Wanda tells me it’s my duty to make the coffee every morning.
“I haven’t a clue.”
“Hebrew.”
A few moments passed, then Nick said, “So what do I do?”
Valentine had given Nick’s options some serious thought. If he could prove to the Gaming Control Board that the Acropolis had been cheated, Bill Higgins would throw the thirty employees in jail, seize their bank accounts, plus their homes, cars, and everything of value they owned. They would be stripped clean. It wouldn’t cover Nick’s losses, but it was a start.
“Call an emergency meeting of your new hires,” Valentine said. “We’ll back-room them, and I’ll interrogate them. I’ll turn them against each other. I’ll promise to cut deals with the guys I have by the balls in return for the information I don’t have.”
“You think it will work?”
He nodded. “Cheaters always squeal. It’s their nature.”
Nick called Wily and had him set the meeting for four o’clock in the casino’s basement. “No, I’m not going to fire you,” he told his head of security. Hanging up, he said, “Give me five minutes to get dressed. We can go downstairs together.”
Valentine went into Nick’s office to wait. He remembered his earlier promise to Mabel and powered up his cell phone. She’d asked him many times to leave it on, but he’d never seen the value in it. Too damn intrusive.
He had a message. He retrieved it and heard his neighbor’s voice.
Mabel was screaming at him.
24
Valentine’s heart jumped into his throat. Hysterical women did that to him. From what he could make out from his neighbor’s message, there were two men inside his house who may or may not be FBI agents and were handcuffed to his chin-up bar, while a third man was on the neighbor’s roof with a rifle. The phone lines had been cut, and Mabel was calling him from Yolanda’s cell phone.
“Call me back on Yolanda’s cell!” she told him.
He punched in Yolanda’s number. A frantic busy signal filled his ear. The call wasn’t going through. Going to the bedroom door, he rapped loudly. Nick bid him entrance, and he stuck his head in. “I need to use a phone. It’s an emergency. My cell phone isn’t cooperating.”
Nick emerged still dressed in his robe. He escorted Valentine across the room to his desk. It was as big as a sports car and covered with photographs. He pointed at the phone. “Use line two. It’s my private line.”
Nick went back to the bedroom. Valentine picked up line two and dialed Yolanda’s cell number while staring at the photographs. Groups of smiling Greek fishermen stared back at him. In the photos, the men were standing on fishing docks and holding up their catches.
He heard the connection ring through. Mabel answered on the first ring.
“Hey,” he said.
“Oh, Tony,” his neighbor replied. “I’ve done something truly awful.”
He listened to Mabel explain what had happened. She and Yolanda were staying away from the kitchen window, fearful of the sniper on the roof next door. And there was a strange car parked in his driveway, and she had heard scratching sounds around the house.
“Why did you pull the gun on them?” he asked when she was done.
“Because they barged in here and practically called you a traitor,” she hissed. “You always told me you had a good relationship with the FBI, and these men acted like they’d never heard of you.”
“They called me a what?”
“Well, they said you were unpatriotic.”
Valentine felt his face burn. He hung his flag out on Veterans Day, paid his taxes, and believed in truth, justice, and the American Way.
“Are they within earshot?”
“You bet they are,” his neighbor seethed.
“Put one of them on.”
He heard Mabel cross his kitchen, and the sound of the cell phone being placed beneath someone’s mouth. Mabel had said she’d handcuffed the agents to his chin-up bar, and he wondered how they felt about being outwitted by a sixty-five-year-old woman. He said, “This is Tony Valentine. Who is this?”
“FBI Special Agent Reynolds,” a man’s voice replied.
“Sounds like you and your partner are in a pickle,” Valentine said.
There was a long pause. Reynolds cleared his throat. “Your friend Mabel is in a lot of trouble, if you hadn’t already figured that out.”
“So are you,” Valentine replied. “I want you to call off your dogs.”
“Excuse me?”
“The guys who’ve surrounded my house, and the guy on the roof with the rifle. I want you to call them off.”
“What are you offering in return?”
“The opportunity to end this peacefully, without anyone getting hurt.”
Another pause. Reynolds said something to his hanging partner. Valentine made out the words
“Mind telling me how?” Reynolds asked him.
“Easy,” Valentine replied. “I’m going to have a chat with Peter Fuller, your boss. You wouldn’t have a number where I might reach him, would you?”
Reynolds gave him Peter Fuller’s private number, then promised to keep the agents surrounding the house at bay. Valentine hung up and walked out of Nick’s office.
He took the elevator to the penthouse floor, which was one floor below. From his suite he got the laptop computer he’d bought when he’d opened Grift Sense and went back upstairs.
Sitting at Nick’s desk, he ran a wire from the laptop to the phone jack in the wall, and within a minute was connected to the Internet. He picked up the phone and punched in Peter Fuller’s number at the FBI. A woman answered with a curt, “May I help you?”
