like anyone he’d known for five days. But the shootout at the deserted gas station had changed that. Beneath the Jim Carrey personality, there was a bad person hiding. Trusting him was out of the question, and Gerry stared at the headlights of cars coming down the highway next to the motel.
“I guess you’re disappointed in me and my brother,” Pash said.
“Yeah, I’m disappointed,” Gerry said, blowing a monster cloud of smoke. “I came to you with a legitimate business proposition, and you played me for a chump.”
Pash cocked his head and stared at him. “You came to us with a way to make money. We showed you another way to make money. Is that so bad?”
The afternoon had disappeared, and the fractured light reflecting off the motel’s neon sign gave Pash a ghoulish quality. Gerry wagged a finger in his face. “Right. Next we’ll be robbing banks and shooting guards. No thanks.”
“My brother has never shot his gun before. It was just . . .”
“One of those things?”
“Yes.”
Gerry inched closer to Pash and breathed on him. An old mobster trick, and a great way to get another guy’s attention. Pash shrank a few inches.
“I killed a guy this afternoon saving your brother’s ass,” Gerry said. “He may have had it coming, but that doesn’t matter.
“I know,” Pash said.
“Some guys will tell you that killing someone is liberating. It wasn’t for me.”
Pash swallowed hard. “I’m sorry.”
“No, you’re not.”
“I’m not?”
“You’re happy I killed that guy. I saved your brother’s life. You understand what I’m saying?”
Pash shook his head. He didn’t understand at all.
“It’s like this,” Gerry said. “You can never feel the way I feel about what happened this afternoon. You’re going to go on with your life, and eventually you’ll forget about it. Me, I’m going to live with it. It’s going to hang heavy on my soul for a long, long time.”
“Your soul,” Pash whispered.
“That’s right.”
Pash could no longer look him in the eye, and used the fading ember of his cigarette to light another. He gestured weakly with the pack, offering him one. That was all that was left between them, Gerry thought, a fucking cigarette and the thread of a friendship.
“Think about that when you unload those drugs,” Gerry said. Then he went into his motel room and slammed the door behind him.
29
Nick jumped up and down in the nurse’s office while Valentine sat on the examining table, getting his face stitched up.
“That was the greatest thing I’ve ever seen,” Nick told the nurse, an older woman with the patience of Job. “First Tony uses these judo moves to take the knife away from Moss—
Valentine winced as the nurse tied the stitches together. Moss had sliced the side of his face pretty good; he was going to need a plastic surgeon to make his puss look normal. He lifted his hand out of a bowl of ice cubes and stared at his badly bruised knuckles. Moss was going to need a plastic surgeon, too.
He watched Nick prance around the room, still throwing punches. For a guy about to lose everything, he was having a great time, and Valentine remembered why he’d always liked him. Nick knew how to live.
The nurse finished stitching him up, then applied a bandage to his wound. “You’re going to need to change this dressing twice a day. I’m also going to give you some penicillin. Make sure you take the entire dose, okay?”
She said the words like she knew Valentine probably wouldn’t do it. He took the little vial of pills and thanked her. Nick stood a few feet away, delivering a knockout punch to an imaginary foe. Valentine said, “Got anything for our friend?”
“I wish,” the nurse said.
Valentine went into the hallway and powered up his cell phone. The pain in his face was making his entire head hurt. He called Gerry’s cell, got voice mail, and left a message. He tried to make his voice sound gentle, and saw Nick grimace as he hung up.
“Be a tough guy,” Nick said, “and tell him to get his ass over here.”
“You obviously never had kids,” Valentine said.
“What do you mean?”
“That approach doesn’t work anymore.”
The nurse’s office was on the first floor of the casino, behind the registration area. They walked out of her office and into the gaming area. At Valentine’s suggestion, Nick had closed the casino down and put a call into the Gaming Control Bureau. At any moment, a team of GCB agents would swarm through the front doors, throw up yellow tape, and turn the place into a crime scene. In Las Vegas, getting cheated was bad, but not telling the authorities about it was worse. Nick let out an exasperated breath.
“Looks like a tomb, doesn’t it? Here lies Nick Nicocropolis. He never gave in.”
“You want that on your tombstone?”
“It’s the only thing I want on it.”
They walked around the empty casino. There was something sad about the hollow feeling the space gave off, and Valentine was reminded of the time he’d seen a half-sunken ship in a harbor as a kid, and how it had made him cry. He saw Nick stop and pick up a piece of trash from the floor.
“Old habits die hard,” he explained.
Valentine wasn’t listening. His eyes had locked on the cage sitting in the center of the casino floor. The cage was where customers turned their chips into cash. Normally, the cage was on the far end of the casino, the thinking being that a customer might stop along the way and place a wager.
But this cage was in the center of the casino. It was small, with brass bars and cutouts for two cashiers. A sign said CHANGE FOR SLOT PLAYERS ONLY. Inside were several hundred plastic buckets filled with quarters and half-dollars.
Valentine found himself smiling. So this was how Fontaine’s gang was getting coins stolen from slot machines out of the casino. They were converting them.
“You got a key for the cage?” he asked Nick.
“Of course I’ve got a key,” Nick said.
“Open it up. I’m about to make you some money.”
Nick fished a key ring from his pocket and opened the cage door. Valentine went in and searched around the cashiers’ chairs. He found two women’s handbags and poured their contents into Nick’s outstretched hands. Both were stuffed with hundred-dollar bills. Nick counted it. Over thirty grand. He grabbed Valentine’s arm and said, “You’re a beautiful human being, you know that?”
“Thanks,” Valentine said.
“Now tell me what was going on here.”
“Fontaine’s gang rigged the scales in the Hard Count room to show less weight,” Valentine said. “Then they stole the difference and brought those coins back into the casino to this cage. The coins were put in buckets and sold to customers, and that money was put in handbags and carried out by the cashiers.”
Nick made a face. “You’re not going to believe this.”
“What’s that?”
“Putting this cage in the center of the casino was Albert Moss’s idea. He said it would make things easier for
