“Would you please?” she asked.
Gerry stared at the monitor above the door of the trailer. In his hand was Lamar’s gun. The fat guy—who he guessed was Huck Dubb—was having a problem loading his automatic rifle. Gerry wanted him to lower the rifle’s barrel a little bit more. Just another foot, and Gerry was going to open the door and blow his head off.
“He’s got an AK-47,” Lamar said, lying on the floor. His right arm was spurting blood, and he was holding his other hand over the wound. “Their barrels heat up if you fire too many rounds at once.”
Gerry glanced at Kent and Boomer. They had dragged themselves over to the corner and were tending to each other’s wounds.
“You need to take him out,” Lamar said.
“I know,” Gerry said.
“Better turn the safety off.”
Gerry found the safety and flipped it off. In the monitor, Huck Dubb was cursing and banging his rifle with the palm of his hand. Gerry heard his cell phone ring, and jerked it out of his pocket. It was Yolanda, calling from the house. He hit talk.
“I love you,” he said. “Call you right back.”
He killed the power and put the phone away. Then he jerked the door open and stepped outside the trailer. There was a small platform, then three steps to the pavement. Huck stood twenty feet away, not seeing him. He aimed at Huck’s chest and squeezed the trigger. The gun barked, and Huck spun like a top, the rifle flying out of his hands. Gerry watched it slide beneath a parked car and felt the weight of the world lift from his shoulders.
Huck fell against a car and brought his hand up to his head. Blood was spurting from his ear, and Gerry realized he’d winged him. He went down the steps and saw Huck start to back away. Gerry motioned for him to stop. Huck kept backing up.
“I’ll shoot you,” Gerry said.
The side of Huck’s face was sheeted in blood. Huck spit at Gerry.
“You killed my boys,” he said.
“You shouldn’t have sent them after me.”
“You a cop?”
Gerry shook his head. In the distance he could hear an approaching siren.
“Fuck you,” Huck said.
Huck did a one-eighty and took off at a dead run. Gerry aimed at his back. He started to squeeze the trigger, then hesitated. From the trailer he heard Lamar yelling at him to do it. He thought of the faces of the Dubb boys as he dumped the logs on them. He’d seen in their eyes the stark terror that accompanies the realization that your life is about to end. He didn’t want to see that look ever again, and lowered his arm.
“Aw, shit,” he heard Lamar say.
Two ambulances and half the Gulfport police force showed up a minute later. A posse of cops went to hunt down Huck, while the three wounded men were put on gurneys and taken to the hospital. Gerry rode in the ambulance with Lamar.
“You should’ve shot him,” Lamar said.
“You ever kill anyone before?” Gerry asked him.
Lamar shook his head.
“Then shut up,” he said.
Gerry turned his eyes away as a medic treated Lamar’s wound. He felt something being pressed into his hand, and looked down to see Lamar handing him his cell phone.
“Call Isabelle, would you? Tell her what happened.”
Gerry made the call for him. Isabelle had already heard the news. The employees who they suspected of cheating were being rounded up. She made Gerry put Lamar on. He put the phone next to the big man’s lips and saw him whisper something to her, then say good-bye. Gerry put the phone back to his own mouth. “Isabelle, I need you to do something for me.” To Lamar he said, “Which blackjack table was I watching before?”
“Table seventeen.”
“Isabelle, make sure you confiscate the trash can beneath blackjack table seventeen. It will be filled with used tissues.”
She agreed, and the line went dead. He saw Lamar smile at him.
“Used tissues?”
“That’s right.”
“Still want to win that bet, huh?”
“Twenty bucks is twenty bucks,” Gerry said.
32
Valentine was still steaming over Mary Alice’s remark when Bill Higgins called him late Sunday afternoon. She’d made him feel absolutely rotten, and he’d known her exactly one day. Women were amazing that way, the power they wielded far greater than they knew.
“You forget about me?” Bill asked.
Just what he needed. More guilt. No, he hadn’t forgotten about Bill. He just didn’t have anything solid to tell him. He now remembered why he liked to keep his cell phone turned off. It allowed him to lead a normal life.
“I’m on the case,” Valentine said. “Casino bosses biting at your heels?”
“They’re calling me on the carpet tomorrow afternoon,” Bill said.
“I thought your meeting wasn’t until Friday.”
“So did I. The Associated Press won’t leave the story alone. They’re hounding the mayor’s office and the convention and visitors bureau for closure. Did you know that Ricky Smith hired a public relations firm in New York?”
“With whose money?”
“That’s what I’d like to know.”
Valentine was sitting on the rocker on the screened porch of his house, staring at the forest. In Florida, a forest was another name for an overgrown swamp; here, it was maples and pines and vegetation that didn’t have alligators hiding behind it. “My gut tells me Ricky Smith is as crooked as a corkscrew,” he said. “Problem is, I can’t prove it.”
Bill breathed heavily into the phone. He’d worked for the Gaming Control Board for thirty years; finding another job at this stage of his life wouldn’t be easy. He said, “I stumbled upon something strange earlier.”
“What’s that?”
“The night Ricky beat the Mint, I interviewed all the floor people. Everything seemed on the square. It occurred to me that I hadn’t talked to anyone in the surveillance control room. I read their log sheets, and no one reported anything suspicious while Ricky was winning, so I didn’t take it any further. But I figured, what the hell, I should talk to these folks, feel them out.”
“And you found something.”
“Yeah. There were two techs watching the craps table. They got a call from the floor ten minutes before Ricky started to roll the dice. A floor manager thought two rail birds at the table might be stealing other players’ chips.”
Rail birds were bystanders who watched the action but never played. Casino people hated them, but there was no way to get rid of them. It was a free country.
“The rail birds were standing at opposite ends of the table,” Bill went on. “The techs watched them. They didn’t see any stealing, but you know, that stuff is almost invisible.”
“Sure.”
“So one of the techs calls downstairs and gets a cocktail waitress to approach them. She tells them that if they’re staying in the hotel, she’ll get them free drinks. They said yes and volunteered their names. She called upstairs and passed the names to the techs. They contacted the police and the GCB to check if either had a criminal
