“You got to give me something,” Becker told him, and all the rage he felt against the bastards that had double-crossed him and put him in this spot and cheated him out of his share of that other money, all of that rage made him bear down on this one, who finally broke and said, “Some thing else.”
“What? Another robbery? More money?”
“Yes.”
“Quick.”
“All knee. New. York. Cath
“
“What?”
“Cath man. Wan ted me.”
“For a heist. What heist? Quick!”
Howell’s mouth opened again, but this time a great sack of blood came out, and burst down the front of the man, dark red and reeking, the heat of it making Becker recoil.
He hadn’t known the man was that close to death. He hadn’t intended to kill him, and certainly not before he got all his answers, which made him feel stupid and inadequate and a failure then, and still did now. But then, as the man in the Cadillac’s last breath came out full of blood, here came the Federals, leaping and sliding down the hill in their dark blue vinyl coats with the big yellow letters on the back, grabbing for holds one-handed, their machine pistols aimed upward at the sky.
Becker stepped back from the Cadillac. He called up to them, “Take your time. They’re gone. And so is this one.”
But Howell had come through after all, hadn’t he? Becker had seen no choice but to follow through on Howell’s lead, because he didn’t have anything else, and it had all worked out. Hilliard Cathman. Then the one called Parker. Then the rest of them. Then the big white boat on the water, full of money, which hadto be what they were here for.
It would be dark when they got back with the cash, so no need to hide the pickup. He left it between two of the cabins that weren’t in use, then walked into the one they’d occupied. There was no locking these places, and they hadn’t bothered to try, so Becker just opened the door and walked in.
Plenty of time. He walked through the place, saw they’d left nothing personal at all, saw they’d taken all the guns but left a few of the maps. He went into the kitchen and opened the refrigerator and there was beer in there, but he wouldn’t be drinking anything until after. He’d need to be at his best tonight.
Gatorade, a big bottle of it, pale green. That was probably the big one. Kill him first. Kill the girl last.
Becker carried the Gatorade and a glass into the living room, turned on the television set, sat down. He looked at the picture when it came up, and abruptly laughed. The damn thing was black and white.
2
The reason Susan Cahill was so good at handling VIPs was that she understood the question of sex. With female VIPs you were discreetly hot tamales together under the skin, each acknowledging and admiring the allure of the other, becoming confidants and co-conspirators in the ongoing war of women to carve out a place for themselves in a male-dominated world, armed with nothing more than nerve and sex appeal. It worked; with the baggiest old crone, it still worked.
As for the male VIPs, they were even simpler. You turned on a little sex, a few smiles, a sidelong look or two, some body stretching. Enough to keep their minds focused, but not enough that anybody would lose their dignity. It was a nice tightrope to walk, and by now Susan could do it blindfolded.
She’d started, twelve years ago, as a flight attendant, where the most important skill you could learn, or be born with, was the non-aggressive manipulation of other human beings. She’d been very good at the job, keeping everybody happy at thirty-one thousand feet, and she’d also been very good-looking, and soon she was assigned to one of the choice transatlantic routes, Chicago-Milan. Her love affairs were with pilots or with amusing Italian businessmen. She made decent money, she had a nice high-rise apartment in the Loop overlooking Lake Michigan, she was having a good time, and then she made the one mistake. She’d seen others do it, and knew they were wrong, and knew it was stupid, and yet she did it herself. She fell in love with a passenger.
A banker, named Culver, based in Chicago. She fell in love with him, and took vacations with him, and said yes when he asked her to marry him, and quit the airline to spend more time with him, and then he said they’d be getting together forever just as soon as his divorce came through, which was the first she’d heard there already was a Mrs. Culver. Of course there would never be a divorce, and of course he would be prepared to keep her set up in a much better apartment in the same building, and of course there was a hiring freeze at the airline when she asked for her old job back.
Well, we learn from our mistakes. Susan had had this current job, customer relations with Avenue Resorts, for three years now, and she firmly understood that her job was notto have relations with the customers, so she didn’t. She knew that Avenue Resorts, even though its management was clean enough to pass any state gaming commission inspection, was mobbed up in some deep echelon of its command, but the fact of the mob didn’t have anything to do with her work and didn’t impinge on her in any way. The people of Avenue appreciated her, and she appreciated them, and that was that.
For three years she’d enjoyed her nice little house along the canal outside Biloxi, and she was sure she’d enjoy the nice house she’d just bought along the river south of Saratoga Springs, home of the famous racecourse, less than an hour commute from the boat. Mr. Culver the banker had tried to clip the airline attendant’s wings, but it hadn’t worked. And it wasn’t going to work, ever again.
Take Assemblyman Kotkind. At first, he’d tried to be grumpy, insisting on being met on the pier and escorted aboard, defiantly announcing the presence of his armed “aides,” two state cops in civvies, all muscle and gun, no brain. She’d rolled with the initial punches, turned up the sex just a little bit, and in no time at all Assemblyman Kotkind was giving her sidelong looks of his own and having a little trouble concentrating on the job at hand.
Which was, she knew, what the politicians call repositioning. When a question is still undecided, a politician can have any opinion at all on the subject, but once the matter is settled, there’s only one place for a politician to be: with the majority. Whatever Assemblyman Kotkind might personally think about legal gambling, he’d been publicly opposed to it, probably because that played well in his district, but now legal gambling was a fact, and the sky had not fallen, and it was time for Assemblyman Kotkind to be retroactively judicious.
On the other side, it was very much in Avenue’s interests to butter up this assemblyman, to help him in his effort to switch horses in midstream without getting wet. As it says in the Bible, there’s more joy when we get one to switch over to us than there is for the ninety-nine we’ve already got in our pocket. Therefore, “I am yours to command,” Susan told the assemblyman, with her most professional smile.
“I just want to see for myself what the attraction is here,” the assemblyman said, looking at the front of her blouse. He was short enough to do that without being really obvious about it.
She took a deep breath, and turned slightly into profile, also not really being obvious about it. “That’s what we’re here for,” she assured him. “You look us over as much as you want. Avenue Resorts wants you to see everything on this ship.”
“Good,” the assemblyman said, and blinked.
“And you’ll findthis way, Mister Assemblyman our first consideration is always safety.”
He gave her a different kind of look, considerably more jaundiced. “Not money?”
She laughed lightly. “That’s our second consideration,” she said. “Safety first, profit second. We’ll take this elevator up to the sundeck, you’ll get a better idea of what’s happening.”