“You think she’ll fall for that bullshit?”
“She will if you say it right. It’s all about the delivery, and the conviction in your voice.”
“Sounds risky, you ask me.”
Every job he’d ever pulled was risky; without the risk, there was no reward. He poked the larger man in the chest so hard that it made Ike’s eyes bulge. Ike wasn’t used to someone half his size pushing him around, and it showed.
“It’s called the big time. The question is, are you guys ready to play?”
“I’m ready,” Ike said.
“Me, too,” T-Bird said.
“Good. I need two things from you. First go downstairs, and buy a few thousand in chips from the cage, and put them in my gym bag. My guy is going to need them so he can set the molds correctly. Then get your car, and bring it around so I can get out of here.”
“You want to use our car?” Ike asked.
“If I drive my own car out of here, I might get spotted. Better to take yours.”
“Well, all right. Our ride’s a refurbished ’68 Camaro. Just go easy on the gas. There’s a tiger under the hood.”
“I’ll remember that. Use the money you took from my safe to buy the chips from the cage. My guy will want to see lots of them. He claims that it makes counterfeiting easier.”
“I thought that was our money,” T-Bird objected.
“It’s our money, and we need it to pull this thing off. By the way, I took my jewelry out of the gym bag and hid it. That wasn’t part of our deal.”
“That Rolex with the diamonds was mine,” T-Bird said, clearly upset. “It went perfect with my Super Bowl ring.”
“You can buy yourself a watch with your share of the haul. Now give me your cell phone numbers so I can get a hold of you.”
The punishers gave him their cell numbers, which he entered into his Droid’s memory bank. Two nights ago, as he was getting the crap beat out of him, he’d promised himself he’d pay Ike and T-Bird back. Revenge was sweet, especially when the other guys didn’t see it coming.
“Our car’s parked in the employee garage,” Ike said. “We’ll bring it around to the rear exit. It’s usually pretty quiet this time of day.”
“I’ll be waiting,” Billy said.
THIRTY-FOUR
He drove to Gabe’s place in the punishers’ vintage ‘68 Camaro. Vegas was the pits during the day, and he kept his eyes on the road. Without a million watts of neon to light the place up, it was just another tourist town, the sandblasted hotels showing every dimple and crack.
The Nike gym bag sat on the passenger seat. As instructed, T-Bird had visited the cage and purchased several thousand dollars of chips, from lowly five-dollar red chips to coveted five-hundred-dollar purple chips. Gabe would need these to make his knock-offs. Not just to duplicate the look and color, but also the feel and weight, which varied from casino to casino.
The Strip ended and the highway turned straight and uninteresting. Gabe’s subdivision was dead ahead, with its manicured lawns and indistinguishable track houses, where nothing exciting ever went on. He couldn’t imagine living in these surroundings. Not in a thousand years.
A parade of cars was parked in front of Gabe’s house: Misty’s Mercedes, Pepper’s Beamer, Cory and Morris’s Infiniti, and Travis’s Windstar. His crew was having a meeting, and he hadn’t been invited. He didn’t have a problem if his crew got together socially, but the fact that Travis was present-Travis who never left home except for work-told Billy this wasn’t a book club meeting. They were talking business without the boss.
He parked and cut the engine. He needed to handle this in steps. Step one: find out who the ringleader was and toss his sorry ass on the street. Step two: sit down with the others and read the riot act to them. He didn’t need them, but they sure as hell needed him.
He stared at the house while working up the courage to confront them. The sheers in the front window fluttered, and a man’s face materialized behind the glass. Suntanned, big jawed.
Travis.
He punched the steering wheel. Travis had been challenging him lately, and he’d passed it off to the fact that Travis had gotten married and now answered to a higher authority. Wrong. Travis was trying to take over and had called everyone to Gabe’s house while Billy was dealing with the mess at Galaxy. The big man had betrayed him.
He shouldn’t have been as upset as he was. Part of running a crew was dealing with problems: members got sick, divorced, thrown in jail, all the usual fun stuff. There wasn’t anything he couldn’t handle except having a knife stuck in his back.
The face in the window disappeared. He could remember recruiting Travis as if it were yesterday. Travis had been drowning in debt, with a house in foreclosure and a car about to be repossessed. Within six months of joining his crew, Travis had been back on his feet, the wolves no longer at his door. And this is how the bastard repays me.
He got out and unlocked the Camaro’s trunk. Pulling up a piece of carpet that covered the spare, he grabbed a tire iron. It felt nice and firm in his hand.
His heart was pounding as he banged on Gabe’s front door. To his surprise, no one answered. “Come on, you chickenshits, open up.”
Nothing. In a rage, he called Gabe’s number on his cell phone and got voice mail. “It’s me. I’m standing outside your front door. Let me in, goddamn it.”
When Gabe didn’t call him back, he hopped off the stoop and pressed his face to the front window, straining to see inside the furniture-less house. His view went straight to the family room in the rear. A group of people was moving through a slider onto the lanai, trying to escape. Bad thoughts raced through his head. Had his crew taken a vote and decided to dump him? Fuckers.
He marched around the side of the house, clutching the tire iron. A little voice was telling him to turn around, nothing would be accomplished by violence. A bigger voice was saying go ahead, break some bones, you stuck your neck out for these people, made them lots of money, and this is how they thank you, the dirty rat bastards.
Coming around the house, he hit the brakes. His crew was on the lawn, trying to scale the picket fence in the back of Gabe’s property. Misty and Pepper had on the skintight exercise outfits that they wore for Pilates, while Cory and Morris appeared to have just rolled out of bed, their boyish faces unshaven, hair uncombed. Gabe was a different story: beat up, face bloodied, his right leg hurting. Travis had a gun and was saying, “Hurry, we’ve got to get out of here.”
A hard object dropped in the pit of his stomach. He’d read the whole situation wrong. Something else was going on here; his crew hadn’t finked on him. Ashamed at his miscalculation, he tossed the tire iron into the bushes.
“Hey, guys, what’s up?” he called out.
Travis spun around and took aim. Billy’s bowels loosened, and he raised his arms into the air.
“Don’t shoot.”
“Billy-Jesus Christ, is that you?” Travis asked.
“No, it’s his evil twin brother. Stop aiming that gun at me, will you?”
The others had assembled behind Travis. The big man lowered his weapon and pointed it at the ground. “Was that you in the pimp mobile out front?”
“Yeah, that was me.”
“You scared the shit out of us. Some guys are after Gabe. We thought it was them.”
“Tony G’s boys?”
“Yeah. He’s into them real deep.”
He saw it clearly now, most of it, anyway. Tony G had sent his enforcers to put the heavy on Gabe. Hurt and bleeding, Gabe had called the crew, being they were the only friends he had, and the crew had dropped what they were doing and come to Gabe’s rescue, because that was what friends did. Billy had been left out because his crew knew he was at Galaxy, dealing with his own problems. No one had betrayed him. It was all good.