17. Ari
CHAPTER 17
ARI
S ix p.m. on Friday. Eight days into the case, and I had little to show for my efforts, so the last thing I needed was another call from Jerry. I had nothing to tell her. In fact, I’d spent this morning catching up on background checks for AnyBet while Digby Rennick alternately journeyed through the Galaxy’s accounting records and raked the Zen garden in his office. Every time he took a break to walk barefoot through the gravel, my teeth ground of their own accord, but I couldn’t complain, not when he’d stayed in the office late just to help me out. Lila was there too, keeping us both hydrated and making sure we had plenty of snacks.
Erin’s case wasn’t going anywhere either. Now that she could track Kelsey’s phone, there was no need for such a tight surveillance net, and on Thursday, Kelsey had only left the Neptune to go to work. Today, she hadn’t left the hotel at all.
Reluctantly, I answered Jerry’s call. Better to get the “update” over with.
“Hi, I know you’re busy, so I’ll tell you right now—there haven’t been any further developments since the last time we spoke. We’re kind of running out of leads here.”
“I have a development.”
“You do?”
“We’re calling him T-Rex at the moment.”
“T-Rex? He’s a…dinosaur?”
“No, a human asshole and a second-rate thug. Actually, no, more of a tenth-rate thug. A hundredth-rate. We caught him this morning at the Sunrise Diner. Apparently, he was meant to give me a message about this loan we can’t find, but his delivery left something to be desired. I’ll have to get back to you on his real name.”
Well, damn.
“What did you do? March him out with a gun to his back?”
“You’ve been watching far too many movies. We wheeled him out on a stretcher.”
“A stretcher?” I groaned. “Is he dead?”
“Not yet.”
“Then where is he?”
“In a holding cell. The previous owner of the house left a handy set of shackles in the basement.”
Honestly, I didn’t want to know.
“Did he tell you anything useful?”
“Yes and no. He doesn’t know who hired him—we think he was responsible for the Lucy incident as well, by the way—but he did tell us how he was hired.”
“And?”
“Our old friend Amber Road. He checked out the ‘wanted ads’ and agreed to act as a messenger for five thousand bucks.”
Oh, hell. Amber Road was the dark web equivalent of eBay, but now it seemed they’d served up a side of indeed.com too. I’d first stumbled across the site on a previous case, one Jerry had also been involved in, and it was a clusterfuck of depravity. Drugs, weapons, trafficking… And now thugs for hire.
I groaned again.
“Don’t be like that. We had so much fun the last time.” Jerry and I, we had very different ideas of fun. “Anyhow, T-Rex answered an ad, and the client sent him a photo of me and instructions on what to say. Alexa is obviously sifting through listings on Amber Road as we speak, but I’d put money on the fact that the other shitbirds were hired the same way.”
“So what should we do now?”
“We can probably cancel the hookers. The surveillance, I mean, not actually cancel them. The target is clearly Cole, and he’s flying to San Gallicano the day after tomorrow. I doubt the Amber Road idiots will follow him there. It’s unlikely they’ll even realise he’s left the country.”
“What if they’re watching his house? Or the hotel?”
“There’s nobody watching his house, not constantly. We’re confident of that. And he doesn’t plan to tell the staff at the hotel that he’s overseas. He’s worried his absence would torpedo morale—Captain deserting the sinking ship and all that.”
“Won’t they notice he isn’t there?”
“Officially, he’s going to be working from home with a bout of whooping cough. Only his PA and the general manager know the truth. We’ll keep up the surveillance from the Johansen property, but for now, the case is mostly in Alexa’s hands.”
“You want me to stay in Vegas?”
“Do you have anywhere else you need to be?”
“Need to be? No. Want to be? Of course.”
“Either Alexa will crack this in a week or she won’t crack it at all. Don’t tell her I said that. The ‘won’t crack it at all’ part, I mean—she hates it when people doubt her abilities. ”
“My lips are sealed.” Then curiosity got the better of me. “Does that happen often? Her not cracking things?”
She’d always struck me as the oracle—saw everything, knew everything.
“Often? No. Occasionally? Yes. Alexa knows a fuck of a lot about technology but not so much about people. And people aren’t always predictable.” Wasn’t that the truth? “We should catch up tomorrow. I’m planning to have another chat with T-Rex later tonight to see if I can shoehorn any more useful snippets out of him.”
“Tell me you won’t be using an actual shoehorn?”
“Huh. I never considered that. Guess it could work.”
I should have kept my mouth shut. I didn’t want to be responsible for a man getting his rectum stitched back together, even if that man was a second-rate thug.
“Breakfast tomorrow?” I asked.
“Better make it lunch. I need to get a new cast in the morning.”
“What happened to the old one?”
“It broke.”
“How did you break a cast? I thought those 3D-printed ones were strong?”
“On T-Rex’s face. After he fell to his knees and realised he’d made a terrible mistake.”
Oh. Now I wished I’d never asked.
“Spare me the details. Time and place?”
“One p.m. I’ll book a meeting room at the Black Diamond—go to the desk and tell them you’re from Church Group.”
Church Group? I’d heard that name before. Prior to Alexa installing an app on my phone, I’d called her answering service, and that was the name they gave.
“What’s Church Group?”
“Just a name we use sometimes.”
Why had they chosen that particular name? Tempted though I was to ask, I figured Jerry would either lie or dodge the question, so I didn’t bother.
“I’ll be there.”
Jerry hung up without another word. She and Alexa had clearly been to the same school of etiquette.
“Goodbye to you too.”