Vegas Knights (10 page)

  "Hey," I said, "the water's fine!"

  Bill waved me off like I was crazy. Then he spun around and stared at something coming from behind him. Terrified, he twisted back around and charged across the skylights until he came to a stop right over the center of the pool.

  I heard something crack above him, and I feared it might be the skylight cracking. Then I recognized the sound as that of a muffled gunshot – more than one, actually.

  Bill dropped through the skylight like he'd stepped off of a high-dive platform. He drew himself up into a sphere and slammed into the water in a picture-perfect cannonball.

  I raced around to the edge of the pool closest to where Bill had landed, and I called out to him as he emerged from the water. He swam over to me with clean, steady strokes and pulled himself out of the pool.

  "They came right after me," he said. "They'll be here any second too."

  I looked back up at the skylight and saw three armed men glaring down at us through the glass. If there hadn't been any other people around, I have no doubt that they would have started shooting at us through the skylights, collateral property damage be damned.

  I spotted an emergency exit not too far off – a glass door set in the glass walls that surrounded the pool room – and charged right for it. A red panel on it read, "Emergency Exit Only. Alarm Will Sound."

  I didn't think another alarm would make our situation any worse. I slammed into the panel and flung the door wide.

  Bill and I raced out into the cool, desert night. The noise of the traffic on Las Vegas Boulevard sounded like a roar after the relative quiet inside the hotel. I'd heard it for a second or two while I fell from the restaurant into the pool, but I'd been too busy wailing in fear to listen to it.

  "Head for the street!" Bill said. "Don't go near the entrance!"

  I saw what he meant. The curve of the driveway outside the pool would lead us toward the entrance of the casino, where we'd be sure to find plenty of security cameras and guards keeping an eye out for us.

  I hesitated as I came up against a tall hedge that cut us off from the street, not knowing if I should try to go around or through it. Stopping for that instant reminded me that I'd lost one of my shoes to the Bolthole's service entrance, and I cursed the waste of the money I'd spent on the damned things.

  Then I heard a burst of gunfire and the sound of bullets zipping past me.

  I dove straight through the bushes, not bothering to concentrate on passing through them first. The branches scratched and tore at me, and I let them tear the chef's uniform from me as I went. I didn't even feel the scrapes right then. I had too much adrenaline pumping through me to worry about such things.

  Bill and I burst through the bushes and emerged onto the sidewalk outside the casino, well south of the entrance. We turned to the right and sprinted down the pavement as fast as we could. Not wanting the Bootleggers security team to follow us right back to our hotel room, we ducked into Circus Circus and tried to act as uninteresting as a couple of soaking wet and bloodied young men with guns in their pockets could manage.

  Mostly we kept moving. We speed-walked through the throngs in the carnival area. The place thrummed with conversations and cries of triumph and grief at the carnival games and of astonishment at the acrobats swinging and spinning high overhead.

  I had no interest in any of it. I kept my eyes focused forward, ignoring the decades' worth of attractions designed to grab my attention and draw me in. I hunted for a way out, trusting my instincts and my desperation to show me the right path out of the place.

  Bill and I wove through the casino – never stopping for an instant – until we found our way into the parking structure that stood between Circus Circus and Revolutions. From there, we took the stairs up to the fourth floor and crossed through the structure. On the other side, we took the elevator to the mezzanine level of Revolutions, which gave us a clear shot to the hotel tower's bank of elevators without having to set foot on the casino's main floor.

  A couple of young ladies – both very blonde and Californian – were already in the elevator when Bill and I staggered into it. They giggled as we entered, then gasped when they got a closer look at us.

  Under any other circumstances, Bill would have been hitting on them right away. As it was, he didn't spare them more than a passing glance. We had other things on our mind.

  "What happened to you two?" the taller of the two girls asked.

  I turned to Bill. "What's the first rule of Fight Club?"

  Bill's lips curled into a vicious smile. "You don't talk about Fight Club."

  The women giggled the entire way until we reached our floor and stumbled out of their lives.

  When we got into the room, I stripped off my torn and bloodied jacket and shirt, then grabbed a hand towel and wrapped it around the groove the bullet had sliced through my arm. The wound had stopped bleeding freely, but it still oozed a bit. The hurt had turned from a white-hot burn to a dull ache.

  Bill collapsed on his bed. "What are we going to do?"

  "Pack," I said. "We're getting the hell out of here."

  "We can't just leave," he said. "What about all those chips in your pockets?"

  I kicked off my one remaining shoe, then took off my pants and emptied the pockets onto my bed. The silenced gun and my smartphone sat there on a bed of black and purple chips worth thousands of dollars, maybe enough for a year's tuition. I wanted to take the whole mess and throw it out the window. If the windows actually opened this high up, I might have done it.

  "The money doesn't do us any good if we're too dead to spend it," I said.

  I grabbed a fresh change of clothes from my Army surplus duffel bag and got dressed while Bill did the same. As I was tying my old shoes back on my feet, Bill's phone chirped. He had an incoming text.

  "Surprised it still works," Bill said as he scooped his phone from the dresser on which he'd laid it.

  His eyes grew wide as he read the message. "Oh, shit," he said. "This is really bad." He held up the phone to show me.

  It read: "Heard you blew it. Meet me at the Thunderbird if you need help. Powi."

  "Who the hell's Powi?" he said.

  "That's the woman who carried you back here this morning."

  "Right." A smile started to creep over his lips, but he frowned it back down. "How the hell'd she get my number?" he asked.

  "You were passed out in her casino for hours," I said. "She had plenty of time to figure it out. That's not the worst part though."

  Bill nodded. "If she knows about what just happened in Bootleggers, then how many other people know too?"

  I shook my head. "The real question is how many people know where we are?"

  I jumped up and started shoving everything I owned into my duffel bag, including my laptop. Bill did the same with his things.

  When I was done, I stuffed my phone in my pocket, hoping it still worked, and I shoved the silenced pistol in the other. Then I scooped up the chips. "Hold out your bracelet," I said to Bill.

  He'd already transferred it to the pocket of his dry pants. He pulled it out and held it up in front of me. I peered inside of it and saw nothing but blackness.

  "Hold on," Bill said.

  His hand went in through the bracelet but disappeared rather than coming out the other side. He fiddled around with something for a moment, then pulled his hand back out. It was whole.

  I looked into the hole again. Bill had turned on an LED lightstick inside the pocket, so now I could see the guns and bullets he'd stored there, along with a thick wad of cash. I took the chips in my hands and poured them into the hole. Just like his hand, they failed to appear on the other side.

  "Don't lose that," I said.

  "Believe me, I won't," Bill said. "Even if we can't cash those chips in now, I haven't given up on them yet. Maybe we can find someone else to do it for us."

  I opened my mouth to point out that Bill needed to keep breathing a lot more than he needed to add to his bankroll. Before I could speak, the phone rang. It wasn't either of ours. It was the hotel phone.

  Bill and I stared at the phone as it continued to ring, neither of us moving toward it.

  "Who knows we're here?" I asked.

  "No one. Why would I give out our hotel room's number. We have cell phones."

  "Don't answer it."

  "Maybe it's a wrong number." Bill moved toward the handset.

  "Seriously. Don't."

  Bill rolled his eyes at me. "What? Are they going to zap me right through the phone line?"

  I shrugged. "Maybe. If we learned anything about magic today, it's how little Professor Ultman really taught us."

  The phone kept ringing and would not stop. I zipped up my duffel bag and threw it over my shoulders, wearing the strap bandolier style. Bill kept staring at the phone like it might leap off the table between our beds and bite him.

  Finally, he broke. He snatched the receiver up and barked into it. "What?"

  Bill held the receiver out so we could both hear the voice of the woman on the other end. "Mr Teach? Or Mr Lafitte? There's someone who would like to talk with you."

  "We're just on our way out the door," Bill said. "Who is it?"

  "They say they're friends of yours."

  I clutched my chest. We had no friends in Vegas that we knew of. Had someone from the dorm back in Ann Arbor come down for spring break too and spotted us here? I knew better than that, but my brain kept clutching at any straws within reach.

  "Tell them we'll be right down," Bill said. "We'll meet them in the front lobby."

  "Thank you, sir. I'll let them know."

  Bill hung up the phone.

  "We're going to meet them?" I couldn't believe he'd set up an appointment with whoever was looking for us.

  "Don't be silly," he said. "We're heading for the fire stairs and slipping out the back." Now that he was dressed in fresh clothes and didn't have someone pointing a gun at him or ready to break his legs, Bill seemed much more in control, more like the guy who'd talked me into coming out to give this mad scheme of his a shot in the first place.

  "All right," I said. "Let's go."

  I walked to the door and held it open while Bill grabbed his black leather duffel bag and slung it over his shoulder. I glanced down the curved corridor, toward the bank of elevators that ran down the revolving building's central shaft. A trio of grim men in dark suits stepped from the stable platform onto the slowly spinning hallway and turned toward me.

 

 

CHAPTER ELEVEN
 

I swung back into the room and slammed the door shut. "They're here," I said. "Three guys coming up the hallway right now."

  "Maybe they're heading for their room," said Bill. Even as the words left his lips, I could see that hope die on his face.

  I threw the deadbolt and the security chain on the door. Meanwhile Bill grabbed one of the chairs from the room's table and jammed it up underneath the doorknob. I had no idea if it would do any good at all, but it made me feel better to try.

  "What are we going to do?" I said in a whisper.

  Bill raced to the window. "We can't just jump out of here," he said. "We're on the thirty-third floor."

  The room had turned around so that we could see the north side of the Strip now. Bootleggers' art deco tower stabbed into the sky before us, not even a block away.

  "Maybe we could fly," Bill said. "Aren't magicians supposed to be able to fly?"

  "Professor Ultman only got as far as levitation with us," I said. "It's not the same thing."

  "It's the same principle, though, right?"

  "I am not leaping out of that window on the off chance that we might figure out a way to adapt that principle before we smack into the pavement."

  "I suppose you've got a better idea?"

  Someone knocked at the door. Bill and I both jumped in surprise.

  "Security!" a deep voice behind the door announced. "We need to speak with you immediately."

  "Guess they didn't feel like waiting in the lobby," Bill said.

  "We need to go," I said, glancing around. "If it's not the window, then some way else."

  "Mr Lafitte! Mr Teach!" the voice said, growing firmer. "We know you're in there. Please open up!"

  "Can't we just hide until they go away?" asked Bill.

  "Do you really think that's going to work?"

  I heard a key card slip into the lock, which clicked open. A regular key went into the deadbolt and threw it back too.

  "We have to go," I said. "Now." I glanced around the room, hoping we'd grabbed everything we needed. There would be no coming back.

  "Mr Lafitte! Mr Teach!" the voice said. "We are armed, and we are coming in!"

  "Damn it," Bill said. "I can't believe this. It wasn't supposed to work out like this."

  I grabbed him by the shoulder. Something heavy hit the door. The chair under the door held, but I heard it start to splinter. It wouldn't last much longer.

  I leaned down so I could peer up into Bill's eyes as he stared at the floor below us. "Ready, brother?" I asked. "You gotta be ready now."

  Sweat dripped from his brow. He didn't look at me. He just nodded.

  Something heavy hit the door again. The chair broke into kindling, and the security chain popped off its mooring.

  The man who'd shouldered down the door came stumbling through and landed on his knees. The two other men stormed through behind them, their guns leveled straight at us.

  "Freeze!" they said together.

  "Now!" I said. With a thought, the floor beneath us felt as substantial as the wind, and we fell straight through it, bullets blasting through the air where we had just been.