Vegas Knights (11 page)

  The room we landed in was dark, but the lights of the Strip poured in through the open curtains. Bill had fallen to his knees. I pulled him back up.

  "We made it," I said. "You all right?"

  He gulped and nodded. "That was too close."

  "Get ready," I said. "We got to do it again."

  He clutched my arm. "No! Why can't we just run to the end of the hallway and take the stairs?"

  "They're going to be down here in just a few seconds. They have keys to every room in the entire complex, and there are cameras in every part of the place except inside the rooms." I glanced around. "And I'm not even so sure about that."

  I pulled Bill off my arm. "We need to take the most direct way down. That's straight through the floors until we reach the lobby. Then we run like hell."

  "All right," Bill said, wiping the sweat from his face. "It worked just fine. I'm starting to get used to this. We'll make it. We can do this."

  Someone pounded on the door.

  I grabbed Bill, and we slipped through the floor into the room below. It was dark and empty too.

  "How the hell did they get down there so fast?" Bill said, staring up at the ceiling. "Are they cheating?"

  "We're not just running from three guys." I ignored Bill's unspoken question: were the people chasing us using magic too? "It's the hotel's entire security staff. Their whole system."

  Bill shuddered. "I'm sorry, Jackson. I'm sorry I ever got us into this."

  "Don't even start." I grabbed his shoulder again. "I'm a big boy. I make my own decisions, and I went along with it. Now, let's get out of it."

  Bill took a moment to steady himself, then nodded. We fell through the floor again.

  At that time of night, most of the rooms were empty. Either the hotel hadn't been able to fill them or the people who were staying there were out on the town, hitting the tables, restaurants, shows, or clubs.

  Fearing I'd lose track of where we were, I started counting the floor numbers out loud every time we reached a new one. As I remembered from the elevator buttons, there wasn't a second floor in this part of the complex. The ceilings on the first floor had to be twenty feet high, and I didn't want to fall that far and wind up breaking my legs in the lobby.

  Everything went perfectly most of the way.

  "Thirteen!" I shouted as we slipped down from the fourteenth floor.

  The room wasn't empty. As my head slipped through the floor, I saw that the lights were on, and I knew we had trouble. Bill and I landed on top of the room's table, which someone had moved over from where it had been in every other room on the way down.

  Bill slipped off the side of the table and fell to the floor with a shout. I managed to keep my balance and landed in a crouch. I glanced around the room and saw a woman sitting straight up in the room's king-sized bed and gaping at me as she drew up her sheets to cover her nakedness. When she saw me gaping back at her, she screamed.

  The ear-piercing noise threw off my concentration. I put up my hands and said, "Hey, it's all right! We're just passing through. Sorry for the – ah, whatever – sliding through your ceiling. I'm sorry!"

  I looked for Bill, but he'd already disappeared through the floor. I was just about to do the same when someone tackled me from behind and dragged me off the table. I got a glimpse of an angry man wrapped in a towel before I fell over.

  I instinctively tried to slip through the table and the floor to get away, and it almost worked. No matter how much my trick might have shocked the man, he held on to my ankle with an iron grip that would not let go. While the rest of me passed through into the darkened room below, he kept a hold of my leg, keeping me from getting away clean.

  I wound up dangling into the room below, upside down, my foot still in the room above.

  Bill looked up and me and hollered in horror. "Oh my god!" he said. "You got stuck in the floor!"

  "No!" I shouted. "Some jackass has me by the foot and won't let go. I can't slip free!"

  "You can't phase through living things!" Bill said. "Not unless they let you."

  "Somehow, I don't think he's willing!" I said. I could feel the blood rushing to my head. I wondered how long I might have before I passed out – and what the man holding on to my leg must be thinking.

  I struggled with the man's grip, but I couldn't get any leverage to break free. If I turned solid, my leg would fuse with the concrete passing through it, and that would likely be the end of my non-existent track and field career.

  "Don't push on the ceiling!" Bill said, stepping away. "Kick him!"

  "How?"

  "Your body is still phased. Kick back up as hard as you can! Aim for your ankle!"

  I gave it a shot. I lined up my free foot and booted myself in the ankle as hard as I could.

  My shoe didn't connect with my trapped leg though. Instead it cracked into the fingers of the man holding onto me up above. That must have been enough to hurt him because an instant later my leg came free, and I fell to the floor below.

  I caught myself on my hands and rolled flat onto my front. The landing knocked the wind out of me for a second, and Bill was at my side before I could breathe again.

  "Are you all right?" he said. "Jackson!"

  I nodded as I gasped for air.

  "God, I thought you might be trapped in that ceiling until someone could come out and amputate your leg."

  The thought made me want to vomit, but my need to breathe superseded that. "I'm fine," I finally said. "Let's get going."

  "Sure," he said, helping me to my feet. "Just one question."

  "What's that?"

  "Just before we landed in that room, you yelled 'Thirteen,' right?"

  I didn't see where he wanted to go with that, but I nodded anyhow.

  He cleared his throat. "Does this hotel have a thirteenth floor?"

  I stared at him, then started laughing. He joined in, and we knelt there cackling on the floor, tears rolling from our eyes, until we were too weak to laugh any more.

  Once I caught my breath and wiped my eyes, I said, "I have no damn clue."

  Before Bill could respond, I heard someone shove a key card into the door. Without a word, we slipped through the floor again. I thought I heard someone curse at us as we left, but it was cut off too fast for me to be sure.

  "Eleven," I said as we hit the next floor.

  "Or maybe ten."

  I nodded to concede the point.

  "What are we going to do?" Bill said. "I don't want to fall 20 feet onto a marble floor."

  "Right now, we keep going. When we get to the fourth-maybe-third floor, I have an idea."

  We made it down the rest of the floors without any real problems. On the sixth-maybe-fifth floor, someone was in the room, sitting at the table and counting stacks of cash. He yelped in surprise as we appeared, but we didn't stick around long enough to see him do much more than that.

  "He's in for a big surprise when security storms his room," Bill said as we appeared in the room below.

  "If we're lucky, maybe it'll slow them down."

  Another jump down, and we were on the fourthmaybe-third floor. The room sat dark and empty.

  "So what's the plan?" Bill asked.

  "Lie down," I said. "Brace your legs against the floor."

  "I don't think we have that kind of relationship, Jackson."

  "Just do it," I said, and he did.

  I laid down with my waist over Bill's legs, then let myself go through the floor. My head and chest pitched forward into the room below, but Bill's frame kept me from falling straight through.

  The blazing lights blinded me for a moment and told me instantly that I'd been smart to look before I leaped. As my eyes cleared, I saw that I was hanging with my head and shoulders sticking down through the ceiling of the lobby, right over the antique paddy wagon that sat in the middle of it.

  I hauled myself back up. "We're good," I said. "Remember that old police van sitting in the middle of the lobby? We're right on top of it. We drop down here, and we can slip on down the front and charge for the exit."

  "Are you sure about that?" he asked. "I'd be surprised if they didn't have someone waiting for us near the doors. Look again."

  I thought he was being paranoid, but if there was ever a time for that, it was now. I leaned back down through the ceiling and craned my neck for a good look around.

  Sure enough, Bill had been right. Five men and women in dark suits stood near the exits, listening to someone squawking at them through their earpieces.

  I swung back up. "Good call. That way's screwed."

  I walked over to the window.

  "Any other ideas?" Bill asked. "If we take the stairs or the elevator, they've probably got those covered too."

  I looked out at the strip. We were facing the Thunderbird now, the ghostly blue mythic creature stabbing out from the front of the place's facade. Powi was there. She might be able to help if we could reach her.

  "Hey," Bill said, "look – a rooftop."

  I glanced down and saw that he was right. The window outside the room looked out over a broad expanse of roof that covered the vast casino floor out of which the revolving hotel tower rose.

  I gave Bill a fist bump. "Ready?"

  He nodded. Together, we took a running start at the window and leaped straight through it.

 
 

CHAPTER TWELVE
 

Getting down off the roof wasn't easy, but we managed it. Given everything else we'd been through that night, climbing down the part of the facade farthest from the front door wasn't hard. We wound up behind some of the bushes lining the casino's front. We hunkered down there and tried to figure out our next move.

  Then Bill's phone rang. He pulled it out of his pocket, looked at it, and swore. He turned it to show me the caller ID:
Powi
. I took it from him and thumbed it on.

  "You two are prime idiots."

  "Hi, Powi," I said. "Always great to hear from you. Now's not such a good time for a chat though."

  "So I gather. From what I hear, Gaviota has every spare security guard from Revolutions and Bootleggers combing the Strip for you. He's put out the word to every other house in the city. You're as good as dead."

  "Fine," I said. "In lieu of sending flowers to our funeral, please make a donation to the Prime Idiots Memorial Fund. Your dollars will help ensure no one ever makes the same mistakes we made again."

  Bill elbowed me to be quiet.

  "Do you want my help or not?" she asked.

  "What do you have in mind?"

  "Where are you?"

  "In the bushes off to the south side of the casino at Revolutions."

  "Can you see the post office from where you are?"

  I stuck my head up like a prairie dog poking out of the ground. "It's just to the southwest of us."

  "Sit pretty," she said. "I'll be there in a minute."

  I thumbed the phone off. Before I handed it back to Bill, I brought up Powi's number and memorized it.

  "Help is on the way," I said.

  Bill cocked his head at me. "Are you sure we can trust her?"

  I shrugged. "She had you knocked out cold in her place for hours, and she brought you back to the room and dumped you into a bed. That's about the best I think we can expect in Vegas."

  "Truth."

  A minute later, a red ragtop Mini Cooper with the roof and windows down zipped into the parking lot and cruised up right alongside our hiding spot. Bill and I glanced at each other, then burst out of the bushes, vaulted over the car's passenger side, and landed in the seats.

  "Drive!" I said.

  "Keep your heads down," Powi said, scowling at us both. She hit the gas, and seconds later we were rolling south on the Strip.

  "Is anyone following us?" I asked.

  Powi glanced in her rearview mirror. "Not that I can see at the moment, but if they're any good I wouldn't. Stay down."

  "Where the hell are we going?" Bill asked from the back seat.

  "Someplace safe. Relatively."

  We rolled past the Mirage, Caesar's Palace, and the Bellagio on our way to the south part of the Strip. When we reached New York, New York, we turned left on Tropicana and threaded our way between the MGM Grand and the Trop on our way east. For Powi, every light turned yellow as we approached it and shifted to red directly behind us. I couldn't tell if she was controlling the lights or was just so in tune with them that it amounted to the same thing.

  "This is the way we came in from the airport," I said.

  "I'm not taking you to the airport," she said. "At least not yet."

  We made it past the north side of the airport and beyond the edge of the Thomas and Mack Center on the edge of the UNLV campus. Powi turned off the main streets then and started to wind her way through the crazy quilt of small streets and tiny houses that made up the bulk of Las Vegas that sprawled in the dim edges of the brilliance thrown off from the Strip. Not too long later, I'd been totally turned around and had given up on figuring out exactly where we were. I figured as long as I could still see the blinding beacon stabbing out of the tip of the Luxor's pyramid of glossy black glass, I could still find my way back to the center of town if it came to that. Until that moment, safe or not, I was in Powi's hands.

  Powi slipped off the lit streets and into a dark, empty stretch of land that had been platted out for a residential subdivision. Empty streets snaked through the naked land, a barren stretch of undeveloped desert filled only with broken promises and shattered dreams.

  "Got some property you want to show us?" Bill asked. "Looks like a real ground-floor opportunity."