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  Darren

  Mabel felt an icy finger run down her spine. A contract on Tony’s life? She thought she was going to get sick, and snatched the phone off the desk. Her boss never kept his cell phone on, but Gerry did, and she punched in his number.

  Valentine and his son were standing by the pool behind Bronco’s house when Gerry’s cell phone rang. Gerry answered it, then handed the phone to his father.

  “Mabel needs to talk to you.”

  “Hey good looking, what’s up?” Valentine said into the phone.

  “You’re not going to believe the e-mail you just received.” She read the email Crawford had sent. “You need to stay away from Reno until the FBI finds out whose going to take this contract on your life.”

  Valentine stared at the desolate backyard. He should have been shocked, yet he wasn’t. He and Bronco had a history that was written in blood. One day, one of them was going to kill the other, and he had a feeling that day was about to come.

  “Maybe you’re right,” he said.

  “Of course I’m right. To be forewarned is to be forearmed.”

  He found himself nodding. Mabel, the voice of reason.

  “Okay,” he said.

  “Oh, Tony, I’m worried about you.”

  “Don’t be. Remember, I’ve got Gerry to protect me.”

  “Now you’re being funny. Please be careful.”

  “I will.” He thanked his neighbor and folded the phone. They went inside the house, and found Bill in the living room gathering evidence.

  “Change of plans. I’m not going to Reno to interview Bronco,” Valentine said.

  Bill looked confused. “How can you conduct this case, and not talk to our only suspect?”

  “Bronco’s trying to hire a hit man to kill me. I don’t want to go until I know who the hit man is. Make sense?”

  “Sure. Who tipped you off?”

  “A little bird.”

  “So what are you going to do?”

  “Switch to Plan B.”

  “Which is?”

  “I know an inmate in the Jean Correctional Facility for Women in Las Vegas,” Valentine said. “She sends me letters. In one, she described getting approached by a guy in a casino, who asked her to play a slot machine a certain way. She did, and won a jackpot. I think the guy who approached her was your bad agent.”

  Bill stared at him. “She’s actually met him?”

  “Yes. It was a few years ago. If I talk to her, I’m sure I can get a description.”

  Bill suddenly looked mad as hell, and Valentine guessed Bill was thinking they should have talked to Lucy Price first.

  “This woman’s had a hard life,” Valentine explained when they were in Bill’s car a few minutes later. “I didn’t want to implicate her in another crime if I didn’t have to. I know how the courts treat cheaters out here.”

  “You think even if she cooperated, we’d screw her?” Bill asked.

  “Name a cheater or an accomplice you haven’t screwed.”

  Bill shook his head and stared at the road.

  Chapter 12

  Jean Correctional Facility was situated on the north end of Las Vegas. The prison was a depressing complex of sandy brown buildings surrounded by eight-foot chain link fence topped with razor wire. Bill parked in the visitor lot and they got out. The sun was broiling hot, and felt like an oven.

  The prison’s main building was three stories high and resembled a school house. Bill showed his credentials to the receptionist, and the warden appeared in the reception area a few minutes later. Being the most powerful law enforcement agent in the state had its privileges, and the warden agreed to Bill’s request to bring Lucy Price to the visitor’s area as soon as she could be found. When the warden was gone, Bill said, “I guess you’d like to talk to this woman alone.”

  “That’s the only way she’s going to cooperate,” Valentine said.

  Bill and Gerry headed down the hallway toward a sign that said cafeteria. Stopping at the door, Gerry glanced back at his father.

  “Good luck, Pop.”

  Valentine went into the visitor’s room and took a seat behind a three-inch sheet of plexiglass used to keep prisoners and visitors apart. The room was empty, and he stared at the vacant seat on the other side of the glass. The last time he’d seen Lucy was the day she’d been sentenced. It had been one of the hardest days of his life. Through the plexiglass he saw a door open, and felt the air catch in his throat.

  Lucy entered the visitor’s room and sat down stiffly in the chair across from him. She wore a drab brown uniform, no make-up, and had her dark hair tied in a braid. Her face was filled with sadness. Despite the plainness of her appearance and her dark expression, there was no denying the affect she had upon him. To Valentine’s eyes, she appeared to be spun from light.

  “It was the letter,” she said. “That’s why you came.”

  He blinked, not understanding. “What are you talking about?”

  “Please don’t play games with me, Tony.”

  “I’m not playing games.”

  “The letter I sent last week. Don’t tell me you didn’t get it.”

  He shrugged helplessly. “No.”

  “Did you get any of my letters?”

  “Yes, of course.”

  “Did you read them?”

  “Yes, I read all of them. I still have them.”

  “But not the letter I sent last week.”

  Despite his advancing years, Valentine’s memory wasn’t fading. He shook his head.

  “Oh, for the love of Christ, then why are you here?” she said.

  “I need your help.”

  Lucy leaned forward, her breath fogging the plexiglass. She was a slender, fifty-two year old woman who reminded him more of his late wife than any female he’d ever met. Maybe that was why he’d fallen so helplessly in love with her.

  “I can’t help you, Tony,” she said. “I have a shrink inside the prison who I see every week. He wants me to stay away from you. He thinks you’re part of my problem. That’s what my letter said.”

  “I’m part of your problem?”

  Her eyes were glistening. “In a figurative sense, yes. You’re in the gambling business. I’m a degenerate gambler, and I’ve always been attracted to people in the business. Old boyfriends, my ex-husband, you. My shrink wants me to stop writing you, and break off our relationship.”

  Valentine leaned back in his chair. For some reason, he’d thought that Lucy would always be in his life, even if from a distance.

  “Forever?”

  She smiled like he’d made a joke. “You want to see me when I get out?”

  “Yes, of course.”

  “Then quit the casino business.”

  Lucy would be getting out in five years if she behaved herself. Maybe by then he’d be sick of catching cheaters, and be ready to retire.

  “All right,” he heard himself say.

  “I mean right now.”

  “How can I quit now? I’m on a job.”

  “Suit yourself.” She rose abruptly from her chair, and signaled to the guard on duty that she was ready to leave. “Goodbye, Tony.”

  “But I need your help.”

  “You’re hurting me. Don’t you understand that?”

  “Please. It will only take a few minutes.”

  She did not bother to turn around as she walked out of the room.

  Valentine sat there for a while, staring at the chair she’d occupied. After a few minutes, a guard stuck his head in, quizzed him with a glance, then left. Valentine tried to imagine how he looked, sitting there dejectedly like a jilted highschool kid.

  He found Bill and his son in the cafeteria, drinking coffee.

  “How did it go?” Bill asked.

  “Looks like we’re going to Reno,” he said.

  Chapter 13

  There were three ways to travel from Las Vegas to Reno. You could drive for eight hours through the mountains, take a throw-up flight on a puddle jumper, or, if
the governor was backing your action, go in style on the taxpayer’s nickel. Gerry whistled through his teeth as they boarded Smoltz’s private Lear jet on a tarmac at McCarren.

  “Wow, leather seats and upholstery. This guy travels like a rock star.”

  Five minutes later they were airborne. The pilot came over the P.A., and announced their cruising altitude at twenty thousand feet, and what side of the plane the best views would be on. After they leveled off, Bill opened his briefcase, and removed a stack of documents.

  “I had my secretary Xerox the files of every agent on my payroll, ” he said. “She highlighted those agents who had filed grievances, or had disputes with their superiors, plus anyone with a medical problem resulting from the job.”

  Valentine took the documents out of Bill’s hands. There were nine hundred agents with the Gaming Control Board, and the stack weighed several pounds. He separated it into three piles, and turned to Gerry. His son had his seat back, and was snoring like a baby. Valentine dropped a stack into his lap, and Gerry blinked awake.

  “No sleeping on the job.”

  “I was just resting my eyes. What’s up?”

  “There’s a bad apple in these files,” Valentine said. “See if you can find him.”

  Looking for a crooked law enforcement agent was never fun. It reminded you that even good people turned bad.

  In Valentine’s opinion, the Nevada Gaming Control Board had some of the best law enforcement agents in the world. They not only helped casinos protect themselves, they were also responsible for protecting consumers against bad casinos. At any time, a GCB agent could enter a casino, and declare a “freezeout” for a particular game. The equipment would be confiscated, and sent to a laboratory for forensic testing. If the equipment was found to be “gaffed,” the casino would lose its license. Because of these responsibilities, GCB agents were viewed as the knights on the white horses, entrusted to keep things fair. In a place like Nevada, that was no easy task.

  As Valentine looked through the files, he tried to imagine why an agent might go bad. Money was the obvious motivator, but he guessed it went deeper. As a cop, he’d known other cops who’d taken bribes, or flagrantly broken the rules. In every case, there had been a prior event that had triggered the event, a turning point.

  For a GCB agent to go bad, he imagined the turning point was tied to the job. Why else would an agent cheat a casino, unless he’d seen a casino do something unsavory which he felt warranted a payback? He imagined their bad agent saw himself as an avenging angel. It happened a lot with cops.

  “These guys are all boy scouts,” Gerry said after pouring through the agent files for an hour. To his father he said, “You find anything?”

  “Maybe.”

  His son sat up straight. “Way to go.”

  Valentine had pulled out the files of five agents whose primary job was to inspect slot machines. Each had filed a work-related grievance in the past year. Passing the files to Bill, he said, “Tell me what a typical day would be like for one of these agents.”

  Bill looked through each file, then removed his glasses and rubbed his eyes. “The five agents you pulled out are part of our field group. There are a hundred and fifty field agents in Nevada. Every day, they enter casinos, and check different slot machines to ensure they’re running properly.”

  “You mean freezeouts?”

  Bill shook his head. “We used to cart the machines out of the casino and check them, but the downtime cost the casino money. So, we came up with a way to do a test on the floor. The machine is opened, and the agent wires a laptop computer to the machine’s RNG chip. The notebook runs a series of tests to determine if the RNG chip is generating random numbers. Once the test is finished, the information is e-mailed back to headquarters, and the results are checked by a tech.”

  “How many of these tests are done per day?”

  “About five hundred.”

  “Is there any way an agent could use his laptop to corrupt the slot machine?”

  “Believe me, we thought about that,” Bill said. “So, we devised a failsafe system to keep everyone honest. There are two agents present whenever a slot machine is tested, and every tested machine is retested a few days later by another team. If tampering is found, the agents who conducted the first test face dismissal and arrest.”

  “Has that ever happened?”

  “Never.”

  “And you keep all this information stored in Vegas?”

  Bill nodded. “The information fills several floors. It’s overseen by Fred Friendly, the director of the Electronic Systems Division. Fred and his team examine the results of the tests every single day.”

  “And you think they’d notice any discrepancies,” Valentine said.

  “Yes. It’s what they’re paid to do.”

  The pilot came over the P.A. to announce he was beginning his initial descent into the Reno/Tahoe International airport, and asked them to make sure their seat belts were fastened.

  Chapter 14

  Instead of going home after cashing his check, Karl Klinghoffer went to a saloon and drank whiskey with some strangers sitting at the bar. Coupled with the two beers he’d sucked down at the Gold Rush, the alcohol had a more powerful effect on him than he would have liked. Driving home a few hours later, he wrestled with the wheel each time his car crossed the double line.

  He drove past the amphitheater where afternoon concerts were performed on the weekends during the summer. Crossing Arlington Street, he entered the area of town called “City of Trembling Leaves.” Maybe they should call it ‘City of Trembling Hands,’ he thought. It was the oldest part of Reno, the streets lined with three-story Victorians left over from the Roaring Twenties, when rich divorcees had waited out the six-week residence required for their freedom.

  He parked in the street and killed the engine. He lived with Becky and his son behind one of these grand dames in a converted two-car garage. The rent was steep, but Becky was accustomed to a certain standard of living.

  He walked down a dirt path to his place. The people they rented from made him use this path instead of the driveway. It had always made him feel like a servant, and he wanted to knock on their front door, and tell them off.

  Instead, he climbed the wood staircase that hugged the side of the garage. Their apartment was on the second floor, and he saw lights inside and stopped. He tucked his shirt in, then unlocked the door and went in.

  “Hey, Becky, I’m home.”

  “Hey yourself,” his wife said from the dining room.

  “Hey,” his son chorused from another part of the house.

  Klinghoffer stopped in the kitchen. There was a plate of meat loaf and mashed potatoes sitting at his spot at the kitchen table, and he saw a fly buzzing around it. He stuck his finger in the mashed potatoes. They were ice cold.

  He went to the doorway leading to the living room and stopped. Becky was hunched over the dining room table, dressed in grey sweats. During the day, she home-schooled Karl Jr. At night, she wrote religious tracts for her father’s church. She did not look up.

  “Where you been?” she wanted to know.

  “Out and about.”

  He came in and peered over her shoulder. Becky’s writing appeared in religious pamphlets that were mass-mailed by her father’s church, and it was not uncommon to see them floating around town during windy days. Her handwriting was poor, and he had to squint.

  “Is it any wonder why young people are committing such horrible crimes against the innocent, when we protect the rights of atheists, and abolish the recognition of the Lord Jesus in our schools? The diabolical forces of moral corruption walk the halls of Congress, state legislatures and the courts. The gay coalitions, rabid feminist groups, United Nation one-world government radicals, and A.C.L.U., all use their political action committee funds to influence elected officials who force us under protection of law to tolerate their despicable conduct. These are the forces destroying our society!”

  “Where you
been?” she asked again.

  He pulled up a chair. At the bar, he’d thought over what he wanted to say. Rehearsed it to the drunk next to him. The drunk had seemed to like it. Sitting, he said, “Has Jesus ever spoken to you, Becky?”

  She smiled, still writing. “Sure. He speaks to me every day.”

  “He spoke to me today. At least I think it was him.”

  Her smile grew. “What did he say?”

  “Promise you won’t laugh.”

  “Why should I do that?”

  “Just promise me, okay?”

  She looked up and made eye contact with him. “Karl?”

  “What’s wrong?”

  “Have you been drinking? Your eyes look funny.”

  He’d decided in the bar that if he was going to tell a lie, it might as well be a big one. The drunk next to him had approved of the strategy.

  “Jesus told me to play a slot machine.”

  Becky swallowed hard. “Jesus told you to play a slot machine?”

  “That’s right.”

  “You sure it wasn’t some drunk you met?” she said, turning nasty.

  “Couldn’t have been.”

  “And why’s that, Mr. Alcohol on his Breath?”

  Klinghoffer took stacks of hundred dollar bills from his pockets, and tossed them onto the table. Becky’s mouth opened, but no words came out. She picked up the money, her face aglow. Right then, Klinghoffer knew he was going to be okay. She wasn’t going to throw him out, or threaten divorce, or do any of the other childish things she did whenever his behavior did not suit her. She held the money to her bosom.

  “Praise the Lord,” she said.

  Valentine, Gerry, and Bill Higgins landed in the Reno Airport at eight o’clock that night, and were taken by police escort to the Washoe County Detention Center. The Reno police had been alerted to the fact that someone might be gunning for Valentine, and the show-of-force was befitting a politician.