“Vanilla,” Jerry said to the waitress.
After she cleared off the plates, Sal said, “Last or. You call the FBI. Admit everything. Turn yourself in.”
“Then what?”
“Bail will be in the millions. They’ll segregate you in county, but it won’t matter. You’ll be dead by nightfall. Between Boris and Bennie, you’d need to be on the fucking moon to be beyond their reach.”
“You were me,” Jerry said. “What would you do?”
“Ambien,” Sal said, “and a bag over my head.”
“Yeah?”
“Take Xanax first,” Sal said. “Like, ten of them. Chase it with the Ambien. Then put the bag on.”
“Okay.” Jerry inhaled deeply, placed his fingers lightly on the table. “What if I told you that the FBI has already been in contact with me?”
“About what?”
“I got a subpoena.”
“When?”
“Last week,” Jerry said. “It’s not about the Temple. It’s about a firm I do business with out of Florida. A real chop shop. I’m supposed to speak to a grand jury in a few weeks. My lawyer says it’s nothing. Just providing some background. I’ve only ever done legit business with them. This sort of thing happens in this business. If I told you about every subpoena I got, you’d be constantly looking over your shoulder.”
“Then why are we talking about it?”
“I don’t show up,” Jerry said, “it’s going to be a real problem. For you. And maybe there’s a deal for us, both.”
David had to give it up to Jerry Ford. Motherfucker had some moves. “This money you mentioned,” David said. “How much we talking about?”
“How much you need?”
“Two million. Cash. No fucking around.”
“Not even a pause? You just had that number ready?”
“I’ve done my math.”
“I’d need some time,” Jerry said.
“How much?”
“A week?”
“I can get you five days.”
“You just had that number, too?”
The waitress set down the milkshakes. “Anything else?” she asked, or at least that’s what Sal thought she said when the fireball exploded from the back of the Commercial Center. The concussion swept up the block, dust and debris immediately turning the night sky thick and ashy, the air acrid with chemicals. Sal was aware that people inside the restaurant were already screaming and scrambling under their tables, which was good; they’d learned what to do from the news in the case of a terror attack, and in truth, of course, this was terror inducing, eyeballs spattering against the restaurant’s windows, loose arms and legs falling from the sky now, bouncing off the hoods of cars, human heads crashing through windshields.
Sal took all the money from his wallet and set it on the table under the saltshaker, then grabbed Jerry by the collar, yanked him out of the booth. “Time to go,” he said.
ELEVEN
WEDNESDAY, APRIL 17, 2002
LAS VEGAS, NV
TRADITIONALLY, WEDNESDAY MORNINGS IN LAS VEGAS WERE FOR HANGINGS and bank robberies. Wake up in a hotel room, three days since the weekend, all your money and hope gone? Anything could happen. People did desperate shit. Fortunately, Special Agent Kristy Levine was in the business of desperate shit.
Kristy understood the feeling. She should already be dead. She’d even purchased her final resting place at the Jewish cemetery in Summerlin, across from her synagogue, made plans for who’d take her dog—her favorite bartender at Pour Decisions—and adjusted her will.
And then something remarkable happened.
Her cancer didn’t kill her. Oh, it tried. The chemo took her hair, three of her teeth, about thirty pounds, and her taste buds, but goddamn, it also knocked her fucking cancer out. Oncologist said it was just short of a miracle, since the odds were the cancer would be back, and vengeful, sometime in the next two to five years. “Live your life accordingly,” he told her.
So here she was, six thirty in the morning, wearing a blond wig—she’d always wanted to be a blond—that made her look like she danced weekends at the Wildhorse, still a little foggy from the chemo brain but fucking thankful to be alive, walking through the burned-out husk of the Red Lantern Swingers Club, an N95 strapped to her face, safety glasses on her eyes, booties over her low-rise Cole Haan boots, trying to figure out if she needed to adjust her settings. Maybe Wednesday mornings were now for terrorist attacks? She’d need to move her night at Pour Decisions if that was the case, since she was operating this morning with a low-grade hangover on top of everything else. Working a bank robbery was typically a pleasant, well-air-conditioned affair with plenty of coffee and very little blood. This? This was a horror show.
The parking lot of the Commercial Center looked like the aftermath of a plane crash, body parts scattered in a corona around the blast site. Weird thing was, firefighters hadn’t found anyone whole anywhere in the vicinity.
It didn’t make any sense. The main difference between a fire and an explosion is speed. Everything Kristy was seeing told her there’d been an explosion followed by an accelerated fire. It wasn’t like someone left a cigarette burning and it caught a magazine and then there was a conflagration. Something went boom and chemicals accelerated the destruction—that the city had closed off this stretch of East Sahara because of toxicity in the air helped confirm that—but that wouldn’t disintegrate all of these people. And if Al-Qaeda had set off a dirty bomb—that was the rumor already spilling across the ticker on CNN this morning—why didn’t they set it off inside the Mirage versus a closed swingers club on the edge of town?
The other thing she couldn’t figure out: there were about two dozen onlookers down the street, on the other side of the police tape, but there weren’t any screaming or crying relatives looking for their loved ones, and yet human heads were all over the fucking place.
Kristy looked up and saw nothing but sky. What had been up there?
She walked through the back of the club, ended up in an alley that was strewn with what looked like . . . industrial freezers? There were three of them, on their sides. She’d seen a few more inside the wreckage of the Red Lantern. They must have fallen through the floor.
