Steve Forrester awoke at seven-thirty with a dull throbbing in his temples courtesy of Jack Daniel’s and the taste of burnt straw in his mouth thanks to R. J. Reynolds.
Blinking back the glorious desert sunrise that streamed through his bedroom window, he stumbled into the kitchen to make coffee. The goddamn Folgers jar was empty. He peered into the fridge—a half-full box of Arm & Hammer baking soda and a can of Coors Light. Perfect, he thought numbly, I’ll have the six-course American breakfast. One can of beer and five cigarettes.
Back in the living room he flipped on the TV. The CNN announcer’s voice was properly sober. “Sad news from Las Vegas last night,” the announcer read from the teleprompter as a recent photograph of the extortionists’ latest victim appeared over his left shoulder. “Legendary entertainer Tony Francisco is dead, apparently from an electrical accident that occurred in his suite at the Galaxy Hotel, where he was performing. No official report has yet been filed as to the exact cause of his death, but some sources have suggested suspicious circumstances. An autopsy is scheduled for later today, after which a press conference will be held at the Clark County Coroner’s Office.
“Mr. Francisco’s companion, Gloria Latorella, also sustained a severe electric shock when she went to the star’s aid, but her injuries are not life-threatening and she is reported to be recovering at Sunrise Hospital.” The announcer paused while his image dissolved to some grainy black-and-white footage from the singer’s early years. All the major networks kept updated bios of well-known personalities on file for the inevitable obits. Over the familiar strains of “My Town,” the announcer continued: “Francisco was a fixture in American show business for more than five decades … .”
Forrester pushed the OFF button. Still clad only in a pair of boxer shorts, he cracked open the front door and reached through for the paper lying on the doormat. A two-inch headline in the Las Vegas Review-Journal stared up at him accusingly. Over a four-column color photograph of the deceased star it read, FOUL PLAY SUSPECTED IN SINGER’S DEATH. He picked up the paper and squinted at the subhead: TONY FRANCISCO DIES IN “ACCIDENT” AT GALAXY. Steve wondered how they’d found out so quickly about the so-called foul play. The electrician must have blabbed—or maybe one of the cops did.
Not that it really mattered, because in the long run there was no way to cover up what had happened. Forrester shuddered when he imagined what the tabloids would do to the Galaxy when they got their claws into the story. Droopy’s going to pop his hemorrhoids, he thought.
The Coors actually helped clear Forrester’s head, and he began to feel semihuman as he stepped into the tiled shower stall. A quick flash of Tony Francisco’s fatal shower scene caused him a second’s hesitation, but he quickly purged that ghastly image. Steve had always exercised his most creative thinking in the shower; while he lathered up under the hot spray he considered the potential outcomes of Thanatos’s latest threat.
Despite Druperman’s bullheadedness, the Las Vegas Casino Association could decide to knuckle under and pay off the extortionists. It might not be the red-blooded American solution but, weighed against the risk of a major fire, hundreds of deaths, and billions in damages, maybe the wisest course.
Or the police might arrest the gang before they had a chance to carry out any more threats. End of problem.
In Forrester’s opinion, the most likely scenario was neither of the above.
He believed that the LVCA under Druperman’s leadership would continue to refuse to pay. The fact that the Galaxy was unlikely to be targeted a third time would certainly encourage Emmett to preach tenacity; he’d taken his lumps like a mensch and now it was their turn to tough it out.
And while Steve respected Frank Marshall’s ability, he doubted that his ex-partner would be able to locate the extortionists before Wednesday night—even with the full resources of the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department behind him. These Thanatos bastards were just too goddamn
smart. So far there simply hadn’t been any chinks in their armor.
They probably would carry out their awful promise and then come back with even bigger threats and even steeper monetary demands. Because how do you stop them? In the real world, how do you find that needle in the haystack? How does even the biggest army of law enforcement officers cover every corridor, scope every stairwell, reconnoiter every room—in every hotel on the Strip and downtown? With seventeen of the twenty largest hotels in the world located in Las Vegas, the whole city was just so damned vulnerable that it amazed Forrester these extortions hadn’t happened before. Perhaps this was the beginning of a trend; maybe the copycat criminals would move in to plow these fresh pastures, much as a spate of airline hijackings occurred after D. B. Cooper broke new ground with his notorious $200,000 parachute jump over the Pacific Northwest. Forrester shuddered, visualizing Las Vegas as an armed camp at the mercy of every psycho with a Bic lighter. He dared not equate Las Vegas’s current dilemma with the awful events in Oklahoma City or New York … .
So, what could they really do about it? Should the casinos pay off this particular gang of extortionists and hope that this time it was merely an aberration, a minor stumbling block in Las Vegas’s march toward its hoped-for future as the family entertainment capital of America? Or would the casinos, as Druperman believed, simply be opening the floodgates to more of the same, to a deluge of demands, a torrent of extortions that would make aircraft hijackings look like kindergarten lunch-money rip-offs?