“Jack, I need to talk to you.”
There was a pause and I almost hung up. But then he said, “Do you want me to come to you?”
“No,” I said quickly. “Can we meet somewhere?”
“My place?”
“No, not there either. Someplace…”
“Neutral?” There was a tiny hint of humor in his voice.
“Public,” I clarified.
“Johanna, are you okay?” The humor had turned to concern.
“Yes. I’m…” I stopped. Was I okay? I didn’t really know.
“Hey?”
“Yeah, I’m okay. This isn’t about me. Not really. But I need some help.”
“I’m done for the day and I’m not far from the Strip. Can you meet me over there?”
“Sure.”
“A book room somewhere?”
“No,” I said firmly.
“Okaaay.” He waited for an explanation that I didn’t give.
“Just. Not.” I let out a sigh. “How about somewhere in the Forum?”
“Okay. Where exactly?” The Forum was the mall of high-end shops connected to Caesar’s Palace. From where I parked, I wouldn’t have to walk through the casino to get there.
“Outside the Cheesecake Factory?” It was the furthest point from the casino entrance, plus I could bring home some cheesecake for Ben. He said it was the closest he’d found to the New York style cheesecake he’d grown up with.
“Sounds good. I can be there in a half hour?”
“See you then. Thanks,” I said as hung up.
It was Monday night. I’d spent most of the day working up the guts to make that call and checking back with Jimmy on any news out of Chicago. Nothing.
A knock came on the closed office door, and Lorelei poked her head in. “You have a minute?” she said, looking at the closed phone still clutched tight in my hand.
I put the phone on my desk and waved her in. “Sure. I need to talk to you, too. Better close the door.” But I didn’t even need to say it. She’d already begun to shut it behind her.
She sat on her side of the double desk, facing me. “The DNA place called today. The results will be ready for you to pick up tomorrow.”
Crap. I’d totally forgotten about Jack’s parentage. “Really? So soon.”
“You paid extra for the speed.”
“Yeah.” My hesitation must have been obvious in my voice.
“Jo, you don’t have to pick them up if you don’t want to know. They can just stay there forever. Or we can tell them to destroy it.”
“No,” I said.
She let out a breath of relief. “Oh, thank God. I don’t think I could have stood it not knowing.”
I laughed. “But you would have let me have them destroy it?”
She looked sheepish. “Well, I probably would have tried to talk you out of it, first.” She straightened in her seat. “But ultimately, it’s your choice.”
I put my elbows on the desk and buried my face in my hands. “God, it doesn’t feel like my choice anymore. It feels like everything is out of my hands.”
“Jo?”
I sighed, scrubbed my hands over my face, trying to rub sanity into my head. It didn’t work. “Lor, I’m going to need a credit card. Maybe two depending on what their limits are.”
Her body tensed, and she straightened even more, if that was possible. She looked down at the desk, as if trying to gather her thoughts, or remember a previously rehearsed speech. She most likely was, as she’d probably been waiting years for this. For me to come to her with the request I’d made her promise to deny me.
“No,” she said calmly.
I held my hand up as if to stop her, but she’d already said her piece in one, succinct, harsh word. “But this is different.”
“That’s what you said you’d say, and to tell you no.”
I smiled. She was right. “You’re right, I did. And thank you for remembering that. But this really is different.”
“You said you’d say that, too.”
I sighed. “Okay, here’s the abbreviated edition. I have to go to Chicago for a couple of days. I need a card.”
A look of relief came over her face. “Why didn’t you say it was for travel? Of course you can have one. Just like when you go home to Wisconsin and then you give it back to me when you get home. I’ll have it for you…is tomorrow morning okay? Do you need me to look up flights for you?”
“I probably will, yes. And tomorrow morning is fine. But I might be making more charges on them just traveling, so you’re going to have to tell me the limits on them, and like I said, I might need more than one.” She started to speak, and I tried to stave off any argument. “I’m not buying stuff to hock for gambling, I promise.”
A look of concern mixed with pity and, yes, horror, came across her face. For the first time in a long time – maybe ever – I was glad for the conception of JoJo so that I hadn’t had to see that look in Lorelei’s eyes before now. Now was bad enough.
“This has nothing to do with gambling?” she tried to nail me down.
“Not directly. But…” Well, shit, I guess I might as well practice for Jack on Lorelei. “My gambling indirectly got a friend into trouble. He’s in Chicago, in a bad situation, and I’d like to get him, his mother, and his sister out of there. So, I might need to charge a year’s worth of rent or something like that on a card.”
“Chicago? Who do you even know in Chicago?”
I shook my head. “That’s not important.” I had a flash of Vince and me standing on the cliff at Red Rock Canyon. “And really, the less you know about it the better.”
“So this is illegal?”
“Parts of it,” I admitted.
She sat back in her chair and folded her arms across her chest. She wanted to hear it all.
“I can’t tell you, Lor. This isn’t my story to tell.” As I’d said to Vince, I was just the middle man.
“Your friend in Chicago?”
“Yes.”
“You’re going to bring him, his mom and sister here, to Vegas.”
“God, no. That’s the last place he should go.” Lorelei sat still, arms still folded, waiting. “He shouldn’t be connected to anyone here. His sister’s in drug rehab. Or at least she was. So I was thinking maybe someplace out of state, but near a good rehab facility. Maybe like Minnesota and Hazeltine? But maybe they’d like to get farther away than that. I’m going to leave it up to them.”
She unfolded her arms. “Okay. I’ll have the cards for you tomorrow morning. I’ll have to check, but I think there’s something like a fifty thousand dollar limit on each one.”
“Fifty thousand?” I said, shocked.
“That’s not enough? I can get more in cashier’s checks or cash tomorrow if you want.”
“No, that’s not what I meant. I just didn’t realize I had a limit that high.”
She furrowed her brows at me. “Jo, you know you’re filthy rich, right?”
I waved my arms around. “I know the house and everything in it is paid for. The cars. I know you have a stash to keep the house running for a few years if I hit a bad streak playing poker. I – ”
“That’s just the tip of the iceberg.”
“Really?”
“I’m a very good investor, Jo.”
“You invested for me?”
She snorted. “Well somebody had to think of the future.”
“That’s what the three-year cushion was for.”
Another snort. “What happens after three years?”
“I’ve never had a dry spell longer than that. Not even close.”
“What happens when you stop playing poker?”
I stared at her with a blank look. “Who says I’m going to stop playing poker?”
A long sigh escaped her. “I know. I know. But a girl can hope, can’t she?”
“If this is going to launch into another intervention…” I started to rise from my seat, but she waved me down.
“It’s not. I promise. I just want you to know that you don’t have to gamble anymore. That you, and Ben, and me if you want, will be okay for a long, long time on what you’ve earned.”
“And you’ve invested.”
She nodded.
“Even in this economy? You might want to check that balance again.”
“I got it out of the risky stuff awhile ago.”
“You foresaw what the great economic minds of our time didn’t?”
She shrugged. “A dancer I knew bought a house a few years ago that I knew she couldn’t afford. She explained her mortgage to me, and I thought it all sounded kind of hinky. Then another dancer I knew got laid off, a whole bunch of dancers did. It hits the tourist places first, you know.”
No, I didn’t know. But apparently, Lorelei did. She started lapsing into talk of stocks, bonds, treasury bills, safe assets, and my head started spinning.
“Lor, Lor.” I held up my hand cutting her off. “I’m never going to understand all that. I don’t want to. Just…thank you.” She nodded. “And what’s the bottom line?”
“The bottom line is you cannot only afford the style to which we’ve all become accustomed, but you can afford it for another family of three as well. Two or three families of three if you don’t buy Porsches for them all.”
“Holy crap.”
A satisfied smile crossed her face, but all I could think about was the missions JoJo had undertaken when all kinds of cash sat…somewhere.
As if reading my thoughts, she said, “It’s not easily accessible. There are forms and things, and most of them need my signature as well as yours.”
“But we can get some? By tomorrow?”
“Yes. I’ll get it as well as the credit cards. How much?”
“As much cash as you can.”
“Oh, Jo, that’s not safe. Can’t you just take some cash then use the cards?”
I was already shaking my head. “I was going to use the cards because I thought that was my only option, but I’d rather not have any kind of paper trail. Cash would be better. I’ll take as much as I can to Chicago, but you better get some more freed up in case…” I didn’t finish, didn’t know how to.
“I hate to think of you carrying so much cash on you when you travel alone.”
Good thing she didn’t know about the under-the-clothes money belts that I had hidden in the back of my closet. Although, after this conversation, that fact might not surprise her all that much. I looked at my watch. I needed to leave now to meet Jack.
“It’ll be okay, Lor,” I said as I tapped my horseshoe pendant three times for luck. “And, depending on how the next couple of hours go, I might not be going to Chicago alone.”
“No. No way. Absolutely not,” Jack said a few hours later.
I started to rise from our table in the back of The Cheesecake Factory. “Yeah, it was a dumb idea. Sorry I –”
He yanked on my sleeve, and I sat back down. “Sit down,” he said a bit harshly. “Jesus Christ, Johanna,” he said a lot harshly.
I took a sip of my Diet Coke and another bite of my cheesecake, which was starting to taste like chalk in my mouth. But it was better than looking at Jack as he scrubbed his hands over his face and mumbled something I couldn’t quite make out. Not that I wanted to.
We’d met and grabbed a table. I’d ordered cheesecake, he’d ordered nothing until I’d launched into my story. Then he’d held up a hand and ordered a bourbon before waving for me to continue.
I started with the statement that I wasn’t going to lie to him, but I wasn’t able to tell him everything, either. But that I’d gotten someone into trouble and I needed his help to go to Chicago’s South Side with me and try to offer a way out.
I then told him that the person in Chicago was Raymond Joseph. Jack didn’t know who that was, bless his non-gambling heart. I quickly explained Raymond’s current circumstances and Jack, no dummy he, put most of the pieces together rather quickly.
Which is where we stood – or sat – now.
“How is Vince Santini involved in this?” he asked, taking his hands from his face and skewering me with his cop gaze.
“He’s not,” I said.
“You said you weren’t going to lie to me.”
“I’m not. Vince is not involved in Raymond soliciting this Bubba Kinney. This is all me.”
“But he was invol – ”
I raised a hand to stop him. “This is all me. From here on out, this is all me.”
He stared at me for a long time, then gave a slight nod. “Go on. What’s your plan?”
“I want to go to Chicago and find out what the hell is really going on. Jimmy’s guys can only know so much. And, if possible, I want to get Raymond, his mother and his sister out of there.”
“If the Feds are really investigating him, they’re not going to let that happen.”
“I don’t want him to disappear. It’s not about running. We’ll let whoever needs to know in on our plans, give them forwarding addresses, whatever. If Raymond is truly under investigation, or if he decides he wants to…confess, they’ll be able to find each other easily enough.”
“Confess? So you know he’s guilty?”
I shook my head. “I haven’t spoken to Raymond about this Kinney guy. All I know is what the media is reporting and what Jimmy’s guys know, which isn’t much.”
“But you think, given your…past history with this guy, that the accusations are probably true?”
I nodded once, but didn’t say anything.
“Let’s put aside the fact that the Feds aren’t going to let him out of their sight if they don’t want to, even if you give them a damned forwarding address.” He snorted at that. “If it’s not about running, why do you need to swoop in and get him out of Chicago?”
“From what I understand, he’s fallen in with some bad guys. I’m actually afraid for his well-being in Chicago more than I am about his facing possible charges.”
“And you said it was South Side?”
I nodded. “The old Cabrini-Green area. Know of it?”
“Shit,” he said, confirming my fears. “Their homicide rate is the highest in the nation.”
Now, unfortunately, we were talking Jack’s language.
“That’s what I’ve read online.”
“I have a buddy from my Portland days that transferred to Chicago. I think he went to the South Side?”
“Willingly?”
Jack shrugged. “That’s where he was from originally. When he and his wife split up, he decided to go back. He wanted to help his old neighborhood.”
“Do you think he’d help me?” At his raised brow, I amended, “Us?”
“He was a good guy. I’ll give him a call.”
“Thank you. All I really need is someone to get me into that area to see Raymond. I’m sure I’m just being a chicken-shit, but I don’t want to face him and his…buddies…alone. I’d prefer to have someone with a badge and gun with me.”
“That’s smart, not wanting to be alone. But I don’t know if the badge would help you or hurt you.”
“That bad, hey?” I said, anguished again that Raymond was deep into the hell he’d worked so hard to avoid.
As if reading my mind, he said, “That’s nothing for you to feel guilty about. South Side’s a pretty violent place these days. If the kid grew up there, he knows his way around.”
I was shaking my head before he’d even finished his sentence. “He doesn’t. Not really. He spent his childhood staying out of trouble. Trying very hard to stay out of that life. All he concentrated on was basketball. It was his way out. For him and his mom and sister. He’s been gone away to school for four years. He was going to get his mom and sister out of there as soon as he had some money from the pros. He never intended on going back.”
Jack looked away from me, started to sit back in his seat, pulling away. I leaned forward and grabbed the sleeve of his blue chambray shirt. “He’s not going to make it very long, Jack. Something bad is going to happen to him there,” I said with absolute certainty.
He looked at me with his cop eyes that slowly, so slowly, turned into the Jack whose arms I’d laid in. “Okay, I’ll go.”
My hand, still on his arm, squeezed my gratitude. “Thanks, Jack. Can you leave tomorrow?”
He was already pulling out his phone while he nodded his head. “Yeah. I think so. I need to let Frank and our boss know, but I can take a couple of sick days.” I nodded. “And one condition.”
“Yes?”
“You’re going to tell me the whole story, Johanna, on our way to Chicago.”
“But – ”
“But nothing. That’s my condition. I want it all.”
When I made to argue again, he held up a hand. ”Don’t worry, we’ll be thirty-thousand feet up, way out of my jurisdiction. No repercussions.”
I nodded. I owed him that, at the very least, for what he was about to do. I released his arm and watched as he dialed. “Thanks, Jack. I owe you.”
He raised one brow at me as he raised the phone to his mouth. “Yes. You do. And Johanna, I mean to collect.”