Betting on Hope

Chapter 21



Faith pulled into the service driveway of the Desert Dunes casino, did a three-point turn in the empty lot, and backed her refrigerated van into loading dock number eighteen, which led into the Ginger Palace restaurant. Today she was delivering vegetables to Kenji while Kenji was out at the ranch, working with Amber on their cookbook. It was funny how things happened.

She grabbed her orders clipboard, jumped out of the cab, swung the back doors open, and hopped into the cargo area. The boxes of produce had been labeled for each destination and loaded in the order that they’d be delivered. Faith checked off the boxes for the Ginger Palace, hung the clipboard on the hook by the door, and muscled the first four crates onto the dolly.

Farming, she’d come to realize, was not for lightweights. The hours were brutal and the work never-ending. On the other hand, she was her own boss. She was growing good food. And she never had to go to the gym.

With the crates piled four deep on the dolly, she dropped the bridge plate that let her roll her vegetables from the truck to the concrete loading platform. Glancing from side to side to make sure she hit the swinging doors squarely, she headed toward the kitchen.



With the unerring cunning of a wild forest creature, Johnny Red realized that he and his entourage were the object of pursuit long before they reached the exit sign at the end of the casino hallway. He turned his head to glance back at Alexei and the triplets. “Run!” he shouted, breaking into a sprint.

Alexei turned to see what Johnny Red was so worked up about. And then he saw it, too.

Two security guards—a young man with spiked hair and a middle-aged woman in glasses—followed by a gasping geezer in a sport coat, trotted after them. Johnny Red had been made, and no surprises there. The noose around their operations had been growing steadily tighter. They’d had trouble in Jersey—with the feds, the cops, and Big Julie Saladino’s unexpectedly loyal crew. Now here.

But, Alexei thought, he’d never expected that they’d be dodging the law while wearing Groucho glasses and pushing a laundry cart filled with a naked Jersey mobster across a Vegas casino floor.

They’d thought they could take over the east-coast protection rackets by taking out Big Julie here in Vegas. That was turning out to be a bigger challenge than they’d expected. Now instead of Big Julie dead and the Jersey rackets secured, they had Big Julie naked and unconscious in a laundry cart. This did not look like a step in the right direction to Alexei. If the cops out here knew Big Julie, then one call to the feds would tell them that his abductor was probably Johnny Red.

This attempted kidnapping and potential murder could not turn out well for a person who intended one day to practice the noble profession of law. If they were caught, Alexei didn’t see how he could explain it.

So Alexei’s bottom line was that they couldn’t get caught. He turned back to the cart and, leaning into it, broke into a sprint. “Run!” he yelped to the maid.

The maid turned, too, and when she saw the security guards in swift pursuit, she gasped in fright. She knew what they were after.

Her.

“La migra!” she shouted to the other workers in the casino. “Immigration!” She leaned into the cart next to Alexei and gasped with the effort to push it faster.

Yakov also turned to see what threatened him, and in the determined crew running after them, he saw a one-way ticket back to the old country. Reaching out, he grabbed the cart on the other side of the maid and helped them push.

“Faster!” he shouted as they ran down the hallway with the cart, scattering tourists like bowling pins, bumping into casino workers fleeing the immigration threat. “We’ll be okay. Igor’s bringing the car around.”



Igor, in fact, had not brought the car around. He had not counted on the Dobbs-Wilkinson wedding and the many attendants, friends, and family members who’d driven to the Desert Dunes to attend the sumptuous ceremony in the casino’s Hearts Afire chapel. Igor’s getaway vehicle was just one in an excruciatingly long line of cars in the wedding party that were waiting to exit the parking garage. The drivers were in a party mood, honking their horns, revving their engines, blasting their radios, and driving erratically while catcalling each other through open windows, enjoying the echoes that bounced off the concrete walls.

Come on, Igor swore, honking his horn to no effect whatsoever. He glanced at his watch. Surely by now Johnny Red and the others would be through the casino and waiting for him at the loading dock. The success of their venture was, literally, riding with him. He had to get out of the parking lot and back into the loading area. He was the getaway car. Getaway cars did not get stuck in parking garages.

Igor honked his horn in fury.



Pushing her dolly loaded with vegetable crates, Faith had just reached the swinging doors to the back entrance of the restaurant when three people pushing a laundry cart burst out of the Ginger Palace kitchen and smashed into her. Momentum was on their side. The force of their combined pushing, their speed, and Big Julie’s weight in the cart were too much for Faith to withstand. Unbalanced by the heavy vegetable boxes, she lost her footing and staggered back, feeling the dolly start to tip.

Johnny Red and Markov crashed through the door after Alexei, the maid, and Yakov pushing the cart. They rammed into the cart and their companions, creating a stew of bodies, speed, and confusion. The anarchy of shoving forces pushed Faith back another step. The dolly keeled over.

She made a grab to save the vegetables and took one step too many, realizing her mistake too late. With a startled cry, she fell off the dock, letting go of the dolly as she went over. The boxes toppled off the dolly onto the dock and fell open. Cabbages, rutabagas, beets, and carrots spilled out, onto the platform, and over the edge to the pavement below, where Faith lay motionless in the hot morning sun.

The Russians and the maid were instantly stilled. They all rushed to the end of the loading dock and peered over the edge to the motionless woman sprawled among the root vegetables on the pavement four feet below.

The maid made the sign of the cross and wrung her hands. “La pobrecita,” she moaned. “Madre de dios, la pobrecita.”

“Shit,” said Markov.

“Did we kill her?” asked Yakov.

“I hope not,” Alexei said grimly. “We better not have.”

Johnny Red, looking like thunder, scanned the service area.

“Where in the name of Trotsky’s assassin is the getaway car?” he asked.



The car wasn’t there.

While Johnny Red swore on the names of dead and discredited Bolshevik revolutionaries, Alexei surveyed the scene and saw a solution.

He jumped down to the pavement and dashed to the cab of Faith’s truck and leaned in, checking the ignition. Bingo.

Keys.

“Come on!” he yelled to Johnny Red, waving his arm and getting into the cab. “We’ll take the truck!”

Johnny Red instantly shouted his thanks to the rehabilitated revolutionary heroes and leaped down onto the pavement.

“And bring the cart!” he yelled to Markov and Yakov, and yanking open the passenger door, hopped into the cab. Markov and Yakov muscled the heavy cart full of Big Julie Saladino across the bridge plate and into the back of the truck, jumped in after it and kicked the plate to the ground. The maid crossed herself and fled back into the kitchen.

Alexei turned the key and revved the engine just as FBI Agent Roy Frelly, Mavis O’Toole, and Justin Trinkler burst out of the kitchen in hot pursuit. Seeing the vegetable truck heading out of the loading dock confused them for an instant. But then they saw the laundry cart and their quarry through the open rear doors as the van pulled away.

“Stop!” Frelly yelled. “FBI!”

Alexei stamped on the accelerator and the truck screamed out of the space, heading for the driveway and the open road. Frelly pulled out his service revolver and, taking careful aim, shot at the truck and missed.

He was aiming to shoot again when a heavy projectile came from nowhere and hit him just above his left eyebrow, momentarily causing his vision to blur and stunning him. Markov—the 1988 all-Soviet representative to the European Games in the shot put—had hurled a beet with unerring accuracy and hit the agent in the head. The beet dribbled away across the loading dock and dropped onto the pavement below.

“Hey!” Mavis O’Toole yelled, grabbing Frelly’s arm. “What are you doing? No shooting!”

A second beet sailed over her head and smashed into the wall behind her.

“Hey!” she yelled again, this time at the truck.

A fusillade of beets followed. She and Justin ducked and bobbed to avoid the missiles. Frelly was hit several times.

The truck barreled out of beet firing range, heading for the driveway.

“They can’t shoot us now,” Alexei shouted confidently to Johnny Red. He glanced over. “We’re almost at the boulevard. Five more seconds—three more seconds!—and we’re safe.”

“Come on!” Mavis O’Toole yelled, grabbing Justin’s arm. “They’re getting away! We gotta call the cops! Call the FBI! Put out an APB! Move!” And with that the two security guards grabbed Frelly, still stunned from the beet attack, and rushed back into the casino to call for help.



Igor, driving the getaway car, finally got clear of the parking garage. He gunned the motor as he downshifted, burning rubber as he peeled out of the garage’s driveway. He threw the change the attendant had given him into the back seat of the car. Now was not the time to play neat with quarters. He glanced at his watch. Shit. Too much time had gone by. By now Johnny Red would be pacing on the dock, ready to kill him. By the time they got up in the helicopter over Lake Mead, Johnny Red would be throwing two bodies out of the open doors—Big Julie Saladino’s and his own.

But maybe not. Maybe not if he drove like the wind.

He ground the accelerator to the floor, rounding the corner that led to the back of the casino. Ahead of him was the service driveway. In a crowded, public space like a casino with cameras everywhere, every second counted when you were staging a getaway.

Igor took the service driveway on two wheels traveling at sixty miles per hour. Before he could see what was coming, and well before he realized he’d have to slam on the brakes, he smashed head-on into the Happy Valley Farmer vegetable truck driven by Alexei.

Metal screeched on metal. Glass crunched. Airbags popped. Steam hissed.

Flung against the shoulder harness, his head bouncing against the steering wheel and now stunned by the impact, Igor slumped over the steering wheel of the smashed-up getaway car. His head ached. He tasted blood, and realized his mouth was full of shattered teeth. His nose felt broken, swollen and numb. His ribs were bruised, and his ankle screeched in pain. In misery, he rested his head against the steering wheel.

In the truck, Alexei and Johnny Red were cut and bruised, but as passengers in the larger, heavier vehicle, they’d fared better. Neither had broken bones.

Markov and Yakov were merely bruised. The momentum of the sudden crash had propelled them into the boxes of produce, and the reaction had tossed them against the wall of the truck. They’d fallen heavily to the floor, but they hadn’t fallen out of the van.

Which was more than could be said for the laundry cart. The cart, too, had bounced wildly during the collision, but its tiny wheels gave it more mobility on the metal truck bed than it had had on the casino’s carpets. The cart had rolled into the vegetable boxes going forward, then bounced off and skidded across the length of the truck and shot out the open doors, where it landed heavily on the pavement, tipping over and spilling Big Julie, still naked and unconscious, onto the concrete.

The carnage was complete.

The noise of the crash roused Faith, who sat up groggily and looked around. It took a few seconds before she realized that there’d been an accident, that her truck was involved, that it had been stolen, and that the thieves were still in it.

She had to call for help. She got to her knees and then stood, holding onto the edge of the loading dock for support, feeling shaky and nauseated. Her vision was blurred. Her hands and arms were scraped raw from the fall. One wrist throbbed with a sharp, painful ache. She didn’t have her phone. It was in her purse, in the truck. And no way was she going over there to retrieve it. Either the thieves were alive, or they were dead. And she didn’t want her phone bad enough to find out which.

She raised one leg, swinging it onto the loading dock, and hauled the rest of herself after it. She lay still for a moment to recover from the effort. The rough cement dug into her raw palms. Her arms ached. Her head swam. Her wrist screamed in pain. But she was on the dock.

Standing carefully, she staggered toward the kitchen doors. Just as she entered, she looked back out to the driveway again. Now she saw that there was a big, naked guy lying on the pavement next to a laundry cart. Faith squinted, her head throbbing. There couldn’t be a naked guy. It must be a—what? Sea lion? A pink sea lion?

Faith realized she’d probably taken a pretty good bump on the head. She fell through the swinging doors into the cool, dark kitchen, looking for a phone she could use to call the cops. And then an ambulance. Because she was pretty sure she was seeing things that weren’t there.



Several minutes later, Alexei lifted his head. He looked around. Next to him, Johnny Red groaned.

“Hey,” Alexei said, stretching his arms to see if anything was broken. “You all right?”

Johnny Red sat up and slowly rolled his head. “I think so,” he said.

Alexei opened the door of the cab and stepped carefully down to survey the damage. The front of the truck was smashed. The headlights were gone, and the grill would never be the same. Maybe the radiator was cracked, too. No getaway here.

He leaned into Johnny Red’s window.

“Come on,” Alexei said. “We’ve got to get out of here. We don’t want to be around when the cops get here.”

“We gotta take Big Julie, too,” Johnny Red complained, easing out of the truck. “He’s over there.”

Alexei looked at the big man lying naked on the pavement.

“No,” he said, going to the back of the truck. “We have to leave him. We can’t take the cart, and he’s still out cold. We can make another grab for him later. The plan’s still good. Get Igor out of the getaway car. We have to move.”

Johnny Red limped over to the sedan. The rental car was a total loss. The front was accordioned to half its normal size. The hood had sprung open. The bumper was half torn off and dragged on the ground. Inside, Igor still sat dazed, leaning into the exploded airbag. Pale powder drifted in the air.

“Come on you son of a procrastinating anarcho-syndicalist,” Johnny Red said to Igor, who became a little more alert with the abuse.

Johnny Red pulled open the car door and grabbed Igor’s arm. Igor wobbled on his broken ankle, but he got out of the car.

“Everybody okay?” Alexei asked as he came up with a shaky Markov and Yakov. “Let’s go, then.”

The five men limped slowly the fifteen feet out to the boulevard. Traffic was heavy. Alexei stuck his hand in the air, but three cabs passed them by. Then he realized what was wrong.

“Lose the Groucho glasses,” he said, and everybody did. Alexei raised his hand again, and a passing cab shrieked to a halt in front of them.

They staggered after it and dropped gratefully into its air-conditioned interior.

“Where to, fellas?” the cabbie asked. He looked closer. “Jesus. It looks like you guys got yourselves in an accident. Or a fight.”

Nobody spoke.

“I guess you’re right,” Alexei finally said. “We should go to the hospital.”

“Las Vegas General’s the closest,” the cabbie said. “And they got a good trauma center. Been there myself.”

He gunned the motor and sped away.