The Good Thief's Guide To Vegas Read online

  The moment I crossed the threshold, I experienced a buzz of electricity 100 times more powerful than anything the hotel carpets could conjure. It’s always been that way for me. I guess if I spoke to a psychologist about it, I might learn some ugly truths about myself. Then again, perhaps if I broke into that same psychologist’s office after hours and ripped the good doctor off, I might enjoy the biggest thrill of my life.

  Analysis aside, I nudged the door closed and stood in the tiled entrance hall to the suite, whistling at the sight before me. Let me tell you, my own room had been plenty impressive when I first checked in, but this guy’s suite was a whole different story.

  Ahead of me was a compact kitchen with sleek, illuminated

  glass cupboards, a sizeable American fridge-freezer and a granite breakfast bar. Beyond the kitchen was a sunken area that featured a glass dining-table capable of seating twelve people, a large L-shaped couch in black leather, a wall-mounted television not a great deal smaller than the dining-table, a corner wet bar and a sturdy writing desk with a telephone and a fax machine. The desk was positioned beneath a brightly lit standing lamp and in front of some floor-to-ceiling windows that looked out over the rear of the hotel complex, the cross-streets and highways running behind the Strip and the red-hued mountain peaks beyond. A lighted passenger jet was coming in over the mountain ridge to land at McCarran International Airport.

  The room was still and silent, save for the rumble of the air-conditioning unit. I shook my head in wonder and moved down onto the thick carpet of the living area. I shook it even more when it occurred to me that I was yet to see a bed.

  I snuck across to a pair of double doors on my right and tried the handles. The doors were locked, and I got the impression they connected with a neighbouring suite. There was another door on the opposite side of the room, just beyond the desk, and I breezed right through until I found myself gawping at a super-king-sized bed adorned with fine cotton sheets, quilted eiderdowns and woollen throws, not to mention enough pillows to stock the home-ware section of a strip mall Macy’s.

  A pair of teak cabinets flanked the bed, and on the nearest one a lamp with a fringed shade cast its light upon an alarm clock, a paperback book, and a spiral notepad and pen. A water glass was positioned beside the notepad, its rim covered with a paper disc bearing the casino’s logo.

  Behind me was a double closet, and I threw open the doors, quickly discovering just how many leather jackets and pairs of stonewashed jeans one man could possess. An entire shelf was stacked with neatly folded white T-shirts, and another with grey. Masters’ briefs were arranged just so, and his socks, I noticed with a shudder, were embroidered with his initials.

  I must say I felt a good deal happier when I looked towards the bottom of the closet and found the room-safe. That may sound curious, but a safe can save me a lot of time. Without it, a guest might hide their possessions among their clothes, or their shoes or their luggage. They might find an obscure spot in their dresser or under their bed. They might even keep their valuables with them when they go out for the day. But more often than not, a safe eliminates those dangers, because most people think that it’s a secure place to store their belongings.

  It’s not. Hotel safes are susceptible to the charms of most burglars, and that includes absolute beginners. They tend to be guarded by a simple electronic code, and it’s often quite easy to guess the code a stranger has selected. If you don’t believe me, try letting yourself into somebody else’s hotel room and entering one of the following sequences – 999, 911, 000, 1234 . . . You take my point. Oh, and if that doesn’t work, try the number of the guest room itself. That baby’s a frequent flyer.

  But here’s the really neat part. In certain American hotels, the safes are even more accommodating. For your own personal gratification, they offer you a choice. Sure, you can enter a good old-fashioned code, but if you’re wise to the risks and you want a little more protection, you can opt to swipe your credit card through an electronic reader on the fascia of the safe. Secure, right? Well yes, unless the scoundrel who broke into your room happened to do it by lifting your wallet. Because if he has your wallet, then chances are he has your credit card too.

  I had Josh Masters’ credit cards and it was his platinum American Express that did the trick. As soon as I’d swiped it, I heard the whir and whiz of the locking motor, and the word OPEN flashed across the red electronic screen. Being a sucker for commands, I did exactly as I was told, and eased back the door to the safe before letting go of a variety of sigh that I usually reserve for somewhat more intimate moments.

  The base of the safe was lined with a cushioned foam mat, and balanced on top of the mat were stack upon stack of some delightful casino chips. Most of the chips were purple, with flecks of lilac and mauve around their edges, but a few were painted plain, old-fashioned silver. Each purple chip was worth five hundred dollars in the Fifty-Fifty casino, and there were ten to a stack, six stacks in all. The silver chips were worth ten thousand dollars each, and there were three of those. Even my maths was capable of running that sum. Sixty thousand dollars. It seemed to me like karma. No doubt it would seem to Josh Masters like an outrage. But to be perfectly honest, I didn’t care, because I was more than happy for this to be one vanishing act that he’d never forget.

  I filled my hands and had started to fill my pockets before I realised the error of my ways. The last thing I wanted was to lose a chip or to have them click against one another as I walked around the casino, and now that I considered the matter in more detail, I thought that one of the cringe-worthy socks bearing Masters’ initials might make an ideal chip-holder. I reached for a sock and stuffed it appropriately, then tied off the end and gave it a shake. The sock worked beautifully, muffling the chips. I congratulated myself on an elegant solution, slipped the sock inside my jacket and pondered what to do next.

  I weighed Masters’ wallet in my palm. It was tempting to take the thing with me and try to return it to his pocket without being caught. All things considered, it would be the neatest outcome imaginable, and I felt pretty confident that I could pull the move off. But it was risky. A more sensible option was to dump the wallet in a litterbin elsewhere in the hotel. Yup, that was the clever play. Which probably explains why I decided to be a smartarse and toss his wallet into the safe.

  Of course, I couldn’t lock the safe with one of his credit cards, because then the card in question would be separated from his wallet. So in the end I used a code. And since I considered the code I’d selected to be mighty clever, I had a sizeable grin on my face as I closed the closet doors and made my way back through the magnificent sitting room to the kitchen.

  Helpfully, there was a peephole in the middle of the front door, so I could check that the coast was clear before making my exit. And making my exit was just what I was in the process of doing when I happened to glance to my left and spot something that prompted my brow to furrow.

  Another key card.

  The card in question was inserted in a plastic receptacle on the wall, and a tiny green light was shining beside it. Come to think of it, a good many lights had been on in the suite – the ones in the kitchen cupboards, the standing lamp over the desk, even the bedside lamps.

  Hmm. I knew from my own room downstairs that unless a card was fitted in the slot, the lights couldn’t work and the climate control couldn’t function. But the lights were on in Masters’ suite and the temperature was uniformly chill.

  Now, it could be that Masters had two room cards, and if he was as environmentally concerned as the rest of Las Vegas, it wasn’t too outlandish to suppose that he liked his air-con to be running while he was out and his lights to be on when he returned.

  Or it could be that somebody else was inside his suite.

  But I tended to believe that I’d have noticed if someone was watching television or taking a nap on the oversized bed while I ransacked the safe. And then it hit me.

  I hadn’t checked the bathroom.

 
All right, if you want to be picky, I hadn’t even seen the bathroom. But there had to be one, and in all likelihood it was annexed to the bedroom. I hadn’t noticed a door when I’d been in there, but then again, my attention had been focused on the safe.

  I backed away from the peephole and drummed my fingernails on my teeth. Thinking logically, I was confident that if I found my way to the bathroom, there wouldn’t be anybody inside. I mean, if there had been somebody there, I would have heard them moving about or they would have heard me and said something, because they would have assumed that I was Masters. The other alternative, the notion that somebody could have heard me enter the suite and had hidden in the bathroom, was too crazy to even consider.

  So why was I considering it? And why was I dithering? Even assuming there was somebody in there (which there patently wasn’t), there was absolutely no sense in me hanging around for a moment longer. I had the chips and my getaway was clear. The bathroom really shouldn’t have bothered me in the slightest.

  But the sad truth is, it did.

  Call me a perfectionist. Call me obsessive compulsive. Call me an utter bloody fool. Either way, I had to know that the bathroom was empty. I had to prove to myself that I hadn’t slipped up. It would bug me all night if I didn’t make sure – just as it bugs a lot of misguided folk if they don’t check that they’ve locked their front door before heading out for the day.

  So I returned to the bedroom and I immediately saw the door that I’d missed. It was white and bevelled and located on the far side of the bed. I approached it and set my ear to the wood – and there wasn’t even the faintest murmur of a sound. And that definitely should have been enough.

  But the peculiar impulse to be certain had me in its grip, and so I reached for the handle and edged the door open just a fraction.

  And do you know what I found?

  No, of course you don’t, and I’m not going to tell you yet, either. Because right now I can feel my hack instincts tingling away, telling me that this is a choice spot for a crafty cliff-hanger. So if you’ll forgive me, I think we’ll leave things where they stand for just a moment while I leap backwards and explain how it was that I’d found myself in this situation in the first place.

  THREE

  ‘Ah, Paris,’ I said. ‘There’s nowhere quite like it in the spring.’

  Victoria groaned and rolled her eyes. If there was one thing I’d noticed about Victoria, it was her extensive repertoire of eye-movements. This particular hitching of the pupils was one I’d become familiar with during our flight across the Atlantic to Newark, our two days in Manhattan and our hop onwards to McCarran Airport. From what I could tell, it betrayed a monumental disappointment, perhaps even a regret, at my latest attempt at humour. The gag, you see, was that we weren’t in Paris at all. We had been, only a week before, but right now we were in a taxi cab cruising along the Las Vegas Strip, and with a friendly nudge of the arm and a wink, I’d drawn Victoria’s attention to the replica Eiffel Tower outside the Paris-Las Vegas casino. And then I’d delivered my punchline, and been left in no doubt that I was fortunate to avoid a punch of my own.

  Being a perceptive type, I’d begun to suspect that my personality was beginning to wear a touch on Victoria. I thought that was understandable, considering we hadn’t spent all that much time together before. Yes, we’d known one another for years, and Victoria had been my literary agent and confidante throughout what might charitably be referred to as my writing career, but Paris had been the first time we’d met in person, and much to Victoria’s distaste, she’d discovered that my face didn’t look anything like the author photo in the back of my mystery novels. The portrait in question was of a dashing chap in a dinner jacket, and it was as fake as the sham Eiffel Tower I’d so foolishly drawn her attention to – though now didn’t seem like an opportune moment to mention the parallel.

  I suppose, with this kind of background, you may well ask what we were doing together in Las Vegas in the first place. And in response, let me just say, in an obscure and rather mysterious way, that there were a number of reasons.

  Not good enough? Okay, the truth is that I’d been invited to leave France (by which I mean that I was told to get out and never return), and at the time of my departure I happened to be holding some merchandise of a somewhat dubious provenance. Now, there aren’t too many markets for the type of goods I had hidden in my luggage, but I knew of a dealer in Brooklyn who might be inclined to take a look. And by coincidence, Victoria had recently agreed to represent an author based in New York, whom she was keen to shake the hand of, following what she’d taken to referring to as my deception. So, in short, we had come to America. And after I’d sold my wares for a respectable profit, and Victoria had glumly confirmed that her latest scribe was indeed the mirror image of his rather unfortunate mug-shot, I’d suggested that we might be entitled to a little fun. And fun, to me, meant Vegas.

  In all honesty, persuading Victoria to come to Sin City had been far trickier than I could have anticipated. To begin with, she’d given me a flat-out refusal, insisting that she needed to return to London for the sake of her clients. Then she’d told me that she couldn’t afford a vacation.

  ‘Piffle,’ I told her – largely because it was a word I’d always wanted to use. ‘You deserve a break. I can’t even remember the last time you took a holiday.’

  ‘Try a few days ago. In Paris.’

  ‘Piffle,’ I replied – because I really felt like I’d mastered the use by now. ‘You can’t call that a holiday. It was a business trip, of a kind, followed by an adventure, of a sort, and not a vacation by any stretch of the imagination.’

  Victoria closed her eyes and drew an audible breath. Then she told me, in a caustic tone, that if I said ‘piffle’ once more, she’d be forced to cause me some damage of a rather unfortunate and testicular nature. And she added, quite calmly, that she positively didn’t gamble. That it was, in fact, a Newbury family rule never to bet on anything.

  ‘Not gamble?’ I said, as if she was mad. ‘Are you a Mormon?’ And believe me, I was careful to pronounce the second ‘m’ very clearly.

  ‘No, Charlie. I’m just a responsible adult. And anyway, what would I wager? I’m hardly going to fritter away the less than jaw-dropping commission I earn on your books.’

  ‘I’ll stump you. I have more than a fistful of dollars from my Brooklyn contact. By rights, half of it’s yours anyway.’

  ‘Then buy me a ticket home.’

  ‘But Vegas will be fun, Vic. You could do with a little frivolity in your life.’

  ‘Oh believe me, seeing all those Charlie Howard fees pile up in my bank account makes me quite giddy enough.’

  Her little barb caused my jaw to drop, and once it had struck my kneecap, I uttered what can best be described as a gasp. ‘Sometimes, I think it’s lucky for you that I’m not precious about my writing.’

  ‘Not precious? Or not serious?’

  ‘Ouch.’

  ‘All I’m saying is that it’s been more than a year since you’ve given me anything new. And from what I can gather, your latest Faulks novel has hit the buffers.’

  ‘Not true. It’s just that the Cuban section’s proving a little tricky to develop. But give it time and it’ll come together.’

  ‘Time? Well, if you spent half as much time at your desk as you do breaking into people’s homes, it might be finished already.’

  I twirled a finger at my temple. ‘My subconscious has been toiling away like you wouldn’t believe.’

  ‘Yes, but it’s your conscious I’m worried about. That’s the part that does the actual typing. Can’t you at least pull together a short story? Something I might be able to place in an anthology? We do need to keep your name out there.’

  I paused for a moment and tried to gauge the turn our conversation had taken, my grey cells running through all kinds of complex and intricate thoughts.

  ‘I don’t mean to sound like a conspiracy nut here, Vic, but are you just nagging me
in the hope I’ll become so annoyed that I buy you a ticket to London?’

  ‘Devious, moi?’ She wafted her hand in front of her face and fluttered her eyelids.

  ‘And you’ll quit bugging me if I do?’

  ‘I’ll give you a month’s grace.’

  ‘Done.’ I slapped my fist into my palm, as if I was banging an auction-house gavel. ‘And cheap at the price. You may even find yourself travelling first class.’

  Except she didn’t, and neither did she find herself on a plane to the UK. Because left to my own devices, I went ahead and booked us non-stop to Las Vegas, together with connecting guest rooms at the Fifty-Fifty.

  Now, it will come as no surprise to the more worldly among you that my subterfuge didn’t go down all that well. In fact, it went down about as badly as you could imagine. But unfortunately for Victoria, it wasn’t until I’d hustled her as far as the departure gate at JFK that she rumbled me, and by then she was so stupefied and so enraged that I was able to bundle her onto the plane before she thought better of it.

  A flûte of post-take-off champagne helped to thaw her out, and a good deal of manly pleading persuaded her to talk to me by the second hour of our flight, but now that we were motoring along the Las Vegas Strip, no amount of cajoling could get her to see the humour in my rather weak joke about the Eiffel Tower.

  ‘Listen,’ I said, trying yet again to strike a reasonable note. ‘Surely it’s not the meanest trick in the world. Just think of it as a thank you for all you’ve done for me over the years.’ I placed a hand on her knee. ‘And I did buy you a ticket home for the end of the week.’

  ‘Hmm,’ she said, and folded her arms.

  ‘Is that a “Hmm, yes I forgive you”?’

  ‘No, Charlie. It’s a “Hmm, let’s see how quickly we can change my flight so that I can get away from you before I kill you”.’

  I checked on our cab driver in the rearview mirror. A toothy grin had slashed his face in half.