Ghosts by Matt Rogers (ap literature book list txt) 📕

He said, ‘Really, I’m doing you a favour.’

She figured it was now or never. He wasn’t talking to her like a cop talking to a civilian. He was talking to her like a man talking to a woman. The guard was down. It might come back up at any moment.

She said, ‘Are we off the record?’

He paused. ‘Did you not hear a word I said?’

‘I heard,’ she said. ‘I’m just checking whether you’re going to haul me away or not.’

He glanced at his watch, then back up. ‘Go on. Speak freely.’

‘I’ve only tried that once before,’ she said. ‘With a sheriff. You reminded me, just then. I’d forgotten about it. He bought me a drink, but that was it. It didn’t go any further. He was nice. I was wondering if you could tell me more about him.’

He said, ‘A sheriff?’

She said, ‘He seemed pretty important. His name was Keith.’

Alan Ward’s bemused expression turned to stone.

He reached up to the buttons of his shirt and thumbed a small device like a pinhole camera with a wire running inside his uniform.

His body-cam.

He’d turned it off.

He said, ‘You want nothing to do with him.’

21

It took Violetta less than ninety minutes to get approached.

She went to Caesar’s Palace and found the blackjack table with the highest minimum bets on the public floor.

Then she sat down and gambled.

Three thousand, four thousand a hand, over and over again. She lazily kept a running count in the back of her head, but she knew it was unlikely to amount to much of an advantage. Counting cards, popularised by blockbuster heist movies, was on its way out, with Vegas having put counter-measures in place years ago. But she hadn’t lost the analytical mind — she wasn’t that far separated from her career — so she applied probability math just for the hell of it.

She wasn’t sure if there was any correlation, but eighty minutes into the spree she was up thirty-four thousand dollars.

Not that it made any difference whether she was winning or not.

That wasn’t what she was there for.

The impeccable Eastern European accent never wavered, and she made it bombastic. She talked loudly to everyone who sat at her table, which was the whole point of the exercise. She spun tales when the dealer delivered her bad hands, claiming that if she was back in Russia she’d have him executed for his poor performance. The dealer half-chuckled, unsure whether she was serious or not.

Then she got more specific.

She alluded to connections she had on the Clark County Board of Commissioners, well within earshot of staff and wealthy patrons. She repeated it, several times, over the course of twenty minutes. She knew it’d send everyone scattering, probing into who this foreign woman was, publicly spouting claims of corruption.

At the eighty-minute mark, she spotted the mole from a mile away.

He was a plain unassuming man in his mid-thirties. He was dressed in casualwear but he clearly didn’t belong in it. By that point her table was full, and she was surrounded by intoxicated power players desperate to hear another one of her anecdotes. The unassuming guy sat down on the edge of the table and didn’t gamble.

He just listened.

She ramped up the performance.

Three minutes later he was gone.

Seven minutes after that, a hand touched her on the shoulder.

It was another guy, this one a little older, his face more deeply lined. He had thick black hair and he looked Italian. He was dressed like a Caesar’s Palace staff member, but he wasn’t. The performance was impressive, and Violetta guessed he had the blessing of the casino to parade around in their uniform as he pleased.

Mob ties.

He started, ‘Could you please come with—?’

She shot to her feet, cutting him off mid-sentence, and put her own hand on his shoulder. She looked right at him.

‘Darling, you are just who I have been looking for,’ she purred. ‘Come on.’

She clapped her hands together, as if he were the horse drawing the cart.

Slightly rattled but externally unfazed, he turned on his heel and walked away from the table.

She followed.

He led her to a quiet corner of the floor. With a glint in his eye — a goddamn mean glint — he said, ‘What do you want?’

She didn’t blink, and thanked the exposure therapy of years spent in this world. She could keep her cool with a mob guy staring her in the face. It was a useful tactic for the role she was trying to portray.

She said, ‘I am going to tell you some things, darling. You are going to deny them, or pretend you do not know what I am talking about. Nevertheless, I am going to say them anyway.’

He didn’t flinch.

She said, ‘I am in the business of selling people. I will not elaborate on that. You know what I mean, and you are not going to haul me out of here or hand me over to the police, are you, my dear?’

Silence.

She said, ‘I thought not.’

She was close to him, within touching distance. He didn’t budge. He was a professional.

She said, ‘Now, darling, for the fun part. You are going to get in touch with someone who is going to get in touch with someone else who is going to get in touch with Clark County District Attorney Gloria Kerr. She is going to be told that someone has expressed interest in merging businesses. She is going to be told that it is in her best interests not to ignore me. She is going to be told that it would go very badly for her and everyone she is involved with if she does not respond. She is going to be told all of this as fast as possible.’

‘I don’t know what you’re talking about,’ the mob guy said. ‘You’re rambling.’

His face was steel.

His gaze would have withered anyone.

Violetta said, ‘You heard every word, my dear. But you are playing your role well. I am impressed. Now...’

She plucked an embossed business card out of her suit jacket. It had a