"Are you available?"
"I can be. Where and when?"
"Same place. Tomorrow suit you?"
"On my way," she said, and cut the link.
Houston, Texas
The sports arena was not average, nothing on par with the Sam Houston Coliseum, the Toyota Center or the Alexander Durley Sports Complex. It was, in fact, a renovated warehouse in Galena Park, a couple blocks from Buffalo Bayou.
The kind of place you might expect to watch an MMA cage match with no holds barred.
Blake Mahoney wasn't rated as a headliner. In fact, he wasn't on the card at all, per se. When he pursued mixed martial arts for profit or simply for the excitement of it, he appeared as "Michael Blake," no fixed address that any of the bettors and spectators knew or cared about. He'd been approached on one occasion by a bookie, offering a grand if he would throw a fight where he was favored as the winner, but he'd punched the asshole into traction and advised him to report it as a traffic hit-and-run.
If anyone had ever tried to follow up on that, no word of it had reached Mahoney at his home in San Diego. Woe betide whoever tried to track him down for that, or any indiscretion from his past, unconscious of the Hell they would bring down upon themselves.
His opposition on the undercard tonight was Clemente Arredando out of Dallas, shorter than Mahoney at five foot eleven but nearly equal in weight at one-ninety. His body was a canvas of tattoos, something like The Illustrated Man by Ray Bradbury or demigod Maui in that Walt Disney animated film where Dwayne Johnson proved that he could sing. Each time he flexed, it seemed as if a painter's sketchbook came alive, and that could be distracting in the cage.
If his opponent paid attention, anyway.
Mahoney ducked distractions, concentrating on the other grappler's eyes, his hands and feet. Most fighters telegraphed their moves somehow, whether intending to or not, and if you trained yourself to spot those tells, it went a long way toward a knockout.
Arredando held black belts in Shotokan karate, Taekwando and Aikido, but none of that made him invincible. He bled and suffered pain like anybody else. The trick was to deliver more than he could handle in as short a time as possible and get the whole thing over with.
They shook hands, Arredondo tossing in a sneer he meant to be intimidating, then backed off from one another, waiting for the first round's bell to sound. It rang, and Blake Mahoney flew toward Arredondo with a storm of kicks and punches that were swift enough to drive his enemy backward, on the defensive, landing blows on either of Mahoney's shoulders that would bruise but cause no lasting damage. When he put his weight behind the final one-two punch that blacked out Arredondo's lights, a hush fell on the audience, then broke into a wave of cheers from those who'd put their money on the white guy.
From the others, not so much.
Mahoney's phone was buzzing when he got back to his locker. Opening the padlock, he reached in and fished it out. "Good timing, Bro," he said.
"You want in on a job?" the caller asked.
"Will there be traveling?"
"Oh, yeah."
"Not nowhere cold?"
"Not this time."
"When?"
"Tomorrow at the usual?"
"Okay. I'm in."
Las Vegas, Nevada
"Las Vegas" is a Spanish phrase that translated into English as "the meadows, as its state—Nevada—means "snow-clad." Both were derived from first impressions of late 18th-century explorers from New Spain, later rechristened Mexico. Prospectors came along in time, sank shafts, and dubbed the territory that they called their own the "Silver State."
Successive waves of interlopers had been looting the Nevada desert ever since.
Las Vegas was a tawdry wide spot in the road until the end of World War II, when mobsters from the New York and elsewhere realized that back in 1931, state legislators tried to save their state from the Depression by legalizing gambling and granting quickie divorces. Drug money poured in, building lavish "carpet joints" to squeeze out mom-and-pop casinos catering to cowboys who spent more time playing cards or shooting craps than showering or polishing their boots. The first pirates to land were mostly Jewish or Italian—men like Bugsy Siegel, Meyer Lansky, Frank Costello and Sam Giancana.
Nowadays, they might be anyone from anywhere on Earth.
Money still talked in Vegas, and most inhabitants were good at listening. Most also had their hands out, one way or another, for whatever scraps the "whales" might leave behind.
It was a whole new Mob these days—or mobs, more properly—from Russia, Eastern Europe, Southeast Asia, all over the globe, in fact. Tonight there was a merger in the making, fat cats gathered in the penthouse of the King's Ransom resort downtown, on Glitter Gulch, an alias for Fremont Street.
The rivalry amounting to a blood feud had persisted between China and Japan over two millennia and change, as far back as reliable recorded history. That's gotten worse since World War II, with China going Red while Washington remade Japan in its own capitalist image. That discord had also been reflected in their separate crime syndicates. The Yakuza, with four dominant families, was subdivided into some 300 smaller clans with forty thousand members estimated globally. The Chinese Triads, ruled by seven families, also claimed roughly forty thousand oath-bound members, working in conjunction with at least nineteen affiliated gangs worldwide.
Both had their outposts in Las Vegas, had been present in "Sin City" since the 1980s if not earlier, but from reports Dartnell had recently obtained, tonight would be their first attempt to merge—unless, somehow, it all went suddenly, disastrously wrong.
He meant to see it do exactly that.
Security was tight at the King's Ransom, as at all legal casinos in Nevada. Guards in uniform were supplemented by an equal number in plainclothes, all armed, while video surveillance teams—the gaming industry's famous "eyes in the sky" peered down from mirrored ceilings, equally alert for cheaters, random thieves, minors intruding on the glitzy world with fake I.D.s, and armed invaders from outside who might try anything from holdups to a targeted assassination.
Nothing had been left to chance, but those in charge had failed to take account of Stan Dartnell.
He knew when and where the meeting would be held, at 8:00 p.m. in the hotel's executive conference room, one floor below the presidential suite that hadn't seen a chief executive check in so far. Security would be divided up between the Yakuza and Triad factions, but Dartnell had no concerns about making his way inside.
Whether he left the room alive, however, was another question altogether.
He was well armed for the sortie, starting with a Mini-Uzi submachine gun and a dozen magazines loaded with forty rounds of 9×19mm Parabellum ammunition each. The sleek Beretta M9 semiautomatic pistol in his horizontal Jackass shoulder holster fed the same ammo from magazines containing fifteen rounds apiece. Clipped to his belt beneath his jacket, just in case it all went south, Dartnell had four M67 fragmentation hand grenades, each with a lethal radius of sixteen feet and wounding range three times that distance.
He was good to go.
Stan rode the elevator up to level nine and left it there, using the fire stairs to complete his journey without tipping off the guards too soon. Once they accosted him, the shit would then become extremely real and there would be no turning back. He'd either pull it off and slip away, or else he'd leave the King's Ransom zipped up inside a rubber body bag.