The Thousand - Kevin Guilfoile [57]
He walked toward the casino floor, trying to regain his bearings. Nada was still in the building, but she was walking quickly, and from the coordinates on the screen, Wayne was having a difficult time pinning down where. He hadn’t gotten the hang of this device the way Peter had. Peter was only four or five years younger than Wayne, but in technology years Peter might as well have been from the future.
Head down in concentration, Wayne took small steps forward, past rows and rows of busy blackjack tables, with the flat-screen quilt of the sports book just beyond them. He lost the dot on the screen and found it again. “Where are you?” he said out loud just as Nada grabbed his arm.
Startled, he could only imagine the ridiculous look on his face. He knew he had expelled a silly noise, high-pitched and involuntary, and then an embarrassed heat bubbled up from below his skin, reddening his cheeks and ears and neck. He saw Nada kill the first spark of a laugh with a hand to her mouth, and Wayne wanted to die.
He tried to recover with a mumbled explanation, something about how he had been thinking of her, wondering how her meeting had gone. He was hopeful that she might still leave him with one of those promising “Good-bye, lover!” comments, but instead she pointed to a guy across the floor and said, “Search that asshat. He’s got something in his pocket.” As soon as Wayne locked on to the man, Nada had disappeared.
From the way she had said it, Wayne thought the guy might have a gun or a knife. He muttered into his ear bug for backup and followed the kid and three of his buddies as they drifted from blackjack to video poker to craps table to roulette wheel. Peter Trembley and a security guard, Eddie, had now formed a posse behind him, the three of them more than seven hundred pounds together, and they moved in formation to intercept the group, like linebackers pursuing a rusher and his blockers. His embarrassment moments before had been flushed by adrenaline, and they made the confrontation near the entrance to the Rhodes Theater, where a famous but aging magician/impressionist still packed the house with two shows every night. Cornered, the kid acted perplexed, demanding unspecified rights in a loud voice. When he tried to push away, Wayne muscled him to his knees and he and Peter and Eddie helped him toward one of the hot, windowless, and infamous “conference rooms.” As soon as he went to the carpet, the kid’s friends had backed away, disappearing into the tourists and poker machines, not offering even a word of support. Wayne guessed they had bad somethings in their own pockets, but he let them go.
While they walked and stumbled and dragged, the kid flipped a plastic vial of something behind his back at a trash can. Peter picked it up off the floor, covering his fingers with his shirt cuff. When he held it up, Wayne could see a few small white tablets, about the size and shape of the pills he sometimes took for acid reflux.
They sweated him for an hour, but they didn’t touch him, and he didn’t say much. The cops came and took the kid and the plastic tube with the tablets. A few days later, Wayne called to follow up.
“Rohypnol,” a detective acquaintance named Maxwell told him. “Date-rape drug. And the generic kind. Colorless, odorless. Dissolves like sugar into a drink. Anybody who’s got generic rope is up to no good. Have you got a victim? Or a witness? I’d sure like to talk to her.”
Me, too, Wayne thought. He told the cop it was an anonymous tip.
“With what we got, the DA charged him with possession,” Maxwell said. “But first offense with a club drug like that will hardly get him a spanking from the judge’s granny. If it goes to trial, which it won’t, they’ll want you to testify you saw him drop the stuff.