“Tomorrow evening. Unless we have Chains and his crew by then.”
Michael blew out a breath. “Twenty-four hours doesn’t give us much of a window.”
“Do we have any leads?” I asked.
“I’ve got a guy inside the Durante family. He’s been snooping around and found out Chains has a girlfriend who works at the Plaza. I reached out to her. She’s not much of a girlfriend. Couldn’t give me much on him—didn’t even know his real name—but I did manage to squeeze his address and phone number out of her.”
A guy inside the Durante family? I wondered who would be crazy enough to take that gig. Focusing on that was easier than allowing myself to think about whatever Carlo had done to “squeeze” the information out of Chains’s girl. We couldn’t afford to be lenient, especially not when our own guys had been killed in cold blood. But other than dating an asshole, she probably hadn’t done anything wrong.
“I have a team watching his apartment, one on the Plaza, and one on his girlfriend’s place. If he shows his mug, we’ll know.”
Michael nodded. “Tom has my pager number and promised to reach out if Chains, or any of the assholes he hangs with, shows up in his bar again.”
“So now what? Back to the streets?” I asked, stifling a yawn. I’d gotten maybe eight hours of sleep over the last forty-eight hours and the idea of spending the rest of the day in the car made me want to pass out on the spot.
“Yep,” Carlo said, clapping me on the shoulder. “And keep your eyes open. I heard you’re already on babysitting duty, and I’d hate to see my brother have to discipline you again, Dom.”
Discipline… a nice way of putting it. Like labeling the scars littering my body as “training.” Nobody would ever accuse my old man of sparing any rods or spoiling any children.
“Yessir,” I replied.
Carlo gave us a few locations to check into and dismissed us. Michael drove as I rattled off the businesses on Carlo’s list. Each of theborgatas(crime families) had a turf consisting of businesses owned, ran, or protected. My family offered protection to several local shops, but our best investment had come in 1986 when Father had gone in with a couple of his allies to start up a corporation. They currently owned three casinos—the Big Top, the Oasis, and the Round Table—with plans for two more to go in toward the end of 1993. Father’s most influential Las Vegas ally, Don Caruso, ran the Big Top. My family operated out of the Oasis, and the Round Table—which had only been open for two years—was currently in the hands of Don Pelino, boring Valentina’s father.
Father’s enemy, the reigningcapo dei cappi(or boss of bosses) of Las Vegas, Don Maurizio Durante, owned a controlling share of our rival corporation, which currently held six casinos: The Pelican, Nero’s, Sammy’s, The Columbian, Blackbeard’s, and Jafar’s. The Durante family operated out of Nero’s and the Columbian, putting their allies in charge of the others. My family made nice with Don Durante’s allies, but we stayed the hell out of any properties Maurizio ran directly. I wouldn’t put it past the crazy son-of-a-bitch to gun us down in cold blood as soon as we walked through the door. Best not to tempt him.
Still, Carlo had kept all rival casinos off our list. Everyone knew Michael and I were Marianis, so we’d have cameras on us from the moment we entered the lobbies and nobody would dare talk to us. Instead, we stuck to neutral casinos, not owned or protected by either family.
We covered the Mojave, the Caribbean, and the Imperial Casino. In each, we respectfully approached the managers and explained enough to show Chains as a threat we needed to unite on, while careful not to make our family sound vulnerable or weakened by the attack. The managers promised to alert their staff and pass on the information about the reward being offered.
After the casinos, we started the onerous task of covering Vegas’s many restaurants. On our fifth one, we stumbled across another lead.
“Yeah, I know Chains,” a cook by the name of Leslie said.
We’d caught her out back of some greasy spoon restaurant off East Desert Inn Road, dingy apron slung over her shoulder as she puffed on a lit cigarette. I lit up my own smoke and joined her.
“What’d that idiot do now?” she asked.
Michael avoided her question by asking one of his own. “How do you know him?”
“Used to work with his mom. Nice lady, but she let that boy run over her from the day he was born. I told her she needed to put her foot down and kick his ass every now and again, but she had guilt about his daddy being wrapped up in some mob.” Leslie paused long enough to eye me and Michael in our suits. “You’re not with the one of the mob families, are you?”
“No ma’am,” Michael said. He pulled his wallet out and flashed her a fake badge. Most of the time our family credentials busted down the doors we needed opened, but sometimes a badge worked better. Ours were barely higher quality than toys—fake enough looking that if we were ever caught, our attorney could make the argument that nobody would accept them as real—but people rarely looked closely enough to notice. “We’re detectives with the Las Vegas PD. We believe Chains messed up and got himself involved in a robbery that went south. Two men are dead, and we need to find him and ask some questions.”
“You’re shittin’ me,” Leslie breathed out.
“No ma’am,” Michael replied.
She blew out a stream of smoke before snuffing out her cigarette. “Damn, that’s a shame. Can’t say I’m surprised, though. I’m tellin’ you, I tried to warn her about that boy.”
Sensing Leslie wasn’t the sharpest knife in the restaurant, I jumped in to move the conversation along. “We need to find him as soon as possible. Your friend probably doesn’t know what her son did. But it’ll hit the news tonight, and then if we find him staying with her, she’ll be arrested for harboring a criminal. The DA will stack up as many charges on her as he can… obstructing justice, aiding and abetting, you name it.”
“But she… she’d never do anything like that. Only thing you could charge her with is loving her son too damn much and not knowing when to say no.”
“We know that,” Michael said, raising his hands. “But we gotta get Chains locked up before the news airs and the DA can start making a case against her. Most likely one of her neighbors already knows if Chains is staying with her. The family of the deceased is offering a decent reward for information so…”
“Oh?” Leslie asked.
It took everything I had not to shake my head in disgust. Carlo always harped on the payout mentality of Vegas, insisting most everyone in the city believed they’d hit the jackpot someday. Which explained the city’s love of lawyers and malpractice suits. Those who couldn’t win big, sued big. Learning how to hustle meant using that mentality against people, and judging by the gleam in Leslie’s eyes, she saw her potential payout on the horizon. I’d been trying to win her over by manufacturing concern for her friend, when Leslie would have gladly blabbed the second I waved a few bills under her nose.
