I get up from the stool and go over to the kitchen sink. I wash the plate. The water is warm over my hands. I dry it and put it back where it came from. I ignore his. He can wash up his own mess. It’s petty but I don’t have much else. I’m thinking.
“Okay,” I say. “I’ll give you one name for some freedom. Let me out of the suite at least. You’ve got the ankle monitor on me. I’m sure there’s an alarm set to go off if I go past the front door. I’ll swap one name for the ability to leave this floor. I’m going to go stir crazy stuck in here.”
He studies me, thinking, then nods. “Okay. You can go third floor to twenty-fourth. You’re not allowed on the main casino floors below. Bars and restaurants above the third are all available. Break any rules and you’re right back in here.”
I begin to nod but he adds: “And it better be a good name.”
I swallow. “And if you break your word. It’s the last name you get.”
“Deal.”
“Gary Stokes.”
His eyebrows lift. “Are you sure?”
“Yes. Completely. I’m still pinning down evidence on some of the others, but he is a definite.”
Gary Stokes is one of the pit bosses, working most night shifts. Dom clearly wasn’t expecting the name.
But the surprise doesn’t last long. He just nods, then he gets up and walks out.
Then I go to the office and close the door and sit in the chair and stare at the monitor and begin, very carefully, to work out what I do next.
12. Dom
My first instinct is to pick up the phone and have Viktor pull in Stokes, bring him upstairs and lean on him until we find out who he’s working for.
It's what my father would do. It's what Viktor would do. It's the clean, direct response and it would feel very satisfying for about twelve hours.
Then whoever is above Stokes disappears. The runners scatter. The infrastructure goes underground and rebuilds somewhere I can't see it, and six months from now I'm sitting in this office looking at the same loss reports with no leads.
I need every name. Theo has me there even if I won’t admit it. Yes, I could bring someone else in, but he’s already ahead of the curve and he’s good at this.
The other problem is the intricacy of the operation. If the Castellanos are running an operation inside my casino that costs more than it earns, -- and I’d put good money on it being them -- then the money isn't the objective.
The losses on my floor are significant but they're not significant enough to justify the complexity of what Theo described.
Rotating runners who appear once and don't come back are risky and expensive. False trails and deliberate losses don’t just waste the time of my analytics team, they also decrease the profit of the gang running the con.
They’ve deliberately lost money just to try make me look at the wrong people.
The goal isn’t profit. It’s infrastructure.
The question is: infrastructure for what?
I can think of three possibilities. They're mapping my security, identifying weaknesses in my operation, building a picture of who inside the Grand can be bought or pressured.
They're testing my response time, seeing how long it takes me to notice and what I do when I do. Or they're building something larger and the casino is the staging ground.
None of these are good. And there’s nothing I can do about it yet. If I get rid of Stokes, there’ll be someone else waiting to take his place.
I need every single name before I can move. The outside people, I don’t care about too much. We can simply ban them. Or scare them.
It’s the insiders who are the problem. I need to know every single one before I move.
The door opens. Viktor comes in with two coffees and sets one on my desk. He looks like he slept here. He might have.
"Tell me," he says.
