Total pages in book: 89
Estimated words: 83755 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 419(@200wpm)___ 335(@250wpm)___ 279(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 83755 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 419(@200wpm)___ 335(@250wpm)___ 279(@300wpm)
34
MATTEO
Driving all the way to Sin City.
It should have been great.
A wonderful road trip, filled with laughs, amazing roads, awesome food and some sightseeing. Sure, there would be a few sleazy motels along the way, but that would be just a minor detail. A hiccup in the whole thing. It would make a good story to tell in the future.
Well, it wasn’t.
Leonardo’s obsession with Vegas came back with a vengeance. Not that it had gone anywhere really. It had just been slipping my mind these past few weeks. I had been too busy with other stuff to dwell on Leonardo’s damn love affair of the city of slots, blackjack, poker and all things gambling. I could understand a visit to a casino, although I wasn’t stupid. The saying about casinos was as old as the dust in that desert around Vegas.
The house always wins.
Yeah, but there was nothing wrong with someone trying to beat the house in their own game. The thrill was just too big to ignore. For some degenerate gamblers, that thrill was so irresistible that it could bankrupt them in a matter of hours. Even so, I wouldn’t mind trying my luck in a casino, just for the hell of it.
But, in Leonardo’s mind, one casino was just the beginning. He’d been meaning to hit each and every one of those. It would take him days to do so, but he was going to love every minute of it. So, during that long drive, the man wouldn’t shut up about his plan to win in pretty much every game available to him. There were times when I thought I was listening to a ten-year-old. He sounded like he knew every trick in the book and was going to outsmart dealers and machines alike. And I would have loved to yell in his face once or twice, had it not been for my conversations with Cesare. More often than not, we would get to talk about Howard Kanin and his role in the recent developments with Maggie’s crew. Those chats had quite an effect on Leonardo, too. They shut him up and sparked his interest in the task at hand. It should have been on his mind in the first place, but this was Leonardo. A visit to his most favorite city in America had messed with his head too much to ignore it.
Almost three days after we’d set off from the Big Apple, Cesare’s Torino crossed the city limits. I did expect Leonardo to get all excited when he saw that famous sign:
Welcome to: Fabulous
Las Vegas
Nevada
Thankfully, he proved me wrong. He just whistled at the city lights and pointed up ahead. Once Cesare had left Las Vegas Boulevard, he lost his appetite to comment on the sparkly view of Sin City.
As we neared the Atlas Construction building, it dawned on me that Rocco DeLuca had made a very good point. There were skyscrapers all around us. Skyscrapers meant people, and people equaled witnesses. Attempting to go anywhere near Kanin in the middle of the day would get us all thrown in a jail cell.
Cesare following Julian’s car, we left the main road. The head of Maggie’s security pulled over, the Atlas building on our left. It was large and wide, much like most buildings in downtown Manhattan. The lobby was dark and empty. I looked up at the windows on each floor. There were no lights on whatsoever.
Just after 2:30am, I looked in the rearview mirror. There were still cars rolling up and down the road behind us. It wasn’t exactly a traffic jam, but it wasn’t what I’d call “light traffic.” Julian and Slater jogging over to the side entrance, my boys and I joined them.
“I just got a call from Rocco,” Julian said and rolled his mask down his face. “We left him at Neon Tassels about an hour ago. He hired those strippers and he just arrived at Graham’s place.”
“Good,” I commented, pulling my backpack off my shoulder. “Boys, you might want to stand back. Form a circle around me; I don’t want passersby to see what I’m doing here.”
“What’s that?” Slater asked, the moment I held the laser cutter in my grasp.
“Our way in,” I spoke, holding the cutter vertical to the glass. At the push of the button on top, a red laser beam struck the surface, causing a tiny puff of smoke to rise from the glass. I held the cutter steady, starting to draw a large circle. The smell of burning glass getting stronger and stronger, I saw the men’s reflection. Julian and Slater were standing next to one another on my left, with Cesare and Leonardo right behind me. The laser beam completing a full circle, I used the device to push the glass back. That chunk dropped to the floor with a thump, my ears catching the buzz of a cell phone.