Private Vegas (Private 9)

“Thanks, Jack. It’s like this,” Tommy said. “And I’m going to use the legal term for it, okay? You ‘improperly influenced’ Dad so that he would leave Private to you. He had long promised Private to me. You duped him and that’s a fact. Now, Jack, I offered to buy you out, and my offer was pretty generous. You blew me off and left me no choice. So I’m taking you to court—”

“Let’s go, Rick,” I said. I stood up, opened my wallet, dropped a few bills on the table. “Lunch is on me,” I said.

“You can run, but you can’t run far,” Tommy said. “I’ve got witnesses who will swear Dad was leaving Private to me until you visited him at Corcoran. He changed his will just before he died. So I’m going to sue you, Jack. And I’m going to win.”

Del Rio and I went out to the car. I said, “He’s full of crap. No jury is going to take the word of Ray Noccia.”

My best bud, Del Rio, agreed.

But I didn’t convince myself. Ray Noccia could buy off any number of jailhouse rats for pocket change. If he got twenty mugs to say that my father was leaving Private to Tommy before I talked to him, that much testimony could add up to a preponderance of evidence.

It might persuade a jury, and if Dad’s last will was overturned, the prior will would be enforced.

Tommy could try, and I knew he would use every angle and maybe come up with a few new ones. But I wasn’t going to let my brother steal Private from me. I couldn’t let that happen.

No fucking way.

EPILOGUE

AT CROSS PURPOSES

Chapter 117

IT WAS CASUAL Friday, Lori’s favorite day of the week, because the office closed at one.

Lori made sure that the boss was good and gone. Then she grabbed her handbag, jogged down the stairs to the underground garage, and got into her platinum-colored Infiniti, her silver bullet, her wonder car.

She strapped in, checked her mirrors, and felt for the timer on the cord around her neck. Then she turned the ignition, and, as the gates rolled up, she gunned the engine and zoomed up the parking-garage ramp. As soon as the front tires hit the street, she pressed the timer’s start button. She drove a speedy half mile through light traffic, then peeled out onto the ramp taking her to the 110.

Lori had a good feeling about the upcoming twelve minutes. Like, maybe she could knock a few seconds off her best time, like she’d been trying to do for a couple of weeks. She was in a wide-open lane now, moving at seventy-three, the roadway rolling out in front of her like a satin ribbon. She spun the steering wheel with her wrist and took the Infiniti into the inside lane, accelerated, and got up to seventy-six, now eighty, easy-breezy.

As Lori sped toward her own personal finish line, a god-damned paneled van up ahead wandered across the center lanes in some kind of trance. She had her rules: no horns allowed, no brakes, so Lori stepped on the gas and kept to the inside lane, flying so close to the van, she brushed its side panels.

She glanced into her mirror, saw with supreme satisfaction that the van was already a dot behind her—and that she’d gained four seconds on her previous best time for this point in the race. OMG.

Lori was flying through the Figueroa tunnels, and now traffic was merging onto I-5 North. She was passing the Glendale exit on her right at a cool eighty-five, heading toward Griffith Park and her exit onto the 134, when it hit her.

Today. Right now, she was going to break her all-time record by more than twenty seconds.

The exit was coming up and Lori was doing beautifully, all open road and smooth sailing, until a big orange-and-white box-store tractor-trailer began edging her out of her lane, mindlessly sending her away from her turnoff to her right and toward the median strip to her left, giving her no room to maneuver and no time to fade back.

This was just wrong.

Lori had no choice. She gunned the engine, shot into the sliver of lane between the sixteen-wheeler and the median strip. Her left rear tire bumped up against the low concrete wall, climbed it, and spun the Infiniti into a right-handed yaw toward the semi.

Instinctively, Lori wrenched the wheel hard left against the turn, felt the car buck, jump the center strip entirely, and clear it, sending her into oncoming traffic at ninety miles an hour. Her elation was gone, replaced by anger, fear, and then horror as the blue Bentley barreled toward her, looming large. She saw the fear on the face of the driver. He turned his wheel and hit the brakes as the distance between them closed.

Rubber burned, and despite Lori standing on the brakes, using every muscle she had to stop her car, there was nowhere to go, no way out.

“Jesus Christ,” she screamed a split second before the cars collided, before the fireball bloomed, before she died.

“Noooooo.”

Chapter 118

KHEZIR COULD HARDLY believe how quickly their lives had changed. Three days ago, he and Gozan were on the verge of deportation to be followed by either summary execution at Sumar International or exile to the wilderness in rags.

Now, thousands of Sumaris were protesting in the streets across their nation, and Khezir and Gozan had become celebrities. There had been an avalanche of press and TV interviews, countless calls and letters of support from their countrymen.