The Player, The Thief and The Broken Heart - Chapter Nineteen - At the Hideout

Frank drove to the end of the long, unpaved road that cut across the valley where once upon a time there'd been a shallow lake or river bed. The sky was ablaze from the sun setting behind the mountain range and long shadows concealed the dilapidated warehouse. All that was left of the fence that had originally surrounded the property was the odd steel post erupting out of the dried, cracked dirt.

"What the hell is this place?" Robbie climbed out of the back seat and stared at what looked to him like an abandoned airplane hangar. An especially flat strip of desert cutting behind the building sure made him wonder. They were so remote they may as well be stranded on another planet.

"Back in the day," Frank said, "One of Meyer Lansky's associates used to fly suitcases of money out of here. Who knows. Every place has a history even if half of it ain't true." They waited for Crazy Eddie to get out, slowed for now by what he claimed was a temporarily sprained ankle.

"Gang's all here by the looks of it." Robbie jutted his chin out at the pair of Hondas parked next to a rusted out oil drum some ten yards away.

The three of them went around to a side door where Frank pressed a buzzer embedded in the frame. A magnetic lock thumped and the door popped open. There were no supporting walls inside, only a few steel columns holding up the peaked metal roof. The floor was bare concrete and shockingly spotless, sterile.

Robbie and Eddie stayed by the entrance while Frank strolled across, toward a bank of computer monitors. Two men around Jimmy's age sat in front of a console in the middle. At the sound of Frank's footsteps approaching, they wheeled around in their seats as if they'd been synchronized. One of the men had a pale, squarish face and jet black spiky hair. Jeannie's twin brother, Eric. His friend Henry had similar hair but a longer, darker face and a broader grin. Though both his parents were from Korea, most people assumed he was Chinese.

"Ugh, what a day," Frank said. "Guys, these are my old buddies Robbie and Eddie that I told you about."

Robbie and Eddie stepped forward and the four of them exchanged handshakes. Frank gestured and said, "This is Jeannie's twin, Eric, obviously fraternal, and his good buddy Henry Oh."

Robbie chuckled. "Henry Oh? So in school during roll call–"

"Yeah, I get that a lot." Henry hid his grimace behind large white teeth, and shrugged.

"Anyway," Frank said, "Chocolate bar and Jeannie's evil twin will be our tech support."

"Already up and running." Henry rattled something on the keyboard, then turned a knob near the base of the console. "Voilà––we are inside the Golden Dunes Casino!"

Frank eyed the leftmost column of screens on his right. The upper one showed a bird's eye view of the service corridor leading from the main kitchens. Two rows down, he spotted the long wooden bar in the Penthouse High-Rollers Lounge. In the right hand corner of that screen he could see the brass railing surrounding the pit. That must be where the poker table was located. It was covered with a thick black blanket. Rebecca had showed him a bunch of photos of the place that she'd managed to snap with her cell phone, but with this broader view he could orient himself better.

The buzzer sounded.

In a lower right-hand screen, feed from a camera above the side door showed Jimmy bouncing on his toes outside, fists crammed into the pockets of his blue jeans. Eric pressed a red button to release the doors and Jimmy slunk in, pulling one of his hands out for just long enough to wave at all of them.

"You're late," Robbie said.

"Thanks for informing me," Jimmy said. "See, I forgot how to read clocks in your absence."

Frank sighed. "If you're going to come every time with this stinkin' attitude then–"

"Sorry," Jimmy said. "I had a little trouble finding this place and you told me not to use GPS or look on Google maps."

"You're here now," Frank said, slinging his arm around his shoulder. "And hey, whenever you get mouthy like that you remind me of your dad."

Jimmy squeezed next to him and peered at the screens. In the middle of the top row, uniformed employees were pressing the call button for an elevator. "Hey––that's ..."

"A service corridor inside the Golden Dunes," Henry said, his voice swelling with pride now that there was someone around with enough tech-savvy to fully appreciate how much of an accomplishment this was. "And that is the elevator that goes up to the penthouse. And down into the cage room or whatever they call it––the place with all the casino money. Ain't hacking into there, though––we'd be dead in seconds if we tried."

"Ho-lee shit. You guys actually did it." Jimmy's eyes followed Frank's finger as it pointed to a screen in the upper right, to a cramped office housing a large safe.

"That's what you'll be cracking. Right there." Robbie and Jimmy gawked at the screens as if they were showing the inside of Fort Knox.

"You can case inside the whole building from here," Jimmy said. "Fuck me! What kind of security company are they working with?"

"The kind gutted by Yushenko's private equity takeover," Henry said. "Don't forget where Eric and I used to be employed."

Henry added, more for the sake of Robbie than Jimmy, "The two of us got laid off right after and never even saw our last pay checks. So this will be my little way of saying thanks for nothing, asshole!" Holding his two middle fingers up in the air, he kicked himself backwards in his chair and wheeled around in a circle.

"So what exactly did you guys do here?" Robbie asked, brow furrowed while he peered at a screen showing a casino cage disappearing into some kind of dumbwaiter. He caught Frank's eye and jerked his head, mouthing something like come with.

Frank slung his arm around Robbie's shoulder and ushered him to a far corner, then beckoned for Jimmy to follow. The three of them huddled and he whispered, "Jimmy can vouch for both of them."

Jimmy nodded. "I've known them since college."

"Henry and Eric," Frank continued, "used to work for one of the most prestigious security firms in the state. Both of them know all the backdoor ways into their systems and supposedly their boss––the only one who got to stay––is a total retard."

"And this same security company does everything for Yushenko's Hotel and Casino?" Robbie asked, not sounding convinced.

"That's one of the reasons why he bought out the company," Jimmy said.

"That, and because of the financial crisis thingy, it was worth next to nothing at the time. Scooped it up for cheap, fired a bunch of people willy-nilly and he seems to think it can run itself with whoever remains," Frank said. "Only they fired all the smart ones and kept on all the dumb ones."

"But they could change passwords or whatever at any time, couldn't they?" Jimmy asked, amazed they hadn't already.

"It's a risk we have to take," Frank said. "Henry said not to worry, though. See, before they got laid off, rumors were flying around that the ax was coming. So they built their own 'back door' as they call it, to get in undetected. Even if the admin passwords are changed, wouldn't matter. They'd still have to find that, too." Frank began ambling back to where Eric, Henry and Eddie were loitering. "I'm not techie enough to understand everything they said to me, but they both assured me it wouldn't be a problem."

Eric said, "We routed everything so we can get into the systems remotely without anyone detecting it and we can get around new any firewall they put up."

"I dunno. There's always something that goes wrong," Jimmy whispered. "Without fail."