guy lying on the pavement next to a laundry cart. Faith squinted, her head throbbing. There couldn’t be a naked guy. It must be a—what? Sea lion? A pink sea lion?
Faith realized she’d probably taken a pretty good bump on the head. She fell through the swinging doors into the cool, dark kitchen, looking for a phone she could use to call the cops. And then an ambulance. Because she was pretty sure she was seeing things that weren’t there.
Several minutes later, Alexei lifted his head. He looked around. Next to him, Johnny Red groaned.
“Hey,” Alexei said, stretching his arms to see if anything was broken. “You all right?”
Johnny Red sat up and slowly rolled his head. “I think so,” he said.
Alexei opened the door of the cab and stepped carefully down to survey the damage. The front of the truck was smashed. The headlights were gone, and the grill would never be the same. Maybe the radiator was cracked, too. No getaway here.
He leaned into Johnny Red’s window.
“Come on,” Alexei said. “We’ve got to get out of here. We don’t want to be around when the cops get here.”
“We gotta take Big Julie, too,” Johnny Red complained, easing out of the truck. “He’s over there.”
Alexei looked at the big man lying naked on the pavement.
“No,” he said, going to the back of the truck. “We have to leave him. We can’t take the cart, and he’s still out cold. We can make another grab for him later. The plan’s still good. Get Igor out of the getaway car. We have to move.”
Johnny Red limped over to the sedan. The rental car was a total loss. The front was accordioned to half its normal size. The hood had sprung open. The bumper was half torn off and dragged on the ground. Inside, Igor still sat dazed, leaning into the exploded airbag. Pale powder drifted in the air.
“Come on you son of a procrastinating anarcho-syndicalist,” Johnny Red said to Igor, who became a little more alert with the abuse.
Johnny Red pulled open the car door and grabbed Igor’s arm. Igor wobbled on his broken ankle, but he got out of the car.
“Everybody okay?” Alexei asked as he came up with a shaky Markov and Yakov. “Let’s go, then.”
The five men limped slowly the fifteen feet out to the boulevard. Traffic was heavy. Alexei stuck his hand in the air, but three cabs passed them by. Then he realized what was wrong.
“Lose the Groucho glasses,” he said, and everybody did. Alexei raised his hand again, and a passing cab shrieked to a halt in front of them.
They staggered after it and dropped gratefully into its air-conditioned interior.
“Where to, fellas?” the cabbie asked. He looked closer. “Jesus. It looks like you guys got yourselves in an accident. Or a fight.”
Nobody spoke.
“I guess you’re right,” Alexei finally said. “We should go to the hospital.”
“Las Vegas General’s the closest,” the cabbie said. “And they got a good trauma center. Been there myself.”
He gunned the motor and sped away.
Chapter 22
Twenty minutes later the service driveway was crowded with police and emergency vehicles, security personnel, FBI agents, cops, and EMTs. Two young, handsome paramedics from the fire department checked out Faith. Behind them, a police photographer took pictures of smashed beets that had left brilliant purple stains on the casino walls where they’d hit, random rutabagas and stray carrots rolling around on the ground, and a large, pink dildo lying on the loading dock.
Faith felt woozy, disoriented, and flustered from the male attention. One of the EMTs flashed a light in her eyes, and one examined her aching wrist.
“I don’t think it’s broken,” the tall blond one said as he wrapped an elastic bandage around her wrist, smiling at her. “But you’ll need to go to the hospital and get an X-ray just to be sure.”
“I don’t think you have a concussion,” the one with the smoldering eyes said. “But they can check you out there. Will your insurance cover Las Vegas General? They’ve got a good emergency room there.”
“That’s fine,” Faith said.
The naked man who’d been lying on the pavement—Faith had been right about that—was now lying on a gurney with an IV running in his arm, where another set of paramedics worked on him.
“Is he going to be all right?” Faith asked as the EMTs packed up their gear. “What was he doing in my truck?”
“We think it was some kind of religious cult that worships vegetables as sexual symbols,” Smoldering Eyes said.
“Really? Well, I’m