“Deese might be on his way out of town. Gotta believe the blonde called him and told him about Beauchamps,” Lucas said. “We might’ve missed him.”
“Don’t say that,” Rae said. “We got this. We got it.”
* * *
—
THEY WENT BACK to the Bellagio. Bob said he was going to stand in a cool shower for ten minutes, Rae was planning to lie down to think until they moved again. Lucas got online. The first thing he found was a Hertz agency at Caesars Palace.
He called Rae. “I need to get over there. I’ll walk. When Bob gets out of the shower, self-park the Tahoe at Caesars and call me. We might need wheels in a hurry.”
At Caesars, he showed his badge to the manager at the Hertz booth and learned that a man who met Santos’s description had returned a silver Corolla but had paid for it with an American Express card carrying the name Thomas R. Hobbs. The manager said, “The card went right through. He walked back around the corner. There.” He pointed to the end of the hall. “He was either going down to the Forum Shops or he has a room here. Or, I dunno, maybe he was going to gamble. But if marshals are looking for him, that seems kinda unlikely . . . that you’d find him sitting in front of a slot machine.”
Lucas scratched his head, nodded, said, “I’ll look anyway. If the guy tries to rent another car, call me. Right away.”
He gave the manager his card, and as he turned away, the manager said, “You know . . . if he’s, like, a fugitive . . . I don’t know, this guy was carrying a whole bunch of FedEx boxes, like he was delivering them. Does that sound right?”
* * *
—
LUCAS CHECKED with the front desk, and one of the security men came out and told him that he’d already been talking to the Vegas cops and that there were three people named Santos staying at the hotel. They’d checked in two days earlier and appeared, from the registry, to be a husband, a wife, and a child. There was no one in the hotel named Hobbs.
“So if he’s here, he’s under a different name,” Lucas said.
The security man nodded. “I’ve got no idea how you’d find him. If you could give me a photograph, I could show it around to the cleaning staff, see if they remember him. Kind of a long shot, though.”
“Why is it a long shot? If he’s in the hotel—”
“We’ve got almost four thousand rooms here, in six towers. Ninety-nine percent of the rooms have closed doors. Twenty percent have “Do Not Disturb” cards on them. What can I tell you? It’s like finding one guy in a small city.”
“Goddamnit.” Lucas looked around the crazy place; he could probably see five hundred people of all sizes and shapes, scurrying through the lobby and in and out of restaurants and the casino, and he wasn’t even in the main part of the building.
He went out and talked to the head valet, who said, “Man, I got ten people a minute coming through here. I don’t remember the guy. Sorry. We could go down and look for the car.”
Lucas gave him a card with his number on it, and Santos’s car’s license number, and asked him to look for it and to call him when he found it.
* * *
—
RAE CALLED HIM. “We’re here.”
“Cheesecake Factory,” Lucas said.
On the way, the valet called. “We got that car.”
Lucas hurried back to the front of the casino, and the valet took him to the parking structure and pointed out the car, which he said hadn’t been moved since it was first checked in. Lucas looked through the windows and saw absolutely nothing inside.
“If he shows up and asks for the car, take a while to get it and call me,” Lucas told the valet. “This guy is dangerous, so don’t mess with him. Be polite.”
He headed back to the Cheesecake Factory, called Harvey as he walked there, told him about the car.
“We’ll put more pressure on the casino to find him,” Harvey said. “That small city thing is mostly bullshit: there may be that many people here, but in a small city not everybody has to get off one of six elevators. We’ll see if we can get a security guy on the elevator banks.”