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“Are you serious? Ain’t nobody getting paid. I mean, c’mon, it’s for our people!”

Hooks was quiet a moment.

Guess I’m about to get me a good grip for that loot—plenty of benjamins for a while.

And it’d look good if I played that rally.

Might even be news covering it. Get me on TV.

“TV news coming?” he said.

“Yeah. I left messages with ’em all. That Philly News Now and Channel 10 called back and said they were sending reporters. Sure there’ll be more.”

Hooks’s eyebrows went up.

“Yeah, man,” he said, nodding, “I could seriously amp that crowd up.”

“Don’t need you to do a whole set or nothing. Just rap one or two songs. Rev Cross doesn’t like folks taking over his stage.”

Carmelita lit a match, then put the flame to the pot in the pipe bowl. She took a deep puff on the glass pipe and held it in, before holding out the pipe to Hooks.

“So,” Pringle said, “whatcha say, King?”

Tyrone Hooks looked at his gold Rolex watch.

“I say what time you want me there?” he said, winked at Carmelita, then took a puff on the pipe.

[ FOUR ]

Lucky Stars Casino & Entertainment

North Beach Street, Philadelphia

Saturday, December 15, 3:45 P.M.

“The way this ghetto punk strutted out of here, he must’ve really thought that he’d conned everyone, that we were just gonna swallow this little charade of his,” Security Director Sean Francis O’Sullivan said, as he gestured toward the wall of flat-panel monitors showing live video feeds of activity throughout the casino property. One monitor had a sharp freeze-framed close-up image of a smirking Tyrone Hooks as he sat on a Winner’s Lounge barstool.

O’Sullivan looked at Homicide Detective Anthony Harris, and went on: “He expects us to believe that, after being in the jewelry store, he just happened to be having a beer while the robbery was taking place downstairs? Innocently playing a couple hands of five-card stud on the video game at the bar? And then that he just happened to leave the scene after it’s all gone down?”

“That really is pretty ballsy bullshit, Sully,” Harris said, looking from the close-up image and meeting O’Sullivan’s eyes. “Almost like he’s taunting whoever’s watching.”

“I’d say more bullshit than ballsy, Tony. I really don’t think he’s that smart, or that he realizes what deep shit he’s in. Because what I do know is that Mr. Antonov is more than a little pissed. He’s been in and out of here constantly all day, watching the videos, getting information updates, and saying to make sure that we—meaning me personally—give you everything you need.”

Har

ris and O’Sullivan were in the large security office on the top floor of the casino complex, which was down the hall from the office of the casino’s general manager, Nikoli Antonov.

Harris thought the forty-by-forty-foot space—with a small staff busy at a dozen workstations and watching the wall of flat-panel monitors—looked somewhat like the ECC war room at the Roundhouse. O’Sullivan had told him that, while not nearly as impenetrable as the casino’s vault room, which had been built inside a fortress of reinforced concrete walls one floor below ground level, it was highly secure.

O’Sullivan was forty-three years old, tall and fair-skinned, with a smoothly shaven face and scalp and a bushy mustache and goatee and eyebrows that in recent years had faded from carrot-red and added flecks of gray. He wore a nicely cut dark woolen two-piece suit that had been tailored to accommodate the Sig Sauer .40 caliber semiautomatic that Harris knew he carried in a black leather holster on his right hip.

O’Sullivan had put in just over twenty-two years at the Philadelphia Police Department, leaving as a lieutenant in the Citywide Vice Unit, which fell under Specialized Investigations along with Narcotics, Special Victims, Homicide, and other units.

For someone who had served in such an intense unit of the department—while most officers worked within one of the department’s twenty-five districts, performing the necessary street-walking grunt work, Vice worked big complicated cases throughout the city—O’Sullivan required a challenge after retirement.

He had found that challenge at the casino, he said, “protecting the facility from a constant string of knuckleheads who misinterpret its ‘More Money! More Winners!’ slogan as an open invitation to rip off the place.”

O’Sullivan had replayed for Harris that morning’s security camera videos of the flash mob raging through the casino, of the four males in black hoodies and bandannas obscuring their faces while robbing the jewelry store, and finally of Tyrone Hooks. The videos had been made using scores of camera angles to create seamless detailed time lines of each subject’s every step at the casino.