Deadly Assets by Griffin W. E. B. & Iv William E. Butterworth

Author:Griffin, W. E. B. & Iv, William E. Butterworth [Griffin, W. E. B. & Iv, William E. Butterworth]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Mystery, thriller, Crime, Adult
ISBN: 9780698164468
Goodreads: 26515167
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2015-08-05T07:00:00+00:00

[ 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.”

Harris 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

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