The Detachment

he’s out here is to be wined and dined. That would all happen at night. So if we play it right, we’re actually doing significantly better than fifty-fifty.”
    Dox drummed his hands on his belly. “Not bad odds, for Vegas. And there’s one other possibility, though I’d call it a long shot given the Sin City venue and all that. The file says he’s a church-going man. Every Sunday.”
    “What are you thinking?” I asked.
    He shrugged. “Well, he’s scheduled to leave on Sunday. Maybe a pious man would stop at a local house of worship on his way out of town. By the time his flight gets to the East Coast, with the three-hour time difference, he’d be too late for anything back home.”
    I nodded. “Agreed, a long shot, and hard to know where he’d be going ahead of time, assuming he goes at all.”
    “Yeah, you’re probably right. Though how many churches could there be in Las Vegas?”
    “Hundreds,” I said. “If you want to make money in hospitals, you build where people are sick.”
    Larison said, “I like the gym. We can rotate like Treven said, with thirty-minute intervals in between to extend our coverage. Whichever one of us sees him in there can alert the others. They have extensive spa facilities, and if he uses any of it—toilet, shower, steam room, hot tub, sauna—we’ll only need him alone for a second. Sauna or toilet would be perfect, in fact. Easily explained as a heart attack with the first, embolism with the second.”
    I nodded thoughtfully, again trying to convey that these were persuasive points I hadn’t fully considered myself.
    “Doing a man in the steam room,” Dox said. “When you say it like that, it sounds dirty.”
    I didn’t bother pointing out that no one else had said it like that.
    Treven said, “The gym makes sense.”
    The dog barked again. Dox winced and said, “Car alarms, people who yell on cell phones in public, and people who don’t bring their yapping dogs inside. And people who put their seats all the way back in coach, while we’re on the subject. I swear, there’s no more civility in the world. Listen, I’m gonna grab a soda from the machine. Anyone want anything?”
    The others shook their heads. Dox stepped out.
    We talked more about how to approach Shorrock, what we’d do if he showed up in the gym, what we’d do if he didn’t. I noted Dox had been gone a little longer than a trip to the vending machine would have warranted, and wondered if maybe he’d felt an uncharacteristic need for some privacy and had actually gone out to use a restroom in the lobby.
    “What about reconnaissance?” Treven asked. “We need to walk the resort to get the layout and nail down details. We can’t do it together, obviously, but we’ll be conspicuous as singletons wandering the casino. It’s strange behavior, and staff monitoring the cameras might pick up on it.”
    No one responded right away, and in the silence, I realized the dog had finally stopped yapping. It was a relief.
    “That’s a good point,” I said. “What I usually do in a situation like this is get an escort. They don’t care what you do or what you talk about as long as they’re being paid, and if they notice you watching your back or doing anything tactical, they usually attribute it to the fact that you’re married and afraid of being seen.”
    “Works for me,” Treven said. “I’ve done it myself.”
    Larison nodded. “It’s a good idea.”
    There was the sound of a keycard sliding into the door lock, and a moment later Dox walked in. He was grinning.
    “Well, the cyanide works,” he said, holding up the canister.
    For an instant, I couldn’t figure out what he was talking about. Then it hit me. I said, “You didn’t.”
    Dox nodded. “I did. If I had to listen to that thing for one more minute, I was going postal, I swear. This way, it was two birds with one stone. The cyanide works, and we get to enjoy the sounds of silence.”
    I shook my head and sighed, thinking I should have seen it coming.
    “Oh, come on,” Dox said. “Tell me you didn’t think of it yourself.”
    Treven said, “I wish I had.”
    We all laughed at that, and maybe the laughter was good. Nothing brought a team together better than shared laughter—well, shared fighting, maybe, but bar fights were a younger man’s game, and anyway we couldn’t afford the attention. But the momentary sense of camaraderie struck me as likely to be just that: momentary. Nothing more than a lull, a veneer