Face of Death

She looked ahead at the layout of the room, saw which slots were the ones that would pay out more often, placed in strategic locations to excite and encourage other gamblers. The harsh grating noise of a roulette ball rolling across the spinning wheel caught her attention, and she knew without having to wait for the result that the man with all of his chips on black fourteen was not going to get a win.

Zoe knew she would be able to clean up in a place like this. At the blackjack tables alone she could make a fortune, but the poker tables—to her left, four serious men in suits staring intently as the dealer flipped over an ace of clubs, giving the second player from the right around a seventy-five-point-five percent chance of getting a flush—there, she could take the lot of them.

Once, she almost had. Years ago, before she even entered the Bureau. She had been invited to a casino with a group of people she had known from work; acquaintances, really, since she had never been close enough to many people to call them friends. She had hit a few different games, always walking away with her chips at least doubled.

The first time, they laughed and clapped her on the back and congratulated her on her luck. The second time, she was apparently on a lucky streak.

By the fourth, they were giving her strange looks.

It was after her sixth game that she walked away, cashing in the chips so that she could leave and never have to spend leisure time with those people again. She had burned her bridges well enough. Once they looked at her like she was a freak, and even began to accuse her in whispers of cheating, she knew it was done.

There were things that she could not do, things that drew too much attention to her and the skills that she was trying to hide. Gambling was one of them. She had gone home after that and donated the money to a hospital, hoping that the benefit it gave the children’s ward would stop the guilt she felt at using her power for something like that. It was wrong to cheat, and she had most definitely been cheating.

It wasn’t that she wouldn’t have liked to play again. It had been a fun night—very fun, until it started going sour. No, it was the risk and the guilt that stopped her. She had vowed that night never to gamble again, and she was not going to break that vow today.

Not that there was any time for something like that, when you were a special agent tasked with tracking down a mass murderer.

That knowledge did not mean that she could turn the numbers off. She tried to focus on faces and bodies, not cards and bets. There was no point in knowing that there was going to be a payout on the next spin of the roulette wheel, or which of the poker players was a shark and which genuinely had no idea how to bet. None of that would save the killer’s next target.

Zoe followed the twists and turns of the path, alone now, her two shadows having slipped away—one to remain at the entrance and the other to her right, stalking through the maze of slots. She wound through the card tables, trying to look less like an agent and more like a seasoned gambler seeking the right game, though she hardly knew how to make the difference. So long as she looked at the faces, it was all right. But when she let her gaze dip to the tables to keep up appearances, the numbers flooded in, almost to the point of distracting her from her mission.

A movement caught her eye up ahead, and her gaze was drawn to another roulette table, this one served by an attractive blonde croupier. The woman was scraping chips toward winners, scooping the losing bets toward her, announcing the next game. A number of people were gathered around her, four—no, five—all with their attention on the betting grid.

And there, in the middle of them, with the side of his face toward her—Jimmy Sikes.

Zoe reached for her radio, lifting it to her face, but he was sharing a joke with another gambler and happened to look to the side and smile as Zoe moved toward him. He clocked the radio in her hand, her eyes fixed on him, and the laughter died in his throat. After a brief moment, perhaps half a second, he turned on his heel and pushed off at a dead run.

Zoe swore under her breath, pressing the call button. “Suspect identified. He is on foot, attempting escape from the card tables. Keep control of the exits.” She trusted her own men, and the casino’s own security staff, to handle that. So long as they were all in position, there was no chance he was getting away.

She dashed after him, seeing the cop out of the corner of her eye, moving out of the machines in her direction and beginning to speed up. Sikes was only a table ahead, but he had the advantage of the crowd, pushing through them and sending people scattering in surprise, resistant and forming new barriers when Zoe arrived a moment later.

He chanced a look behind him and saw how close she was, his eyes wide and wild. “Stop! FBI!” Zoe called out, giving him a chance to do the right thing.

They never did the right thing.