Nobody Dies in a Casino Read Online Free PDF Page B

compound or DRIP or whatever.
    By the time she made it back to the Las Vegas Hilton, her stomach remembered to turn sour over her fat-drenched dinner and the wine. So she stopped by the twenty-four-hour café for milk and dry toast.
    Her stomach might feel bad—it was a grouchy stomach anyway—but she felt pretty good.
    Until she glanced at the headlines of the Las Vegas Sun left on the seat next to her.
    A cop on the Strip had been found murdered. No question of pedestrian error here. This was an obvious hit-and-run. His name was Timothy Graden. Timothy Graden left behind a wife and two young children.
    There was a picture. He was the bicycle cop who wouldn’t believe her at the scene of another murder last night.

CHAPTER 5
    C HARLIE WOKE UP the next morning much as she had the one before—early, rested, hungry, guilty. She was on a roll here.
    Nothing like murder and being away from home to get some quality sleep. She ordered a bagel, coffee, and milk in deference to her type D stomach. A proud and efficient type A personality, Charlie had been saddled with an underachieving digestive track.
    I was too sick and tired to do anything about the bicycle cop last night, she told her other self. I mean, what good does it do to kill myself when it wouldn’t make the cop, or Pat the pilot, rise from the dead? I am not God.
    You are a woman of elastic morals.
    I am a survivor in a totally fascinating but corrupt world.
    So was Attila the Hun.
    Charlie crawled into bed with her diminished breakfast, drank all of the milk first, then turned on the news. Good old Barry and Terry filled her in on a few details of the bicycle cop’s demise but didn’t report if it had happened on the Strip like Patrick Thompson’s. Terry mentioned briefly that investigators were looking for a black limousine, license number unknown, and went on to workers at the Yucca Mountain site who were claiming a cover-up in the investigations into their charges that grains of radioactive sand had been discovered in their baloney sandwiches.
    â€œThe DOE’s Yucca Mountain Project Office,” Barry assured Terry and Charlie, “has pointed out once again that, though the mountain is being prepared to store radioactive waste, no significant amount has been delivered as yet and also that the workers’ sandwiches were assembled elsewhere. Workers maintain that large quantities of various forms of hot waste material is even now being tested inside the mountain to determine the facility’s usefulness as a safe storage area for the literally infinitely hazardous stuff.”
    â€œMeanwhile, that other area is in the news again today too,” Terry added, unaware of the bright smear of lipstick on a front tooth. “The apparently unlimited curiosity of tourists in the supersecret government base shown on the maps only as Area Fifty-one caused trouble again yesterday both at tiny Rachel, the closest town, and on an unmarked dirt road that leads off across the vast uninhabited desert. Two hunters from Michigan claim they were forced to turn back by armed men in aviator sunglasses and dark leather jackets.”
    Terry had gotten the news of her unsightly tooth, probably from the little receiver behind her ear, about halfway through the first sentence. It dimmed her smile drastically. Charlie could see her relief just as the taped interview with the two hunters from Michigan replaced her on the screen.
    Officer Graden probably died because of you. He probably made forbidden inquiries about Pat the pilot because you insisted Pat was murdered. So, how safe are you—the star witness?
    So, what are you saying? I should have ignored Pat’s murder, let it pass for pedestrian error?
    Why had Pat been flying over Yucca Mountain? If it was being dug to form storerooms for the bad stuff, what would anybody be able to see from the air?
    The hunters from Michigan drove a snazzy Ford Expedition, shown hanging from the end