House Odds by Mike Lawson Read Free Book Online Page A

worried.
    The casino kept two sets of books: one they showed to investors and the IRS and one that showed how much money they really made. The second set of books included Al’s cut from the casino, money laundered from some of Al’s other operations, bribes they paid to local cops and politicians. It was an intentionally complicated accounting system and hard to follow even if you were familiar with it. Greg was beginning to think, however, that McGruder hadn’t seen anything specific in the spreadsheets that had made him suspicious. For one thing, they weren’t trying to hide a big loss—only half a million—and Greg had spread the loss out over a lot of things. He couldn’t claim they lost the money because a couple of heavy hitters had lucky streaks at the tables; there were just too many people watching the gambling side of things. Instead, he cooked the books on the operations side. He expensed maintenance they didn’t do, added in losses for property damage that didn’t occur, increased the amount spent to fix a crack in one of the swimming pools, bumped up the cost of consumables that were hard to track. There was no way McGruder could tell if they’d gone through a few dozen more cases of booze than normal.
    So he didn’t think it was the numbers; it was McGruder’s goddamn nose. He just smelled that something was off, and probably, just like he’d said, it was because of the way he and Ted had been acting. Whatever the case, whether it was something in the spreadsheets or McGruder’s snout, he knew McGruder was going to catch them. He just knew it.
    He reached the corner. His car was parked across the street in a thirty-minute loading zone because he hadn’t expected to be with the cops more than fifteen minutes. But then it took an hour to come to an agreement with the bastards, and he could see the ticket fluttering on his windshield. He shook his head. Everything in his life these days was turning to shit.
    He started to cross the street but before he could step off the curb, a black Lincoln with tinted windows stopped in front of him, blocking the crosswalk. The passenger side window powered-down—and there was McGruder. Delray was driving.
    Oh, Lord Jesus, help me.
    “Get your ass in the car,” McGruder said.
    Greg’s feet reacted faster than his brain: he ran. He ran right around the nose of the Lincoln, planning to dart across the street and get in his car and . . . And he didn’t know what, but no way was he getting in a car with Delray.
    He didn’t see the city bus that killed him, the bus that dragged him fifty-seven yards, its brakes locked, skidding the whole way.

8
    DeMarco was at Clyde’s in Georgetown, at the bar, having a vodka martini, admiring the legs of a tall blonde barmaid. He figured he deserved it—both the view and the drink—for toiling diligently on Molly Mahoney’s behalf.
    After he saw Molly, he had called her lawyer and told him what he’d learned from Randy Sawyer about the previous insider cases involving Reston Technologies. The lawyer was appropriately grateful. When he asked for DeMarco’s source, DeMarco refused to tell him. He then gave the lawyer the names of the other engineers who had worked with Molly on the submarine battery project. The lawyer, now sounding a bit snarky, informed DeMarco that he already had the names and was already doing background checks on those people.
    DeMarco then wasted the rest of the afternoon at the GU law library. He couldn’t remember anything he’d been taught about insider trading in school and thought it might be good to get reacquainted with the subject. After two hours, he hadn’t learned anything that would help Molly and his head ached from trying to understand all the convoluted legal bullshit that seemed to be written in some language other than English. So, when he’d looked at his watch and saw it was four thirty—meaning the cocktail hour, or close enough to it—he’d left the library and ambled over