AllFreeNovel
Share Us
“We got the call, didn’t we?” she asked.
They had a contract with Cadence, among other casinos. Normally, for casinos, they cleaned up wild parties and occasional holy-shit-I-lost-everything-at-the-tables suicides. Casinos were money-making machines. Their whole business model was 24-7 opportunities to blow your life savings on a little dopamine rush. They did not sit back when something happened to interrupt that nonstop stream of vices.
But even with that in mind, Lyra was surprised they were already calling in cleanup while the wounded were still bleeding.
Reed nodded. Pop said, “They want us ready to go in the second the cops release the scene. It’ll take law a while to process a scene so big. We won’t work until tomorrow, maybe Monday. This’ll be huge. We’ll need everyone on deck. All the temps, everybody.” He focused on Lyra. “Sorry, bear, but that means you, too.”
“This’ll be so much worse than anything you’ve ever worked,” Reed added. He’d actually worked Vegas, when a cleaner had sent out a call for more help. “Vegas, he shot from a window down onto a concert. That was fucking horrible, but everybody was outside. The scene was huge, but spread out. Here, it’s all inside, and it’s gonna be ... fuck.” He looked to Pop. “Are you sure she should do this?”
“I can do it, Reed. I can handle it.” Lyra wasn’t entirely sure that was true, but she didn’t like being treated like she was more fragile than they were.
So she would handle it.
––––––––
~oOo~
––––––––
They got the call justbefore dawn on Sunday morning. Even by casinos’ ‘time is all the money’ standards, that was insanely fast. But Haddon Restorative Cleaning was at the Cadence by eight, with a crew of nine. The casino had called in JiffyClean, the Haddons’ local competitor, as well. Normally, Pop would throw a fit about that, but for this job, it made sense. Virtually the whole first floor of the building was their job site. Even with every single person who ever did a job for HRC pulled in, it would be at least a two-day job for one crew. The Cadence wanted repair crews in first thing Monday morning, with a plan to be open for business again before the weekend.
The cleanup had a maximum window of twenty-four hours. And the casino brass was paying a premium to get what they wanted.
It seemed ridiculously fast to Lyra, and unconscionably fast as well. The shooter was dead, but there were were still Feds crawling around everywhere, investigating the case. eighty-two people had been killed at the scene or shortly thereafter, but the death toll was still climbing. A hundred and sixty-seven others had been injured, many gravely. People who’d been badly injured were still dying in the hospital. Some had been airlifted to Vegas because the Laughlin hospital wasn’t a trauma center, nor, of course, were any of the smaller clinics.
One man had done all that.
And the Cadence wanted people back at the tables on the weekend? Casinos weren’t exactly known for their decorum, but Lyra was thoroughly disgusted.
She and Reed stood in the lobby with the rest of their crew while Pop talked with the suits. The JiffyClean crew stood in a similar cluster twenty feet away. The Sharks and the Jets.
Neither crew had gotten any farther into the building yet, but it was already extremely clear that this would be every bit as bad as Reed had warned. The shooter—a young man of only twenty-two, younger than Lyra—had come out of an elevator with an assault rifle in each hand, another on his back with a shotgun, three handguns, crisscrossing bandoliers, a belt full of grenades, and enough full magazines to kill everyone in the Cadence. He’d started firing at once—so quickly that he’d damaged the elevator doors; that elevator still stood open now.
According to accounts Reed and Michelle had heard from survivors they knew, the rapid, nonstop pace of the firing, the exploding grenades, the peculiarities of the Cadence layout—all those trees—and the typical casino layout, with rows of tall slot machines and other gaming features, had effectively neutralized the onsite security teams until the shooter had made it all the way through the lobby and most of the way through the main table room. Only the high roller rooms had been spared. A casino security guard had finally found his shot and dropped him with a bullet through his neck. That man was already doing rounds on the news shows, heralded as a hero.
Seventeen people had been shot in the lobby, eight of whom had died here. Lyra could see several areas too large to be called stains, a few so large she could tell from where she stood that they were still wet.
There was more than blood to clean up, of course, more even than brain matter, bone, and tissue. Dying people often, maybe usually, voided their bowels and bladder. Badly injured people often voided their stomachs. That stench was thick in the air, wrapped in the copper of gallons of blood. The damage bullets did to the human body was rarely as tidy as the movies might lead one to believe.
“Fuck,” she muttered quietly, and Reed put his arm around her and pulled her close.
She hugged him back but said, “I’m okay.”
“I wish you weren’t here. This one’s bad.”
“I can handle it.”
“I know you can. I just wish you didn’t have to.”
Pop was coming toward them, wearing a dangerous scowl and holding a sheaf of papers. HRC worked for state law pretty regularly, and they’d worked with the Feds a few times as well. Pop hated working with the Feds. The bureaucracy was legendary, no matter the job. A high-profile one like this was bound to be extremely regimented.
Part of the gig whenever they cleaned a crime scene was to keep an eye out for possible evidence the legal eagles had missed. It didn’t happen often, but often enough that there was an official process. To keep chain of custody intact, if the cleaners found something—a bullet casing, for instance—they had to stop, keep their hands off or get their hands off if they’d grabbed it before they’d realized it, take a photo ‘in situ,’ and contact the lead investigator. The Feds had very specific rules about how all that went down. Probably today, the entire FBI had become severely OCD.
When Pop arrived at their cluster of waiting cleaners, they all gathered close.
“I’m glad they called Jiffy in, because this is a fuckin’ nightmare. They don’t want us dealing at all with any potential evidence, so each of our teams will have a Fed escort. I just met all the Feds, and they all got saguaros up their asses, so expect to feel that pain. Just take it, say yes sir, and try not to let it slow you down too much. Cleaning’s got to be done by five a.m. so they can transition to the repair crews. We got about twenty hours onsite. It’s far too long for us to work nonstop on a site like this, so we worked out a rotation schedule. We’re on until six tonight, and Jiffy’s coming back in at five. They’ll pick up where we leave off.” He turned his attention to Lyra. “I saw photos of the main tables, and I don’t want you goin’ in there. You work the lobby. It’s not as bad out here.”
Often, her father’s extremely gendered sense of protectiveness irritated the hell out of Lyra, but sometimes she didn’t mind it as much. Right now, she wasn’t remotely tempted to call him on it. She didn’t need to see anything worse than the horror around her right now.
