Words coming out of her in a rush, all the pent-up anxiety and excitement. Her green eyes gleaming with hope. Shane can’t bring himself to rain on her parade, forces himself to say that yes, there’s every possibility Edwin Manning is about to make a payoff.

Jane Garner listens politely and then sighs. “You’re just being nice,” she decides. “You don’t really believe this will work out.”

“Short-term, we’ll see. Maybe this is something, maybe it isn’t. But long-term, I’m a believer. Keep working the angles, we’ll find a way in. We’ll get your daughter back.”

“Coffee okay?”

“Coffee is great. Amazing how much caffeine they pack into that little cup.”

Staring straight ahead as they pick up speed, she asks, very carefully, “Ever had one of these go bad?”

Shane doesn’t know what to say, but the lady obviously expects a truthful answer. “It happens,” he admits. “Depends on the circumstances.”

“Like what sort of circumstances?” she wants to know.

“Worst-case scenario is a psychotic pedophile who preys on young children.”

“A monster.”

“Yes.”

“Use the kid and throw it away.”

“Yes.”

Mrs. Garner, Jane, keeps her silence for the length of a city block. “So what’s the best-case scenario? Is there one?”

Shane touches the brakes. Both hands on the wheel, ten and two, as cautious at twenty miles per hour as he is at one hundred. “Best case is the kid ran away and I find him or her. Which has happened. Next best case is what we’ve got—an apparent abduction for extortion, payoff, or some other business purpose. Which is actually quite rare in this country, thank God. The money scenario has a rational component, rather than a psychosexual component.”

“So in a way this is good?”

“In a way. Better if it never happened at all.”

“Turn signal,” she announces.

Shane sees it, too. The blinkers indicate the target vehicle is changing lanes, headed for an exit.

“Expressway,” he says, following, eyes picking up the signs. “Wherever they’re headed, it’s not the International House of Pancakes.”

15. Scream Like A Girl

Forty-five minutes later we’re circling the enormous parking lot at Nakosha Nation Casinos & Resort. Or rather the access road that feeds all four satellite parking lots. Acres of blacktop under the brutal sun, more or less surrounding the new casino complex, which includes a shimmering, palm-green hotel tower that would not be out of place in Las Vegas. Situated not far from the Everglades, on tribal land. I know this because the last three miles has been punctuated by various signs reminding us that we’ve entered a sovereign nation, and therefore must abide by the laws and regulations of the Nakosha Tribal Council.

What those laws are, and how they might be different from the laws of the United States, is not spelled out. Not enough room on the signs, apparently.

“I think mostly it means gambling is legal here,” Shane opines when prompted. “Plus no tax on tobacco products.”

We’re circling the parking lots—hiding, really—because we don’t want Edwin Manning and his goons to spot us as they slot the Hummer and saunter into the casino, and because, frankly, Randall Shane isn’t sure what to do next.

“If they’re making a payoff, I don’t want to spook the deal,” he says, sounding sick with worry. “Manning knows what I look like. So does his chief of security.”

“You think? Six-foot-five white dude made them pee their pants with fear, you think they’d remember?”

“Sometimes being tall has disadvantages,” he admits.

“Get me near the entrance.”

“They know what you look like, too,” he protests.

“Not with your hat and my dark glasses. I already proved that, okay?”

“You can’t be sure of that.”

“I very much doubt they’d be able to pick me out of a crowd. Not to be a noodge, but their attention was focused on you. I can blend, you can’t.”

“It could be dangerous,” he reminds me.

“Dangerous is whatever happened to Kelly. They get scary, I’ll scream like a girl.”

The first thing I notice, aside from the way brash daylight transitions into soft, lingering twilight inside the casino complex, is the gentle ringing of bells. A kind of musical background noise that reminds me of money. Not cash registers ringing, but the silvery chime of heavy coins colliding. A peaceful, hopeful, never-ending song that says you’re a winner, be happy.

It is, of course, the gaming machines. They all chime. Hundreds of one-armed bandits with lights flashing like diamonds, and soft leather seats for your tired tush. Sit down, my friend, the whole look and feel of the place says. Take a load off and fill your pockets with gold. Very few coins are actually falling, mostly it’s plastic cards you put in the slot, with your loses deducted by magnetic strip, like a debit card. All of which has been described and explained to me by Fern, who claims never to have lost at a casino, but seeing it with my own eyes is something of a revelation.

I’m on a mission here, looking for Edwin Manning and his cronies, and yet the whole machinery of the place calls to me. Demonstrating how powerful the urge to play, to take a chance, to be one of the lucky ones who shriek and point, leaping around like the blissfully demented contestants on Deal or No Deal.

Part of my disguise, in addition to the oversize hat and the big wraparound sunglasses, is my cell phone. Clamp that to the side of your face and you become a slightly different person, more inward, less engaged, and at this point in our cellular society, less noticeable.

“I’m in,” I say into the phone, keeping my voice low, not that anyone is likely to overhear me in the cacophony of machines. “No sign of Manning yet. But this place is huge, they could be anywhere. You enter through what looks like a giant tiki hut. Very dramatic lighting. There are three separate casinos and a bingo hall, all with cute names like Wampum and Sachem’s Cave and Wonderluck.”

“I doubt he’s there to gamble.”

Shane, stuck out in the parking lot, sounds frustrated.

“Wampum is about a million slot machines, rows and rows of them. Lots of older folks, some of them in wheelchairs. They must bring them in by the busload. Can’t see Manning anywhere. Okay, wait, I’m headed toward Wonderluck. Slot machines here, too, but mostly it looks like table games. The one they have on TV, Texas Hold Up.”

“Hold ‘Em,” says Shane, sounding exasperated. “Keep moving.”

“Texas whatever, I am moving. You should see this place. There’s a whole section for some sort of Chinese table game they play with green tiles, like mahjong, but it isn’t mahjong. The dealers are Asian, too. I thought this was a Native American thing?”

“Asians love to gamble. Every casino has a room like that. Keep looking, what do you see?”

I have trouble tearing my eyes away from the enthralled, tile-smacking Asians, who look as crazed as traders on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange, shouting and gesturing and slamming tiles on the blue felt, eyes gleaming like, well, the madly blinking lights of the slot machines.

This corner of the casino feels more like Hong Kong or Macau—not that I’ve ever been further west than Pittsburgh. Looking around, I see antlike trails of feeble old folks trudging eagerly into the vast bingo hall, some of them tottering on walkers.

Old folks you might just as easily find in Long Island as in an Indian casino on the edge of the Everglades. Asians, blacks, whites, Latinos, most ethnic groups seem well represented, some gaming in groups, others traveling solo to their favorite machines. Everybody but the folks who own the place—I’ve yet to see anyone recognizably Native American, either among the uniformed staff, who wear cute little money-green vests, or among the players.