SEVENTY-TWO HOURS EARLIER

Sam nudged Kerry awake. He had been surprised to find her at the NYPD FBI bureau office at five in the morning. And she didn't look like she'd arrived early. In fact, she looked like she'd been there all night, as he remembered leaving her in the same clothes earlier. The day shift people had yet to arrive. This was the overnight crew, no smaller in numbers, from what he could see. 

Kerry stirred to consciousness at Sam's continued finger prodding. "Hey, young lady. What are you doing here at this hour?" 

She smiled meekly at him. "I work twenty-four/seven, Sam. A little trick I picked up from Jack La Lane. He never slept more than fifteen minutes every four hours either." She ran her hand through her hair to make it a little less unkempt. Then she scavenged through her handbag, fetching out her toiletries, and freshening up with some deodorant under her arms, makeup to cover the dark spots under her eyes, and jewelry to switch out with what she had around her neck to make it look like perhaps she had several suits of the same type and hadn't actually slept in hers. She passed a small plastic steam iron from inside her desk drawer over her dress. "Better get out of my way, Sam, unless you want to start taking orders from now." 

"This is me getting out of your way," he said, getting off her desktop. "One question first, though. What allows you to keep this many people on just these two, twenty-four/seven? I can't imagine the bureau would sanction that. Not with government budget cutbacks across the board." 

"Oh this," she said, eying the office full of agents, almost embarrassed. "All of this is paid for three times over by the bank president who the couple managed to piss off. And the president's insistence, of course, that we cooperate. Seems the current FBI director owes him one big time for the appointment. And the extra money, as you say, will help keep the agents in the field chasing after more of America's Most Wanted when this case is through." 

"Don't tell me you're doing yourself any good running yourself into the ground like this. You're already half way to looking like a bag lady. Hell, you even have the bag," he said, pointing to the large brown paper grocery bag in which she kept her crocheting yarn.  

"Just how I work, Sam. Always been this way. Nothing new. If you want to get ahead today, you have to be willing to throw more of yourself into what you do than the other guys." 

They looked over together at Milos's and Dead Man Walking's empty chairs, and he caught the drift well enough. "I'm guessing they're part of the 'work smart, not hard' school of thought," Sam said. 

"Work conniving, anyway." 

"I'm still not walking away until you convince me that you really do operate better this way." 

She threw down a satellite picture of the couple in their latest getaway car, a champagne colored Porsche Boxster, heading across some barren desert in Utah to points west. "DMW left that on your desk yesterday," Sam said, as if she was just making his point for him. 

"Yes, but while I was sleeping I realized why they're headed for points west. They're going to hit up a casino, not a bank this time. That road heads straight to Las Vegas." 

"It leads to a lot of things," he said incredulously. "Including bigger banks than they have in New York." 

"I guess from an altered state of consciousness, fueled by exhaustion, I'm a little more responsive to my intuitive side. That should be proof enough my method works." 

"Little too early to tell that. But I'll wager the other half of that paycheck I owe you, because I'm a man of my convictions, and I'm convinced you need to treat yourself better." 

She smiled at him a little less weakly.  

"Now let's get this show on the road. I want a full tactical field deployment. An entire mobile theater of operations. I'm going out there with more than just a weak connection from my laptop in a land with no internet connections." 

"I hate to be a nag but, assuming you're right, they're two-thirds of the way to the casinos-driving all out in a sports car, no less-and you want to catch them in a couple sixteen wheelers?" 

She smiled. "Something you said about style over function, Sam, which is how I landed on the casino idea in the first place, only thing to rob that might actually be more flamboyant than robbing a bank." 

"I'm still waiting for the other foot to drop." 

"You remember that romantic rooftop dinner he treated her to in the middle of a high speed chase?" 

Sam smiled. "Las Vegas is Style-city." 

"And what do you know about living in style?" 

"You don't rush things. But what if they're just trying to stay under the radar?" 

"What if they are? How would you rule out one high-profile celebrity hangout they might choose from another?" 

Sam nodded. "Short answer. No way. Not even once they decide to get down to business. I lost track of the number of snazzy casinos some years back." 

"None of whom are in the habit of reporting robberies." 

"I'm beginning to think you are dialed into some part of their psyches not even they're attuned to."

* * *

"Let's hustle, people," Dead Man Walking said, addressing the semi-trailer full of FBI analysts moving along at a brisk sixty miles an hour. All of the agents were checking casino parking lots for any sign of the couple or their car. "It can't be that hard to find a champagne gold convertible Porsche Boxster, even in Las Vegas." 

"We've found ten so far," came a voice he didn't even bother turning to identify. He honestly didn't care how long it took them; he was just performing for the video cameras perched in the corners of the trailer so it looked later like he was doing his job instead of doing everything he could to stall Kerry Pierce. 

"I still don't understand why we aren't going over casino footage, using their in-house cameras," came another voice, mumbling off to his side. Again, he didn't bother to turn, didn't care who said it, wasn't about to further anybody's career but his own, so why bother to learn their names? 

"Because," DMW said, "their people are better than ours. And they will shut you down faster than you can get in. And then there'll be a wall of interference to crawl over at the entrances of every one of those casinos, just when we're trying to get in fast and hit them hard." That part was true. Though, he himself could have gotten past their firewalls without anyone noticing. Again, that would be one more thing between him and God and no one else.  

"You need to give us something to narrow the search parameters," said another upstart. They were right about that, of course. He was just hoping none of them would be so rude as to point it out on camera, forcing him to have to do something about it, rather than berate himself later for the "innocent oversight," or for simply trying to be overly thorough. 

"Look for the casinos with the most flash and pomp. Our couple likes to make a statement, and style is a big part of it. That should narrow your search quite a bit." 

"Now we're getting somewhere," came another disembodied voice, detached from its source largely because DMW couldn't be bothered to look in the direction of who said it. Let's hope not, DMW thought. Las Vegas was not short on pomp and circumstance; and overdone flamboyant casinos were a bit of a forte. It was still a needle in a haystack, just a slightly smaller haystack. 

"We lost the wireless internet connection," one of them said as all the screens went black at once to collective sighs and groans, and the occasional, "God damn it!" 

"Switching to satellite feed." Another disembodied voice. And another couple seconds before they were back in operation, the computer screens coming alive with color and form again.

* * * 

Ms. Pierce's Black Wasp helicopter sat perched on the bed of a semi-truck barreling through the wide open other-worldly terrain of the Arizona Badlands. The mobile FBI headquarters comprised the rest of the fleet. 

Kerry sat next to the burly bearded driver of the semi that was pulling the copter, with the constantly draining armpits emptying over a sleeveless tank top, knitting, with Sam at the far window, his laptop open, and the window mercifully down.  

"Cities, suburbs..." Sam said, eying the middle-of-nowhere terrain out the window, "rural settings... Most folks have a preference." 

"I think it's a statement-that their love is strong enough to survive anything." Pausing from her crocheting to look out at the vista, she said, "Even paradise." 

Sam snorted. Paradise, huh? All this much dust and dirt in one place did was make him cough. One more thing to add to the list of differences between them. "I wonder why they keep heading for points west." 

"They're creatures of habit. Unless I miss my guess, their inability to get over themselves is what gave rise to all of this." 

"All of this what?" 

"This flamboyance." 

"Trying to doll up a dull marriage? That's a stretch." 

"Maybe. Or so unable to accept their own ordinariness they just have to keep jumping over the ledge from one minute to the next, hoping to land on extraordinary. Hell of a self-improvement formula, come to think of it." 

Sam regarded her suspiciously, not sure what he was seeing on her face. "And what do you know about an obsessive compulsive flight from ordinariness?" 

"Everything." 

"If I had a file on you, what would it say?" 

"Parents uneducated past high school. Not one book in the house growing up. Only flight path to freedom: outshine everyone else." Her hands never stopped knitting as she talked, and her eyes never rose from her handiwork.  

Sam regarded the windows popping up on his laptop screen. "Reports are coming in of a robbery in progress at the Devlin Casino in Las Vegas-the largest any casino has ever had. Unofficially, of course; it's all in-house communications. One of our boys hacked into the casino networks, going against DMW's orders. That guy. How have we not arrested him for aiding and abetting?" 

"Because he's good, and usually has a very believable rationale for why he does things."  

Ms. Pierce set down her knitting. "This truck isn't meeting my needs anymore, Sam." 

He looked warily at her. "You sure about this?" 

"No, but my hands are cramping up." As she tried to shake out her hands from all the crocheting, Sam gauged time passing by the impressive amount of material she had knitted so far-trailing behind her into the sleeper section of the cab. He gestured for the driver to pull over. 

"I blame myself for this. If I hadn't mentioned the whole form over function idea, then that satellite photo Dead Man Walking showed you of the couple in the champagne Porsche boxster zipping along this highway wouldn't have gotten your blood boiling. Hell, we just had the top of their heads to look at." 

She waited for the vehicle to settle, and for the sound of the truck's hydraulic breaks to subside before replying. "You'll notice they were heading in the direction of Las Vegas at the time the photo was taken." 

Sam assisted her out of the cab onto the dusty unpaved embankment flanking the highway. "You realize the whole reason DMW gave you that picture was in hopes you'd waste more time chasing down dead ends, time he could use to pressure the higher ups to put him back in charge?" 

She smiled impishly. "I used to keep snakes as pets. Lovely creatures, once you learn how to handle them." 

Sam sighed. "So what was it about the picture that got your goat?" he asked, hoisting her up onto the trailer carrying the helicopter. He gestured to the other agents getting out of their cars to release the cables securing the helicopter to the trailer bed, then he climbed up behind her.  

"It belonged to the eighty year old man living across the street from Uncle Ernie's. Well, going by the two letters off the license plate that we could see. Being as he's yet to report it stolen." 

Sam had to fight to close his mouth. He wished he had a hoagie right now to stuff inside it for cover. "That's a Dead Man Walking pickup if I ever saw one. How did you make the connection? I can bet he sure didn't give you that. Wouldn't serve his plan for global domination." 

She smiled. "You know, I did have his job once, before I decided that trying to outcompete supercomputers for data crunching was beneath me." She watched DMW approaching slowly from a distance, doing his best to slow things, while hoping no one would notice. 

Sam shook his head. "You didn't even do a walkthrough of Uncle Ernie's like I expected you to. Probably because you didn't want to pick up too much information and have the fun end too soon. You must have revisited Uncle Ernie's using Google Maps." 

She smiled without looking away from DMW, her smile for DMW's benefit as much as for Sam's. "And stop smiling just because you're becoming increasingly transparent to me," Sam said. "A mature woman would be able to manage a love that's a little less narcissistic." 

Sam shook his head, as he helped her into the helicopter, then followed right behind her. "What are the odds that the picture he hands you to throw you off the track turns out to be a picture of the actual couple?" 

"Not so great really," she said, settling into her seat, "when you consider how hard he had to look for one that fit all the right parameters, and he had to do it under a time crunch. Usually that's when our unconscious starts making connections for us, when our conscious minds get overwhelmed. Something tells me his unconscious is out to betray him." 

"One more thing about him that fits the serial killer, m.o. Does make you wonder, though, about divine intervention, and if some unions are just meant to be," Sam said, reaching over to help her with the stuck safety belt, and getting all tingly just from brushing up against her. 

The pilot climbed in and fired up the bird. Sam picked up the comm device and pressed the button. "Stay close, guys." 

SWAT commander Owen Ryder snorted as his troop deployment helicopter took off from the flat bed of a second trailer that was part of the FBI caravan. "Like I need to be cued to get my rifle muzzle close to that guy's face."

* * *

Inside the Devlin casino, the security doors dropped on all the exits and entrances, and the silent alarms sounded. 

Zinio shrugged it off, gesturing to the others, "Don't worry about it." He put in his earplugs so he could continue to pretend he was just listening to music as he conducted his "symphony." 

All the same, it was increasingly difficult to ignore the cop cars pulling up beyond the caged doors outside.  

When the Black Wasp helicopter landed, and its female occupant marched out in her high heels, that pretty much sealed the deal that his time here was at an end. Zinio made a "not too shabby" expression as he took in the one chasing him to the ends of the earth with eagle eyes of his own.

* * *

Lost somewhere on the Devlin casino basement floor, Tranny was trying to make sense of his section of the bank drawings. He turned every which way down the halls. 

Little Old Lady exited a room with saran-wrapped money-10k bricks on flats on a dolly. She couldn't believe what she was seeing with Miss Thing darting up and down the halls. 

She whistled sharply by putting her fingers to her lips. The transvestite came running around the corner-stopped sharply-looking disbelievingly at the dolly full of money, then at the old lady. 

"My son talks in his sleep." 

"I won't even ask what you're doing in bed with him," Tranny said. 

As Little Old Lady gave him a dirty look, he hastily added, "Do I look like someone who judges others?" 

"I wish I had a son like you, with some balls. He's lived a lie his whole life." 

Puffed up, Tranny stuck his chest out and stood tall, grabbed the dolly. "Thanks for making this easy." 

"Easy? Son, it's not getting the money. It's getting out with the money. But you look like you can run faster than me. Hell, you're all legs." 

"Funny how things work out." Tranny handed her the video camera from her purse. "I was looking forward to being the star in my own show for once. You did rob me of that, which I guess makes you doubly the thief. Now I don't get to blackmail your son as per the plan." 

"Like hell, you don't. He's trying to stick me in an old folk's home. You finish your feature film, darling, with your share of the loot and him as the costar. And I'll see that it plays on every screen in the country if he ever goes through with it." Lowering her voice to a whisper, she said, "Prior to that, I have all sorts of people with whom I can't wait to humiliate him. Most of them are movie producers. You win either way." 

Tranny smiled ear to ear, took back her camera.  

Old Lady impatiently waved him on, trying to catch her breath, and wiping her sweaty face with a handkerchief.