And Then There Were None

You can gamble in Las Vegas? Who knew?

We open on a casino. People are hitting the roulette tables, throwing dice and engaging in other games of statistical probability that megalithic corporations have rigged in their favor. Despite this, they look like they're having a good time.

A player -- not a smooth, would-be ladies' man, but an actual gambler -- slides a Benjamin across the table to his blackjack dealer. She looks up at the floor boss and calls, "Changing one hundred." "Changing one hundred," he confirms. She puts the bill in a Lucite box and slides it into the table; it appears to lock there. I'm going to go out on a limb and guess that the box drops the money into a secured safe set into the table. Except I'm not really, because in the scene, a uniformed security officer comes over pushing what looks like a big steel lockbox, then bends over the table, slides out the steel box, and replaces it with a fresh one, all under the watchful eye of the floor boss. The security guy then looks up at one of the surveillance cameras set in the ceiling and gives it a thumbs-up. We switch perspectives to the surveillance office, where the scene is replayed on a tiny monitor set in a larger bank. "Section G-3 all clear. En route to H-4 and then soft-count." Both men watching the monitors look as though they're in danger of slipping into comas any second now. The camera pulls back to look at a monitor where three long-haired, sunglasses-wearing figures are striding into the casino.

And then we're back on the casino floor, tracking these same three people. One of them is very female, in a fake-looking blonde pageboy and Jackie-O-style glasses; her companions look like Howard Stern and Denise Bryson. The three of them fan out on the crowded casino floor, and then the blonde woman takes out her gun and shoots down the chandelier. Instantly, and nearly reflexively, everyone hits the floor about the same time as the chandelier does. The man in the Howard Stern wig and red coat shoots the security guard in the back, then the Denise-Bryson-looking-guy does likewise. Denise gets a little trigger-happy -- handy for providing cover while Howard relieves the rolling lockbox of its contents. Blondie continues to cover the other half of the casino floor, with considerably more poise than Denise.

Up in the surveillance booth, both men have snapped to and one is saying, "Section G-4, security intercept at section G-5! Contain! Contain!" The two of the continue to watch Denise shoot at people while Howard robs the cart. We transition back down to the live action, and the three of them are now shooting their way out of the casino. Blondie takes the time to shoot out the barware -- smart, given that it puts on an impressive show and is a pain in the ass to clean up -- while Howard and Denise shoot security people instead. Just then, Denise goes down in a wrenching spasm; we watch the body fall and note that inside the shot, Howard's gun-holding hand is tucked discreetly by his hemline.

Then the chaos is over and we're in a considerably more calm casino. Gil and Brass are walking down the stairs; Gil is asking about body count. "Five guards, three civilians wounded, one dead bad guy," Brass says, continuing, "Armed robbers snatched the lockboxes from two high-stakes tables right off the rolling cage." "Cash on wheels," Gil notes. Brass continues expositing, as per his sworn duties as Captain Exposition. "Three women -- well armed and well muscled," he adds. Ohhhh, I feel a punchline building here. Gil counters that the mesomorphic maidens were small-time. Brass replies that they got away with $250,000. Gil reminds him that in Vegas economic terms, that's a petty-cash fund for one table. They walk over to Denise's prone body and Brass rebuts, "Small-time or not, these ladies are dangerous." Gil looks down at Denise and smirks back at Brass. He then hunkers down to examine the body and cracks, "Dangerous, yes. Ladies, no." He pulls off a wig. Brass looks like he's suddenly reevaluating the last few dates he went on.

Cue the Who. Incidentally, back in the day, Roger Daltrey would have made a fetching drag performer. Now, not so much.

Back at the casino of crime, Warrick and Nicky are hunkered down, tending to the unenviable task of cataloging the eight thousand or so bullets Denise and Howard sprayed around the joint. Warrick notes this with, "These guys packed enough ammo for a small army." Nicky replies that security managed to get off a few rounds before being riddled with bullets from a .45 -- and the security guards were packing nine-millimeters. Warrick pines for the good old days of yore, as in last year, when he was gambling like a drunken sailor and security was unarmed. "Times have changed," Old Man Nicky says laconically. Warrick ruefully agrees, then bends back to cataloging bullets. Meanwhile, Brass continues to lay down the backstory: "Same M.O. [modus operandi] as Laughlin, men dressed as women, came in and shot the place to hell, in and out in under five." Gil figures that Laughlin was a dress rehearsal. He and Brass walk toward the floor boss -- Gil expanding on this theory as he goes and basically working around to "practice makes perfect" -- when the floor boss steps in with his own nostalgia-soaked monologue about how in the old days, back when the Mob ran things, this would have never happened. Brass interrupts the man -- Mr. Duncan -- shortly before he launches into a soliloquy on the glory days of Lucky Luciano's involvement in Las Vegas's civic growth, and asks him to recount what happened. Mr. Duncan does: "We'd just made a money transfer to the rolling cages. Then -- bang -- chandelier comes crashing down. It sounded like an explosion, so I dropped to my knees, took cover." "Anything else?" Brass deadpans. "Yeah. I started praying for the gunfire to stop," Duncan replies. He wanders off, and Brass snorts, "Well, that was helpful." Gil says, "Actually it was. The chandelier gives us a starting point. The falling chandelier distracts the guards, makes them easy targets. The armed robbers load up, head for the exits --" "Quick escape," Brass cuts in. Gil continues as if he had never been interrupted: "Chaos moving in one direction, the money moving in the other." While he and Brass are mapping this out, we see another recreation of the crime scene via flashback -- and I'm thinking that either Brass needs to get glasses or else he needs to stop picking up chicks at professional wrestling matches or something, because there is no way any of those guys looked especially feminine.

Meanwhile, Sara and Catherine have been dispatched to the wilderness. They're driving down a lonesome stretch of highway under cover of night, and Catherine's saying irritably, "Can you imagine living out here?" "It's peaceful," Sara counters in a glass-half-full kind of way. "Peaceful? The town just lost five percent of its population," Catherine replies. Well, in a town of twenty, that's not hard, but so long as we're only looking at statistics without anything resembling context -- okay, Catherine, good point. Sara, who does not possess my freakish ability to divide and multiply by fives, says, "I thought you said this was a single homicide." Catherine snorts, "Yeah, in a population of twenty." Fortunately, Sara's saved from multiplication drills by the timely appearance of the Kwik-E-Mart, complete with lonesome state trooper (his job is to patrol the lonesome highway). They pull in, and the trooper -- whom avid television watchers will recognize as Bull Randle -- smirks, "Two hours to go seventy-five miles. You got lost." Since they're women, you know. And -- oh, frail vessels we -- all women are dizzy broads behind the wheel. Sara and Catherine give his crack exactly the attention it deserves, then remind him that one of the nice things about a dead body is that it rarely gets up and goes anywhere under its own power. Bull, however, has places to go, highway to roam, so he fills Sara and Catherine in: Dustin Bale is the name of the stiff, and he's got a bullet in the chest. Before he can take off, Sara bends down to read his nametag -- since they never got around to introductions -- and says, "Officer Spencer, did you touch anything?" Officer Spencer gives her another oh, you silly lady look and says, "Fourteen years as a state trooper? I know how to secure a crime scene without contaminating the evidence." Sara apologizes; he accepts and hits the road.

Sara and Catherine enter the convenience store -- and for the first time, we see that Sara's wearing a truly wretched tie-dyed shirt. I can appreciate that the wardrobe department is trying to delineate between Catherine (confident in her sexuality, likes dressing to flatter) and Sara (indifferent tomboy), but really, can't they find better tomboy togs? Anyway, the two women enter the Kwik-E-Mart, and as they're walking in the store and doing a visual scan, Catherine notices a white, lumpy substance clumped on the floor. Sara and Catherine debate whether it's vomit -- only if someone's on the all-starch diet, ladies -- and we find out instead that it's potato. "Poor man's silencer," Catherine says. We see a shot of a gun, blowing a potato away. Catherine muses, "Why would an assailant need a silencer all the way out here?" Sara, who has wandered off and begun to fondle a particularly provocative-looking potato, has no reply. She then wanders over to the cash register, and notes that the last bill of sale was eight hours ago. Catherine wonders why it took so long for the death to be reported. Sara posits that the assailant flipped the sign from "open" to "closed" on the way out, thus rendering the occasional passersby uninterested in coming inside. Catherine looks up at the security camera and gloats, "But not without getting his picture taken too." Sara goes to get the camera down, and goes, "It's plastic." "You're joking," Catherine says, as if this is the worst news she's gotten all day. It may well be. "Nine-volt attached to a blinking light," Sara clarifies. Catherine replies, disheartened, "Real or fake, it didn't work."

Back at the A-plot, Gil and Brass are taking down a whole lot of contradictory recollections from assorted witnesses. They decamp, and Brass says, "I've interviewed seventeen people. No two accounts are alike." Gil counters, "A professor conducted an experiment, asked a bunch of students to count the number of times the ball was passed...during the game, a person dressed in a gorilla suit ran across the court. When the professor asked his students if they noticed the gorilla, fifty percent responded, 'What gorilla?'" Brass fixes Gil with a pissy look and deadpans, "That's wonderful, Gil. If I see a gorilla, I'll arrest it." Or bury it. Either way, I don't know if it's that weird sage-green jacket or Brass's natural dyspepsia talking, but whatever it is, he amuses me.

Nicky's outside talking to the valet about the getaway vehicle -- it's beige, beat up, and possessed of flashing hazard lights. We establish that the car did not peel out, despite the driver's best gun-the-engine efforts. Nicky hunkers down and examines the dark fluid pooled on the pristine cobblestone pavement. "Smells like wood," he observes. "Motor oil?" the valet asks. "No," Nicky replies. "No?" asks the valet. "Transmission fluid. But it's brown, not red," continues Nicky. There's something weirdly off about using the Socratic method to bone up on automotive lubricants. "Which means?" the valet prompts. "It's not the right color," Nicky says.

Naturally, this is when we transition to a big, red, bloody wound, with David The Conditionally Fun Coroner twiddling a pair of pliers in the meaty bits to extract a bullet from Denise's dead body. Gil comes in and says, "Extraction is an art, Albert." I'd like to think he's quoting someone, but I don't know who. It certainly makes more sense than thinking that the writers have changed David's name halfway through the show. Since neither Gil nor David appear to have been thrown by the Albert reference, I won't harp further. We find out that Denise is actually one Adam Burrow, shot in the back with a hollow-point bullet at close range. "Mushroomed upon impact, maximizing trauma," David says. We see this effect up-close and personal, courtesy of the TMICam. Gil quickly deduces that Adam was shot in the back by one of his own partners, since the bullet in question is a .45 and not a nine-millimeter. The case just got interesting.