Chapter 10
Though the Las Vegas investigators processed the scene from top to bottom, they found nothing that could definitively point to the culprit. It wasn’t as if there was nothing at all—this was a place people moved through all the time, so there were hairs and fingerprints everywhere. But every one of them belonged to employees who had legitimate access to the vault.
He even managed to tamper with the surveillance cameras. There’s no way he’d leave behind something that stupid...
While Kent was still turning over the question of who the thief might be, the casino security staff came up to him.
“...Mr. Kent.”
“Yeah. What is it?”
“We’d like you to come with us for a moment and answer a few questions.”
“!”
Kent turned his head and saw Jason, the head of casino security, staring straight at him.
“It’ll only take a moment.”
“Jason. The boss... suspects me?”
“If it wasn’t you, Mr. Kent, the general manager of the casino, then there’s no one else with access to both the vault and the surveillance system.”
“Ha!”
At the thought that he had been put on the list of suspects, Kent felt the world tilt beneath him.
“The real thief won’t have gotten far! This is no time for this!”
They were wasting time suspecting the wrong man when they should have been hunting the actual robber.
“Even if you searched the whole city of Las Vegas right now, you might not catch him...”
“A culprit is always close by, and they always return to the scene of the crime.”
“!!”
If that was true, then the only person who fit it was him.
“......”
“It’ll only take a moment.”
“Fine. I’m innocent anyway.”
Since he hadn’t done anything wrong, Kent followed the security officers without fear—only to find Las Vegas investigators waiting outside the office.
“Kent Lloyd Hughes?”
“......”
“You have the right to remain silent, and anything you say can and will be used against you in a court of law...”
Listening to the Miranda warning, Kent realized this might not end as easily as he had first hoped.
They’re using me to...
By arresting him, the casino could reclaim its reputation as a place that had, at least belatedly, restored order and security. Besides, he was an inside man—someone in a position of total authority. He was exactly the kind of manager from whom a casino had to be robbed.
“You know it wasn’t me!”
“There were more of your fingerprints and hairs in the vault than anyone else’s. And you had authorization to enter the vault, which makes you the highest-ranking person there—someone no one would even think to question.”
“Well...”
It was true. Security staff changed all the time, but as the general manager, he always went in there with them. Even if he had gone alone, anyone checking the surveillance footage wouldn’t have found it suspicious.
“Let’s go, Mr. Kent.”
“Hah. This’ll all come out eventually, anyway.”
The casino would recover its reputation, and he would eventually be released as an innocent man. Kent had built up plenty of connections over the years, so finding a law firm willing to represent him didn’t seem difficult.
I’ll lose a great deal of time to this trial, though...
And along with it, there was no getting back the reputation and career that would vanish in the meantime. When they reached the police vehicles, he could already see Jefferson being loaded into another car.
“......”
I told Jefferson not to say anything to anyone...
From that point on, Kent shut his mouth. The things he had ordered Jefferson to keep quiet about could also be used against him in court.
If only I had actually been involved in the theft, this would sting less. Why did I have to protect someone else’s vault as though it were my own...?
His mind filled with regret over the life he had lived so far. As the police car pulled away with Kent inside, the jewel-like neon sign of the Diamond Casino glittered behind him.
James hummed along to the song playing from the radio.
“On a dark desert highway, cool wind in my hair.”
In fact, he was riding through the dark desert with the window open, letting the wind wash over him.
“Warm smell of colitas, rising up through the air.”
“Up ahead in the distance, I saw a shimmering light.”
“My head grew heavy and my sight grew dim.”
“I had to stop for the night.”
They still hadn’t reached their destination, so they couldn’t stop yet. James checked the car trailing behind him in the side mirror—the one Colt was driving—and sang out loudly.
“Welcome to the Hotel California.”
The two of them were crossing the Nevada desert on their way to California. Colt had booked the flashiest hotel in California for James, and all that was left was to enjoy themselves while spending money like water.
The hotel pool shimmered gold under the blazing sunlight, and James, showing off the hard lines of his upper body, brought a colorful drink to his lips as the waiter set it before him.
The fresh, icy taste through the straw made him wrinkle his nose slightly, but hidden behind his black sunglasses, it probably looked like he was smiling.
“Heh... California really does have great weather.”
Colt, lounging by the pool just like James, accepted his own drink and replied, “Now this is a real vacation.”
With tens of millions of dollars in cash sitting in the trailer behind them, both of their hearts had never felt more unburdened or content.
“Tip.”
Colt handed a hundred-dollar bill to the waiter who had brought the drinks.
“Thank you, sir.”
At that, James commented, “Isn’t that a little stingy?”
“What? A hundred dollars is stingy?”
Then Colt realized James had said it to him, and laughed.
“Hahaha. Yeah, it is. Too stingy.”
He pulled out another hundred and gave it to the waiter.
“This one’s your tip.”
It wasn’t his own tip—this was James’s share of it.
“If you need anything, please don’t hesitate to call me.”
At the waiter’s words, James asked for today’s newspaper, and thanks to the two-hundred-dollar tip, it arrived almost immediately.
“......”
After checking the paper, James’s face hardened just a little. Colt noticed at once.
“Did something happen?”
“Yeah. It says a casino in Las Vegas was robbed.”
“!”
Since it was news related to him, Colt craned his neck in surprise.
“W-what does the article say?”
James slid the paper slightly out of view and lowered his voice.
“...This is really bad, Colt.”
“Eek!”
Before he had even gotten to the point, Colt was already tense, looking around nervously as if someone might overhear.
“In Las Vegas...”
“Ugh.”
“They seem to have completely forgotten us.”
“...What?”
“I mean, the genius card magician James and the world’s handsomest, most dashing host Colt quit performing, and not a single line makes the paper? We should’ve been on the front page!”
“Why are we suddenly talking about that?”
“Heh heh heh. It says the suspect in the Diamond Casino vault robbery has been caught.”
“Huh?”
The real criminal was right here.
“It says the general manager, Kent—the same guy who used to pick on us every time we performed—was seen conspiring with one of his computer staff?”
“...That guy?”
Kent wasn’t the kind of person who would do that, and Colt knew very well that he hadn’t actually pulled off anything like it.
Even though we’re the ones who did it...
The people who had actually robbed the casino were sitting here, so how could Kent be the suspect?
“S-so he’s being framed...?”
“He’ll be cleared soon enough.”
“...You think so?”
“Still, once the casino’s owner steps in, it won’t be easy.”
“Haaah.”
As Colt let out a troubled sigh, James folded the newspaper and set it aside.
“Think about what’s ahead. We can worry about the rest later.”
“You...”
Colt looked ahead to the days to come, and then remembered what James had said about leaving soon.
“Where are you planning to go?”
For now they had come to California together, but James and Colt were already heading toward a parting of ways.
“Europe.”
“Europe?”
James had to travel to the place his teacher in the book had told him about.
“There’s something important there. I have to go find it.”
His teacher, Mercia, had said she’d come from a place called the Tessar Kingdom, but where that was remained unclear. No matter where James searched through the histories of the world, he couldn’t find any mention of a nation by that name.
“Have you ever lived in Europe? Didn’t you say you were from Texas?”
“I am from Texas. This trip to Europe is sort of like a treasure hunt.”
But through the illustration left in the book, he could tell where his teacher’s other legacy had been hidden.
“A treasure?”
“I’m going to stop by Stonehenge, take a look around, and if nothing’s there, then that’s that.”
The drawing in the book definitely depicted Stonehenge. James was planning to head to England.
“Do you really think there’d be an artifact left at Stonehenge? England’s been investigated for years and years...”
“I know. That’s why I’m just going to look around, and if I don’t find anything, I’ll do a bit of sightseeing.”
“And then?”
“And then?”
“You don’t have another destination after that?”
“Ah.”
James fell silent for a moment as another plan, one tied to his past, came to mind.
...Do I really have to tell Colt about finding my roots? If I do, I’d probably have to tell him about Texas too...
“You don’t want to say?”
“No. I was just thinking.”
The reason he hadn’t told Colt about the gun accident that took his parents wasn’t because he was hiding it; it was simply something he hadn’t said.
“You know I’m alone, right?”
“Why wouldn’t I? No one’s ever calling you, after all.”
“Tch.”
“Do you have some family you’ve been separated from?”
“...Something like that.”
It had been a very long time since he’d been separated from them. In truth, he barely even had a memory of family at all, so calling them family felt awkward.
Maybe they just abandoned me...
He didn’t know whether they had been forced apart by some unavoidable circumstance or whether they had simply sent him to an orphanage because they didn’t want to raise him. But the fact of their separation remained exactly that—a fact.
“Honestly, I don’t even know if they’re dead or alive. I’m just going to check, in case.”
He wanted nothing more than a confirmation. Nothing beyond that.
I just want to know why they sent me to an orphanage.
“So you’re going back to Texas?”
“No. There’s no one there anymore.”
“...But you said you were from Texas. There has to be someone there.”
“......”
James frowned slightly before he spoke.
“There was an accident. My adoptive parents died in it. They were both lifelong Texans.”
“......”
He’d shortened it as much as he could because he didn’t want to say more. But once the words left his mouth, they sounded far too thin, far too casual. However much he wanted to leave the memory untouched, speaking about it so carelessly felt wrong, so he opened his mouth again.
“You’ve lived with me, so you’ve seen the scars on my body. I got them back then, too.”
“......”
Colt could vaguely remember the scars on James’s body, something he’d caught sight of in passing before.
“W-who... no, what happened?”
“A school shooting. The kind that still happens all the time.”
“!”
Even though Colt didn’t ask anything else, James went on and told him about that day.
“Some idiot in Texas came to school high as a kite with a gun. He hated me because I was Asian.”
“......”
“He was the kind of bastard who used to bully me all the time, too... and just then, my adoptive parents happened to run into him at school, and I ran into him as well. Then...”
That past, the one about the shooting that began there, ended with James waking up in the hospital and finally learning the reality of what had happened.
“...After that day, I threw myself into magic and nothing else. I didn’t know any magic at all when the accident happened.”
“Ah...”
Only after telling Colt everything did James realize he was calmer than he had expected.
...So this is what it means to have it all in the past now?
Back then, James had been a sixteen-year-old student; now he was a proper adult of twenty-eight. Twelve years had passed since the accident. And Andrew, the man who had murdered his parents, had already ended his own life after years of James’s curse. The past really had come to an end.
Dad. Mom... can I be happy now?
In the first place, hadn’t the two of them wanted nothing more than his happiness?