Bill grabbed a short stack of chips from his pile and shoved them next to mine. I gaped at him. After all the crap he'd given me up until now, I figured he'd just let me go broke and then be stuck watching him win for the rest of the week.
"You can't bet on my hand," I said.
"It's a loan," Bill said. "Not a bet. Split them."
"Sure you're not just wasting your money? I can't pay that back if I lose."
Bill smiled. "So don't lose."
I pointed at the cards and asked the dealer to split them. Justin moved them apart, and I pushed Bill's chips over to one of the Aces, and my stack over to the other.
I stared at the plastic shoe and the first card sitting in it, the one the dealer would slip out of there and place next to my first Ace. I willed for it to come up a face card. I visualized the Jack of Hearts – and that's just what landed next to my Ace.
"Blackjack," Justin said. He reached into his tray of chips and put a stack of six green chips right next to mine.
The dealer's complete lack of enthusiasm did nothing to dampen mine. I wanted to jump up and let out a war whoop, but I refused to let a single success distract me. I still had another hand to win, and it was Bill's money riding on it, not mine. Somehow, that meant even more to me that I not lose it.
"Can I double down on that Ace?" I asked.
Justin nodded. I moved my the chips I'd just won from him over to double my bet on my remaining Ace. With the double down, I'd only be allowed a single extra card, but I only needed the one.
I stared at the deck and reached out with my mind again. I pictured the King of Diamonds, the One-Eyed King, the Man with the Axe.
The dealer reached for the shoe, drew a card, and flipped it over in front of me.
Hello, Your Majesty.
CHAPTER THREE
The night only got better from there. Bill and I were unstoppable. We made sure to lose enough hands so that no one would get suspicious of our incredible lucky streak, but we steadily raked in the cash. Over the course of an hour, we each turned our five-hundreddollar stakes into a little over two thousand dollars.
At the end of the hour, another dealer stepped up behind Justin, ready to take over for him right after the hand in which he reached the colored plastic card that represented the end of the shoe. We'd been tipping Justin steadily, and he'd even started smiling along with us.
"I think Justin's going to leave us," said Bill. "I'm not sure I can handle that."
"That's right!" I said. "He's our lucky dealer. If our luck's running out, maybe we should too."
"One last hand, gentlemen," Justin says, still all business.
Bill looks at me. "I'm feeling lucky, Jackson. How about you?"
"Hell yeah, brother." And I mean it. Even if I've been creating the luck myself, winning feels great. I look down at my tidy stacks of chips, which Justin has kindly colored up to black, worth one hundred dollars each.
"Just how lucky are you feeling?"
"Ain't nothing that can stop us."
Bill nodded. "I agree, Jackson." He pushed his entire stack forward.
I gawked at it for a full five seconds. Then I reached down and did the same.
"If you're going to go," I said, "go big."
In any other situation, putting a couple thousand dollars down on a bet of any kind would have had me breaking out in a chilled sweat. At that moment, I was riding high. In my mind, we could do no wrong.
There was a lot of truth to that.
The pit boss came over to watch us. We'd started to draw a crowd, and he'd been sneaking sly glances at us, pretending not to care. Now, though, we'd gotten his attention.
The twenty-five dollar tables had a ten-thousanddollar limit on single bets. We were still well under that, so Justin didn't need to get special permission to take our bets. Still, he glanced at the pit boss, a rough-cut man with a lantern jaw and a Fred Flintstone five o'clock shadow. The boss nodded his assent.
Justin dealt the cards. My first card came up a Jack, and Bill found himself facing an Ace.
I took that as a signal that Bill was going for a blackjack, which paid half again as much as a regular bet. If we wanted to push our luck, now seemed like the right time, and I decided to join in. I focused on the cards and had Justin give me the Ace of Hearts.
"Blackjack," Justin said.
I jumped up and pumped my fist in the air. The people gathered around me, watching the table, cheered.
Justin kept dealing, not ready to pay anything out until he'd finished getting all the players their starting hands. Bill's card came up the Jack of Clubs.
"Blackjack again," Justin said.
Bill leaped up and joined me in my whooping. In a single hand, we'd won more than five thousand dollars each.
We were rich. Ten thousand dollars was more money than I'd ever seen in a single place in my entire life. I may have screamed like a little girl.
Justin pulled our winnings out of his rack and pushed them across the table to us with a wide grin. We each tossed him a black chip for his troubles, then had him color us up. That left us each with five orange chips worth a thousand dollars each, plus change.
The pit boss gave us a strange look, like a shark sizing up a meal, trying to figure out if it might be worth the bother. He smiled at us, but all I could think about was a great white in a zoot suit, baring his teeth.
I was too excited to let it bring me down. After a high five or three, Bill and I grabbed our chips and made our way through the crowd of well wishers.
"Where to now?" I asked. "The moon?"
"Slow down, cowboy," Bill said. "First we need to find a cage and cash out."
At the cage, Bill and I took most of our winnings on debit cards but each put a thousand dollars cash in our pockets. I couldn't stop grinning the entire time. I felt happy and free and ready to party.
Then a hand tapped me on the shoulder, and I came crashing back to earth.
A beautiful, blue-eyed woman with sun-bleached hair and a trim, tanned body that her sparkly white flapper's dress did little to hide flashed me a smile so dazzling I wondered where I'd left my shades. "Hi," she said, shaking hands with me and then Bill. "My name's Melody, and I'm a casino host here at Bootleggers. I'd like to welcome you to the Inner Circle, our exclusive high-rollers club."
I blushed at the attention. "We're hardly high rollers," I said.
"Pay no attention to him," Bill said. "We're just getting started."
"Excellent. I've taken the liberty of making up membership cards for you already. If you can show me your IDs, I can get your accounts all set up for you, and I can offer you your first set of comps."
I glanced at Bill. At eighteen and nineteen, we were technically too young to be gambling. By Nevada state law, we had to be at least twenty-one.
I froze. With an easy smile, Bill reached for his wallet and pulled out his Michigan driver's license. He showed it to Melody, and she took it from him and snapped a photo of it with her smartphone.
"That will send it automagically to our database so we can get you in right away, Mr Teach," she said. She handed Bill back his ID and a black plastic card with the Bootleggers logo stamped on it in silver foil.
She turned to me, and I just stared at her. She was as beautiful as a bouquet of magnolias.
"Your ID, sir?" she asked. Her smile never faltered for an instant.
"Oh," I said. "Right." I fished my wallet out of my pocket and handed her my Louisiana driver's license.
Once Bill and I had gotten to Vegas, the first thing he'd insisted on doing was altering our IDs. "As far as anyone other than the airlines is concerned, we're not here," he said. "While we're in Vegas, we're other people: cooler, smarter, richer, better."
I don't know if I'd have thought that far ahead. Growing up in the French Quarter, I'd never had much trouble getting into clubs or buying drinks if I wanted them. As long as you were tall enough to reach over the bar, most places were willing to serve you. I'd never needed a fake ID.
That changed when I went off to the University of Michigan last fall. The bouncers there checked IDs with jeweler's loupes and UV lights. That never stopped me from finding a beer if I wanted it, but it had become a hassle. The first thing Bill and I did after Professor Ultman taught us a little of what he called "ink rearrangement" magic – the same thing we used to alter playing cards – was make ourselves a few years older.
Figuring that casino security might be a bit tighter than what we found at the bars in Ann Arbor, we'd decided to change a bit more than our birthdays this time. We altered the last names and addresses too. We even changed our license numbers, just in case someone decided to run those through a national database. We'd come up blank on a credit check, but we weren't planning to need any. We kept our first names the same to make sure we wouldn't get too confused under pressure.
Bill had become William E. Teach, and I took the name Jackson J. Lafitte, both in honor of famous pirates. It just seemed to fit.
"From the Big Easy," she said. "Were you there during Katrina?"
I failed to keep the smile on my face. "Born and raised," I said. "I saw it all."
A flash of real concern crinkled her forehead. I'd seen it a thousand times before. She followed it up with "You poor thing."
I was proud to be from New Orleans, but this was the reason I didn't talk about it too much. I just couldn't take the pity.
"I survived," I said.
"So did the Quarter," Bill said with a grin. "I think they're still celebrating the Super Bowl down there."
I let Bill's smile infect me. I'd had enough sadness about my hometown. "They ran it straight through to Mardi Gras before they took a break," I said. I wished I could have been there for all that, but Bill and I had been saving every cent for our run at Vegas instead. If it all worked out, I'd be able to afford season tickets for the Saints next year.
Melody smiled at that, her momentary concern washed away like bird tracks on a beach. "Because you're new to Bootleggers, we'd like to credit your play here today. That qualifies you for a free pass through our Little Italy Buffet. Just jump to the front of the line and flash the cashier your card."
"I'm too pumped up to eat," Bill said, glancing at me. "You ready to celebrate?"
Melody giggled. "Well, I can't quite help you with that yet, but if you continue playing like you have, I can get you access to the VIP lounge at the Speakeasy nightclub."
"I think we're done for the night," I said. The thrill of winning hadn't left me, but I wasn't ready to leap right back into it quite yet.
"What are you doing tonight?" Bill winked at Melody, and I had to struggle not to roll my eyes.
Her perfect smile never wavered. "I'm on duty tonight, so I can't help you personally, but I have some friends who can."
She handed Bill a business card printed in gold foil with black lettering knocked out of it. It read "Ace of Clubs" and had a phone number listed below that, nothing else.
"Call them," she said. "They'll take care of you. They specialize in getting people whatever they want, and they're very discreet."
We thanked her, promised her we'd be back soon, then headed for the exit.
Once outside, Bill got on his smartphone and called the number. While he chatted with someone on the other end, I looked out at the flashing lights of the Sahara across the street. Off to the north, I heard a bunch of people screaming. I peeked around the corner and spotted the Stratosphere. I ran my gaze up the side of the tower until it reached the rails spiking out of the top, where I saw a glowing circle of lights bouncing up and down. Someone up there was having too much fun.
Bill came up and clapped me on the back. "We're all set," he said. "Our ride will be here in a few minutes."
I patted my pocket just to make sure the grand I'd kept out in cash was still there. "I can't believe it worked," I said. "I can't believe we're rich."
Bill smirked. "Rich? That's just the beginning. Now that we've got a bigger stake, we can hit the high-roller tables. The minimums start at a hundred dollars and go into the tens of thousands. I hear some games – the ones they don't tell anyone about – have no limit at all."
My head spun with the possibilities. "This can't last though," I said. "I mean, even if nothing crazy happens, we only have a week until break's over and we have to get back to school."
Bill arched his eyebrows at that. "I don't know about you, Jackson, but if we keep making this kind of cash I'm in no hurry to head back. Michigan's always going to be there."
I can't lie. The notion of staying in Vegas for ever, of being rich and living the high roller's life, appealed to me. This desert city was so strange and colorful and blazing full of life, it seemed like a different planet from Ann Arbor or my home in the French Quarter.
I could hear my Grandma Laveau's voice in my head, though, saying what she always did just before she got off the phone with me. "You keep dat nose of yours clean, cher. You all I got in dis world."
Most days I tried to listen to Grandma. She'd raised me on my own ever since Katrina, and I knew the sacrifices she'd had to make to send me off to college. I'd worked hard to get the kind of grades I needed to go, and no one was happier for me than her when my acceptance letters started rolling in.
Right now, though, the call of the Vegas nightlife was drowning her out.
A long black car pulled up next to us, gleaming in the ghostly lights of the casino entrance. It looked like something out of a bootlegger's dream, long and sleek with silvery trim and a hood that seemed longer than the whole rest of the car, with running boards to match. It looked like it ate streets for dinner and then came back for the alleys as its midnight snack. All it needed was a man with a fedora and a Tommygun, and it would be ready to take the town, Dillinger style.