"Hell, if we're doing that, I'm taking summer classes. There's no way you'd get me to go back home."
I smiled. "All right then. Let's do it."
CHAPTER SIX
"Welcome back to Bootleggers, gentlemen," Melody said, her smile just as wide and pretty as I remembered it from last night. "I hope you enjoyed the buffet."
"It was excellent," Bill said, rubbing his belly. "We are stuffed!"
I grinned in agreement, mostly to cover my nerves. I couldn't shake the feeling that despite how confident Bill seemed, Powi had known exactly what she was talking about. We'd made the decision to keep at it, though, and I was determined to do just that – at least for tonight. If we won big enough, I hoped I might be able to convince Bill to take our winnings and head for safer ground.
"Well, I hope you didn't fill up too much on all that Chicago deep-dish pizza and Midwestern prime rib. If you're interested, I have an invitation for the two of you to the Bolthole, our high-limit VIP lounge."
"How high are the limits?" Bill asked.
"It depends on your game. If you stick with Blackjack, our tables in the Bolthole have a one hundred dollar minimum bet and a limit of up to ten thousand dollars."
I blinked at the thought of risking five figures on a single hand.
"Yeah." Bill motioned for her to lead us to the lounge. "That I like."
"Of course, if you want to bet more, you can always arrange to play several hands at once. Our tables can manage up to seven hands at a time."
"That's seventy thousand dollars a round," said Bill. "Not bad. With each round taking roughly a minute, you could bet four-point-two million dollars in an hour."
I had to clear my throat. "I think we'll probably start off a bit easier than that."
"You're free to set your own speed," Melody said with a wink as she led us across the crowded floor and into an elevator that zipped us up to the fortieth floor.
"I hope you had a great time last night," she said.
Bill snorted at that. I put a hand on my head. "Maybe a little too much," I said.
Melody flashed us a wicked grin. "That's what the Strip is here for. Just remember, what happens in Vegas stays in Vegas."
Bill laughed. "Thank God for that."
The doors to the elevator opened, and Melody led us down a short hallway to a thick door set in a wide, curved wall of dark oak paneling. It bore no sign or window, nothing but a little sliding door set at eye level. As we approached, that little door slid open, and a pair of dark eyes looked out at us.
"Password?" the man said. He sounded like he'd smoked cigarettes from birth.
"They're with me, Misha," Melody said.
"They still gotta use their passwords, Miss Melody," Misha said. "Them's the rules."
"Just wave your Inner Circle cards over that panel on the door, gentlemen." Melody pointed at a small, innocuous inset panel right where a knob should have been but wasn't.
Bill and I fished out our cards. He was faster on the draw than I was, and he waved his card over the panel first. The door clicked open, and the man behind it pulled it wide for us.
"Misha and the rest of the gang inside will take excellent care of you," Melody said. She pressed a business card into each of our hands. "If you need anything else while you're here, don't hesitate to give me a call."
Misha was a moose of a man, towering over Bill and me and maybe weighing as much as the two of us put together. In his zoot suit and fedora, he seemed like the original archetype of the leg breaker. There was no way I ever wanted to owe money to this man or anyone he worked for.
"What's your poison, fellas?" Misha said in a thick Chicago accent. "Poker, Craps, Roulette, Baccarat, Pai Gow, Blackjack?"
We gazed around the room. The walls of the large, circular room were lined with old bricks, and the room had a high tin ceiling pressed in patterns that resembled the backs of cards. Old lampposts stabbed out of the floor, providing most of the chamber's soft, welcoming lighting. A long brass-railed bar of gleaming oak stood against the far wall, and a brace of bartenders with rolled-up sleeves and black suspenders worked diligently behind it.
Despite how much money the players had to have just to get into the room, it was packed. Every card-game table had at least two or three players at it, and the crowd around the craps tables stood two or three deep. Unlike in the other parts of the casino, though, they were anything but raucous. With few exceptions, these were serious people who'd come to play serious games, probably staked with more money to risk in a single night than I'd ever seen in a year.
Nervous as I was, that made me smile.
"Blackjack, I think." Bill tried to act nonchalant, but I could tell that the amount of money floating around the room had unnerved even him. "That seems to be our game."
"Right this way, fellas." Misha led us off to a cluster of six Blackjack tables off to the left and directed us to sit at the least crowded one. "Here ya go," he said, clapping his hands once to turn us over to the dealer's tender mercies. "Good luck, guys."
The dealer was a petite woman with long tight curls. Her name tag read "Gabriella, Cicero." She was so small that I wondered if they should have given her a box to stand on, but she handled the cards just fine. She gave us a winning smile as we sat down at the table and handed her the debit cards Melody had given us last night.
"How much would you like to play?" she said.
"All of it." Bill spoke without an instant's hesitation. I just nodded that I was fine with that plan too.
Gabriella checked our balances and counted us out twenty black one hundred dollar chips and four purple five hundred dollar chips each, plus a bit of change. I fondled the chips while she shuffled the cards for a fresh shoe. It made my fingers tingle to handle this much cash at once.
Two other players sat at the table with us. Neither of them seemed much in the mood for jabber. The woman directly to Bill's right, to the far side of me, was young, probably not too much older than me. She wore a sharp suit over a half-open white dress shirt, and sunglasses so dark I wondered how she could see the cards. Her short black hair had been gelled up in some kind of anime-inspired spikefest. Her upper lip curled in a perpetual sneer.
The other player sat just beyond her, ignoring us and sipping his drink. His thick head of hair had gone a steely gray, but his browned skin glowed with vibrancy. He had the easy way about him of someone who was entirely comfortable with himself. He looked like he'd been born in this spot and the casino had been built around him.
Gabriella started dealing the cards. Bill and I each tossed a hundred-dollar chip on to the table. The other two players threw out a yellow chip worth a straight thousand dollars.
As we'd walked into the room, I'd started to feel like maybe Bill and I had hit the big time. Watching the bets fly, I realized just how small we really were.
Bill and I had worked it out ahead of time that we'd play without using any mojo for the first half hour or so. We'd both studied Blackjack enough to know how to squeeze the most out of the game. Even playing perfectly would still give the house an edge, but barring a terribly bad run of luck, we'd manage to only lose slowly, which wouldn't add up to too much over thirty minutes. Then we'd strike.
At least, that was the plan. For the first twenty minutes or so, everything worked fine. Bill sipped at a complimentary glass of Laphroaig as we played. I wanted one to lathe the edge off the remnants of the hangover still lurking around the edges of my brain, but I needed a clear head, so I stuck to water.
The other players at our table didn't say a word as they played. By the familiar way the dealer and the cocktail waitresses dealt with them, it seemed they were regulars here, but they could have just earned that kind of respect with their wagers. The rest of the room murmured along with their games, punctuated only occasionally with a whoop of triumph or a groan of defeat. Compared to the constant dull roar of the thousands of people in the main casino, the Bolthole felt peaceful and quiet.
That meant I could really concentrate on the cards once it was time.
Before Bill and I were ready, though, our luck hit the skids. We each lost ten rounds in a row. While that's not impossible, it's statistically significant, and it cost us a cool grand each. By the time we'd been playing a half hour, I'd already lost half my chips.
When the time came to get to work, I cracked my fingers and said, "Brother, it's about time our luck started to change."
Bill gave me a glum look. "I've been thinking that for a while now."
I didn't know why he seemed so down, but I couldn't stop to ask him about it here in the middle of the room. I decided to just focus on the cards and make the magic happen.
I upped my bet to two hundred dollars and reached out with my mind. I won the next three hands in a row, but Bill kept up his losing streak. We'd talked about how it might not look good for both of us to be winning at the same time, so I assumed he was just letting his unlucky streak slide to help allay any suspicions.
I lost the next hand, then upped my bet to five hundred dollars. "I think things are finally turning my way," I said with a grin.
Bill gave me a helpless shrug.
Within minutes, I'd recovered all of my losses and had stormed into the black. I knew I'd orchestrated the hot streak, but it felt good. A few players started drifting over from the other tables to watch. I just ignored them and kept my mind and my mojo on the cards.
I lost every third or fourth hand, just to keep my lucky streak from becoming too unbelievable. I gave myself a blackjack every now and then to make up for it.
Bill took a break for a few minutes to cheer me on. We hadn't talked about it before, but it seemed like a smart idea. This way the spotlight only shone on one of us at the time.
Bill clapped me on the back. "I can't believe this," he said. "I guess I was more hungover than I thought, but you, you're on fire!"
The man at the other end of the table stopped playing too and just sat watching me, his lips pursed. The woman cursed at me a few times for stealing all the luck from the table, but I just laughed her off. Gabriella kept dealing. With only the two of us playing, she ran through the rounds fast.
When Gabriella ran through to the end of the shoe again, the pit boss tapped her on the shoulder. She spread her hands in front of her and thanked us all for playing. I picked up a black chip from the huge stack in front of me and tossed it to her as a tip.
"I think it's time for a break," Bill said.
"Why?" I said, half serious. The pit boss handed me a rack, and I started filling it with chips. "I'm on a streak!"
"It's time. I need a smoke."
That stopped me cold. My smile froze on my face.
Bill didn't smoke, not even when he'd been drinking. He'd had asthma ever since he'd been a little kid, and he'd never even tried it. He often insisted on leaving a bar if people were smoking there. Several places in Ann Arbor were already smoke free, but he'd cheered when the Michigan legislature had passed a statewide smoking ban in bars and restaurants just before our winter break.
If Bill wanted a smoke, something was seriously wrong.
Fixing my winner's grin wide and strong, I nodded at him and finished stacking my chips in my tray. "That sounds great," I said. "After all that action, I could use one too."
The people around us laughed at that, and the rubberneckers around the table began to disperse. I scooped up my heavy rack of chips, put my arm around Bill, and headed for the exit, where Misha still stood guard.
Instead of opening the door for us, though, Misha blocked it. "Good run, fellas," he said, his friendly demeanor gone. "The management would like to congratulate you. Personally."
Bill blanched. I glanced around the room and realized that we were trapped. The Bolthole only had one door for patrons, and Misha was blocking it.
I'd worked in enough restaurants in the French Quarter to know that there had to be another way out. The staff would need a way to get in and out of the place without running everything through the front door, and fire codes would demand it.
I spotted a small alcove next to the bar, which I guessed led to the restrooms and the storage room, and the service entrance beyond. It wouldn't be easy to get to it, but I rated our chances there better than trying to force our way past the man-mountain standing before us.
"Sure thing," I said to Misha, pretending not to notice how much trouble Bill and I were in. "Just let us hit the head here first. I don't think I can wait another minute."
As I swung Bill around and headed for the restroom, the silver-haired man who'd been sitting at the table with us stepped into our path.
"Hello, my young friends," he said. From his looks, I had thought he would have a Mexican accent, but he sounded like maybe he'd come from New York a long time ago instead. "My name is Benito Gaviota. I'm the head of security for Bootleggers. I'd like a moment of your time."
CHAPTER SEVEN
"Is there a problem, sir?" I gave the man my most innocent look of concern. Grandma had never bought it, but no one else knew me as well.
Gaviota smiled, showing rows of perfect white teeth. "Not at all," he said. "There's a question about your IDs we need to clear up. As I said, this should only take a moment."
Bill gaped at the man, not saying a word. He'd always been the smooth talker, but he just stood there shaking his head.
"Sure thing," I said. "If you could just give us a minute, though, I think my friend isn't feeling too well. I'd like to get him to the restroom before he throws up all over your carpet."