"Of course." Gaviota stepped aside with an even smile, and I pressed straight past him.
I planned to walk straight past the restrooms and bolt into the lounge's back room. From there, I hoped to find a way out into the main casino. How we would manage to leave from there, I couldn't say, but I figured I'd tackle one challenge at a time.
As we moved, I dumped the chips from my tray into my pockets. I didn't want to have to worry about them during what I knew would come next.
I leaned over and whispered into Bill's ear. "When I start running, follow me."
"I tried," Bill said, not bothering to keep his voice low. "I tried as hard as I could. I just couldn't do it."
"What the hell are you talking about?" I whispered.
"I couldn't beat that damn game for anything. The harder I tried, the worse it got."
I shushed him. "Let's just get out of here. We can do the post-game analysis later."
We entered the alcove next to the bar, and it turned out to be a short hallway, just as I'd guessed. Doors leading to the men's and women's rest rooms lined the right wall, and a third door sat at the end of the hall.
I glanced back and didn't see Misha or Benito behind me. Grateful for small favors, I moved straight to the unmarked door and tried it. It was unlocked.
"Time to go," I said to Bill.
He gave me a determined nod and then pushed his way through in front of me. I followed right after and almost ran into him. As I looked past him to see what had caused him to haul up short, I heard the door click behind me.
"Your friend seems to have recovered," Gaviota said. He stood next to Misha in the middle of the well-lit storage room.
"We must have gotten turned around," I said.
Gaviota frowned. "Could you drop the charade, please? It's insulting to all of us – even Misha here."
The big man didn't even look askance at Gaviota. He either didn't understand the insult or was so used to such cracks that he no longer cared.
"What do you want?" I said.
Gaviota's lips curled upward in an approximation of a smile. "Better," he said. "But I can't tell you what I want yet. First, I need some more information."
I shrugged. "Like what?"
"Who sent you?"
That surprised me: that there might have been someone who sent us here to cheat the casino out of its money. Who could he have meant?
"To the Bolthole? I believe her name was Melody."
The man took a step toward me. While he was barely an inch or three taller than me, he loomed over me like the casino's tower, exuding menace.
My throat ran dry.
"Let's try that again," he said. His tone told me that this was my last chance. "Who sent you?"
I cleared my throat. "No one," I said. "We came here on our own."
Gaviota stared into my eyes as if he could read the answer to his question in my soul and had only asked it to see if I would lie. He laughed. It was a sound with no warmth in it.
"That's priceless," he said. "You two are so goddamn naive."
"We don't want any trouble," said Bill.
Gaviota spoke to him but kept his eyes on me. "Then you came to the wrong place. Here we got nothing but trouble. This trouble, though, you brought with you."
I glanced at Misha. The massive man hadn't said a word. He just stood there, impassive, with his hands folded in front of himself. I had no doubt that he was ready to break any one of my bones Gaviota might point him toward though.
"We didn't do anything wrong." I tried to believe it as I said it.
Gaviota reached out and gave me a pat on the cheek. "I think I asked you to drop the lies. Politely."
He slapped me across the face. It stung like hell.
Without thinking – it seemed like my hand moved on its own – I slapped him too. I'd been in enough fights growing up in the Ninth Ward to not let something like a slap shock me. My blow left a red mark on the man's cheek, and the man staggered back a step, his eyes wide with surprise. I don't doubt he'd been in a lot of fights himself, but it had probably been a while since someone had hit him back.
"You little bastard." Misha strode forward. I put up my fists. I knew he was going to beat me into a pulp, but I wasn't going to stand there and take it.
Gaviota put out a hand to stop Misha, and the big man ground to a halt with me just out of his reach. His face flushed red, and his nostrils flared like those of a bull about to charge.
I heard something behind me, and I chanced a glance back to see Bill hauling on the handle of the door we'd come through. It didn't give an inch. I scowled at him. Here, I was about to get my head handed to me, and instead of having my back he'd bolted for the door.
Gaviota spit on the floor. "Forget it, kid," he said to Bill, who jumped away from the door in shock. "The only way out of here is through me."
Ignoring Bill, Gaviota focused on me again. "You need to think hard about what the next few minutes here are going to mean to you and your not-so-great friend there. They're going to determine a great deal about how you spend the rest of your life – and just how long that might be."
I kept my mouth shut and nodded.
"Now, tell me how you worked your lucky streak in there."
"I was counting cards," I said. "It's not illegal."
"No," Gaviota said, "it's not. It is unsporting, though, and we and every other casino in the city frown on it. Do you know what we do to card counters we catch here?"
I shook my head. I had my guesses, but they were all based upon film and TV.
"We show them the door. Then we ban them from our casino for life. After that, we send photos of them to every other casino in town to make sure that they can never try to ruin another game again. If we catch them a second time, we prosecute them for trespassing – and we know several excellent judges who are only too happy to throw the book at them."
I swallowed hard. "All right," I said. "You do what you gotta do."
Gaviota frowned at me. "Unfortunately, that's not what you've been doing here. It's too bad. Handling card counters is so much simpler."
I was getting tired of this too. "If you're so sure of what I've been doing, why don't you just come out and say it? If you'd rather play games, let's go back out and hit the tables."
Gaviota smirked. "You've got spirit, kid. I like that."
"Enough to let us go?" asked Bill.
Gaviota scowled at him. "No one likes a comedian."
"I wasn't trying to be… oh. Shutting up now."
"Just beat us up and get it over with," I said.
"Spoken like a kid who's never taken a good beating," Misha said as he cracked his knuckles.
"We didn't do anything wrong," Bill said, not bothering to keep his desperation from his voice. "You can't prove that we did."
Misha snorted. "This ain't a court of law."
Gaviota sneered at us. "You two think you're the first people to come to Vegas to try rigging the games in your favor? People have been trying to cheat the casinos here ever since the first one opened its doors. You think just because you're using magic you're something special?"
The word
magic
made me freeze. Bill actually whimpered. A key part of our plan had been to dare anyone who accused us of cheating to prove that we had. We were sure that no one would have a shot in hell at doing it. They wouldn't even know where to start looking.
But when Gaviota said "magic," I knew we were screwed – maybe dead.
"Magic?" Bill said. "That's preposterous. Next thing you're going to say that Tinkerbell came in and sprinkled the cards with fairy dust for us."
I shook my head. "Nuh-uh. I'm pretty sure I would have seen that."
"Shut up," said Gaviota. "Don't bother with the denials. We know what you did. We want to know who taught you how to do it."
My mind flashed straight to Professor Rishi Ultman, probably one of the gentlest people I'd ever known. I couldn't bear to think that this might somehow come back to haunt him. It was one thing for Bill and me to pay for our stupidity, but Professor Ultman didn't deserve that.
Bill opened his mouth to say something, but I cut him off. "We taught ourselves," I said. "We found a site on the Internet and learned most of it from there."
"Ah, Christ," Misha said. "I told the boss that Internet thing would be trouble for us sooner or later." Looking at the man, I found it hard to believe he'd ever done anything with the web other than surf for porn.
"Bullshit," Gaviota said. "You can't learn that kind of stuff by just reading about it. I don't care how good a site it is."
"It had video too," said Bill. "And lots of pictures. With step-by-step diagrams."
Gaviota gave Bill a murderous look. "What's the name of the site?"
Bill blanked.
"The site," Gaviota said. "It has to have a name. An address. What is it?"
"MagicForMorons.com," I said.
Gaviota fixed me in his glare. I wondered if the only thing that kept him from killing me there was having to find someone to clean up all the blood. "Throw them in the cooler," he said to Misha.
The big man reached out and grabbed Bill, who was closer to him. I leaped at the man, but he was faster than I thought anyone his size could be. He backhanded me with a fist that felt like a brick, and I dropped to the floor. Stars spiraled before my eyes.
Bill started to shout for help, but he stopped in midsentence. As my eyes cleared, I gazed up at him, expecting to see Misha's meaty hand clamped around Bill's throat. The man had him by the front of his shirt instead. Bill seemed to be shouting at the top of his lungs, but no sound came out of his mouth.
I hauled myself to my feet and steadied myself for another run at the bruiser, but before I could I heard something zip right by me, and my left arm felt like it was on fire. I looked down at my arm and saw blood seeping through the torn fabric of my jacket's sleeve, which looked like someone had punched a screwdriver through it.
I glanced over to see Gaviota pointing an automatic pistol at me. "Try not to be any stupider than you already are, kid," he said. "I don't want to have to shoot you again."
I put up my hands. I hadn't heard the gun go off, but given the pain in my arm I couldn't dispute it.
"I'll give it my best," I said. I almost added "shot" to that but stopped myself cold.
Misha had scooped Bill up by his collar, and the big man hauled him over to the door of a walk-in cooler. He opened it and tossed Bill inside, where he landed without a shout of protest.
"You next." Gaviota gestured me toward the cooler with his gun.
Playing dumb hadn't worked out well for me, so I decided to comply. I walked into the cooler, turning to keep my eyes on the gun the entire time.
"Pity you couldn't do this the easy way," Gaviota said, "but I'm sure the boss will be able to get it all out of you."
"You – you don't have to do that," I said clutching my wounded arm with my opposite hand. I wondered how long they'd leave us in here and whether I'd freeze to death or bleed out first. "Can't we work something out?"
"I think it's a little late for that now, kid."
The time we'd spent at the table flashed through my mind. I couldn't understand it. Bill and I had played perfectly. He'd even taken the extra step of making sure to lose while I won big.
"How did you figure it out?" I asked. I'd started to feel lightheaded. If I was going to die here, I wanted to know how they'd spotted us. And if I somehow survived this, I wanted to figure out how to keep it from happening again.
Gaviota smirked. "Because you kept winning."
"That could have just been a lucky streak," I said. "Doesn't anyone ever win in this casino besides the house?"
"Not when I'm playing, kid," Gaviota said. "I was using magic too."
I stared at the man in disbelief. "But you weren't playing against us. That would have only helped you win the game."
Misha laughed, but Gaviota just shook his head, his face filled with concern. "Maybe you two really are morons," he said. "I wasn't using my magic against the dealer. I was using it against you."
The big man pointed at Bill and laughed even louder. "Didn't you ever wonder why you started losing?"
I glanced at Bill. He sat there on the floor still, gaping at Gaviota.
"I figured he was just trying to throw you off," I said. Bill shook his head a silent but emphatic no, even mouthing the word.
"He didn't throw me off," Gaviota said. "You did."
"How's that?" I said.
"I used my best magic against you," he said, "and you still kept winning. How you managed to do that, I don't know, but that little mystery is the one reason you and your friend aren't dead – yet."
CHAPTER EIGHT
After Misha slammed shut the door, I went over and tried it. It was locked, just like I'd expected. I turned back and offered Bill a hand up. When he saw how it was covered with blood, he waved me off and got up on his own.
Bill stabbed a finger at his throat, snarling silently in frustration.
"They did something to you, didn't they?" I said. "Gaviota must have used his magic to kill the noise around you."
Bill nodded, then made a gun with his finger.
"That makes sense," I said. "He silenced the gun with his magic too. That's why I didn't hear it go off."
I stared at the door. "How long do you figure we have?" I said. "Before they come back with their boss, I mean?"
Bill shrugged and pointed at my arm.
"Right," I said. "The question probably should be how long do I have." I groaned. "It hurts like a bitch. Feels like a gator took a nip at me."