Work Done for Hire (11 page)

The parking lot was huge, serving both the casino and a miniature Disneyworld that didn't have any Disney characters. We parked at Tombstone A-5 and discussed strategy.

Kit had been to Vegas with her parents, and knew how to play blackjack conservatively. I could do the same with side bets on the craps table, though it took more concentration, and the ambience at craps was loud and testosterone-soaked. So we'd stick to blackjack and not play at the same tables.

We'd move around, playing for a couple of hours, cashing the G-notes at different tables. There were $100-minimum games where the big bills wouldn't be uncommon. I was hoping that if we cashed them at the tables rather than at the cashier, the serial numbers wouldn't be scanned immediately.

This was the overall plan: lose steadily but not spectacularly. Quit when we still had 80 or 90 percent of our stake, converted into somewhat used C-notes and fifties.

We quizzed each other on betting strategy for half an hour, using the iPak to deal out of a four-deck shoe, which is what Google said they used here. Then we got on the slidewalk a few minutes apart, agreeing to meet at the main entrance at 5:00.

The entrance foyer was ice-cold and not too loud, a good distance from the muted clang of slot machines and susurrus of crowd noise. As I approached it, it was like walking toward crashing surf.

Trying to look casual, half expecting some cop to appear out of nowhere, I strolled into the slots area and sacrificed a few tens and twenties, keeping track. I put in $210 and got back two hundred. A little slow, and the machine wouldn't take anything bigger than a fifty. It paid back in metal-and-plastic medallions, of course, and dollar coins. They weighed down my left pocket as I walked toward the table games.

Kit had a small stack of gold and silver chips in front of her. We waved, as prearranged—there were cameras all over the place, and they probably had our names and Social Security numbers locked in before we bought a chip. The probability that the casino's computer knew we had come in the same car was high enough that ignoring each other might be suspicious. We didn't want to play at the same table, though, two people who knew each other flashing G-notes together.

I went on to a smoking table, since it had a couple of empty chairs and I could stand the smoke for a little while. It would also be a good cover if I wanted to leave early, coughing.

“Hundreds,” I said, and set down two bills. The dealer didn't blink and slid over two short stacks of silver chips. The G-notes went straight into a slot without being scanned, good.

We had agreed that the best strategy would be the least conspicuous, simply “by the book.” I knew that a lot of high-rollers played with dramatic sloppiness, either not knowing better or demonstrating how little money meant to them, or for some peculiar thrill, but most of them knew the basic algorithm and won or lost more slowly. Hit sixteen unless the dealer shows less than seven; stand on seventeen or more, always. Split any pair under nines, and nines if the dealer has between three and eight. Double down on eleven, or on ten if the dealer has shit.

There were about a dozen exceptions to those rules, but we weren't playing to win. We wanted to appear mildly interested for a short while and then leave with a handful of high-denomination chips.

The casino was quite happy with people who played this way, bleeding customers by transfusion rather than amputation. Some places even handed out business cards with the strategy printed on the back, which is how I learned it as a kid, a souvenir that Dad brought back from Mississippi.

Even careful players presented less of a gamble for the house than putting money in a savings account. A bank can fail, but hope is constantly reborn—not to mention greed.

I was down three hundred when the dealer played out the shoe and shuffled. Feigning impatience, I tossed out three more notes. “Gold, please,” I said, and he gave me twelve chips. They did have platinum thousand-dollar chips, but I didn't want to hemorrhage all over the table.

With the fresh shoe I had a disconcerting run of luck betting the gold chips, but then bet heavily and lost three times in a row. Just a little behind, I said I wanted to take a walk, and went to the cashier window and cashed in all my chips. So I'd gotten rid of five of the G-notes, and still had $4,900 in a thick roll in my pocket, mostly hundreds. Headed for Kit, I took a detour through the slot area and turned ten of the C-notes into twenties, a separate roll in the other pocket.

I panicked a moment when Kit wasn't at her place at the table, but then she came up behind me: “Hey, sailor! New in town?”

I turned and asked her sotto voce how she was doing.

“I could leave,” she said with a broad grin. “Have you cashed in?”

“A hundred behind.”

“My hero.” She took my arm. “Let's not go straight out to the car.” She steered me into a bar area, and ordered two Heinekens. We sat at the bar.

“You're drinking beer?”

“Oh, yeah.” She touched the back of my hand with her little finger and opened her palm for a second. On it she'd written with eyeliner: WATCHED PICK U UP EXACT 5:17. “What time you have?”

I checked. “Quarter to five.”

“Good.” She launched into a long anecdote about her Aunt Betty going to Vegas, which I'd just heard. I made appropriate responses, ignoring my watch until she said she had to go to the “little girls' room,” a phrase she never used.

I finished my beer and left a good tip and carried her bottle out with me. Sat and played poker machines until 5:11. Wandered toward the entrance, stopped to take a leak, and stepped out into the wall of dry heat at exactly 5:17. She pulled up and I got into the car and we rolled away.

I exhaled heavily. “So you were being watched?”

“Who knows. Probably just a casino cop; maybe they check you out when you flash a thousand-dollar bill. Maybe he was a gigolo, about to make a move. Or I might just be paranoid.”

“Paranoid is good.”

“I changed tables twice and he followed me like a shadow, not even trying to be subtle. Smiled at me all the time.”

“Maybe he was just interested in rich beautiful women.”

“Oh, stop it. If he wasn't trying to scare me, he would have made some small talk. Not just stalking.”

“Think you got rid of him?”

“Went in the ladies' room and straight out the other door, then out the exit and walked halfway around the building. He didn't follow me out through the parking lot, for whatever that's worth.” She checked her mirrors.

“Yeah, he could—”

“Hold on!” She crossed three lanes without signaling, gunned through a left-turn light as it turned red, and spun the car in a fast U-turn and accelerated through another yellow light, then braked sharply and pulled into a side road and parked.

I was still clinging to the seat. “That . . . that should do it.”

She mopped her face with a balled-up tissue. “Whatever ‘it' is.” She turned on the radio and tapped the search bar until she got some classical music, and turned it up to maximum volume.

She leaned against my shoulder and whispered in my ear: “What now?”

I turned on the car's dash map and tapped it till it showed all of Illinois and part of Indiana. I touched the border town Oak Grove and raised eyebrows at her. She nodded and put it into gear.

I took a page out of her paper notebook and printed big capital letters as she drove along.

WORST CASE: THERE'S A NANODEVICE IN OUR CLOTHES OR ON OUR SKIN OR HAIR. MY CLOTHES ARE NEW AND RANDOM. ARE YOURS? She shook her head.

Another page. ASSUME THE CAR IS BUGGED. WE'LL LEAVE IT AT A MOTEL W/A NOTE TO THE OWNER & SOME CASH. Another page. WALK TO THE BUS STATION & GET A TICKET TO NOWHERE. Another page. LIE LOW FOR A YEAR & WATCH THE NEWS.

Meanwhile, we talked about music, art, and science. She liked Mozart, Monet, and math. I was more like Van Halen, Vermeer, and voodoo. But we already knew all that about each other.

For some reason—perhaps not to avoid the obvious—she asked me about the desert, about being a sniper. “You said it bothered you less when you were actually doing it.”

“Well, yeah,” I said. “Partly it's tit for tat; they're shooting at you, so you shoot back.

“But it wasn't like an even exchange. I was only seriously shot at twice before the one that got me. I mean, they sometimes mortared us at night and all, but that's just weather. Most of the first six months I was there, the death rate was higher for troops stateside, like drunk driving. I was a mile away from the people I was shooting at, and they usually had Marines fucking with them a lot closer.

“It was like that woman said in the book about killing. Without the scope, you could hardly see the targets at all. You squeeze the trigger, bang, the guy falls over three seconds later. If you get your sight picture back you might see him go down.”

“You had a spotter watching with a more powerful telescope?”

“Usually. Sometimes we just did targets of opportunity, fuck with them long-distance. Even if you miss, it's not by much. 'Course they do it back. That's how I got hit, I think.”

“You told me they never got the guy.”

“No, shit, he was in some dunes in the middle of nowhere. We'd used up all the drones, the rubber-band guys, and he had ten minutes to get lost before we had air support.”

“And before you were medivaced.”

“More like fifteen. But our medic was cool. Some superglue spray kept the lung from deflating, pneumothorax. But the hand, that was bad.”

“Yeah.” She knew that one; they'd bound my hand up tight to stop the bleeding, and hadn't seen that the little finger was only hanging on with a little skin. By the time they got around to it, it might as well have been blown off and lost. Rather lose a finger than a lung, though.

“It was brave of you to relearn the guitar, the new fingerings.”

“Not much else to do in rehab.” Actually, after a year, I was playing better than I ever had with all my fingers. A thousand hours of compulsive repetition.

Losing that finger didn't affect my writing because I could never type worth a shit anyhow.

“You'd sit and think,” she said.

“Yeah, too much of that.” That was when the PTSD first crawled into bed with me, and I started to get the high-octane drugs. I try to remember what that felt like and I can't, quite. Just a fog and a memory of a memory of nightmares. While the guitar sort of learned how to play itself.

I dozed for a while. “Over the state line,” she said, waking me. “How does the Oak Grove Motel sound?”

“Sounds like Indiana. Or is it Kentucky?”

It was Indiana; Hoosiers not horses. The eponymous grove only had one tree, but it was an oak—a pin oak, the only leaf I remembered from freshman botany. It has a pin on the end. Like a grenade.

While Kit was showering (definitely a one-person stall) I went down the road for a six-pack and a bag of ice, and on impulse snagged a homemade bag of red-hot pork rinds. She ate a bite of one and made a face. I scarfed down most of a bag, leaving a little room for dinner. Can't get them in Iowa.

We went back across the state line to a pizza place that had a 2-for-1 special and a rear parking lot, where the car couldn't be spotted from the road. The second pizza we'd keep for breakfast.

It wasn't exactly a relaxing place, all bright primary colors and loud music. But the benches were comfortable and the guy turned the music down to a whisper when I asked him to. He also politely wiped the crumbs off the table, onto the floor.

I asked for wine and got a half carafe of ice-cold Chianti. Kit unfolded a large-scale roadmap and studied it.

“We want to go south,” she said.

“Down to the Gulf? And over to Florida.”

“I don't know. We're not exactly on vacation.”

“Nothing wrong with Florida.”

“Except that it's an obvious destination. If the bad guys know we're headed south.”

“Maybe so,” I said. “But if they go looking for us in Florida, they have to find us in the middle of a million tourists. If we're in Pigsty, Arkansas, we'll stand out.”

“That's ‘Piggott.' Didn't Hemingway write there?”

“Another reason to go somewhere else. I'd start doing short declarative sentences.”

She smiled and lowered her voice. “My instinct is to look for run-down small places that might not be on the Net. Once the car's registered somewhere, we're vulnerable.”

“Well, we don't really need a motel. We could just pull over on a back road and catch some Zs, then move on.”

“No way.” She laughed. “I read that book. Some homicidal alien'll cut us up and eat the pieces.”

“I bet he made that up.” A cockroach came out of a crack in the wall and skipped toward the pizza. I slapped at it and it scuttled back. “Yuck. Kind of glad I missed.” More than an inch long.

“They're bigger in Florida,” she said.

“Maybe slower, too. Pity I left the gun behind.”

She was staring at the crack. “Maybe we should get one.”

“What?”

“Just a thought. Stupid, I guess.”

It had crossed my mind, too, of course. “Not stupid. But not a rifle. I can't imagine any scenario where that would work. Maybe a concealable pistol, like a Derringer, if we get cornered.”

“But you can't just buy one in a store, can you? Without showing ID? The guy in your book, Steve, he had a permit and everything.”

“Yeah, he needed a concealed-weapon permit, which was true down in Florida . . . but when I went down there as a kid, my uncle kept a handgun in his tackle box, and it wasn't a big deal that he didn't have a permit; he joked about it with my dad. But I remember he hadn't bought the gun; it was an old thing he got from his own father.”

“So the trick is to choose your grandparents wisely?”

“Always. There used to be a used-gun section in the want ads. I remember when they stopped doing that, ran a sanctimonious notice for weeks.”