“We need to go.”
“Just one more bet.”
I told her June 15, and she promptly placed an entire stack of chips each on 6 and 15.
“Jesus, how much are you betting?” I asked her.
“I don’t know — five hundred on each, I think.”
Betty focused on me now like I’d really been the one interrogating her. When the roulette ball landed, she announced “thirty-five” in a small voice and cleared the table of more than half the chips Mai had won in the last spin.
“I’ll cash out,” Mai said. “In blacks, please.” She took out the business card I’d returned to her and placed it on the felt, her phone number faced up.
Betty counted out her remaining chips, announced the cash-out to the pit, and set nine black chips—$900 total — in front of Mai. “Thank you for playing,” she said and mustered one last halfhearted smile for us.
Mai stood from the table, palmed four of the chips, stacked the other five on the card, and slid it toward Betty. “For you. Please tell Happy to call me at that number. Tell her it’s Hong, and that I really need to speak to her.”
Betty looked wary of both the tip and the card.
A man in a black turtleneck and a sport coat appeared at the table with a blond half his age and twice his height, his hand on the small of her back. In one smooth movement, greeting them as she had greeted us, Betty scooped Mai’s $500 tip into her tip bin and slipped the card into her vest pocket.
As we walked away, I glanced back and caught her eyeing us. I asked Mai, “What did you say to her?”
“I told her Happy’s in trouble and needs our help. Did you see her face?”
“You can’t go around right now giving strangers your number. There’s no telling who or what she knows — or if she’s even loyal to Happy.”
“She doesn’t need to be to deliver the message.”
“You’re taking too many chances.”
“I was right, though. You saw her face. A middle-aged Vietnamese woman dealing in a casino? Good odds she’s been here a while and knows every Vietnamese woman who works here, who they’re married to, who they love and hate. She’ll deliver the message.”
We elbowed our way through a thick crowd of people waiting in the lobby for the start of some live music show. Mai bumped the arm of a guy twice her size, who muttered after her, but she kept walking like nothing had happened.
We returned to the elevator, and again we rode it alone. Mai stared at the elevator doors as though she could see some distant destination through them.
It wasn’t recklessness. She was too deliberate for that. What worried me was her unpredictability, always another plan or urge withheld. It had loomed inside her mother too, that same shadowy sea creature right beneath the surface of the water. You’re alone in the company of such people.
“There was more,” I said. “You said something else to her.”
Mai passed a hand through her hair. “I said they’ll hurt Happy again if we don’t help her. They’ll kill her next time.”
When the elevator opened, she marched toward the Jeep. It took me some effort to keep up with her.
13
THREE MILES EAST of the Strip, we disappeared into a dusky neighborhood of low apartment buildings, gravel lawns, and famished pine trees, a few of them lazily adorned with Christmas lights. Mai turned into an alley that led to a small walled-off parking lot behind her complex. She parked beside a rusty VW bus with two flat tires and cut the Jeep’s engine. I had to adjust to the quiet, slot machines still ringing in my ears.
I followed her through a gate with a hole where the knob should be. Her complex looked more like an abandoned moteclass="underline" two stories of crusty peach stucco wrapped around a dusty gravel courtyard and a lit-up swimming pool half filled with greenish water and leaves, its bottom a brown blanket of scum.
Chicano music drifted from somewhere in the darkness.
We clanged up a metal staircase to the second-floor balcony that led around the building. She led me past dark windows, vacant inside perhaps or nobody home. Across the courtyard, two young black men stood smoking on the opposite balcony, leaning out of the shadows, their murmurs echoing across the way in some African language.
We turned the corner and approached a Mexican man on a plastic stool with a beer in his hand and a small boy in his lap, wrapped in his coat. I smelled grilled onions. When we passed their window, I saw a woman working the kitchen stove and three more children crowded around a small TV on the carpet, beneath a painting of the Virgin Mary framed with Christmas lights. Mai and the man nodded at each other, and the boy watched us intently as we made our way past and arrived two doors down at Mai’s apartment.
When she inserted her key, I said, “Let me go in first. How many rooms are there?”
“Just my bedroom. The kitchen opens to the living room.”
I flipped on the lights, smelled the cold odor of cigarettes. I pulled out my gun and gestured for her to stay by the doorway.
Her place was small, the walls completely bare and the brown shag carpet dark enough to hide stains. The only furniture, shoved into the center of the living room, was a leather recliner, a coffee table littered with a pizza box and soda cans, and a fancy big-screen TV as tall as Mai. In the cramped kitchen, my jacket snagged on the chipped edge of the Formica counter, which looked more yellowed than yellow and held a microwave and a rice cooker and nothing else.
The walls of her bedroom were also bare, her bed a mattress on the floor, a tangle of yellow sheets. Beside the head of the mattress was a lamp and a cardboard box of file folders as well as piles of books stacked against the wall.
I came back out to wave her in. I picked an empty cigarette pack off the floor and set it on the counter. “You get robbed recently, or did you just move in?”
Mai closed the front door, locked it. “I live simply,” she said and walked past me into her bedroom. She opened the closet, pulled out a black suitcase, and started throwing clothes inside.
“Take only what you absolutely need,” I reminded her. “Once everything cools off, we can get someone to come back for the rest of your stuff.”
“I can get new stuff.”
“Won’t your landlord wonder?”
“I’ve always leased month to month. He’ll be more than happy to take the big-screen.”
I noticed a bunch of poker manuals among her books, some Hemingway and Chandler novels, a few books on yoga and Eastern spirituality.
My foot knocked over an ashtray and I apologized, picking up the cigarette butts despite it not mattering. I checked my watch. It was nearly 7:00. Victor said we had until 8:30, but I didn’t want to take any chances.
“Can I ask a question?”
“Why do I live in a shit hole?” She set the file folders atop the clothes. The top one had “Bankroll” written on it, the others neatly labeled too, by far the most meticulous things in the apartment.
“You spend money like you have it.”
“Didn’t when I got to town four years ago. This was the only place I could afford and it’s been good enough for me.”
“Kinda shady, no?” I peeked through the mini blinds at the alley below, shrouded in an orange-tinged darkness.
She shrugged. “I don’t go for walks at night.”
“Pretty sure we passed a drug deal down the street — those two kids on their skateboards.”
“Par for the course around here. Muggings too. A stabbing or shooting now and then. Doesn’t make me nervous anymore. If a man can live here with his wife and kids, I can too.”
“Easy to say until shit happens to you.”
“What makes you think it hasn’t?”
She went to the bathroom, and I heard her rummaging through drawers.