Frank went on tilt. He ordered Billy to drop to his knees and stick his arms behind his back. He handcuffed Billy, squeezing the cuffs so tightly that they cut off the circulation in Billy’s hands. Then he smacked Billy in the face.
“You’re going down once I get those dice back,” Frank said.
“What dice?” Billy replied.
“The gaffed dice you just threw onto the awning. I’m onto your scam.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about, mister.”
Deny, deny, deny-that was the hustler’s refrain. A blue platoon of security burst through the front doors and circled the two men. Traffic coming into the casino ground to a halt, causing a line of yellow cabs waiting to drop off fares to back up to Paradise Road and down Harmon. Frank was in deep shit now. He wasn’t supposed to get in the way of casinos making money. But at that point, Frank didn’t care. He hated Billy, hated his lavish lifestyle, his sleek Italian sports car, and most of all, the harem of women Billy had at his disposal. Frank was going to nail this little candy-ass hustler if it was the last thing he did.
A metal ladder was produced, and Frank tried to climb atop the awning. It wasn’t tall enough, and Frank could not get up without fear of falling. By now, the Hard Rock’s general manager was begging Frank to reconsider. Couldn’t Frank see the casino was losing money? Frank told the GM to get lost and summoned Las Vegas Fire and Rescue to bring a fire truck with a retractable ladder to the casino.
While Frank waited for the fire truck, a KLAS news van appeared. Local TV news crews weren’t allowed inside the casinos and were forced to slum around town, looking for stabbings, shootings, and other mayhem suitable for the evening news. The front entrance to the Hard Rock was fair game, and a female reporter stuck a mike in Billy’s face.
“Care to make a statement?” the reporter asked.
“They grabbed the wrong guy. I didn’t do anything,” Billy declared.
By now, Frank was sweating bullets. If he didn’t find the gaffed dice, his long-overdue promotion would disappear, and he’d be stuck pounding the pavement. He got on the horn and asked for a team of agents to help search for the missing dice.
The fire truck was wailing as it pulled into the Hard Rock. A team of gaming agents arrived, including Frank’s boss, a hard-ass named Tricaricco. Under Frank’s direction, the fire truck’s ladder was stretched onto the awning, and the gaming agents scampered up the ladder. Frank was the last to go. He was afraid of heights and kept gazing down at the pavement. He spotted Billy staring up at him, his boyish face curled in a shit-eating grin.
It was at that moment that Frank knew he was fucked.
“Fucked how?” Mags asked.
She continued to kneel by Frank’s chair. She could not imagine how Billy had gotten out of this jam, and she gave Frank’s arm a tug.
“Come on, tell me.”
Frank’s glass was empty. He belched into space, consumed by the memory. “We looked everywhere on that awning for those fucking dice. It was so hot, the soles of our feet got burned. We couldn’t find them.”
“Did they skip over the other side?”
“That’s what I thought at first. We climbed down the ladder and scoured the bushes where the dice would have fallen. The branches were sharp and cut our hands and arms. The dice were nowhere-it was as if they’d vanished. My review was coming up, and I knew this was going to sink me. Ten years busting my ass down the drain.”
She pretended to be sympathetic, only she wasn’t sympathetic at all. She didn’t give a rat’s ass about Frank’s promotion or how bad he’d looked in front of his boss. What she cared about was how on earth Billy had managed to weasel his way out of this.
“What happened to the dice? They didn’t just disappear.”
“They got flushed down a toilet inside the casino.”
“What?”
He found the strength to meet her gaze. “The Hard Rock’s surveillance director broke the news to me. He said the tapes showed Billy passing off the gaffed dice to one of his bimbos before coming outside. She ran to the bathroom and flushed them away.”
“So what did Billy throw on the awning?”
“Nothing. His hand was empty.”
“He faked you out?”
“Yeah, and I fell for it. We had to let him go.”
It was as delicious a cross as Mags had ever heard, and a tiny laugh escaped her lips. Her mother had warned her never to laugh in a man’s face. The difference between men and women, her mother had claimed, was that men were afraid of women laughing at them, while women were afraid of men killing them. Somehow, she’d forgotten her mother’s sage advice.
Frank’s hand slapped her face. The next thing Mags knew, she was lying on her back, watching the room spin like a pinwheel. Frank threw on his rumpled clothes and grabbed his wallet and keys off the bureau. Standing over her, he spoke in a dead, emotionless tone.
“Don’t ever laugh at me again.”
“Sorry,” she whispered.
“You okay?”
“I’ll live.”
“That’s my girl. I’ll pick you up tomorrow at noon.”
“Okay.”
“Mad at me?”
“I’ll get over it.”
“Good answer.”
The door slammed, and Mags listened to his footsteps tread down the hall to the elevators. Only when she was certain he was gone did she pull herself off the floor.
She sat on the edge of the bed. She was seeing double, and she tried to will it to stop. It seemed a perfect metaphor for the two worlds she was living in. She’d gotten herself into this mess, and she was the only one who could get herself out.
The room returned to normal. She went to the slider on wobbly legs and pressed her face to the glass. The Strip’s neon bathed her in false colors, and she forced herself not to cry.
TWENTY-SEVEN
At midnight, Billy scratched the podiatrists off his list of groups the Gypsies might be using as cover. Wearing a waiter’s uniform and balancing a tray on his palm, he’d been canvassing a banquet room where the foot doctors were having dinner. Older, bespectacled, with big marriage bellies and soft hands, they wore suits that only saw the light of day a few times a year, and sat at round tables drinking decaf and discussing such scintillating topics as foot fungus, ingrown toe nails, and plantar fasciitis. Nearly all had spouses, an equally unexciting group of half-asleep women with stiff heads of beauty-parlor hair. None appeared in any great hurry to visit the casino, or take advantage of the other pleasurable pursuits Galaxy had to offer, and he couldn’t imagine any of them being a member of the Gypsy clan. Too dull, too old, and too heavy. The Gypsies had started out as shoplifters, meaning they were fleet of foot and as lean as circus acrobats. Not a single person in the banquet room fit that description.
As he took a final swing through the room, his brand new Droid hummed in his pocket. Caller ID was local but unfamiliar. He walked over to a dessert table with a melting ice sculpture and took the call.
“Billy, it’s me,” Ly said. “I’m in trouble.”
“What’s wrong? What’s that noise in the background?”
“I got busted for cheating at the casino tonight. I only got one phone call, so I call you.”
“You’ve got to be kidding me.”
“Don’t get mad. Not my fault.”
“How can it not be your fault?”
“Because I don’t do nothing wrong. Come bail me out.”
She made it sound like an order. And maybe it was; if he didn’t bail her out, she might get pissed and spill her guts about their little enterprise to the cops. He couldn’t take that risk and decided he’d better spring her out of jail.
“I’ll get there as soon as I can,” he said.
“Hurry. This place scary,” she said.
He put the phone away. A podiatrist at a nearby table with his wildly drunk wife was trying to get his attention. He was done playing waiter and flipped the podiatrist the bird.