Billy looked up, obviously gloating in his self-assurance and the sense of power that he held over the thin-lipped young man who was practically begging in front of him.
"You get a slice of the cake, of course you do, Vito," Billy said slyly. "But it ain't gonna be anything important. You just might do a little eating, understand?"
Vito slunk back from the table, a cruel hurt look apparent in his dark eyes. Ellen watched him carefully out of the side of her vision, fearing that Billy might provoke him beyond the point where Vito could take any more of the gang leader's vicious jibes. It was obvious that Billy was glorying in the salacious glances the others were casting at her nakedly white body, and it seemed as though he wanted to extend his domination over them as far as he could under the opportune circumstances.
While the men rose and went to the opposite side of the room, Ellen began clearing away the table. She watched for a moment as they bent a few feet from the wall, and she took the dishes into the kitchen. After she had set the dishes in the sink and returned to the living room, Billy made her drink from another glass of the whiskey. She had now consumed nearly three glasses of the strong-tasting liquid, and although it made her feel somewhat light-headed, it was preferable to the horrible fainting feeling she experienced when they looked at her so obscenely. She needed something to shield herself from the shocks that had been assaulting her mind and body all evening, and though she usually found drinking distasteful she now welcomed each additional glass of the warm liquid he made her take.
The craps game was going at a slow pace. Ellen didn't quite understand the rules they were following for tossing the dice, but she could see by Billy's worried expression that things were not proceeding as he had planned. He would toss the dice against the wall, and it appeared that the three men would bet on the number of dots that came up. She noticed several times that when both dice came up with two dots face up on each cube the men would scream out "snake eyes" which seemed to mean that Billy had lost that particular toss. But when Billy tossed the next time and came up after the first throw with a combination of seven or eleven as a total number, the men looked disappointed. However, this did not happen often. Usually seven came up after the initial throw, and Billy would curse and snarl at the dice almost as though they were alive.
Cash knelt on the floor and watched Billy toss the dice. He smiled exultantly as his leader's losses piled up. Cash was not only slowly whittling more and more of Billy's money away from him, but was betting the other two men on what numbers might come up… and he seemed to be winning there besides.
After two and a half hours of intense play Vito rose, and growling something incoherently, he threw the remainder of his stakes on the floor in disgust. Ellen breathed a sigh of relief at this turn of events. At least she needn't be bothered with Vito any more this evening; yet the game between Cash and Billy, with Pop still betting, was growing close and more intense.
Each throw of the dice seemed to send up those glittering snake eyes that took on a more evil quality as Ellen tried to concentrate her will on making Billy's luck run better. But it was impossible. Billy was now drinking heavily, even though Ellen tried to down most of the liquor in the glass he had poured for himself, and Pop and Cash seemed to sense his growing impatience, and they played it for all it was worth. At one point, Ellen got up with the liquor bottle tucked in hand, intending to go into the kitchen and secretively dilute the whiskey with water. Cash's watchful eye caught her as she was about to disappear into the next room, and silently she turned around and seated herself again at the table. The game went on. Billy drunkenly pushed his glass next to the bottle, bidding her to refill it, and with a growing sense of anguished helplessness, Ellen obeyed his command.
The shapes of tables and chairs and dice throwers was growing quite hazy, and Ellen had difficulty focusing on the movement of the players crouched down on the floor in front of her. If she could have her way she would drink the whole bottle of whiskey in order to send herself into complete unconsciousness, but the truth was she couldn't. The men had carefully kept their eyes on the bottle knowing full well what her intentions had been. They were not going to let her get away with blotting out their actions from her mind if they got hold of her – and at this point it looked like they just might succeed in winning her away from Billy. Now she had become nothing more than an exalted pawn in a dice game that had turned into a play for power among four desperately gambling escaped convicts whose main purpose in life had been and still was to dominate and destroy every defenseless being that came within their grasp.
Ellen leaned back in her chair and took another long sip at the glass of whiskey, almost forgetting her own nakedness as she concentrated on the game going on before her. But now as the dice continually came up craps, snake eyes or box cars for Billy's first throws and sevens after he had established a point, and as Cash gathered in more and more slips of paper she became aware of her nakedly defenseless flesh open to all four men's view.
"You about to call me on this one, huh," Billy said coldly. "Well, just try it." His expression changed as Cash immediately covered his bet.
Vito and Pop who both were now out of the game shuffled forward to see what would happen next, and Cash sat silently watching as Billy's hands trembled slightly as he gripped the dice for a final throw.
"We'll make a break in the game," Cash said, hardly able to conceal his glee. "I say you're about to crap out on this throw." He pushed a bundle of paper slips toward the center. "Crap out and I get the girl. Don't crap out and you win enough to play a little longer."
"Man, you got some kinda nerve to be pushing like that," Billy said, seeming to regain his confidence.
"I got all kinds of nerve," Cash said shortly. "Luck's with me tonight, you can see that plain as daylight."
Cash stood up confidently from the floor and passed his eyes from Billy's hand to Ellen's smoothly curved body that stood defensively close to Billy. He smiled expectantly as he surveyed every inch of her voluptuously tensed young figure that seemed to be unaware of its own provocative nakedness, then he glanced back at Billy who was still shaking the dice in his cupped hands. "Man, get a move on, I think I got a little appointment with a lovely lady over here."
Billy shifted his weight, looking back at Vito and the other two men who faced him with anticipation, their leers of expectant triumph dissolving as he regained his arrogant confidence momentarily; but as he turned back to face the wall, they broke into knowing smiles again. "Here goes your ass, Cash," Billy hissed and tossed the dice sharply against the wall.
"Goddamn!" the chorus of voices went up in unison as the dice turned up with Cash's predicted craps glaring directly into Billy's face.
Silence reigned in the room for several interminable seconds as Pop, Billy and Vito looked worshipfully down at the dice which had conformed to Cash's incredible prediction. Then Cash slowly rose up, and took a deep gulp as though he had crossed some important threshold in his life and there was no turning back.
"Jeezus, would you look at that," he said in a deep throaty voice. "This little old piece of ass is gonna get it tonight! Yes sirree, Cash is gonna give it to her good, and, fellas, you're gonna watch this stuck up little prissy enjoy it like nothin' she ever had before."
"It don't mean a shit to me," Billy lied, rising from the crouch he had been kneeling in for the past three hours. "It just means somethin' off my back. But, you take it easy on her. Remember, we wanna let her outta here, so she looks like we didn't do nothin' to her."
"Look here, part of the deal was I get to do anything I like, ain't that so, Pop?"
"He's absolutely right, Billy. You can't go back on nothin' you already said," the old man reminded, grinning from ear to ear. "As a matter of fact, I gotta make up for some lost time myself, fifteen years to be exact."