**His casino?**
**Yeah. Didn't you know? He owns this place.**
**Oh. So — **
**He's downstairs right now.** I flinch, and discover the hard way that it is indeed possible to cut yourself on an electric razor if you try hard enough. I finish off hurriedly and open the door. Ramona thrusts a bulky carrier bag at me.
"Put this on."
"Where did you get this?" I pull out a tuxedo jacket, neatly folded; there's more stuff below it.
"It was waiting for you at the front desk." She smiles tightly. "You have to look the part if we're going to carry this off"
"Shit." I duck back into the bathroom and try to figure out what goes where. The trousers have odd fasteners in strange places and I've got no idea what to do with the red silk scarf-like thing, but at least they cheated on the bow tie.
When I open the door Ramona is sitting in the chair by the bed, carefully reloading cartridges into the magazine of an extremely compact automatic pistol. She looks at me and frowns. "That's supposed to go around your waist," she says.
"I've never worn one of these before."
"It shows. Let me." She makes the gun vanish then comes over and adjusts my appearance. After a minute she steps back and looks at me critically. "Okay, that'll do for now. In a dim light, after a couple of cocktails. Try not to hunch up like that, it makes you look like you need to sue your orthopedic surgeon."
"Sorry, it's the shoes. That, and you managed to land a critical hit on my geek purity score. Are you sure I can't just wear a tee shirt and jeans"
"No, you can't." She grins at me unexpectedly. "Monkeyboy isn't comfortable in a monkey suit? Consider yourself lucky you don't have to deal with underwire bras."
"If you say so." I yawn, then before my hindbrain can start issuing shutdown commands again I go over to my briefcase and start gathering up the necessaries Boris issued to me: a Tag Heuer wristwatch with all sorts of strange dials (at least one of which measures thaumic entropy levels — I'm not sure what the buttons do) a set of car keys with a fob concealing a teensy GPS tracker, a bulky old-fashioned cellphone ...
"Hey, there's something fishy about this phone! Isn't it — " I pick it up " — a bit heavy"
I suddenly realize that Ramona is standing behind me.
"Switch it off!" she hisses. "The power switch is the safety catch."
"Okay already! I'm switching it off!" I put it in my inside pocket and she relaxes. "Boris didn't say anything about — what does it do?" Then the penny drops. "Holy fuck."
"That's what you'd get if you switched it on, pointed it at the pope, and dialed 1-4-7-star," she agrees. "It takes nine millimeter ammunition. Are you okay with that?" She raises one perfectly sketched eyebrow at me.
"No!" I'm not used to firearms, they make me nervous; I'm much happier with a PDA loaded with Laundry CAT-A countermeasure invocations and a fully charged Hand of Glory. Still, nothing wakes me up quite like nearly shooting someone by accident. I fidget with the new tablet PC that Brains provisioned for me, plugging it in and setting it for counter-intrusion duty. "Shall we go drop in on Billington"
I'm not much of a beach bunny. I'm not a culture vulture or a clothes horse either. Opera leaves me cold, clubbing is something bad guys do to baby seals, and I'm no more inclined to work the slots than I am to stand in the middle of a railway station ripping up twenty-pound notes. Nevertheless, there's a certain vicarious amusement to be had in stepping out at night with a beautiful blonde on my arm and a brown manila envelope in my inside pocket labeled HOSPITALITY EXPENSES — even if I'm going to have to account for any cash I pull out of it, in triplicate, on a form F.219/B that doesn't list "gambling losses" as an acceptable excuse.
It's dark, and the air temperature has dropped to about gas mark five, leaving me feeling like a Sunday roast in a tinfoil jacket. There's an onshore breeze that gives a faint illusion of coolness, but it's too humid to do much more than stir the sand grains on the sidewalk. The promenade is a modern pastel-painted concrete walkway decorated to a tropical theme, like Neo-Brutalist architecture on holiday. It's bright and noisy with late-opening boutiques, open-windowed bars, and nightclubs. The crowd is what you'd expect: tourists, surfers, and holiday-makers, all dressed up for a night out on the town. By the morning they'll be puking their margaritas up on the boardwalk at the end of the development, but right now they're a happy, noisy crowd. Ramona leads me through them with supreme confidence, straight towards a garishly illuminated, red-carpeted lobby that covers half the block ahead of us.
My nose prickles. Something they never mention in the brochures is that the night-blooming plants let rip during the tourist season. I try not to sneeze convulsively as Ramona sashays right up the red carpet, bypassing the gaggle of tourists being checked at the door by security. A uniformed flunkey scrambles to grovel over her gloved hand. I follow her into the lobby and he gives me a cold-fish stare as if he can't make up his mind whether to grope my wallet or punch me in the face. I smile patronizingly at him while Ramona speaks.
"You'll have to excuse me but Bob and I are new here and I'm so excited! Would you mind showing me where the cashier's office is? Bobby darling, do you think you could get me a drink? I'm so thirsty!"
She does an inspired airhead impersonation. I nod, then catch the doorman's eye and let the smile slip. "If you'd show her to the office," I murmur, then turn on my heel and walk indoors — hoping I'm not going in the wrong direction — to give Ramona space to turn her glamour loose on him. I feel a bit of a shit about leaving the doorman to her tender mercies, but console myself with the fact that as far as he's concerned, I'm just another mark: what goes around comes around.
It's darker and noisier inside than on the promenade and a lot of overdressed, middle-aged folks are milling around the gaming tables in the outer room. Mirror balls scatter rainbow refractions across the floor, at the far end of the room a fourpiece is murdering famous jazz classics on stage. I spot the bar eventually and manage to catch one of the bartender's eyes. She's young and cute and I smile a bit more honestly.
"Hi! What's your order, sir"
"A vodka martini on the rocks." I pause for just a heartbeat, then add, "And a margarita." She smiles ingratiatingly at me and turns away, and the ghostly sensation of a stiletto heel grinding against my instep fades as quickly as it arrived.
**That was entirely unnecessary,** I tell Ramona stiffly.
**Wanna bet? You're falling into character too easily, monkey-boy. Try to stay focused.** When I find her she's leaning up against a small, thick window set in one wall, scooping plastic chips into her purse.
I wait alongside with the drinks, then hand her the margarita.
"Thanks." She closes the purse then leads me past a bunch of chattering one-armed-bandit fans towards an empty patch of floor near a table where a bunch of tense-looking coffin-dodgers are watching a young chav in a white shirt and dickey-bow deal cards with robotic efficiency.
"What was that about?" I murmur.
"What was what?" She turns to stare at me in the darkness, but I avoid making eye contact.
"The thing with the doorman."
"It's been a hard day, and American Airlines doesn't cater for my special dietary requirements."
"Really?" I stare at her. "I don't know how you can live with yourself."
"Marc over there — " she jerks her head almost imperceptibly, back towards the door " — likes to think of himself as a lone wolf. He's twenty-five and he got the job here after a dishonorable discharge from the French paratroops. He served two years of a five-year sentence first. You wouldn't believe the things that happen on UN peacekeeping missions ..."