They took a table in a darkened corner of the lounge, and a dark-skinned girl with braids brought their drinks. He’d ordered a Dirty Martini, and she’d followed his lead.
“Olive juice,” he explained. “Gives a little salty taste to the vodka. But I have to say what I like most about it is just saying the name of it. ‘A Dirty Martini, please. Straight up.’ Don’t you like the sound of it?”
“And the taste.”
“Did you ever tell me your name? Because I can’t remember it.”
“It’s Lucky.”
“You’re kidding, right?”
“It says Lucky on my driver’s license,” she said. “On my birth certificate it says Lucretia, but my parents didn’t realize they’d opened the door for a lifetime of Lucretia Borgia jokes.”
“I can imagine.”
“You can’t, because you don’t know the whole story. Lucretia is bad enough, but when you attach it to Eagle Feather it becomes really awful, and—”
“That’s your last name? Eagle Feather?”
“Used to be. I chopped the Lucretia and dropped the Feather and went in front of a judge to make it legal. Lucky Eagle’s what I wound up with, and it’s still pretty dopey.”
“You’re Indian.”
God, he was quick on the uptake, wasn’t he? You just couldn’t keep anything from this dude.
“My father’s half Chippewa,” she improvised, “and my mother’s part Apache and part Blackfoot, and some Swedish and Irish and I don’t know what else. I worked it all out one time, and I’m one-third Indian.”
“A third, huh?”
“Uh-huh.”
“Lucky Eagle Feather,” he said. She liked that he was willing to skip the Lucretia part, but still wanted to hold on to that Feather. Made her a little bit more exotic, that’s how she figured it. A little more Indian. And hadn’t he just finished screwing a bunch of Indians out of a few thousand dollars? So why not screw a genuine Indian for dessert?
His name, she learned, was Hank Walker. Short for Henry, but he’d been Hank since childhood. Seemed to suit him better, he told her, but it still said Henry on his driver’s license. And he’d been born in New Jersey, the southern part of the state, near Philadelphia, but he’d moved west as soon as he could, because that seemed to suit him better, too. He indicated the Western shirt, the string tie. “Sort of a uniform,” he said, and grinned.
“It suits you,” she agreed.
He lived in Nevada now, outside of Carson City. And right now he was driving across the country, seeking out casinos wherever he went.
“I guess you like to play.”
“When I’m on a roll,” he said. “But these out-of-the-way places, I come here for the chips as much as the action.”
“The chips?”
“Casino chips. People collect them.”
“You sure collected a batch at the crap table.”
What people collected, he explained, just as others collected coins and stamps, were the small-denomination chips the casinos issued, especially the one-dollar chips. At each casino he visited he’d buy twenty or thirty or fifty of the dollar chips, and they’d be added to his stock when he got back home. He had a collection of his own, of course, but he also had a business, selling chips to collectors at chip shows — who knew there were chip shows? — and on his website.
“Ever since the government decided the tribes have the right to run casinos,” he told her, “they’ve been popping up like mushrooms. And they come and they go, because not all of the tribes know a whole lot about running a gaming operation. You belong to the tribe that’s operating this place?”
She didn’t.
“Well, nothing against them, and I hope they make a go of it, but there are a few things they’re doing wrong.” She half-listened while he took the casino’s inventory, took another sip of her Dirty Martini (which, all things considered, sounded better than it tasted), and breathed in his aftershave and an undertone of perspiration.
He finished his casino critique and reached across the table to put his hand on hers. “Now it seems to me we’ve got a decision to make. Do we have another round of drinks before we go to my room?”
For answer she picked up his hand, lowered her head and blew her warm breath into his palm. “For luck,” she said without looking up, and then her tongue darted out and she licked his palm. His sweat, she noticed, tasted not all that different from the Dirty Martini.
He had a nice body. Barrel-chested, with a little more of a gut than she might have preferred, and a lot of chest hair. No hair on his back, though, and she supposed he got it waxed at the same salon that provided his million-dollar haircuts.
Muscular arms, muscular shoulders, and that meant regular gym workouts, because he couldn’t have gotten those muscles simply by throwing his own weight around. An all-over tan, too, that probably came from a tanning bed. You could shake your head at the artifice, or you could go with the result — a fit, good-looking man in his late forties, who, it had to be said, was as impressive in the sack as he’d been at the crap table. And if he owed some of that to Viagra, well, so what? He got her hot and he got her off, and what more could a poor girl desire?
And the best was yet to be.
Optima futura — that was the Latin for it, and she knew it because it had been her high school’s motto. It was, she’d always thought, singularly apt, because anything the future held had to be better than high school.
Somewhere along the way, after high school was just a blur, she’d come across some lines from Robert Browning, and perhaps it was the high school motto that made her commit them to memory, but it had worked, because she remembered them stilclass="underline"
“Part Indian, huh? I bet I know which part is Indian.”
And he reached out a hand and touched the part he had in mind. She put her hand on top of his hand, rubbed his fingers against her.
“A third Indian,” she reminded him.
“So you said. You know, I was wondering—”
She put her hand on him, curled her fingers around him. She worked him artfully, and he sighed.
“Lucky,” he said. “Man, I’d say I got Lucky, didn’t I? But I think I’m tapped out for this evening.”
“You think so?”
“You drained me to the dregs, babe. About all I can do right now is sleep.”
“I bet you’re wrong.”
“Oh?”
“What we did so far,” she said, “was just a warmup.”
“Yeah, right.”
“Can I ask you something?”
He raised his eyebrows.
“Have you ever been tied up?”
“Jesus,” he said.
“Just imagine,” she said, her hands still busy. “You’re tied up, you can’t move, and the entire focus is giving you pleasure. I’ll do things to you nobody’s ever done to you before, Hank. You think this has been your lucky night? You just wait.”
“Uh—”
“I’ve got all the gear in my bag,” she said. “Everything we could possibly need. You’re gonna love this.”
Handcuffs, silk scarves, nylon cords. She had everything she needed, and she knew just how to employ them.
The last time she’d done this she’d given her partner a couple of the blue pills first, and let them knock him out before she trussed him up. That had worked fine, but she’d been stuck with a two-hour wait for the son of a bitch to wake up, and who needed that?
This was much simpler. And he cooperated, putting his hands where she told him, spread-eagling himself on the bed. And making little jokes while she did what she had to do.