"Oh hit, Sal, you're still… UNH! You're still the wildest, baby! Ooooo, your beautiful cunt! Mmmmm!"
And it was beautiful, throbbing and twisting and shuddering expertly as Sally worked it to feel his massive dick in every nook and cranny of her tingling cunt, climaxing in spite of her rage, slamming her naked ass back with a loud slap each time he plunged.
"Oh God, you bastard," she panted, "I hate you but oh Jesus how I love that prick! Ooooo, Jack, honey, I'm… I'm getting my rocks off, aaaaagh! Oh crazy cock!"
Fucking was what held them welded so securely together in spite of vicious fights and screwing around and constant bickering. They got off on each other, loved to fuck each other above anyone and everyone else, a strange perfect chemical bond, a marriage of lust. Deep inside her Sally knew she really loved the treacherous bastard and that in his grasping, endlessly hustling way he loved her, a profound sexual love that bypassed everything else.
They came together and afterward Jack staggered to the dresser, got the bottle of gin and collapsed on the bed with it.
"How much have we got now?" she asked him. The melted candy kiss felt sticky and pleasurable deep in her pussy, where his cock had forced it.
He told her. She nodded, feeling the urge to get out now, feeling that something would go drastically wrong. Just nerves, she told herself. She too was becoming hooked on the terrific ease with which they took bundles of fifties and hundreds every night. At first she'd insisted on keeping her own earnings in her own motel room, just in case he did try to double-cross her. But some perverse feminine instinct inside her, alien to her hardness, gave in to his arguments. It was her way of showing him that no matter what he did they were welded together, that in a showdown she would trust him. So each night she passed him her take.
Besides, he knew what would happen if he did double-cross her.
He rested and swilled gin for another hour and then left for the casino. Oh God, his cock was killing him, throbbing with raw hurt, his bones sore everywhere. They were sucking him literally dry of his juices. He felt close to a wheelchair, growing suddenly old thirty years before his time. They didn't just fuck him, he thought angrily, they were wolves sucking at his blood, demanding his jism on schedule, raping his poor rod with mad fingers and lips and pussies, even in his sleep. A man couldn't rest for all this crazy cunt. He'd almost been strangled by one a little while go, literally smothered to death by an insane pussy.
Jack stumbled down the street to the casino, exhausted, his mind whirling, his muscles aching, only the liquor holding him up. He felt as if there were a bleeding mass of tissue, a festering wound where his loins used to be.
This, he decided as he blinked his eyes in the harsh bright sunlight, must be the hell they were talking about in the bible. When he went to hell – and he wasn't kidding himself about the outcome – shit, you couldn't con forever – he would be greeted by a squirming sea of crazed cunt, smearing his face, clawing at his cock, strangling him with no rest, viciously sucking his come out of his balls and the marrow out of his bones and the brain out of his skull. Pink hot ravenous pussy everywhere, grinding up his meat, and his body into soggy mush.
Maybe, Jack thought as he swung open the doors and went into the air-conditioned casino, the… Devil was gay and he'd get a break…
And that was just the beginning of Day Three.
CHAPTER NINE
Eleven o'clock in the evening, Day Five.
At table four, Jack knew he had to get the hell out of there. Sally had her quota, she was gone already. He had nine thousand, six hundred in front of him. Lane was restlessly prowling the pit, pausing again and again at his table, his cold eyes eternally watching.
Okay, Jack promised himself fervently, okay, I split the minute Lane goes away. The very minute the sonofabitch leaves the table I leave forever.
But Lane didn't leave.
He was obsessed now. He'd gone over the films of tables one and four again and again, searching for anything that would clue him in. It couldn't be a hot streak, not a consistent losing streak on two tables to the same two people. Not almost exactly the same amounts, close to ten thousand a day. No fucking way in this world, Lane thought viciously.
That morning he'd gone down to the stock room and personally checked the seals on the cartons from Apex, measuring them in precise detail against others. They were genuine, no doubt about that. If the seals were genuine, then the cards had to be too because Apex was as solid as Gibraltar. He'd called Apex and the owner assured him after a thorough check everything was accounted for. He checked the shipping schedules, and they matched the deliveries, correct serial numbers and all.
Then how? Lane seethed. How in the fuck did they do it?
And why was this sleek bastard's face haunting him, keeping him awake at night, nagging endlessly at his mind?
Jack dared not look at Lane, feeling his icy gaze. He was no longer sleek and self-assured. He was haggard, he'd aged twenty years from sheer tension. And the nightmare of constant sucking and fucking, keeping two lust-crazed women in line while his nerves threatened to explode momentarily. It was the booze that held him together, that and the counting of the cash in the black valise in his motel closet, counting the bundles over and over and over, dreaming of Easy Street, so close now, so fucking close, only a pussy-hair away.
Ah shit, go away, you death-eyed bastard, Jack seethed silently at Lane. Shit you cold-hearted mother. GO!
As if he knew every Goddamn card coming off the deck, Lane thought furiously. He'd checked the cards too but they were all right, Apex quality grade A.
If he didn't trust Apex so much… Lane suddenly held up his right hand and snapped his fingers twice, sharply.
The pit boss came running.
The moment the dealer finished the round, Lane inched over and took the cards from her fingers, pushing her a fresh deck. He handed them to the pit boss with low-voiced instructions.
The pit boss disappeared with the deck.
Jack felt a wave of dread rising in his blood like a flood of doom, and images of the vast desert, bleached with bones of other careless thieves, flashed cruelly in his mind. Lane would not go away. There was no other option. He would have to split with Lane standing there.
He gulped down the rest of his drink, looked pointedly at his watch and scooped up his chips, avoiding Lane's steely eyes. He stood up, pushing a few chips forward for the dealer.
"Going somewhere?" Lane asked in a grating voice.
Jack stared back at him flatly. Fuck this honcho. "Yeah," he said. "I'm going to take my action to another casino because I don't like to be bugged."
Again, his balls had saved him in a showdown. There was no reply to that. Anytime the pit boss or casino manager hugged a table too closely for too long, professional gamblers left, feeling their luck was being constricted. And Lane knew that. He shrugged, watching Jack saunter toward the cashier's cage with narrowed eyes. That voice! Goddamnit, that voice rang a bell in his mind!
Where, WHERE?
There was a simple test Lane had completely forgotten to run on the cards, simply because he trusted Apex all the way. But suppose, the uneasy thought came to him a few minutes ago, suppose someone switched decks without Apex knowing? Sure, their security was tight but anything was possible in this business. Anything.
He'd sent the pit boss downstairs to run the cards under an infrared machine, a test usually reserved for suspected cases of dice-switching. A really hot switcher could switch in loaded dice in two seconds right under the nose of the dealer. Of course it was almost impossible to switch decks of cards because they never left the dealer's hands, so they never used the infra-red for cards.