While watching a whiskey sour fill up before me, a familiar metallic sheen approached and slipped into the chair at my right.
'Margarita. No salt.' She spoke slowly. A low, intimate tone.
When the bartender slid the drink over to her, she handed him a couple of chips. He looked at them for a moment.
'Lady,' he said, 'there was a devaluation two days ago. A hundred new dollars is quite a bit.'
She smiled and shrugged her lovely shoulders. The barkeep argued no further. A grin spread across his ruddy face.
'Thank
, lady!'
She ignored him to turn to me. 'You don't belong here,' she said in a quizzical voice.
'Okay,' I said, 'I don't. And what's a nice girl like you-'
'You're different. You notice me. You
me.'
I eyeballed her up and down. Her long legs, as far as I could see, possessed the sleek lines of a professional dancer's. From there on up, she pulled in at the right places and flared out at the righter places. Her piercingly blue eyes imparted a startling power to her defiant visage. Anyone who trifled with her, it read, paid the price.
'You're hard to overlook.' I turned back to my drink.
She sipped at her margarita. Her eyes continued to watch me.
'I want to thank you for what you did the other night.' She smiled with friendly ease. 'Things such as that don't usually happen to me.'
'Me neither.'
'What's your name?'
'Ammo. Dell Ammo.'
She nodded. 'It fits.' She returned to her drink.
She wasn't going to tell me her name-that much was obvious. I gave the whiskey my undivided attention.
After a few minutes of nursing her drink, she spoke without turning to face me.
'What do you think they did with them? The robbers.'
The thieves most likely had been sold to the kink caves on Auberge's lowest level. Both the living and the dead. I didn't think she wanted to hear that.
'I don't know' was all I said. 'If you think they're after you, don't worry. They won't bother you again.'
She set her glass down. 'And what makes you think they were after me?' Her baby blues gazed at me with penetrating force.
'Someone's after you.' I leaned back and groped around for a cigarette. 'If it wasn't the little rat that happened to point his rod in your direction, then it must have been someone else. Why were you in such a hurry to leave?'
'Wouldn't most people try to run away from a shooting?'
'Most people last night stuck around to watch.'
She shuddered. 'Death... repels me.' She took a long sip of her drink, then gulped the remainder down. The glass returned to the bar with a resounding clank. She stood, gazing toward the craps table.
