The last time he'd made love had been eighteen months ago.
He'd done it with his wife on the couch in the living room of their new home in Palm Harbor. The couch had been delivered that morning, and its addition had made the house complete. It was the beginning of their new lives; like a pair of kids he and Lois had stripped off each other's clothes and done the wild thing.
It had been great. So much so, they'd gone to bed after dinner and made love again, then fallen asleep wrapped in each other's arms.
The next morning, he'd lain in bed and run his fingers through Lois's hair, hoping she'd wake up wanting to do it one more time. Only she hadn't.
The autopsy had revealed that his wife was suffering from degenerative heart disease. Lois had always been in touch with her body, and Valentine figured that she'd known something inside of her wasn't working right. Only she'd said nothing, wanting to get settled in before seeing a doctor.
Whatever the reason, she had spared him from news he felt certain she knew was bad.
Later on, he'd realized a terrible thing. He'd instigated the sex, something he did from time to time, his choice of venues not always appropriate. Lois never complained, and sometimes had more fun than he did.
Only this last time, it had been all him, and he could not help but think that the exertion had added a strain to her already fragile heart, and that it had killed her.
Which made him what? A carnal killer? It ripped him apart to think that his cravings had destroyed the thing he loved the most in this world. The guilt had hung heavy on his soul, and made the idea of having sex impossible.
Until now.
Had someone been staying next door, Valentine guessed they'd be banging on the walls about now, he and Kat having more fun than civilized people were supposed to have. It was sex with fireworks in the background, the kind of sex you heard about, read about, saw on the big screen, but never got to experience firsthand, the problem not with your plumbing or your mate, but just the situation itself. It was sex with a wild, unbridled glee tacked on to it, a smoldering fire suddenly doused with buckets of gasoline.
He tried not to think of Lois, and for the most part he succeeded. But her memory crept up a few times, and he found himself imagining her in the place she now inhabited, judging him. Any other time, it would have stopped him cold, only he was too far gone to care.
“What are you thinking,” Kat whispered a half hour later.
The blankets were off the bed and the lamp from the night table lay on the floor. Valentine stared at the cheap popcorn ceiling, his lungs aching for a cigarette.
“I'm thinking I'd better up my life insurance if I'm going to hang around with you.”
“Come on, be serious.”
“I haven't felt this good in a long time,” he admitted.
“Tell me something about yourself,” she said a short while later. “Something no one else knows.”
He turned on his side and looked at her. He didn't have a lot of secrets—what you saw was pretty much what you got—and had to think about it some.
“And don't make something up,” she added.
“Okay,” he said after a lengthy pause, “I'll tell you a story that I never told anyone.”
“What's that?”
“I once let a cheater go.”
“On purpose?”
“Uh-huh.”
Kat propped herself up on an elbow. “I'm all ears.”
“Back when Atlantic City first opened, the casino owners didn't know what they were doing. Hustlers liked the town so much, they'd called it a candy store.
“One night, I was standing in the blackjack pit at the Sands. A woman in a motorized wheelchair came in. She was about seventy, and her name was Justine. She told the pit boss she'd been in a car accident, gotten a settlement from the insurance company, and wanted to play some blackjack. The pit boss cleared a spot at a table, and Justine started playing all seven hands, a hundred bucks a bet.
“Woman was a real character. Chain-smoking, drinking whiskey, calling the pit boss and the dealer ‘Honey' and ‘Sweetie.' Everyone loved her, until she started winning.”
“How much did she win?”
“After an hour, she had all the dealer's chips.”
“How much was that?”
“Around twenty grand.”
“Was she cheating?”
“Well,
“How come?”
“It didn't pass the smell test. If she'd only played one hand, I would have said beginner's luck. But she played all seven. It felt like a hustle.”
Kat giggled. “The smell test. I like that.”
He touched his nose. “Still works pretty good.”
“So what happened?”
“The dealer gets more chips, and Justine goes back to work,
“She's already betting the table limit, so the pit boss asks the shift manager. The shift manager wants to win his money back, so he says sure. Then he turns to me and says, ‘You agree?' Well, I didn't agree. So I grabbed a drink girl—”
“Cocktail waitress.”
“—sorry, and I took a glass of water off her tray. I'd come up with a theory of what Justine was doing, and I decided to test it.”
Their bodies had finally cooled down, and Kat covered them with a blanket. “Which was what?”
“Blackjack is hard to play, especially if you're talking. And Justine was talking to everybody. I couldn't figure out how she was keeping track of all her cards. And then it hit me. She wasn't playing her hands.”
“Who was?”
“The wheelchair. There was a computer hidden in the motor. Justine was entering the cards on a keypad, then looking at a digital readout. So I went and spilled my water on her. The next thing you know, the wheelchair starts smoking.”
“Is having a computer illegal?”
“It sure is.”
“Then why did you let her go?”
“It was strange. I looked at her, and she looked at me. She was scared. I had a feeling it was the first time she'd ever broken the law. I said, ‘Learned your lesson?' And she nodded. So I looked away, and she ran out of the casino.”
“Did you get in trouble?”
“No. The computer melted, so all the evidence was destroyed. I later got grilled by my captain, but I got out of it.”
“How?”
“I told him I'd doused her with holy water.”
Kat punched him in the arm. “You're horrible,” she said.
35
Tattoos
Valentine did not want to start their relationship with a lie, so he asked Kat to get dressed, then told her everything that had taken place in the past twenty-four hours, including how the Mollo brothers had been turned into cinders the night before. Brushing out her hair, she said, “Well, I guess they got what was coming to them.”
