do whatever they wanted for a negotiable fee.
She glanced over at the bar where a few prostitutes had already begun to congregate in their skintight party dresses cut down to their navels. A couple of middleaged conventioneers were already mingling among them. The girls cast angry glances at her as she passed, which caused her to laugh harder. Of all the companies going bankrupt, the world’s oldest profession would definitely not be one of them. Business was slow but steady, at least in this casino.
There were blackjack dealers standing at empty tables and row after row of empty slot machines. Empty craps tables, poker tables, and roulette wheels gave the casino an almost abandoned look despite the fact that there were still a couple hundred gamblers on the casino floor. It was just a few hundred fewer than one would have expected.
It didn’t take Sarah long to spot her husband. He was standing alone at one of the empty tables. Next to him a withered and wrinkled Asian woman who looked nearly a century old sat alone playing cards, just her and the dealer, a tall blonde in her early to midforties who looked like she had probably been stunning in her youth. She looked like an aging showgirl. Sarah decided to join them at the table.
As she walked up to the dealer’s pit, Josh turned to her and smiled wide, obviously happy to see her. His smile widened further when he noticed that she was wearing his T-shirt. Sarah smiled back politely, then took a seat at the table adjacent to his, next to the old Asian woman.
“Hello, mind if I play?”
Josh’s smile widened and he almost laughed as she pretended not to know him. The man Sarah had ridden the elevator down with took a seat at Josh’s table. Sarah had an irrational moment of fear where she suspected he might have been following her. Then she saw Josh greet him with obvious recognition and realized that he must have been a regular.
Sarah reached into her purse and took out the money Josh had left her with. Two hundred dollars. Josh had intended it to be her spending money for the next three days or so. She hoped that she wouldn’t lose it all on the first night.
“Uh…I need to buy some chips.”
A cashier arrived within moments to relieve her of her cash in exchange for little hard circular pieces of plastic in three different colors stamped with the Hollywood Galaxy Casino logo.
“Thank you.”
Sarah pulled out a yellow chip and tossed it on the table. She was ashamed to admit that even being the wife of a dealer she knew very little about the game. She preferred slot machines. She wasn’t even sure how much the yellow chips were worth. She hoped that she hadn’t just bet fifty bucks on the first hand.
Sarah barely paid attention to the game. She preferred to watch Josh work. He and the man from the elevator were laughing and joking as the man played one hand after another, then lost it all, then won again, then lost again. Occasionally, Josh would stare over at Sarah and Sarah would stare back at him as if they were strangers flirting across a crowded room, trying to gain the courage to approach each other.
The man at Josh’s table was tipping heavily whenever he won and Sarah found herself wishing he’d keep winning and keep tipping but inevitably he’d lose all his money to the house. They all did. No one built a multimillion-dollar casino to make other people rich. She’d heard a statistic once that 85 percent of the people who gambled in casinos won but only 13 percent actually left the casino with their winnings. The rest gambled it all away, giving it right back to the casino and usually with interest. The casinos knew this and that’s why they made sure to keep you there as long as possible.
There were no clocks and no windows in the casinos. Nothing to give customers any indication of how long they had been sitting at the poker tables or blackjack tables or slot machines. As long as you were playing the drinks were free. And cocktail waitresses came by three or four times an hour to make sure you had everything you needed, making sure that there was never any need for you to leave the casino. The waitress had already come by her table three times and she was starting to feel a bit of a buzz from her third glass of chardonnay. They were not supposed to let you gamble if you were drunk but, as long as a customer didn’t actually pass out at the table and as long as you continued to gamble, the drinks usually kept flowing. There was even a famous rumor that the casinos pumped pure oxygen into the casino to keep you awake. As far as she knew it was just a rumor but she wouldn’t have been surprised.
You could cash your paycheck at the casino and they would even give you a free roll of quarters if you did as a sort of incentive, not just to cash your check there but to stay and gamble. You could even take a loan out against your house right there at the cashier’s window inside the casino. Sarah wondered if perhaps the psychology of the compulsive gambler might have made a better subject for her dissertation. At least gamblers didn’t freak her out the way porn and just about anything sexual had begun to disturb her.
Sarah was starting to lose too much money and she was drinking a bit more than usual, feeling quite good but aware of how easily it could turn bad with just a few more drinks. She stood up and gathered what chips she had left. Smiling at the Asian woman, and leaving a twenty-dollar chip for the dealer as a tip, she walked over to the cashier’s booth to cash in her chips.
She’d started with $200. After a dizzying series of wins and losses that she had just barely paid attention to, she’d come away from the table more than a hundred dollars short. She hoped that the man from the elevator started to win again soon. In addition to the gun and the alarm system, Josh would now have to make an extra hundred dollars to cover the money she’d lost. But Josh had always forgiven her recklessness. Her daring was a quality he lacked and had always admired her for. From the beginning of their relationship he’d always said that he found her wild spirit to be one of her most attractive features second only to her breasts. But with all the money she’d been spending lately, her breasts were going to have to pick up some of the slack.
Sarah took the eighty-two dollars she had left after playing blackjack and cashed them in for quarters. She took her bucket of quarters and sat down at a row of slot machines. She sat down at the machine at the very end so that she was still in sight of Josh. As she pumped quarters into the machine, she watched the other patrons. Most of them were elderly retirees gambling their life savings, their social security checks, the equity in their homes, all in hopes of hitting it big. There was a smattering of young couples and young singles but they were few and far between.
A young Mexican woman sat on her boyfriend’s lap feeding quarters into the machine and pulling the lever. The hopeful expression on her face each time she plopped in a quarter was as if she expected each one to hit the jackpot. She was barely old enough to be in the casino. Her breasts were even larger and more perfect than Sarah’s. She had long, thin, muscular legs sticking out from beneath a tight plaid miniskirt. Thin, muscular arms like a dancer. A gorgeous body except for a stomach that bugled out over the top of her skirt, giving her a muffin top.
Her boyfriend looked to be almost twice her age. He was in his early thirties and wore a clean white polo shirt, plaid Carhartt pants, and black leather loafers with white socks. He had tattoos on his hands, arms, and neck. His eyes were completely dead. He showed no interest at all in either the slot machine or the woman on his lap. When he turned and looked at Sarah, no doubt wondering why she was staring at him, she felt as if she were looking into the cold black eyes of a great white shark. Sarah smiled weakly and turned back to her own machine.
Sarah was nearly down to her last ten dollars when the lights went crazy on her machine and a siren went off. She had hit the jackpot. More than $2,000 in quarters poured out of the machine. Sarah started clapping and jumping up and down, screaming as silver coins rained from the machine. She collected herself just in time to shove a bucket under the tray. One of the cocktail waitresses came and brought her more buckets. The Mexican couple sitting just a few machines away were staring at her now. The young woman looked happy and excited. Her boyfriend was just staring with those dead eyes. Sarah was happy she would not have to leave the casino. She would have been terrified that the man might have followed her out into the parking lot. She scolded herself for stereotyping but the tattoos on his neck certainly looked like gang tattoos to her, not that she was an expert on such things.
The waitress helped Sarah carry her buckets over to the cashier. Sarah could not get the grin off her face as she watched the cashier dump her quarters into a counter and then slowly count out $2,500 in hundred-dollar bills. When Sarah turned around, stuffing her cash into her purse, Josh was standing behind her.
“It looks like you made out better than I did tonight. I only had about half a dozen customers during my whole shift. I made about a hundred and twenty bucks.”
