“Shut up, Gwen,” Lucky says. To me he says, “You know how late it is? I’ve been up twenty hours, nonstop. Not to mention my ass feels like the doctor left his scalpel in my upper intestine.”
I say, “Lucky, look at me.”
“Fine. I’m looking. What do you want?”
“I know what we’re looking for. But I want to know what you plan to do with it.”
He shrugs. “Phyllis had a device. A work product. I need it.”
“Start at the beginning. But before you say anything, I’m going to allow you one lie.”
“Excuse me?”
“You’re going to tell me everything you know about the device, and how you first learned about it, and I’ll let you lie up to one time. If I believe you’re lying twice, I’ll kill you without giving it a second thought. Do you believe me?”
“I don’t know. You could be bluffing.”
“Spoken like a gambler.”
“Thanks.”
“It’s not a compliment.”
I glance in the mirror and see the sudden flash of Gwen’s smile as she realizes I just made a reference to what she said earlier in the day: that I was great looking, but it wasn’t a compliment. I give her a wink.
“Spill it,” I say to Lucky. “I won’t use this information against you. You have my word.”
He pauses a few seconds, then says, “How much do you know?”
“I know a lot about the device. Things I haven’t told you. But I need to know what you know, or we could be at a disadvantage with Connor Payne.”
“What do you know about Ropic Industries?”
“I know you put twenty million bucks into a technology company that had a surplus of sixty million at the time. You bought your way onto the board, and worked a deal with your accountant to get your hands on twelve million of their investment capital. I think you took that money and bet it on college hoops, or pro football, or whatever the hell you like to bet on. And I think you lost your ass. So you went back to the trough for more money, and you lost that, too. I think you maxed out what you could get from the accountant, so you came up with this whole Vegas Moon bullshit. You can’t get bank financing, so you’re scamming your degenerate gambling friends, a million here, a half-million there. You’re supposed to be using it to replace the money you stole from Ropic Industries, but you figure if you put it on the Lakers to beat Boston, you’ll be able to repay twice as much. Only you’re in a slump, and nothing’s going your way. You know you’ll dig out eventually, but you need some cash to get you through this slump. Meanwhile, you’ve got this device that Ropic manufactured, and somehow you’re planning to cash in on it. Stop me if I’m wrong.”
“You’re wrong.”
“Which part?”
“I don’t want to do this in front of Gwen.”
“She deserves to know what you’ve been up to.”
“It’s okay, Lucky,” Gwen says. “You can tell the truth. I’ll love you no matter what.”
“You think?”
“I know. ’Cause you’re a winner, Lucky. Everyone knows that.”
He nods.
“Everything you said is true,” Lucky says, “except the part about Vegas Moon, and the device.”
“You’ve just told the first lie,” I said. “Next lie kills you.”
“It’s not a lie! Not exactly.”
Something in his voice makes me believe him. A little.
“Go on.”
“Vegas Moon was my dream,” he says. “I always planned to build it. I put two million of my own money into it, and bought an option on the land. Then the bank crisis hit, and the regulators went ape shit and forced the banks and insurance companies out of the project. So I tried to raise the money myself. But the economy is so fucked up, only a few people invested. It wasn’t enough to start the project. So I used Ropic’s money as a nest egg for my bets. I figured if I could win enough, I could pay Ropic back, with interest, and break ground on Vegas Moon. Here in Vegas, once you break ground, the money starts pouring in.”
I think about what he says, and decide it could have gone down that way.
“Okay, you can have your lie back. Now tell me about the device.”
“I liked Ropic because, like you said, they had a lot of cash, and no one knows this, but the accountant was one of my employees. He’d made money with me before, but never had any real cash to bet. Plus, he was frustrated, tired of counting other people’s money all day. I convinced him I had some locks, some sure-thing bets, and kicked him back fifty grand for every million he got me. He used his share to mirror my bets, meaning, we both lost everything. But there was another reason I liked Ropic: their research team owned patents on super-secret technology the government needed for high tech weapons. For a corporation that size, a government contract would have made the stockholders rich.”
“But that didn’t work out.”
“Right. Because the new administration cut the funding, and the military backed out. Our products had no use
