look.
I knew what I’d see before I even turned. She’d be tall and dark. Thin. That was a given. When it came to women, Mitch definitely favored a certain type. Genus Gen X, species Morticia Adamsette.
But this one wasn’t dressed in black, which was kind of a surprise. She wore a white T-shirt with faux bullet holes that streamed equally faux blood.
“Hey,” Mitch said. “Where’d you get that shirt?”
“That’s not the question,” she said.
Mitch raised his eyebrows. “What is?”
“The question is what you’ll give me for it.”
They laughed. Mitch bought her a drink. Her name was Doreen. Past the expected pleasantries, I kept my mouth shut and didn’t get in the way. Hell, I could barely afford my own drink, let alone someone else’s.
Mitch and Doreen talked about T-shirts until that went dead, and then they found something else to talk about, and pretty soon I noticed that Doreen’s hand was on Mitch’s thigh.
Doreen made the inevitable trip to the Ladies’, and Mitch got down to business.
“You mind?” Mitch asked.
“No, man,” I said. “Go for it.”
“You okay? I mean, you’ve got enough money, right?”
“Yeah,” I said. “Go on. Have fun. If I’m not here, I’ll be in the car.”
Mitch and Doreen left together, heading for the shop that sold the SLOWEST GUN IN VIRGINIA CITY’ T- shirts, which was where Doreen worked. She said that she lived in a little apartment above the place, and there was only one reason I could think of for her to impart that particular information.
The bartender and I traded grins as Mitch and Doreen crossed the plank sidewalk outside the saloon. The old guy was all ruined around the eyes and someone had stove in his nose a long time ago. Even though he worked in a saloon, he looked like he managed to spend a lot of the time in the sun. According to his nameplate, his name was Roy and he hailed from Albuquerque, New Mexico.
That info didn’t do me any good — I’d never been to Albuquerque. But Roy knew how to keep a conversation moving without any help. Just as smooth as Johnny Carson, he asked, ‘“Nother round?”
I thought about my wallet first.
Then I thought about Mitch… and Doreen.
“Why not,” I said. “Maybe I’ll be here awhile.”
“Knowing Doreen, I can practical guarantee it, amigo.”
Roy grinned and opened a bottle. I had four bucks in my pocket, the last of the money I’d brought on our trip. A weekend getaway — some gambling, a few thrift shops, a few tourist traps. We were heading home tomorrow, anyway. If Mitch got lucky with Doreen and I ended up spending the night in Mitch’s Mustang, eating crackers and cheese and drinking Pacifico, that would suit me just fine. Most nights I didn’t do that good at home.
Feeling fuck-it-all magnanimous, I peeled off three bucks for the beer, tipped Roy my last dollar, and raised my bottle.
“Here’s to true love,” I said.
“Yeah,” Roy said, soaping Doreen’s lipstick off her empty glass. “Right.”
My hands are angel white in the moonlight. Mitch — head back, eyes closed— wears the beatific expression of a saintly corpse. Trapped between his Converse All-Stars is a change bucket, the kind slot players use to collect their winnings. This one’s from the Bucket of Blood Saloon. A first class souvenir. It’s half full, brimming, contents gleaming in the moonlight.
Get me to Vegas, one of those five star casinos with five buck slots, and I’m putting that bucket to work for me.
Maybe it’s the bucket that’s lucky. Maybe the shiny contents. Or maybe it’s me.
One thing’s for certain — I can’t lose.
Not tonight, anyway.
I’ve got to get to Vegas.
Before my luck runs out.
Mitch owned a couple of clubs in San Francisco, hole-in-the-wall joints in the Mission District. He started out on the cheap, backed only with a little bit of an inheritance from his dad, and there wasn’t anything fancy about either place. Just a come-one-come-all attitude, a half-dozen beers on tap, clean glasses, and live music a couple nights a week. Mitch said that the secret to his success was throwing a good party every night. He definitely knew how to do that.
We’d been friends for a long time — since high school — and I was real happy for him. But mostly I wished I could be real happy for me, too. I’d been making my living as a writer for the last five years, but mine was a strictly hanging-on-by-the-skin-of-my-teeth kind of existence. I was more than a little tired of worrying about the rent, and the credit card bill, and the beater of a car that had been rolling atop four balding tires for the last five thousand miles. And I was sure enough sick of eating bologna sandwiches for dinner.
I knew that in a lot of ways I was luckier than most. I sold everything I wrote. Four published novels under my belt, and a fifth on the way. Every one of them had garnered good reviews, and I had a drawerful of laudatory quotes from writers I admired.
But I’d never come close to making the kind of score I wanted to make. No publisher had ever shot the big advance my way, or offered to send me on tour, or put a single penny into publicizing my books. No Hollywood bigwigs had optioned any of my novels for the movies. People I respected told me that I had a bright future and that financial success was just around the corner. But I’d been hearing that for so long that it annoyed me more than anything else.
People told me other things, too. Like money isn’t everything. Of course, it was my considered opinion that people who spoke about money in those terms slapped filet mignon on the barbecue grill whenever the mood struck them and fed the scraps to the dog. To put it plainly, they hadn’t eaten a bologna sandwich in many many moons.
My stomach growled. There was a popcorn machine at the end of the bar. Popcorn was free if you were buying a beer. I helped myself to a bowl.
I glanced at my watch. It was a little past eight o’clock. Mitch must have gotten lucky. The tourist crowd at the saloon was starting to thin out. Plenty of barstools stood vacant, and the clatter of the slot machines was practically nonexistent. Roy was chatting with a few local alcoholics who appeared glued to their stools, but his heart sure didn’t seem to be in it.
No such problem with Big John Dingo. He waited behind the barroom doors, the cassette tape rolling endlessly, spewing his rattler-rough come-on for just one more quarter.
A guy wandered up to the mechanical gunslinger. He sure didn’t seem like the type. He looked as trail worn as Big John himself, and he wore a T-shirt that proclaimed: TOP HAND AT THE MUSTANG RANCH.
The T-shirt was black, but the material was so faded that it couldn’t disguise several angry smears of machine oil. I wondered if the guy was a biker. He looked the part. I was just about to congratulate myself for my keen observational skill when he produced a key from a ring chained to his belt, unlocked Big John Dingo’s change box, and pawed a mound of quarters into his hand.
The take wasn’t much more than what Mitch fed the machine a couple hours earlier. The greaseball wandered over to Roy and stacked quarters carefully on the bar. He slid two stacks to Roy and kept the other for himself.
