The first thing he thought was that he was a natural-born gambler, that his quick mind gave him an edge over people who lost at roulette. He knew when to bet and when not to bet.
That's so much bullshit! You were just incredibly lucky, that's all. Dumb beginner's luck. Period. If you go back down there and try to do that again, you will lose very dime of that, plus the two fifties mad money.
The thing to do is put that money someplace safe and forget about it.
He figured that he might as well round it off, to forty-five hundred, keeping one hundred eight-five to play with, and then he changed that to rounding it off to four thousand even, which left him six hundred eight-five to play with, which meant lose.
He took out his toilet kit, and with some effort managed to cram forty hundred-dollar bills into the chrome soap dish.
He looked at his watch. It was quarter after three. That was Philadelphia time. It was only a little after midnight here, but it explained why he was hungry again.
With his luck, the restaurants would be closed at this hour. He would be denied another meal.
That's not true. With my luck, the restaurant will not only be open, but the headwaiter will show me to my table with a flourish of trumpets.
The headwaiter made him wait for a table, as the restaurant was even more crowded at midnight, Las Vegas time, than it had been when he'd had lunch, or breakfast, or whatever meal that had been. He had a martini, a shrimp cocktail, and another filet mignon, and then went back to the casino.
He went to the same roulette table and gave the croupier one hundred eight-five dollars, specifying nickels, and promptly lost it all.
He moved away from the table and decided he would see if he could figure out how one bet at a craps table, as he had figured out how one bet at roulette.
There was a man at the head of the table rolling dice. He looked like a gambler, Matt decided. He had gold rings on both hands, and a long-collared shirt unbuttoned nearly to his navel, so as to display his hairy chest and a large gold medallion. And he had, one on each side of him, a pair of what Matt decided must be Las Vegas hookers of fame and legend.
Matt moved to what he hoped was an unobtrusive distance from the gambler and tried to figure out what was going on. Ten minutes later, the only thing he was fairly sure of was that the gambler was a fellow Philadelphian. The accent was unmistakable.
'Sir, if you are not going to wager, would you mind stepping aside and making room for someone who would like to play?'
'Sorry,' Matt said, and pulled his wad of hundred-dollar bills from his pocket and laid one somewhere, anywhere, on the felt of the craps table. The gambler threw the dice. The hooker on his left said ' ooooh' and the one on his right kissed him and gave him a little hug.
The croupier picked up Matt's one-hundred-dollar bill…
I lost. Why did I bet a hundred?
…and held a handful of chips over it.
'Quarters all right, sir?'
I won. I'll be goddamned. What did I bet on?
'Quarters are fine, thank you.'
He picked up the stack of quarters, there were twelve of them, and walked away from the table.
If you have no idea what you're betting on, you have no business betting.
'Stick around,' the gambler said. 'I'm on a roll.'
The temptation was nearly irresistible. The hooker on the left was smiling at him with invitation in her eyes. He had never been with a hooker.
Was this the time and place?
Get thee behind me, Satan! Back to the roulette table.
The Lindens was a forty-five-minute drive from the Flamingo. Matt was sorry that he had let himself be ushered into the back seat of the limousine. He certainly could have seen more of Las Vegas and the desert upfront than he could see from the back seat, through the deeply tinted windows.
But he had been more than a little groggy when he left the Flamingo. He had lost the seven hundred dollars he had walked away from the craps table with, gone to bed, woken up, and-absolute insanity-decided he could take a chance with another five hundred, and then had compounded that insanity by taking a thousand dollars, not five hundred, from the soap dish and going back to the casino with it.
When he'd finally left the table, at quarter past six, Las Vegas time, he had worked the thousand up to thirty-seven hundred. Since that obviously wouldn't fit into the soap dish, and he didn't want to have that much money in his pockets, or put it in the suitcase, he told the man in the cashier's cage to give him a check for his winnings.
By the time they had made out the check, and he'd taken another quick shower, they had called from the desk and told him his limousine was waiting for him.
There was nothing he could see for miles around The Lindens, which turned out to be a rambling, vaguely Spanish-looking collection of connected buildings built on a barren mountainside. There was a private road, a mile and a half long, from a secondary highway.
There was no fence around the place. Probably, he decided, because you would have to be out of your mind to try to walk away from The Lindens. There was nothing but desert.
In front of the main building, in an improbably lush patch of grass, were six trees. Lindens, he decided, as in Unter den Linden.
A hefty, middle-aged man in a blazer with retired cop written all over him saw him get out of the limousine and unlocked a double door as Matt walked up to it.
'Mr. Payne?'
'Right?'
'Dr. Newberry is expecting you, sir. Will you follow me, please?'
He locked the door again before he headed inside the building.
Dr. Newberry was a woman in a white coat who looked very much like the cashier in the Flamingo.
'You look very much like your sister,' Dr. Newberry greeted him cordially. Matt did not think he should inform her that that must be a genetic anomaly, because he and Amy shared no genes. He nodded politely.
'It was very good of you to come out to be with Penelope on her trip home.'
'Not at all.'
'We believe, as I'm sure Dr. Payne has told you, that we've done all we can for Penelope here. We've talked her through her problems, and of course, we believe that her physical addiction is under control.'
'Yes, ma'am.'
'We've tried to convince her that the best thing she can do is put what happened behind her, that she's not the only young woman who has had difficulty like this in her life, and that she will not be the only one to overcome it.'
'Yes, ma'am.'
'What I'm trying to get across is that I hope you can behave in a natural manner toward Penelope. While neither you nor she can deny that she has had problems, or has spent this time with us, the less you dwell upon it, the better. Do you understand?'
'Yes, ma'am. I think so.'
Dr. Newberry got up and smiled.
'Well, let's go get her. She's been waiting for you.'
She led him through a series of wide corridors furnished with simple, heavy furniture and finally to a wide door. She pushed it open.
