one black chip. The guy who sold him the chip looked amazed. He said to Longshot, ‘Musta been a nightmare run to leave you short.’
Longshot grinned his easy prairie-sky grin. ‘No bad dreams, Ed; more like good vision.’
He asked what I wanted to bet it on – Come or Don’t at even money, numbers from two to twelve, Snake-eyes to Boxcars – I stopped him right there. ‘Boxcars,’ I said. I could hear the roar and rattle of a train coming down the mountain, see newspaper-wrapped hoboes watching the stars hurtle by.
Longshot said, ‘Double sixes pays 30–1, but it’s 36–1 against rolling it. Long odds.’
He was explaining what I’d done, not challenging my choice. I batted my pretty blue eyes and said, ‘I like long shots, Longshot.’ (Jenny, you’re so bad.)
A skinny guy in rimless glasses rolled the dice. Boxcars. Three thousand dollars.
Longshot smiled at me and said, ‘How much and on what?’ God, does he have style.
I could still hear the train wailing lonely through the night. ‘All of it,’ I said. ‘Boxcars again.’
The guy running the game lifted a brow at Longshot. Longshot told him, ‘The lady says let it ride.’
When I heard ‘let it ride,’ I knew we were rich. We were. Boxcars. Ninety-three thousand dollars.
Longshot gave me the sweetest smile. ‘It’s a $10,000-limit table.’ I loved that – not even asking if I wanted to stop, right, but regretting we couldn’t bet more. Now that gave me confidence.
Good thing, because I didn’t hear the train anymore. The train was gone. And in its place, as if its fading whistle had snagged her breath, Mia keened softly in her sleep. For an instant I flashed through her dreams, and she was dreaming again of snakes falling on her in the darkness, their eyes like tiny beads of moonlight.
‘Snake-Eyes,’ I told Longshot. ‘Last roll.’ And then, because I wanted him to know me, I said, ‘I have an imaginary daughter I have to take care of.’
That splendid man looked me right in the eye and said, ‘Whatever you say. Whoever you are.’
As we girls say, I was swooning.
Hello, aces! Snake-Eyes! Yes. Three hundred thousand dollars. Three hundred and ninety-three thousand dollars total. One hundred and ninety-six thousand five hundred each. Minus tips. I gave Lyle $500 on our way out.
Me and Longshot (Mia, after that one cry, had fallen deeply asleep) celebrated our good fortune by assaulting his drug supply – cocaine, killer weed, and disco-biscuits (my first time with any of them except marijuana, and that was nothing like these crusty buds), and then by joining in those sweet little obliterations that keep us alive.
Life is great.
Nina Pleshette, an R.N. at Oakland’s Kaiser Hospital, dialed the number she’d been given from a pay phone in front of the building. An answering machine picked up her call on the third ring. The message said, ‘Thank you for calling on TNT. At the tone, please punch in your code, followed by the code you seek.’
The tone was a bugle blowing Charge, followed immediately by Red Freddie screaming, ‘Smash the State!’
Nina punched in RN43, paused, then punched R77. There were two clicks, then the sound of an autodialer.
The phone rang twice in a concrete bunker three hundred miles northeast before Charmaine put down the research paper she was reading and answered with a soft ‘Hello.’
‘This is RN43. The patient died at 11.45 p.m. without regaining consciousness.’
‘That’s too bad,’ Charmaine said. ‘Did he have any visitors?’
‘No.’
‘Has a cause of death been established?’
‘No. No official diagnosis, either. The doctors were proceeding on the assumption it was a rare allergic reaction to an undetermined agent. His immune system just seemed to collapse.’
‘Thank you for calling,’ Charmaine said, and replaced the receiver.
She returned to the paper on ricin, a poison for which she’d been working on an antidote for almost two weeks. She concentrated on the molecular diagram, trying to imagine how it interacted with various coenzymes, but after a few minutes she put the paper aside and thought about Gurry Debritto. She was surprised he’d given up so quickly. She must have released a terrible force inside him, some mirror image of his own murderous power. She knew it wasn’t the drugs. The two darts had carried nonfatal doses of neuroblockers. The two injections she’d given him were harmless. In fact, since both had contained a balanced combination of vitamins and minerals, they should have given him strength against himself.
