“Don’t play games with me, Granger. Tell me where he is!”
“No, that wouldn’t be prudent.”
I swore under my breath. Then I swore over my breath, several times. “You’re still sulking because I wouldn’t suck your dick that time at Gordy’s, aren’t you?”
“Jesus Christ, that was what? Ten years ago? Before you hooked up with David? I’d just met you.”
“Yeah, but you haven’t forgotten. Who was drunk that night?”
“I think you should go now, Susan.”
“I think you’re right. The smell in here is getting intense.” I bolted for the door. “Have fun playing detective, Granger. If you need any help-go fuck yourself.”
I slammed the door-my door-just for dramatic effect.
“How’d it go?” Lisa asked as I slid into the passenger seat.
“Fine. Swell.”
“No problems?”
“Nah. They were all very kind. Glad to see me. Granger and I embraced.”
“Granger?”
“Yeah. Who’da thought?” Well, if I couldn’t live the fantasy, I could at least make Lisa think I did. While she drove to the house where Rachel was staying, I used her cell phone to call Eleanor, one of the young girls in Dispatch. She was nice, I thought she liked me, and I also thought she was gullible enough to believe anything.
“Eleanor? Susan Pulaski. I’ve got some lab reports for O’Bannon. Is he still at the crime scene?”
“Yeah,” she answered. I heard a dozen other lines working in the background. “But I thought you-”
“He brought me back in. Said he needed my expertise on this one. So he’s still out there?”
“Far as I know.”
I noticed a light drizzle on the dashboard. “You think I should bring him a raincoat?”
“Nah. He’ll be inside the hotel.”
Getting warm. “And still working in that… that-what do they call it?”
“The Edgar Allan Poe Ballroom?”
“Right, right.” That would have to be the Transylvania. One of the newer “family” resorts on the Strip. “Dumb of me. I never paid much attention in English class. I was thinking of that other guy. Hawthorne.”
“No, it’s Poe.”
“Okay, thanks.” For more than you know.
Annabel Spencer gazed nervously at the mirror-paneled walls, the smoky glass ceiling, the translucent corbels. Cameras behind every one of them, she thought. She had read that the camera positions were changed regularly to prevent anyone from knowing for certain what the security people could and could not see. Men on metal catwalks hidden behind the ceiling peered down 24/7. There was no telling how many people were watching her right now. Did they know she wasn’t supposed to be here? How long would it take them to figure it out? And once they knew, what would they do to her?
As soon as she passed through the front doors of the casino, she knew her face was scanned by a computer running facial recognition software-developed at MIT, of course-which converted a fluid digital image of her face into mathematical data, translating facial landmarks into algorithms, then comparing the results to the millions of faces in a shared database. She didn’t know if anyone had her cheekbones on file yet. In this day and age, it was impossible to be certain. The latest hot cyber-rumor held that Big Brother was constantly scooping up people’s faces, taking them off Web sites and newspapers and airport security scanners. Today, almost anyone could be identified by an entity with the financial resources to pay for the data. Privacy was an illusion, or perhaps more accurately, a luxury that many big businesses could no longer afford. So the casino hard drives must be whirring away, she mused, trying to come up with a match, determining if she was a player or a patsy, a tourist or that most dreaded of all evils: a card counter.
Given the famous hatred of casinos for card counters, the minor detail that she was underage might seem negligible-although it would certainly give them a no-questions-asked excuse to bar her from the premises. Not that they needed one. They could expel anyone, and would, if they thought the player was too successful at the blackjack table. It hardly seemed fair-they only allowed people to play the game if they weren’t very good at it. Forget the signs saying the dealer rests on seventeen; the signs should read: SUCKERS ONLY.
Like many of her fellow students, Annabel considered herself a freedom fighter, not a card cheat. But she knew the casino would take a different view. Dark rumors circulated throughout the MIT campus about what happened to card counters in the back rooms of Vegas gambling emporiums. Since they were private property, they could ban anyone they wanted, and if you violated their ban, you could be charged with trespassing. But this was the town the mob built, after all, and casino bosses were known to employ means not sanctioned by law to convey the message that card counting was disfavored. She’d seen more than one MIT hotshot return to class on Monday morning looking as if he’d lost a fight with a tractor. And a few had disappeared altogether-never to return.
Trying to remain calm, Annabel strolled into the blackjack pit and scanned for an open seat. She was wearing her best DKNY Sex and the City black dress, and for an MIT math major, she looked pretty damn hot, if she did say so herself. Not that she wanted to attract attention-she just wanted to look as if she belonged there. Because everything depended on her having a successful night. Everything in the world.
She saw her mother’s face on an overhead TV in the bar and froze. If her mother found out what she had done…
God. Annabel didn’t even want to think about it.
A zombie dressed in tattered rags bumped into her backside. Clumsy, or copping a feel? Hard to be sure, but she was not inclined to give a guy in tatters and black eyeliner the benefit of the doubt.
“Sorry about that, ma’am.”
Well, at least he was a polite zombie. “No problem.”
“Can I get you something? Drink? Change?”
She suspected he really wanted to give her something altogether different. Damn those horny zombies. “I’m fine, thanks.”
He moved on down the aisle, dragging his leprous skin and putrescent sores with him, brushing aside a cobweb and blending into the crowd of ghosts, witches, and assorted ghouls.
Welcome to Transylvania.
Not that she was an expert, but in her mind a casino should be sleek and elegant, like the ones in James Bond movies, where the men wore tuxes and the women wore beaded floor-length gowns with décolleté bodices. None of that here-this joint was pure Disneyland. Dolorous Victorian décor and bar stools that creaked when you sat on them. Your “ghost host” checked you in; the bell captain wore a long black hooded robe and carried a scythe. The gambling pit was decked out like a haunted house, with shutters blowing in the wind and tombstones with corny epitaphs. A Vegas casino with a Halloween party motif-it was enough to make you barf. And there were cops swarming everywhere, which also made her nervous. Apparently some horrible crime had taken place in one of the ballrooms; an entire wing of the hotel was roped off. But like it or not, this was the only house in town that still dealt a six-deck shoe all the way to the sixth deck. So here she was. Anyone want to suck her blood?
She found a stool at a hundred-dollar blackjack table and slid onto it. She liked sitting at the far left-Position Three, they called it at MIT. It gave her the most time to count cards before she had to play. Most amateurs thought the game of blackjack favored the dealer. It didn’t. The dealer was stuck hitting sixteens and standing on seventeens whether it was smart or not. He didn’t have the luxury of sitting pat on a twelve and waiting to see what happened. The only advantage the dealer had was that he played last. If you went bust, he collected your bet and kept it-even if he later went bust himself. A small point, but one that made a huge financial difference to the casinos. The only way to overcome that advantage was to count cards.