by Harley Slate
“Great-grand-daughter,” Lana said. “Considering the age difference. But there's no guarantee with Mrs. Grant. That lady never met a stranger.”
He went silent. They were both thinking of an incident from last week when a seventeen-year-old got onto the casino floor by pretending to be Grant's twenty-one-year-old grandson. Her memory was going. If anyone was friendly to her, she bluffed it through, pretended to recognize them, pretended to know who they were.
Probably just as well she bought in for the minimum at poker.
Durrell finally drifted off, and Lana scanned the monitors alone for a while. Not much happening today. Red was the only question mark. She still hadn't placed a bet.
What the hell is a girl like you doing in a place like this?
Telling herself it wasn't the same as Durrell zooming in on legs, Lana adjusted one of the cameras to grab a better look at the hands. They could tell you a lot about a player, and Red's hands were definitely worth some looking. Long silk, no rings.
Interesting. Not too many expensive people in Vegas did without rings.
She spoke to Durrell via the headpiece, since she wasn't sure where he'd gone. “How long should we let her hang around without placing a bet? As of this moment, we've got no name and we've got no reason for her to be here. We could cut to the chase and eighty-six her right now.”
In Vegas, you didn't have to give a reason to kick a person out of a casino. If a business didn't want to gamble with you, they didn't have to. But Lana didn't have enough clout with Dragonhoarde management to take that action based on pure instinct.
His raspy reply came back right away. “Grant might know her, so... maybe we better give her a little longer. We'll never get this clip joint out of the red if we kick out everybody who waltzes in looking like they have too much money. Especially if they're friends with some of the regulars.”
Fine. Red might be shady as shit, but Lana enjoyed watching her move. Poetry in motion, as the saying goes. Her hips had a soft, seductive sway that didn't seesaw enough to look deliberate. It was just her natural gait.
At last, the wandering redhead arrived at an empty dice table. They didn't always run a game during this shift, and Lana guessed the floor manager had been minutes away from sending the crew home. But he'd let the game run now. A pretty girl in flashy clothes was guaranteed to pull in a crowd.
Red tossed a hundred-dollar bill on the green felt. That's when it registered with Lana that she wasn't carrying a purse. An expensive woman in a jacket worth thousands, a dress worth more thousands, but no rings, no purse. And a hundred bucks wasn't any kind of stakes, not for a woman dressed like that. The whole thing seemed almost anti-climatic.
This math isn't adding up for me. He should have sent me down there to talk her up. I know I could get a lot more if we engaged in person.
The lack of audio continued to frustrate Lana. She could see the dice crew laugh at something Red said but couldn't figure out what it was. The game began. She was a graceful player, the kind who hit the exact same spot on the back wall every time. She put all the weight on her right leg when she threw, so that her left foot went up a little in back with every pass.
That leg. That ankle.
Durrell was back in the control center breathing down Lana's neck again.
“She's done this before,” Lana said. “She's good.”
“Some people can't walk past an empty dice table.” He was beginning to see what Red wanted them to see. Either that, or he was beginning to see what she really was. Somebody's young relative who wandered into this senior trap and now couldn't get out of the maze while there was still money in her pocket.
An addicted gambler. Sure, it fit. The missing rings could be pawned. The designer purse sold on eBay. The jacket would go next. Then the dress. There was an app for selling everything designer, even the very clothes on your back.
Lana would never involve herself with a gambling addict. Never, ever. When she told people the abbreviated version of her sad story― that taking care of her sick mother had cost her the chance to finish her FBI training― she let them imagine something else. Some lingering disease science hadn't yet found a cure for. It was true, in a way. Science hadn't found a cure for gambling addiction.
The redhead was suddenly way less attractive. Or so Lana told herself. Didn't matter anyway. She was never going to be face-to-face with this woman. Working the sky meant you always observed your guests from a distance.
The game went on. Sometimes Red won, and sometimes she lost. More and more people began to crowd around the table. The gamblers too shy to open a table themselves were always happy to join a game already in progress. After an hour, Red's chips were gone, and she stepped back to surrender her place to another player.
Exactly the way it's supposed to go with craps.
Nothing to see here, move along. Durrell already had.
Their person of interest was a bust. She was just a girl with no place to go and nothing to do on a Tuesday morning.
Busted out but reluctant to leave― a situation Lana had seen a million times before― Red stopped here and there to study the blinking lights of the various slot machines she encountered on the maze she threaded back to the front door.
Once she tapped an icon, the better to consider the array of games on the machine. So many games. All the same to Lana. Who cared whether it was three diamonds or three piggies or three hot red peppers or three rainbow pots of gold? You weren't going to hit any of them, not you, that kind of luck always happened to somebody else.
Probably thinking the same, Red strolled on without making a contribution to the cause.
What's she looking for?
What was anybody looking for? A change of luck.
“You still watching that chick?”
Lana knew better than to waste her time objecting to the word. “I'd still feel better if we had a name.”
At that moment, as if she could finally feel the eyes on her face, Red looked up. Straight up. She already knew where the cameras were, and now she stared without blinking into the one that fed monitor 142.
Looking straight at me. Looking straight into me.
Lana zoomed in close enough to pick up golden flecks in the wide green eyes. She couldn't stop herself. Couldn't look away. If this woman was a distraction from something else going down in this casino, she was one hell of an effective one.
“She knows we're watching.”
“Everybody in the place knows we're watching,” he said.
True. The old-school camera bubbles stuck all over the walls and ceilings made sure of that. The technology to monitor places with tiny almost-invisible pinhole cameras had existed for years. Decades, probably. The casinos didn't care, because they wanted people to see the cameras. Wanted them to know their every deed was being recorded on video.
Red drifted. The random walk, or was she loitering with intent? At long last, she paused in front of a tired progressive jackpot machine with a neon fire-breathing dragon on top of it. Part of the neon flame had burned out.
A progressive jackpot could be big money if it hit, but the odds were long against you. The Dragonhoarde wasn't known for its frequent payouts.
The butter-soft jacket shifted over the slim figure as Red settled onto the round stool. Lana zoomed in on the beautiful hands feeding in a twenty. Maybe her last twenty, the last hurrah of the addicted gambler. Or maybe it was something else.
Something else. I can smell it.
Clear polish on those perfect manicured nails. How did you play dice and not get felt caught under your nails? Lana had never managed the trick. But there was no telltale line of dark there.
The fingers blurred.
Red, at last, betrayed impatience. She was playing fast, pushing buttons faster than she'd tossed the dice, and she wasn't a slow dice player.
Her pale fingers flew faster and faster.
Durrell's raspy voice in her ear. “There are other people in the casino, Jones.”
> Now? He's telling me to look away now?
“Fuck other people. Every one of them is a local. We have names, addresses, for all of them.”
And then the sirens above the bank of machines began to scream.
Chapter Three
“Melody Lysander. Age twenty-seven. Henderson address.”
You have to show ID after winning way less money than Red just did. The slots floor manager was the one to take the driver's license and run it through the various checks. Lana, trapped high in the sky, was helpless to do much of anything except listen in on the headphones.
The movie-star redhead now had a movie-star name to go with the perfect face and body. Melody. It was almost too perfect. She laughed happily along with the people who swirled around her in the aftermath of her jackpot. Older ladies always wanted to hug the big winners, just in case luck was contagious.
Delia Grant emerged from the poker room at almost the same moment the cocktail waitress arrived with a congratulatory flute of cheap champagne. Lysander, still laughing, passed off the bubbly to Mrs. Grant. Were they actually friends or relations? Or was Lysander simply being polite? Lana still didn't know.
“Seventy-three thousand nine hundred sixty-three dollars,” she said.
“Well. It happens.” Durrell wasn't thrilled, but he sounded way less upset than she'd expect him to be. They'd spotted Lysander from the minute she waltzed through the door, and yet somehow she was getting away with whatever the hell she was getting away with.
Lana didn't know what it was. But it was something. The lady was too casual, too indirect, too fucking lucky. It took her three hours to make her approach to that machine. Three minutes to hit the jackpot.
Tell me that's not hinky.
The floor manager's voice chirped in Lana's headphones. “She comes back clean on NCIC.” The National Crime Information Center. “And there's no local arrest record either. We can keep looking, but I doubt we're going to find.”
That was unfortunate. A criminal history of fraud would give them a reason to hold the jackpot in escrow until they could investigate further. Hell, even a minor trespass arrest in Vegas would give them a clue of where she'd been spotted before.
“Almost seventy-four thousand dollars,” Lana said. “We can't let it just walk out that door.”
Durrell put his hand on Lana's hand. A cautious touch. “Jones. We have to. This place already has a shitty reputation for tight machines. We can't let it get a rep for not paying off at all.”
“This is wrong. You know it's wrong.”
“We can't withhold a jackpot because my security officer thinks the winner's jacket is too fucking classy for a dump like this. She's passed every test, Jones. We've got to pay.”
“But you know she's not right. You know it as well as I do. We saw her coming from a mile off.”
“We saw her coming, and we watched her every fucking step of the way. We checked her out. She's clean, Jones. There's nothing.”
Lana rubbed her hand in front of her eyes.
“We've got to let it go,” he said. “Sometimes the other guy wins.”
“Fine. Fine. Guess it's Ms. Lysander's lucky day.” She was saying something else on the inside.
No way she's getting away with this bullshit. Not on my fucking watch.
THE NEXT TIME LANA Jones spotted Melody Lysander, it was on an entirely different screen. Her personal Google Pixel 3. And it was no coincidence. She didn't have to decide to swipe right. Didn't have to wrestle with her conscience over the should-she or shouldn't-she.
She'd already known exactly what she intended to do. Hell, from the moment those curvy hips in the red dress sashayed out the door, Lana had been thinking about ways to track down the scam on her own.
Because there was a scam.
Lana knew it. She could fucking smell it. She had that FBI profiler's nose, even if she'd never been able to complete her FBI training.
Sure you're not just trying to prove something to yourself?
It was her chance to be a hero, if only a north Vegas casino employee-of-the-month hero. After an hour of noodling around and checking various federal, state, and local agencies, the floor manager had ascertained Lysander wasn't subject to tax withholding. One hundred-dollar tip to the slot attendant who brought the paperwork, another hundred-dollar tip to the waitress who'd ended up giving the celebratory champagne to Delia Grant, and the leggy, lickable Melody Lysander had strolled away with a check for a cool seventy-three thousand nine hundred sixty-three dollars.
A lot of money for a place like this. Lana knew, she didn't have to ask.
She also knew the slot manager had actually conferred with the general manager over whether she should ask the woman to delay depositing the check for twenty-four hours. The GM had been yelling at everybody in meetings lately about their cash crunch. In the end, they decided not to make the ask. The casino regulators expected you to have a bankroll, and nobody wanted to take a chance on Lysander filing a complaint.
They'd cover the check somehow. They had to.
But everybody above the level of buffet busboy knew Lysander's hit had wiped out two days of Dragonhoarde's profit.
Nobody would even care if they'd lost the money to some local who'd lose it back the next week. Trouble was, Lysander lived all the way to hell and gone on the other side of town in Henderson. Banked there too. The entire Strip was in between Henderson and the Dragonhoarde. They'd never seen her before, and the odds were they'd never see her again.
“Girl dressed like that, she'll lose it back at the fucking Cosmopolitan.” At the emergency staff meeting called that afternoon, Durrell said what they were all thinking.
“Letting the money leave was a mistake.” Lana shouldn't have said it in front of brass, but she'd been saying it to Durrell all along, and somehow it came spilling out.
“We had no choice.” Durrell too was repeating himself. “As far as we can determine, she's a legit taxpayer who caught a legit win.”
Troy, the young day shift host, said he'd mail some free-play coupons and buffet tickets to the Henderson address. Like a girl in a fifty-two-hundred-dollar jacket would drive two hours across town for a fifty buck free-play coupon.
Lana had a better idea, but her fellow co-workers weren't interested in hearing it. The money was gone, and they were ready to move on.
I can solve this. I can do this. And maybe some doors that got closed off to me will come swinging open again...
As she went through the rest of her shift, hell, as she went through the next few days, she continued to think about what she'd actually seen. Bare legs and bouncing hair. Expensive clothes. Long hands made of silk. An easy walk, a gracious personality. A pretty surface, but what was underneath the surface?
I need to talk to you, Melody Lysander.
Although... was this about Lysander, or was this about Lana Jones having a job that didn't challenge her mind? Was she seeing things that weren't there? Her gut told her the machine had somehow been primed to go off at a certain time for a certain person. There was a famous scam like that a few years back, but it had been a lot of work, and it had been played for millions, not thousands. This might be the leading wedge into something huge― or at least something big enough to bring the FBI's attention back to thoughts of recruiting Lana.
Those long, smooth hands. Lana didn't need to focus on the hands.
Think.
How it worked was you needed a chip programmer, and you needed a way to get the bad chip into the right machine. Then you needed somebody you could trust to play the machine, pass the casino and law enforcement checks long enough to collect the cash, and honest enough to come back to share the profits with the rest of the crew.
Tougher than you'd think.
Honor among thieves was a rare virtue, if it existed at all. And the people who played the part of the face on the camera had a way of feeling like they'd taken a greater risk, thus they should receive a greater reward. A lot of big teams were brought down
because somebody started skimming, and somebody else brought along a handgun when they went to argue about it.
Based on what they knew so far, Lysander was a decent candidate for the role of honest thief. For one thing, she had a house, so she probably wasn't going anywhere just to keep less than eighty thousand all to herself. Young to be a homeowner, and Henderson wasn't cheap, but the county records said she'd bought in during the crash. 2009. No liens, just the first mortgage, mostly paid off by this time. That was interesting.
Twenty-seven in 2019 was seventeen in 2009. A legal minor. Somebody would have had to co-sign Lysander's mortgage. Probably would have had to chip in on the down payment too.
A parent? A sugar daddy? The other name, if it existed in the records, hadn't been noted in the brief report emailed over to the Dragonhoarde.
A sugar daddy. The thought didn't sit well with Lana, but it was a possibility she had to consider. Seventeen was illegal in California, legal in Nevada. A pretty girl who traveled with her older rich boyfriend between the two states had a way of attracting generous gifts.
The sugar daddy could be mobbed up. If there even was a sugar daddy.
Lana needed to check the public records for herself. Sometimes, a casino's security team relied too much on software and information sharing from other casinos. But sometimes there was no substitute for doing your own research. Besides, the Dragonhoarde's financial stresses meant they still hadn't caught up on their payments for their various online subscriptions.
“We could dig a little more,” she'd said at the weekly meeting. “I could put in a couple of hours at the county courthouse.”
“I appreciate your enthusiasm.” The general manager sounded like he hadn't appreciated anything since 1985. “But I'm in agreement with Troy...” The young host. “The way to get the money back is to get her back in the casino before she loses it somewhere else. You treat her like a criminal, you're giving that money to the fucking Aria.”
That was that. Lana was too new an employee to argue with the GM. She firmed her jaw and shut up.