Winner

by Harley Slate

  The sky above was completely wide and open.

  Somebody had unrolled a wide blanket over most of what would be the floor if they were actually indoors. On top of the blanket rested a double sleeping bag and a collection of plump pillows. Lana's eyes had adjusted to the night, and the pale fabric seemed to glow in the starlight.

  “You have to lay down,” Mel said.

  “I thought I was laying down in bed.” Lana couldn't resist the final tease.

  “Come on.” Giggling, already halfway to the ground, Mel pulled playfully on Lana's knees to make her tumble down beside her.

  Maybe this whole scenario was a dream. Maybe Lana was still in the hotel suite, cuddled around the warmth of Mel in the king-sized bed. Could this be real, this mysterious mountain, this gated-off outdoor arena? The dreamlike feel was only enhanced by the easy way Mel pulled her down. Somehow, without conscious planning, Lana found herself on top, where she began to kiss Mel's inviting lips. A fast kiss, then a slower one. Mel's body arched beneath Lana's, and her tongue spanked upward.

  There was a distant murmur of voices. Impossible to make out what the other couple was saying. The dark hedges clipped into neat fences prevented you from seeing anything in the other garden rooms. You couldn't really hear them either, just enough to know they were there.

  It felt private and yet not, kissing under the stars like this. A little naughty. Like they were getting away with something only rich people got away with.

  Mel rolled Lana off and over, and now Lana was the one on her back.

  “Look. Look up.” Mel sounded excited.

  And then Lana really was in a dream, Mel at her side, both of them looking at the sky. The murmurs from the other garden rooms around them were more excited too. No need to pick out individual words. Lana could see for herself what was happening.

  The sky rained stars. Most of them white and bright, falling arrows of pure flame. But one of them was closer. It was green, and it sparked and hissed. Lana had never heard that before, a shooting star that fell close enough to be heard.

  “How did you know? How?”

  “This meteor storm comes every year at the same time. Science figured it out. A long, long time ago.”

  This was more than science. Lana had lived in Vegas all her life. There were star parties associated with the university and what not, but the glow from the casinos made the regular meteor showers less than spectacular. No doubt lots of people traveled out from the city to the mountains to watch the show, but she'd never heard of this place. A gated, guarded road where you could park your fucking Lamborghini?

  That should have created some gossip, friend.

  “It's always better after the moon sets. And it's always the very best in the wee hours of the morning,” Mel said. “Not sure why. Maybe it's that whole thing about how it's always darkest before the dawn. Anyway, this is a good show this year. Damn good show. That green one, did you see it?”

  “How could I miss it?”

  “You don't get one that close every year. That was an actual piece of space rock burning up right in front of us. You could hear the crackle.”

  That wasn't the only crackle and spark Lana heard this night. “So you do this every year? Come all the way out from Chicago to see the shooting stars?”

  Mel hesitated.

  Lana shouldn't have mentioned Chicago. It reminded Mel she had a cover story, that she wasn't supposed to be a local.

  “Something like that,” she said slowly.

  “Hey, it's all right. Come here.” Lana pulled her closer, put a leg over Mel's leg. This was a good surprise, and she shouldn't be pushing it any further. Not tonight. “I heard a thing, you probably heard it too. When you see a shooting star, you should make a wish. That's a lot of wishes raining down on us.”

  Mel nuzzled into Lana's neck for a minute. It gave her the feeling Mel liked Lana's scent as much as Lana liked hers. “I guess I've got a lot of wishes.”

  Chapter Seven

  Lana should have felt proud of a job well done. Instead, she felt a little shitty. Mel wasn't who she said she was, but there was something real about her that couldn't be faked.

  Ashton was the fucking fake. She asked Mel to drop her off in front of the Cosmopolitan. “Meeting my brother for breakfast,” was how she put it.

  I'm not obligated to give her a real name or real address. That fucking hotel room isn't her real house, either.

  Still, she felt uncomfortable with some of her actions of the night before. Mel had been a lot more forthcoming than Ashton. She'd shared a real name and her secret place. Not to mention the fucking Versace shell, which only now Lana realized she'd forgotten to give back.

  Good. You'll have an excuse to get in touch again.

  Did she need an excuse? When Mel said, “I'll call you,” Lana thought it was more than the traditional final line of a never-to-be-repeated hookup.

  Maybe Lana wasn't cut out to be undercover. It seemed different from what she'd studied in her criminal justice courses. Sneakier, somehow. Almost like it was just a fancy word for lying.

  Back home. A shower, a change of clothes. The magical night under the falling stars had to be put away in a box separate from her workaday reality. If she thought too hard about it...

  But she wouldn't think about it.

  Saturday, like always, turned out to be the busiest day of the week for security at the Dragonhoarde. The hustles were the same-old-same-old, depressing Lana with how petty and pointless they were. The bubble cameras didn't seem to make a difference after a few drinks. Everybody thought they were smarter than they really were, everybody thought they had an angle.

  A woman in her seventies palmed chips from the man's stack next to hers, knowing she could claim age and forgetfulness if she was caught. Well, she'd been caught one too many times before for Lana's liking, so she phoned down to order floor security to hold the lady for the cops. If they declined to arrest her for theft, Lana would ask them to ticket her for trespassing. This so-called guest was no longer welcome on the premises.

  There was a low buzz among her fellow co-workers when Mel walked in, but Lana was still wrapping up the paperwork on the old lady when the jackpot sirens went off again. There hadn't been any slow, wandering walk through the casino tonight. The sultry redhead had gone directly to her target, a bank of dollar progressive machines.

  “Thought you said she wouldn't be back.” Salvatore Durrell's raspy voice sounded grim in Lana's headset.

  “I said she wouldn't be back to lose money. Completely different thing.”

  She phoned down to the floor. “Slow walk the paperwork.”

  “You don't have to tell me,” said the slot manager. “Has she been hitting anywhere else?”

  “Last I heard, no, but I'll call around again.” Dragonhoarde still wasn't up-to-date on their payments to the BOLO service, so they weren't being kept in the loop automatically. Casinos weren't shy to share the names of suspected hustlers, so Lana would get the information if she asked for it, but there were a lot of casinos to phone.

  This place needs to pay its damn bills to somebody besides a professional grifter.

  Lana didn't have time to phone over a hundred and fifty casinos in Clark County, so she put a priority on calling the ones with a reputation on the street for being relatively soft. Any crime crew worth its salt would tackle the low-hanging fruit first. She texted Mel's photo around and chatted a little to her counterparts in some of the older casinos, but she wasn't coming up with any hits.

  Durrell wanted all eyes on the monitors. “She isn't doing this alone, and somebody on the crew will be in the place, watching her. Identify the bodyguard, and you've identified the organization.”

  “We're the target,” she said. “Nobody else has seen her.”

  “We did invite her back,” Durrell said. “We painted this target on our own backs.”

  “Troy sent her a fifty-dollar free-play coupon and a buffet dinner for two. Does that look like a girl who'l
l drive an hour for fifty bucks and all the free jello desserts you can eat? She was coming anyway, she's got somebody on the inside.”

  “Maybe.” He pulled at his lower lip, a gesture that reminded Lana of a chimpanzee in a zoo. A pretense of thinking, rather than any serious thought. “I'm heading down.”

  The minute he was out of earshot, the guy on Lana's right leaned in. “This is bullshit, and we both know it's bullshit.” Connor was cute if you liked the skinny type with a pink stripe in his hair. Useless in a uniform, even with a gun on his hip, but a keen observer of human nature who never tired of staring at a screen.

  Lana nodded carefully to encourage him to go on. He gossiped a lot, but the gossip usually held a seed of something worth thinking about.

  “Don't say anything to anybody until I turn in my notice, but I've accepted a job opening at a new joint in West Virginia. This place is circling the drain.”

  “Circling the drain faster than West Virginia?” Lana struggled to keep the skepticism out of her voice. Not that she'd ever been there, but you didn't picture it as the happy hunting grounds for a gay guy with a standing appointment to see a stylist every three weeks.

  “At least I got family there. And it's a new place, so there's a chance. Whatever's going on here, I want no fucking part of it. Maybe you should think about getting clear of Vegas yourself, Lana. I could put in a word for you.”

  “I'm not going to West Virginia. Sorry, Connor, but that's a bridge too far.” She didn't really want to be the one who crapped on his country boy dream, so she softened her tone. “Besides, my brother and his wife just made me an aunt. I'm from here, I still got family here. You know how it is.”

  All the time they talked, they never took their eyes from the monitors. Durrell wasn't wrong to order them to watch the area around Mel Lysander. Whoever she was working for had to have a way of keeping tabs on their money.

  Delia Grant, along with three other older women, drifted over to see what Mel had won now. More hugs, more laughter, more champagne. Just like the last time. As before, Mel didn't drink any of the champagne herself. She had no moral objection to alcohol, she'd had no trouble handling her tequila last night. Of course, she wasn't on the job when she was hooking up with somebody at Ghost Donkey.

  Evidently, Mel was an honest hustler, the kind who didn't drink when she was out getting money for the crew. A fucking rarity in Vegas.

  Still, she was a hustler. It just wasn't natural to keep hitting jackpots. There was no doubt about it. The beautiful redhead was the bad guy in this movie, and Lana was the white hat who would bring her to justice.

  It should have been a great feeling. But it wasn't.

  Once he arrived on the floor, Durrell's approach was visible on multiple monitors. He picked up a flute of champagne and pretended to drink. Mel pretended to drink right back at him. She might suspect but she wouldn't necessarily know for sure he was casino security. He was just another man in a suit with a gaming badge.

  Connor kept sitting tight very close to Lana and not because he had the slightest interest in her as a woman. He had more to say, and she could guess what it was. Nobody else needed to hear this discussion, so she dropped her voice another few decibels.

  “So. You think it's the owners behind this. You think maybe they're paying her to take money out before they declare bankruptcy.” It was the logical conclusion. The majority of gaming jobs were right here in Nevada. If he was running all the way to West Virginia, he thought something bad was coming down.

  He shrugged a slim shoulder. “It's gonna get messy, and I don't want to be involved.”

  “You have any evidence?”

  “Nope. I have a brain.” He tapped his forehead. “Look, we weren't hired to protect the casino from the owners. That's for the gaming commission to do. Me, I don't want to get caught in the middle.”

  “It doesn't have to be the owners. It can be somebody else on the inside.”

  “See, that's exactly why I don't want to be here. Somebody's going to take the fall. One of us, Lana. And I don't intend for that somebody to be me. This gorgeous face wouldn't do so well in prison.”

  His faith in the Nevada court system was touching. Although Lana couldn't blame him. DNA proved the wrong people were sent away for rape and murder all the time, but you couldn't use DNA to prove your innocence in a white-collar crime. You were just plain fucked if you were wrongly convicted.

  She rubbed her hand in front of her face, then refocused her gaze on the bank of monitors. It didn't seem to matter how many people crowded around Mel. She didn't seem twitchy or impatient. She smiled and smiled, as if she had nothing better to do than sit there for hours getting rubbed on the shoulder by random old ladies.

  “We've got to ramp up the pressure,” Lana said.

  “Agreed,” he said. “We should put the jackpot in escrow for forty-eight hours.”

  The casino couldn't keep money from a progressive jackpot forever, but with two big hits in less than a week by the same person, they had enough to delay paying off while they investigated the circumstances of the win. The odds against were astronomical.

  “Durrell will have to sign off on it.” Even as she said the name, the man himself was coming through the door.

  “Anything new?” he asked.

  “Nobody's seen her anywhere else,” Lana said. “And we're not picking up on any known associates. Did you spot anybody from the floor who could be with her?”

  He shook his head. “Nothing and nobody. I mean, yeah, she's not drinking, she's faking there, but there's nothing really suspicious about that, since she has a long drive after she leaves this place.”

  Since when did Durrell think it wasn't suspicious for a gambler to pass up a free drink?

  Connor was looking not at his boss but at his assigned monitors. He'd already mentally checked out of this job.

  Lana repressed a sigh. “Can I get authorization to put the jackpot in escrow for forty-eight hours?”

  “You were in the same meeting with everybody else. The GM says no. We have to continue operating like there's nothing out of the ordinary. We can't do anything that might create doubt and start rumors about the profitability of this casino.”

  What doubt remains? The place ain't profitable.

  But she knew damn well what he meant. Casinos that couldn't pay off lost their customers to the casinos that could. A solid place on central Strip could tolerate some grumbling and some gossip.

  An already shaky joint like the Dragonhoarde?

  Withholding a jackpot, even briefly, could be the final nail in the coffin.

  Lana still had to try. “This is bullshit, and you can see it's bullshit, Durrell.”

  “I'm not the idiot you take me for, Jones. I'm on it.”

  She folded her arms over her chest. “On it how?”

  Connor looked up from his monitors. Most of her other co-workers did too. Durrell let his gaze sweep the room. “The feds are on it, all right? The information doesn't leave this room, but they've got their own operation going. Have a little faith. We pay, she takes the money, and she leads us to the rest of the team.”

  “We pay and she leads the feds to the rest of the team,” Lana said. “Also, that money ends up in a fucking evidence locker. You don't see a problem here?”

  “See, that's why they pay me the big bucks. You see a problem, I see an opportunity. We get on the right side of the feds, we assist in the takedown of a big criminal organization, that's publicity you can't buy. Maybe even a movie deal.”

  Are you fucking crazy? A movie deal? Since when have you gone all Hollywood on our happy asses?

  She started to shake her head but then she looked around the room. Everybody else was nodding like Durrell was making all the sense in the world. Everybody but Connor, and he was looking at his feet. No help there.

  “Fine.” Lana called back down to the slots manager. “Sorry for the delay. We have your authorization now. Pay the lady.”

  Chapter Eight
<
br />   There were two possible futures for Mel Lysander. In the first timeline, she decides enough is enough. Takes the money and runs, never to be seen again.

  Not gonna happen. Lana had double-checked the county court records by now. Mel had two hundred and fifty thousand dollars worth of equity in the Henderson house. No known debts.

  No way she was walking away from that.

  That left the second timeline. She keeps playing the game, keeps taking risks. And everybody knows what happens if you keep playing the game.

  Nobody wins every time. Or even most of the time.

  They'd figure out how she was making the play. And then she'd be caught dead to rights.

  So there was only one future. Mel in prison, locked away from the sky and the shooting stars that knew how to rain down wishes.

  She's the bad guy. You didn't put her on that path. She was already on her way when you met her.

  Lana felt sick when she thought of everything. The warmth of her. Those graceful hands. The easy way she drove up a mountain on the way to a secret.

  The money lost wasn't Lana's money. She should let it go. She was part of a surveillance team, and that was it. Past a certain point, you had to stand back and let law enforcement track these people down.

  And, yet, somehow she couldn't.

  I should talk to her. Get her to come in. She could cut a deal, save herself. If she waits for them to track her down, she'll have nothing to bargain with.

  Lana knew perfectly well she shouldn't be meeting with a suspected rip-off artist. She hadn't been authorized to investigate this woman on her own time and off casino property. That went far beyond the boundaries of her job. Still, since she had to return the Versace shell anyway...

  After work, she messaged Mel from the hookup app.

  ―Hey.

  It felt weird, but it wasn't. There was nothing weird at all about a classic one in the morning booty call from a recent hookup.