Apparently Cary had been given that same advice. And she shouldn’t have been as surprised as she was.
You have to run, Lucky. You can’t just sit here, waiting to be caught.
She stood and went to her suitcase, opened it, dug down, searched until her hand found the zippered pouch: inside it was her cache of fake IDs, a box of hair dye, and a pair of scissors.
The lottery ticket was there, too, the one she had bought the day before, what felt like a lifetime ago. As she held the ticket up, the hope of it bubbled inside her for just a second. What if?
But that was just a dream. Nothing could get her out of this. She tossed it on the floor and went into the bathroom with the dye and scissors, where she began to hack away at her distinctive red curls, forcing her mind to go blank so she could fill it with the information she would need to develop a new identity and start running.
“Bonnie Skinner,” she said to the mirror. The name was from a byline she’d seen in Gambling Insider, one of the magazines that had been fanned across the bar when she and Cary had arrived in their suite the day before. “Bonnie,” she repeated, heading out to the bar to check the masthead. It was printed in Phoenix, which was where she was now from. Bonnie was a freelance writer, here on a thrilling business trip that was a far cry from her ordinary life as a mother of two.
She shoved her shorn curls into a pillowcase and applied the dye to her remaining locks. After she rinsed it, her now-brown hair dried in curls close to her head, like an older woman’s style. Perfect. She moved through the room, throwing clothes in a backpack and gathering other items: bills, change, the lottery ticket she had abandoned on the floor. She put those in her wallet, and searched the room for any more bills and change she could find. She put their passports and her phone into the pillowcase with her cut hair and tied it shut, then grabbed her backpack and headed for the door.
Never look back, her father used to say when they would leave a place behind. But she couldn’t help herself: she turned, she looked. It was a disaster. Dye-stained towels, a broken glass, empty bottles on the floor. She thought of the maid who was going to have to deal with this mess, maybe even lose wages while being interviewed by police. She took a few twentys out of her wallet and left them on top of a pillow. The door slammed behind her, and Lucky was gone.
October 1992
NORTH MAINE WOODS
“Haircut time,” Lucky’s father said, waking her in the middle of the night. He was holding the scissors from their sewing kit, the one that had belonged to his mother, he had told her, with its rattan exterior and the red and white roses woven over the surface.
“What?” Lucky mumbled, turning her face away from him and burying it in the musty-smelling pillow. They were staying in a rooming house, a ramshackle log cabin at the edge of the North Maine Woods.
“You’ve got to cut your hair off,” he said matter-of-factly. “And then we have to get out of here. Come on.” She sat up and faced him. She could smell whiskey and cigar smoke on him. Her heart plummeted.
“Why? I thought we were staying here for a while.”
“Yeah, well, we can’t. I faked a wire transfer to pay for this place and I have a feeling the jig is about to be up. And also… I played a game of blackjack tonight with the wrong people.”
“Dad.”
His hangdog expression was so familiar. “Lost the rest of the money, and then some,” he said, as if she didn’t already know that. “We have to leave before they come looking for what I owe.”
“I told you not to—”
“And I told you there was no other choice. I had to try to earn back some of what we lost after we were robbed. But I failed.”
This was the unfortunate reality for people like them: You had to carry cash, you couldn’t have a bank account; and when you traveled with cash, you had to decide whether to carry it all with you or leave it in your room. Sometimes you trusted the wrong person, or sometimes, someone figured you out and the next thing you knew, your money was gone. Or sometimes, it was just a fluke. They’d been robbed before, but never this much. Mostly because they’d never had this much.
“I don’t want to cut my hair. I just want to sleep!”
“Please don’t give me a hard time about this,” he said. “I’m just as upset as you are.”
She squeezed her eyes shut. “No, you aren’t. No one is asking you to cut off your hair.”
“It’s just hair.”
A mother would understand that it was not just hair. A mother would understand that Lucky was getting to the age where she looked at herself a little longer in the mirror, where she saw the styles the other girls were putting their hair into and tried to do the same.
“Come on. You’re a little young still for preteen histrionics.”
She tossed the covers to the floor and glared at him. “Am I? Because you always tell me I’m basically a grown-up! Seems to me I should be able to act however the hell I want!”
He sighed and looked at her sadly, and this just made her angrier. “We simply have no choice. We have to go back in.”
“Back in” meant away from the border towns. Back to the major cities, where the money was a little easier to come by. They always got so close. “Once we get to Canada, we’ll lead an honest life,” he would tell her. But he didn’t know what honest meant.
Lucky wanted to scream; she wanted to cry. Lately she’d been feeling this way more and more. Like the world didn’t make sense—like her world didn’t make sense. No other kids lived like this. She knew it. And she was done.
She tried all her tricks to get the tears to stop threatening, but nothing worked. One trickled down her left cheek. And while she was distracted by that, her father grabbed a hank of her long, curly, waving flag of hair, and snip—it was lying there like a dead animal on the floor. “Was that so bad? Easy-peasy.”
She jumped from the bed. “How dare you?” she shouted, and he flinched.
“Keep it down, for heaven’s sake! I told you, we’re in trouble.”
“We’re always in trouble. Always, always, always!”
He shrugged, because there was nothing to say to that. They were always in trouble because they were trouble.
She glanced at the door then. There was a tingling in her fingers and in her bare toes, and there was that word singing through her head. Run. She thought of the vast forest that started just behind the rooming house, how cool and green the mossy floor of the woods would feel on her feet. She could eat berries and bark to survive. She could hide in a tree, and he’d never find her.
Run, run, run. She turned, she opened the door, and she ran before her father realized what she was doing. She would do it all by herself. She would go to Canada. She didn’t need anyone. Least of all him.
CHAPTER FOUR
Lucky took the stairs, all twenty flights down, and exited the Bellagio through a back door into the heat of the Las Vegas morning. She found a dumpster and disposed of the bag containing her hair and cell phone, and the passports. She had flushed her SIM card down the toilet upstairs.
She pressed her large sunglasses against her face, hitched up her backpack, and walked out onto the sidewalk, into the teeming mass of tourists on the Vegas strip. She ducked into a shop and browsed the T-shirts, found a pink one that said Welcome to Fabulous Las Vegas and a matching baseball cap.
“Do you have a changing room I could use?”
She closed the door, ripped the tags off a hot pink belt bag, and put it in her backpack.
Next, she went to a Duane Reade, bought rust-brown lipstick, the wrong shade of foundation, and mouse-gray eye shadow.
Then she found a coffee shop bathroom, where she layered the makeup on, smudging a little lipstick on her teeth. After, as she walked down the strip again, she felt her body tighten and her muscles coil defensively. She couldn’t help but brace herself. For someone to start shouting her other name. For a firm hand to clamp down on her shoulder and tell her she was under arrest.
Eve
ntually, she reached her destination: she was at the Bellagio again. As she walked through the ornate front doors and toward the casino’s security, as the sounds of the slot machines grew louder and the air grew still and cool instead of desert dry, as she thought of the young pimply poker player from the night before and the new strategy she would employ to connive him, she felt her fear give way to anticipation. It rose through her body like fizz in a champagne flute and curdled her stomach.
She headed over to the bar, where she ordered a diet cola on the rocks with lime. “No rum, no rye, no vodka?” the bartender asked, one eyebrow raised.
“No, thank you,” Bonnie Skinner said. “I abstain from liquor. I’m just parched, though, from this desert heat, except too much soda gives me the—” She patted her belly and grimaced; the bartender looked away. “So I like it in the little glasses.” The bartender started polishing snifters, and she smiled down at the bar top. She’d done it; she’d managed to turn herself into a woman people barely noticed.
Lucky wandered away from the bar and through the slots area, her drink in hand, listening to the endless barrage of money going in and money coming out. The house always won; she knew that. But it wasn’t the house she was interested in.
She kept moving, pursing her lips and squinting at different machines as if trying to decide on the right one for her, but not landing on one. The sound of the slot machines was an endless, swirling ka-ching. She walked toward the green-clad tables for blackjack, roulette, craps, baccarat, and finally poker, where she’d been the night before. She stopped when she reached that last table. There was a rail around it, a table in the middle, penned in. She leaned against the rail. Four men were playing the game. As she approached, one of them stood, shook his head in frustration, and left. Two of the remaining men—one late-middle-aged, the other one younger, with greasy black hair in a ponytail—were hunched over their cards as if their lives depended on it.
The third player was the person Lucky was looking for—the pimply kid from the night before, still wearing the same clothes. She’d expected she might have to wait around for him for a while, but here he was, looking like he hadn’t slept yet. He sat in the same relaxed position she remembered, hands folded over his cards. He leaned forward and raised. The two men at the table met his bet. The black-haired man raised, the middle-aged man folded, and the pimply young man smiled. Then he did something she had noticed the night before, too: he touched a medallion around his neck. She peered at it, but from this distance she was unable to tell what was engraved on it.
“All in,” he said.
Players fell in and out over the next hour. The kid won every time. Lucky leaned against the rail, pretending to be rapt.
Eventually the kid checked his watch. “Time for my afternoon siesta,” he said to the dealer, sliding chips across the table as a tip. Lucky counted them: seven.
“Thank you, sir,” the dealer said, putting his tip under the table.
As the young man walked away, Lucky caught up, then fell into step beside him. He didn’t seem to notice her at first, or perhaps he was trying to ignore her. “Well, that was fun,” she said. “It’s on my bucket list, you know: to play a few hands of poker at the Bellagio with one of the greats. And you—you’re great at the game. But, alas, I was too nervous to buy in. I’m still learning. Researchin’. ”
Now he was looking directly at her, and she could see a flash of boyish pride in his eyes. What she did not see was any hint that he recognized her. Good.
“You been playing long?”
“A while,” he said.
“Like, maybe since birth?”
He turned toward the exit. “Uh, yeah, something like that,” he said. “Anyway, thanks. And bye.”
He was speeding away from her, but she caught up. “I’m a writer,” she said. “A reporter for Gambling Insider.”
This made him stop walking. “Oh?”
“I’m writing an article about the new up-and-comers in the game. People like you. The young, exciting, fresh faces of this country’s gambling scene. I’d love to interview you, Mr.…?”
“Gibson,” he said. “Jeremy.”
“Yes, I was just going to say that! Of course I already know who you are. Everybody does. Am I ever glad I got to watch you play. The thing is, I’m on the red-eye out of here tonight. So if I’m going to interview you for the feature, it has to be now…”
“Okay. Sure,” he said, taking his hands out of his pockets. “Why not?”
“Great. Do you want to get a coffee?”
“Nah. Let’s go up to my suite. I have a postgame routine and I always have to stick to it.” He veered off toward the elevator and she kept up, the feeling of being right about a mark ferrying her along in its triumphant current. From the moment she’d seen him the day before, she’d known what an easy mark he could be. It wasn’t money he wanted, not exactly. It was praise and recognition for being able to do something no one else could do. What he didn’t realize was that people did what he did all the time.
“Wow,” she said when they walked through the door—on the seventh floor, suite 717. It was the exact same type of suite she had vacated just that morning but she still said, “I mean, wow, wow, and holy moly.”
She grabbed the branded notebook and pen sitting on the little writing desk near the front door. “Okay, so let’s start at the beginning. How does everyone in your family feel about being related to a poker star?”
But he wasn’t paying attention to her. He had clicked on the television to CNN. It was a replay of Hillary Clinton standing on a stage, hands held high in victory after winning the Kentucky primary. “She’ll never be president,” Jeremy said. “No one wants a chick as president during a financial crisis. What do women know about money?”
“Well, it’s 2008. Women these days—”
He talked over her. “And look at that one. That woman DA, in Manhattan. She’s always on TV. The media freaking loves her, and why? Because she’s a chick?” Lucky caught a glimpse of the woman he was disparaging, saw red hair and an earnest expression. She looked familiar. Lucky must have seen her on TV before. Jeremy was still talking and she had to focus. “What did you ask me before? About my parents? They hate this, what I do. They don’t understand it. My father thinks I should be back home in New York, getting all set up to run the family business, but that’s not the life for me. You know?”
She swallowed and smiled sweetly. “My parents wanted me to be a nurse, but I always wanted to be a writer, so I went for it. You want something extraordinary, I get it. Because you are extraordinary. When you sit at a poker table, it’s like magic. I saw it. Everyone saw it.”
“Yeah,” Jeremy said, nodding along to the story she was weaving. He walked over to the bar and ran his hand along it. “Want anything? A cocktail? Anything at all?”
“You go ahead.”
He opened the bar fridge and took out a Coke, cracked the can open, and chugged half of it. Then he extended his arm as if he were a king displaying his domain. “You’re lucky you ran into me,” he said. He put the can down on the bar top. The newscasters had now started talking about the Multi Millions lottery jackpot, about how the winner hadn’t yet come forward, but he clicked it off. “I’m going to make this the most interesting article your magazine has ever published. Hey, you have to see this bathroom. Come on.” He walked ahead of her, still talking loudly, his words echoing off the marble walls of a bathroom she already knew well. As she followed him, she passed the bar, where he had emptied his pockets when they entered the room. There were a few bills, coins, errant poker chips—and his key card. In one fluid movement, she switched her suite key with his and continued into the next room.
“It really is incredible,” she said. “Look at this place. Wow! This bathroom alone is the size of my room! I’ve never seen anything like it.” They were standing in the middle of the bathroom; their faces were reflected in dozens of mirrors, an endless line of Bonnie Skinners and Jeremy Gibsons.
“Oh, I get that all the time,” she said. “I have one of those faces. Familiar like.”
“Yeah, I guess,” he said, and wandered out of the bathroom again while she stood and stared at her many reflections, waiting for her heart to start beating at a normal pace again.
Then she came back out, her notepad and pen at the ready. “Tell me more,” she said. “I’m fascinated. I could listen to you talk about your life all day. Now, you mentioned your postgame ritual. Tell me more about that. What are the things you absolutely must do to guarantee you have a great game?”
Jeremy sat on the couch and crossed his legs. “Interesting question,” he said as she settled down in a chair across from him and began to scribble down his answers.
He talked about himself for hours, while “Bonnie” dutifully transcribed. On the note paper, she revealed him slowly, like a sketch. He was superstitious, never played a game without his Saint Cajetan medal around his neck—Cajetan, he told her, was the patron saint of good fortune, and the luckiest of all. Plus, his feast day was on the seventh of August. “I know it sounds cheesy, the whole ‘lucky number seven’ thing, but I have to tell you, it’s worked for me. I always stay on the seventh floor, you see, and my room number always has to have at least one number seven in it. And they accommodate me, of course, because I spend so much money here. I can have whatever I want.”
Finally, he yawned and rubbed his eyes, which were bleary and red. “I really need a nap,” he said. “I always sleep a few hours during the day, and then I’m back at it again.”
Lucky Page 4