“Dead might have a straight flush,” Joe said. “That’s about the only thing that could beat us.” Shelly let her shoulders rise and fall, hoping Joe would understand her mute question, and he did. “A straight flush is unlikely,” Joe went on. “Very unlikely. He’d have to have the nine of clubs and the queen of clubs in the hold.”
Everyone at the table eyed Shelly, waiting for her to make her move. She shrugged again.
“No, don’t move all in,” Joe said. “Raise another thousand.”
Shelly felt like screaming. She might not be a long-term student of the fine art of Texas Hold’em but she knew that four of a kind was a damn fine hand. She had won all of her previous pots with a lot less than that. Joe was smart, sure, but he was beginning to sound like every other man in her life. Telling her to be cautious. Telling her to hold back. Meanwhile, her heart was pounding and her face was flushed and every man at the table was glued to her. The power of the moment was heady with Shelly not only the center of attention but also the center of control.
“All in,” she said, and pushed her entire stack— just shy of three thousand dollars—to the middle of the table.
Chapter Twenty
Ben sat back in his airplane seat and said a little prayer, It was a non-specific prayer directed toward a non-specific deity, but he supposed it was better than nothing. When he’d awakened that morning there had been a text from Shelly. Not exactly full of information or gushing with love, but it had felt like an invitation. She missed him. The room at the Bellagio was great.
Ever since he had been so cold to her in that parking deck Ben had been kicking himself. He’d known from the start that she was a gambler. He’d know she had this compulsion and yet he had fallen in love with her anyway, had asked her to marry him. He should have stood by her and not run off like that.
Okay, so it hadn’t been the most romantic proposal on record. In fact, as the plane now taxied and began its ascent, heading west toward Las Vegas, Ben knew exactly where he had gone wrong.
His exact words had been “We should get married. Provided you get that gambling thing under control, that is.”
Yeah. Move over, Brad Pitt. There’s a new leading man in town.
He had qualified his love for her, had attached their marriage to a condition.
Years of living with an alcoholic father should have told Ben that would never work. Shelly couldn’t help having her demons, her compulsions, and his job as her fiancé was to love her anyway but without becoming a co-dependent. His mind flickered over all the times he’d taken business calls when they’d been at dinner. Hell, all the times he’d taken them when they’d been in bed. All the vacations cut short, the dates cancelled at the last minute, the sales trips that were supposed to have been two days and bled into three. No wonder she’d stopped believing that he’d be there for her. No wonder she had run away.
A bell dinged. The flight attendant said it was now permissible to use electronic devises. But for the first time in years, Ben did not reach for his laptop. Instead, he leaned back, shut his eyes, and hoped he would get to Shelly before it was too late.
*****
Alanna moved swiftly and invisibly back through the mall, wondering what the hell the saleswoman at Tiffany’s would make of the fact that a woman had vanished almost before her eyes. There was no way she could tell Joe what she’d done. He wouldn’t understand why she’d been practicing materializing and dematerializing all over a shopping mall while he’d been in the casino doing their job.
And he certainly wouldn’t understand why she’d felt compelled to try on an engagement ring. Alanna didn’t even understand that part herself.
She was back in the Bellagio casino within a minute or so—travel certainly was easier without a body—and she could see that everyone at the table where Joe and Shelly had been playing was on their feet, all staring intently at the table where evidently something momentous was happening.
Shelly had gone all in. Everyone except Grateful Dead, who’d called her, had dropped out of the hand.
When Grateful Dead slid his chips forward, Joe let out a groan that only Shelly could hear and she went pale as a funeral lily and flipped up her cards, revealing the two jacks. The whole table applauded and whistled, which brought others to the table to hover in expectation of a big win. It was a Vegas superstition almost as ingrained as the gambling. Everyone wanted to be close to a winner.
Grateful Dead turned over two nines. A diamond and a spade.
“It’s probably okay,” Joe whispered to Alanna, who had come up to his side. “He’s got two pair but she has four of a kind. If we can just avoid a straight flush on the river she’s golden.”
“I have no idea what you just said,” Alanna told him.
“The queen of spades is the only thing that can kill us now.”
“Not us. Her. Remember? We’re not the ones with the gambling bug.”
“Right . . . I know but this is a great hand. A once in a lifetime hand. You can’t help but get juiced by it. Just look at this crowd.”
“I don’t even care about the crowd. I just want to go home.”
“And where would that be?” Joe asked her quietly. “If you and I wanted to go home, Alanna, where would we go?”
Everyone at the table was completely silent, staring at the line of cards.
The dealer turned over the queen of spades.
*****
“I told her not to go all in.”
Morgan raised an eyebrow.
“It’s true,” Joe felt defensive and didn’t know why they’d been manifested to a meeting room. “Isn’t there some sort of tape you can rewind, some way you can verify what I’m saying? It seems like you people would have that sort of technology. Because I swear I told her not to go all in.”
“I know,” Morgan said.
A light began to dawn in Joe. “So we don’t have any control over what these people do?”
“Did I ever say that you did?”
“So let me make sure I’ve got this straight. We can give them their wish. I mean we can set up the situation perfectly, wrap up everything they said they wanted and hand it to them with a great big bow on top, but they still might manage to blow it?”
“You’re not God,” Morgan said. “You can’t force anyone to do anything.”
“Can God do that? Force people to do what’s in their own best interest?” Joe asked.
“What do you think?”
“Based on what I remember about most people, seems like the answer would have to be no. But there’s a lot I don’t remember.”
“It will come back to you eventually. But, for now, you have this little problem it seems. Her name is Shelly and she’s just a tad stubborn, isn’t she?”
“Yeah, so what you’re telling us is we can give them their wish but they might not take it. How screwed up is that?”
“People walk away from what they claim to want every day,” Alanna broke in, her voice a little hollow.
“Indeed they do,” said Morgan. He glanced at Alanna and she had the oddest sense that she could read his mind.
This is part of what we’ve been sent here to learn she thought. We’re supposed to see all the times in our own lives when we were given exactly what we said we wanted, and all the times we ruined our own chances, turned our back on possible happiness. All the times we threw that nice wrapped up gift with the big bow right back into the face of life. The sound of a diamond ring hitting a glass counter reverberated in her head once again and she squirmed under the coordinator’s steady gaze. She realized that he knew everything, that he knew how she had deserted Joe and Shelly in the casino, that he had watched her work her way through the mall, practicing her manifesting skills.
“But do we still get credit for granting the wish?” Joe persisted. His own reservations about blowing the Shelly case had faded and he was now indignant. Hell, it seemed like the odds of winning in this game were worse than those in Vegas. “Does it go in the win col
umn for us, get us one step closer to completing whatever test you’re giving us, get us closer to the next level, whatever that is?”
“This task isn’t over,” Morgan said briskly, leaning forward in his chair. “Shelly is still in Vegas and she needs you.”
“But she’s out of money,” Joe protested. “How is she supposed to make the big hit without any chips?”
“Ah,” Morgan said, and Alanna thought he was almost on the verge of a smile. “You need to think—what’s the Earth phrase? You need to think outside the box.”
Joe wanted to ask what box that would be, but he could already feel himself starting to fade, preparing to manifest somewhere else. It was infuriating, this being out of control. Infuriating and also tantalizing.
“I told her not to go all in,” he managed to say one more time before his mouth dissolved, and the room went silent.
Chapter Twenty-One
Shelly sat glumly at a bar in the Bellagio lobby, sucking on a sprig of mint that she’d managed to fish from the bottom of her mojito. There was no telling where Alanna and Joe had gone and Shelly knew all about fair-weather friends, those people who loved you when you were up and deserted you when you were down. Even Ben had not texted her back.
She signaled to the bartender, who was dressed in a lavender and peach swirly vest. He promptly picked up his mortar and pestle and began to grind up more mint. At least he cared about her.
“I lost a huge stack of chips at the table today,” she informed him and he nodded solemnly. He’d heard this story about a million times.
Shelly sighed. She was suddenly tired and decided that whatever the afternoon held for her, perhaps it would go better with a nap. Or maybe a swim in the pool. She had looked down from her window this morning and seen the elaborate waterways and cascades of the resort pool below her and yet she had not managed to get out of the confines of the hotel during her first 24-hours in Vegas. She would go up, take a little nap, and then hit the pool. Screw Joe and Alanna and Ben back in Virginia, Ben who had told her not to come, Ben who said nobody ever wins and you have to work for everything you get in life. Ben, who insisted that life was not about a big win but about the journey and planning for the trip.
“Can I take the drink with me to my room?” she asked, already digging for her room key in her purse. The bartender nodded and handed her the bill to which she added a thirty percent tip and signed. She still wasn’t clear on exactly how the hotel room and food were being taken care of, but what possible difference could a couple of fifteen dollar mojitos make at this stage of the game? Or a nine dollar tip to the only man in the world who was still talking to her?
Shelly picked up her mojito in her left hand and, with her right, fumbled inside her bag until she found the room key. A room key and a single loose quarter, dropped to the bottom of her purse. She sighed and pushed herself to her feet and, from across the broad lobby, she could see Joe and Alanna walking toward her. She wasn’t in the mood for Joe’s “I told you so” sermon, even though he had told her so, even if she’d been too impulsive and had put too much on the line. Shelly looked down at the quarter in her hand then glanced around the bar. There was a row of slots right outside the ladies room, positioned so that men waiting for their lady friends to freshen up wouldn’t have to miss even a minute of casino action.
Tossing her head defiantly in Joe’s general direction, Shelly picked up her drink and headed toward the three lone slot machines tucked in their pitiful corner. Even she knew that slots located so far from the main drag were unlikely to pay off. The casino set the best odds on the machines that were in crowded places, places where everyone would hear the clanging and the bells, would get juiced and excited anew about their own chances. That’s where you found the winners—front and center, not in a far-flung corner of a lobby bar at slots that didn’t even have stools in front of them.
But Joe was coming to scold her. Shelly knew that. Men had scolded her all her life. Her dad, her big brother, her GA sponsor, a long line of boyfriends ending with Ben. All those men standing there with that disappointed expression saying “Now Shelly, why on earth would you do something like that?”
She wasn’t even looking at the slot machine. She was looking over her shoulder at Joe and Alanna who were almost at the bar and her finger found the machine’s coin drop by instinct. She slid the final quarter in, pushed the button to start the spin and raised her mojito toward Joe.
“Cheers to me,” she said. “The biggest loser in a town full of losers.”
And then the bar exploded with the sound of clanging bells and flashing signs and whoops and hollers and a voice from somewhere over a loudspeaker yelling Winner! Winner! Winner!
*****
People poured out of the bars and the casinos and the hallways and the elevators and the restaurants. There was a big winner in their midst. The thing they all craved, the thing they all hoped for, the thing they all traveled here to have. That thing had happened. Maybe not to them. But to somebody. And the excitement spread like a fire in autumn leaves pulling everyone into its heat.
Shelly stood in the middle of the crowd, the mojito still in her hand, her purse slung over her arm, her room key between her fingers, with a look of shock on her face. Never in her dreams of winning, in all her years of gambling and losing, had she ever contemplated how this would feel. She only knew the temporary highs after a small win. The lift that got her to place the next bet. And then the slide down again that put her back in a hole. The hole was comfortable somehow. It was where she had existed for all these years. But this. This was enormous.
She didn’t have any idea how big she’d won. But when a line of casino employees marched her way holding a banner that said two hundred and fifty thousand dollars, Shelly’s legs began to wobble and she felt as if her head had spun off her neck and was rotating on its own across the room. Her eyes glazed over and she had trouble catching her breath while her heart thumped wildly.
“Oh dear God,” she finally managed to take a breath. And then as what happened really hit her, “Oh my God.”
She looked toward the lobby, in the direction from which Alanna and Joe had been approaching her, straining to find them. But, once again, they had disappeared.
*****
“Well, that was a little unexpected,” Alanna said it dryly. She and Joe hadn’t de-manifested, but had merely stepped behind one of the huge columns in the Bellagio lobby to watch this drama from a distance. Casino employees converged on Shelly, wrapped the banner that said $250,000 around her shoulders, led her toward the center of the lobby where the crowd had already gathered, chanting “Winner, winner, winner,” over and over again in a manner Alanna found slightly menacing.
“Unexpected for us, maybe,” Joe said. “But not the casino. They set the payout odds and they must have known this would be the day the $250,000 would pay out. Because look at that banner and here come the showgirls. They were prepared for this.”
Alanna raised an eyebrow. “It’s rigged?”
“No, not rigged, exactly,” Joe said, watching Shelly stumble through an impromptu conga line led by one of the showgirls. “They knew which machine and the approximate time the payoff would happen, but they had no way of knowing who would be standing in front of that machine, who would happen to drop the coin that would set all this in motion.”
Shelly looked like she was going to faint as the showgirls bounced her around the lobby where the crowd was chanting and dancing in place. It was an orchestrated but barely contained sort of mayhem. Alanna watched the scene with a slight frown on her face. “She doesn’t look happy.”
“It’ll take a second for it to really sink in. Right now she’s in shock.”
“So what happens next?”
“They’ll have a big ceremony in the middle of the casino where they present her the real check. I guess they chose a machine in the lobby to pay off so they could juice up all the people just checking in, but they’ll make sure the real money is exchanged in
the casino.”
“No, what I meant was, what happens next for us? She got what she wanted, the big win. Does that mean we’re done here?”
Joe shook his head. “Now that,” he said slowly, “I can’t tell you.”
Chapter Twenty-Two
The check was obscenely enormous, the size of a sofa and made out to Michelle O’Malley in gigantic letters that everyone could see no matter how far back from the stage they were standing. Now that Shelly had gotten used to the idea, she was rather enjoying herself. In the blink of an eye and the push of a button, she had become a star. And, yes, it was intoxicating.
As Joe had predicted, they had led her from the lobby to the casino, and onto a small stage designed just for this purpose. Most of the crowd from the lobby had followed the procession and, once they entered the casinos, more people had joined in, actually leaving their slot machines and poker tables to follow the throng of people to the base of the stage. There were balloons, streamers, and a band was playing “When The Saints Go Marching In.”
Shelly took some satisfaction in noting that Grateful Dead, still in the same grungy T-shirt, and Cowboy, were both in the crowd. She nodded her chin slightly in their direction, as she imagined a queen might greet her subjects. If only everybody she’d ever known was here, she thought, all the people back in high school who’d made fun of her for wearing her Goodwill clothes, anyone who’d ever laughed at her and put her down for all the times she’d had to beg off from special activities because her father said they cost too much. They should all be here; they should all see this moment. Especially Marcus from GA. Shelly smiled and waved to the crowd.
Shelly's Second Chance (The Wish Granters, Book One) Page 8