Bet Your Life

by Richard Dooling

  I knew Miranda sent money home to them, knew she had investments, didn’t know what kind. She usually had a Wall Street Journal under her arm in the morning, whereas Lenny and I would be swapping Gamer and PC Magazines.

  After a bit, she asked the bartender for two glasses of the twenty-year-old Graham’s. She had money. So did Lenny—he used to, anyway. Not me. I was still paying car loans and low-limit credit cards. I even had a consumer bank lien on my car and one of my student loans was in default, so I was a long way from ordering vintage port. When we went to Jams for high-end food and wine, Miranda usually grabbed the check and insisted.

  Once the port was gone, she didn’t last long. It was probably ten o’clock at the latest when she said she’d had enough, and we went looking for Lenny.

  We found him playing two hands at a table with a twenty-five-dollar minimum, a five-thousand-dollar maximum, and a dealer who looked like Charlize Theron. I worried about the manic thing again, because Lenny was revved, Action Jackson with deep pockets on Fat Street. He was in no mood to leave, with a thousand or so stacked in front of him, and hanging on his left arm studying his technique, a striking, raven-haired beauty, whom Lenny introduced by saying, “This is Rosa,” as he colored up on his chips.

  Miranda and Rosa gave each other quick smiles and nods, as if they’d met before and had nothing to say about it. Instead Miranda yawned behind her hand and said, “We’re ready to head out, Lenny.”

  Lenny leaned over and listened to Rosa whisper something in his ear. He nodded and said, “I’m coming with you guys, but I’m playing one last hand.”

  Then he pulled a Lenny and decided to go home double rich or nothing broke. He colored up to one big black-and-gold thousand-dollar chip and slid it out to the winner’s circle.

  Maybe Charlize was new, or maybe she just took a certain pleasure in her calling. She cooed and made goo-goo eyes at his big chip, then started sliding cards out of the shoe.

  Lenny got two eights and gave out with a war whoop when Charlize showed a six up. Any mutt would split the eights; it was practically required, no matter what the bet, so the hand went on hold while Lenny consulted the ATM machine up front and a small fan club formed at his table.

  He came back with a shot of Glensomething and cash on the barrel for another black-and-gold chip. He slid the chip out to cover the second eight, just in time for Charlize to turn—gasps all around—a third eight.

  Lenny pondered the layout for all of ten seconds before leaving for the ATM again, and the spectators began arranging themselves for better views of the high-stakes contest.

  “Shouldn’t you stop him?” Miranda asked me. “What if he loses?”

  “He knows what he’s doing,” I said. “She’s got a six up. I can’t say I wouldn’t do the same.”

  “No doubt!” said Rosa. “He has to do it.”

  “Where’s he bank?” whispered Miranda. “I can’t get more than three hundred at a time out of Commercial Federal.”

  “Cash advances on credit cards,” I said, “not bank withdrawals, and he’s got enough plastic on him to fill out that card shoe.”

  Lenny returned with financing and a shot of Grand Marnier for Miranda. He remained standing, the better to survey his portfolio of three $1,000 eights.

  Charlize turned over eight number four like it was destiny itself. She looked at Lenny like he was a wizard in the Voodoo Zone, and again he had no real choice—he had to split the eights, and now he needed four grand on the table. Actually he needed more, because what if he had to double down on a ten or an eleven? How many times do mere mortals get to play four live blackjack hands against a dealer with a six up?

  “Okay, then,” Lenny said to Charlize and Rosa, “if I split the eights again and win it, you’re both coming with me to Saint Kitts to help me spend it.” Rosa giggled, and Charlize shimmied under her dealer’s smock and purred to him about a four-day weekend ahead of her with nobody and no place to go, acting like she’d let him jump her bones right there in the pit if he was man enough to put another thousand on the table.

  Lenny made his way through thronging admirers and kibbitzers and out to the ATM, again, where from the looks of it he maxed out four different cards. The fans cheered his arrival back at the table like Romans hailing Caesar’s return from Gaul. Lenny squared up across from Charlize and bought a fourth black-and-gold chip.

  Charlize licked her lips and gave Lenny a dangerous smile for good luck. The next card out of the shoe was a three on his first eight, for eleven, which—of course!—he’d be crazy not to double down on, and this time he had the extra cash on hand for chip number five. Next card, a nine for twenty. Applause. Then she turned an ace on the second eight (more applause on the nineteen), a king on the third eight, and a queen on the fourth eight. Lenny had two hands at eighteen, one at nineteen, one at twenty. Great hands, especially against a six, but not twenty-ones.

  Her bottom card was a queen, and Lenny loved all three of them: Charlize, the queen, and the six, for a hard sixteen. Time for her to bust. Nobody was breathing when she slipped the last card out of the shoe. A five of spades. She let it fall out of her hand like a used dagger. Then she snapped her gum and shrugged, like it was the ninth or tenth time that shift she’d hit a hard sixteen for twenty-one and sucked five dime bets out of a soft fish named Lenny.

  Lenny was white as a turnip and motionless—like he was buried in wet sand from the neck down. A collective groan from the crowd, and then everybody, including Rosa, moved away from him without saying a word.

  4

  DELTA-STRIKE

  THE AUDI WAS MOSTLY quiet during the hop across the river back to Omaha. I felt sorry for Lenny, but I also knew that nothing short of cash could repair the fiscal carnage wrought by Lady Luck and her nymphet daughter Charlize. Lenny was already into me for fifteen hundred dollars, money I’d see in six months if he found a job right away, and I had interest running on my own debts. We took him back to his place in the Old Market, and I managed to console him along the way without once mentioning money.

  We dropped him at his front door—a good thing, too, because he’d shot another single malt on his way out of the casino and was in no shape to drive. He even lit a cigarette in the back of the car without asking Miranda’s permission, but she just clenched her jaw and held her tongue. He asked me if I wanted one and smirked when I said no, because he knew why—so Miranda wouldn’t find out about those certain periods of my life when I smoke.

  He seemed steady when he climbed out of the car, but there was a hint of muzzy in his voice.

  “I’d offer you a ride,” he said, “but I figure you’d rather have Miranda drive you back to your place, even if I were sober.”

  He was drunk enough to say what we all knew. Lately she’d been letting me chase her more than she let him. Not that it ever led to anything more than occasionally smashing mouths and breathing heavy. My used Explorer was in the shop, and I was looking forward to some quality time alone with Miranda on the way back to my place—I could ask her in for a drink, and she could say no.

  “I’ll give you the lowdown on Heartland before you get too far into it,” said Lenny over his shoulder, “unless you want to tell him, Miranda?”

  Lenny looked more deranged than usual, and Miranda worried me with one of her looks, like I was supposed to crawl out of the car and carry Lenny on my back out to Father Flanagan’s Boys-town. He ain’t heavy, Father. He ain’t crazy, either. He’s my brother!

  “Lenny, you’re okay, right?” she called after him.

  “I scorn pain,” Lenny said. “I laugh at debts. Either they’ll go away, or I will.”

  He opened the door to his building and staggered over the threshold, while we tried to decipher that one.

  Miranda said good-bye with a tap on her horn and wheeled the Audi out onto Dodge Street. She opened the windows and the sunroof, even though it was December, and headed west, trying to shoo the cigarette smoke out of her car with her gloved hand.

/>   “What’s with Heartland?” I asked.

  I watched the moon glow on her skin, the frigid night wind strewing her hair against the headrest, her reindeer eyes lambent with the reflected glow of minimalls, billboards, Christmas lights, and fast food restaurants, her upper lip flexing like Cupid’s Bow as she worked over the chewing the gum I’d given her.

  “You know Lenny,” she said. “He’s got more angles than a rhombohedron. I’ll let him explain it to you.”

  She turned up the volume on the CD player, and I watched her moving with the bass of the Beta Band. She knew what I was thinking about, and she didn’t mind talking about it. To her, it was our problem and nobody’s fault, a result of mismatched neurochemical disorders, incompatible lusts and phobias, even though I hoped that we might someday blend them carefully to produce some intriguing hybrid fetishes.

  By the time she pulled up in front of my place I was transitioning from drunk to sleepy, until she put it in park and looked at me like she might share those lips.

  “You wanna come up?”

  “I shouldn’t,” she said, but she leaned closer to me, and let me kiss her.

  I went easy, hoping I could make it last, but this time her lips opened first, and I could feel heat coming off of her in perfumed waves. Pretty soon we were going at it. I went after her with both hands, feeling her up through her goose down vest, and looking for a way in.

  I had to watch my hands. I even had a dream about it once. We were on her leather couch, and she had all of her clothes off. I was armless, and she let me devour every part of her with my lips and tongue. The dream ended when she said, “See? Now you can do whatever you want because you don’t have any hands.”

  I even meant to try it next time in the real world. See what would happen if I never touched her with my hands and instead just licked her ear, her neck, the scar in the hollow of her throat, her sternum, keep probing lower. You never know what dreams mean.

  The wine made me forget that plan. I got my hands inside the vest and got a hold of her breasts. For a second, I thought this was the night, because she didn’t pull back right away. I was jazzed and ready to start my whole life over with her, right there on the leather seats. But when I went around back to undo her bra, the fever broke. She disengaged and rearranged her clothes.

  She looked on the verge of tears, so I apologized, but she shook her head and said it wasn’t my fault. No shit, it was her fault, otherwise we’d be doing it right now on the center console. No sense arguing with her. Like any common scammer who tried to sneak a bogus claim past her, I was well aware that Miranda knew twenty different seductive and compelling ways to say no.

  “I’m worried about what Lenny said,” she mumbled.

  “He’s fine,” I said. “No, he’s not fine. He’s fucked up.”

  “Let’s both check on him,” she said. “Make sure he’s okay. You should stop him before he gets himself so messed up like that.”

  “Stop him? He’s a force majeure straight out of our coverage exceptions. Hurricane Lenny. He’s okay, but I’ll call him to make sure.”

  She kissed her fingertip and touched it to my lips.

  “Thanks. I’ll call him, too,” she said.

  I climbed out. She wiped her finger off on the custom leather seat and drove away.

  I got the mail out of my box and trudged up to 202B, the enigma of Miranda playing over and over in my head.

  Some of the biggest lies get told with nobody saying a word. She wasn’t that way. She seemed genuinely conflicted about sex, or sex with me—I had to find out which. If she was involved with someone else, she didn’t talk about him. Or was it a her? That might mean that she couldn’t talk about it, for whatever reason. I once chased a woman all over town for months only to find out she was in love with a married man and sworn to vows of absolute secrecy. Worse, she intended to be faithful to the faithless rat.

  Lenny’s theory was that Miranda’s apparent chastity was a Catholic thing, even though he and I had both been raised that way, and we’d dated lots of good Catholic girls for whom sex and piety coexisted in harmony. If religion was her problem it was an affliction she didn’t discuss much. Unlike Lenny and me, she still went to church every Sunday, and every morning during Lent and Advent. Lenny for one claimed that she was one of those controlled nymphomaniacs we used to hear about in college: A woman who was saving a thousand and one nights of raging lust for one man, her husband.

  Maybe, but I suspected that she had other bugs in her ant farm. Somebody might have abused her or hurt her. She told me that her mom was one of those sexually liberated types who belabored the specifics in graphic detail before Miranda and her sister Annette had even had their first periods; gave them both night terrors with anatomically correct images and drawings from Our Bodies, Ourselves. Miranda and Annette had stayed up late giggling and grossing each other out by whispering, “Then the man puts his erect penis inside the woman’s vagina.” “Ewwwww! Stop it!” Miranda said it had been disgusting enough to put two prepubescent girls off their feed for a day or two, but she was laughing when she told me about it.

  She’d worked in Minneapolis for a few years and still visited there off and on, so maybe she was involved with somebody up there?

  I threw my shit in a chair and went to get four aspirin and a quart of bottled water to ward off the effects of mixing liquor. Before I got the aspirin down, the NetPhone beeped and my big IBM flat panel came out of sleep mode.

  It was Lenny. Had to be full manic by now if he wanted to play Delta-Strike after losing five grand. He had a new map loaded called Storm Alley, and he was taking the terrorist role. His name was SnowKiller, and he was packing a Colt M4 A1 carbine with silencer and C4 explosives. He was inside an abandoned warehouse complex with hostages and a VIP.

  “Dirk, are you there?” asked Lenny’s tinny, NetPhone voice. “If you are, I got a VIP peeing in her leopard-skin panties because she knows you’re a pussy and can’t save her.”

  I grabbed the mouse and said, “SnowKiller, everybody knows you got substance abuse problems. You’re too fucked up to take on a Navy Seal.”

  I grabbed the mouse and pulled up my favorite skin, Dirk Stone, Seal Team 6. I had exactly twenty thousand dollars and 6.5 minutes to plan and execute a siege, kill Lenny, and rescue the VIP. Delta-Strike is money-driven: A thousand-dollar fine for each wound incurred or hostage accidentally killed. Head shots are fatal, game over, unless you’re part of a clan, in which case a head shot turns you into a spectator.

  I didn’t scrimp on firepower, because I’ve been caught far from home too many times with nothing but melee weapons. I bought a Kevlar vest, two concussion grenades (flash bangs), and a Benelli M3 Super 90 shotgun. I moved out into the alley where rescue and police vehicles had secured the perimeter. I got direct sound-board audio on the helicopter blades whomping overhead, and my screen pulsated with red strobes coming off the emergency vehicles.

  “I’ve got women and children tied up in a meat locker in here, Dirk,” said Lenny. “I’ve got a VIP, too. Say hello to the voluptuous international fashion model and actress, Renata Vixen.”

  Renata screamed, begging me to save her, and Lenny laughed. I heard fabric ripping and missy gasps of terror from Renata, as she fought off Lenny’s brutish advances somewhere inside the warehouse.

  “I’m tearing Renata’s flimsy clothes off, Dirk,” said Lenny. “First I’m gonna splatter your giblets all over the wall, then I’m gonna despoil Renata on a butcher’s block out on the slaughterhouse floor. Come and save her if you can, you pussy.”

  Lenny was always gabby, and he loved using human shields. But he was also wasted on X and booze. I grabbed the Benelli because it’s great in close quarters, and the shape Lenny was in, he wouldn’t know I was in the environment until I was pointing it at the back of his head.

  He said he was in the warehouse meat locker with Renata and the two kids, so I figured he was really down at the loading dock. I busted in the overhead door on one
of the bays, tossed a flash bang in to blind him, then killed him with a head shot before he even saw me.

  Renata swooned and told me I was her hero. She was wearing a leopard-skin halter, a black leather miniskirt, sheer black nylons, and black stilettos. As usual, the close brush with violent death had a paradoxical effect on her libido. She told me to meet her upstairs in the tankage loft, so she could express her profound gratitude to me in a special, intimate way.

  “Hey, Lenny!” I hollered. “Not bad for a pussy, huh?”

  I clicked on Renata’s halter and she peeled it off for me. I wouldn’t mind spending some time with those, but I planned to waste Lenny one more time first. I reloaded the environment and put myself back out in alley, where I spent my winnings on an M249 Para light machine gun for the next round.

  The NetPhone hissed. Nothing but silence.

  “Lenny?”

  I figured he’d gone to stealth and white noise, probably planning to pop the bolts on the fire exit and waste me with the Colt before I knew he was playing again. So I charged the warehouse and came in through a window off the fire escape, figuring I’d cap Lenny before he could look up.

  But faster than Lenny, drunk or sober, SnowKiller met me on the catwalk with a Mac-10. I couldn’t get a clear shot at him, because he had two kids and Renata tied to him as human shields.

  SnowKiller was a pure low-ping bastard, twice as fast as Lenny on a good day. He wheeled on me and took me out with four head shots before I could move my finger on the trigger.