by Diane Bator
Dan arrived at my office just before seven on Wednesday night.
"What's that?" I asked, directing my question at the plastic contraption he carried under his arm.
"It's a shoe. I'm sure you've seen one before but never out of context like this."
He placed it on the coffee table in the lobby. The device was about the size of a small shoe box, with a hollow back and an opening on the front. Dan took out a small bag filled with decks of playing cards and began shuffling them on top of the table. Then he arranged them into a neat pile and placed them, facing backwards, into the back of the shoe.
"I'll be the dealer," he said, his face looking mischievous.
I knelt down next to the coffee table and began to concentrate. He dealt out five dummy hands of two cards each, all face up, and then dealt the dealer's hand, which was one up and one down.
I scanned the cards as quickly as possible and added up the total. "Plus two?" I asked hopefully.
He shrugged. "Three. Try again." He whisked up all the cards and then dealt another spread of hands. My mind whirred, trying to keep up.
"It's going to be this fast in the casino," he said not very reassuringly.
"Plus one," I whispered.
"Right! Very good."
We continued this exercise for a solid half hour. Usually, I was right or within one, but I whiffed a few completely. I couldn't tell if he was impressed or frustrated.
"Okay," he said. "Now we'll add real play to the mix. You're going to play your hand and keep track of the count. You memorized basic strategy?"
Basic strategy was the well-established method of playing blackjack to get the highest advantage against the house. Most tourists played something close to it with leaks here and there which gave the house an even greater edge.
"I think I've got it," I said. "Except, I sometimes forget when to split and double down."
He smiled knowingly and then gave me a little rhyme to help remember. It was lame, but it was the kind of thing I'd always relied on in school to memorize things.
"Let's go," he said, dealing the cards out of the shoe in a practiced blur. I had gotten a fifteen against the dealer's eight.
"Hit," I muttered.
"Good," he said, dealing out a bust card for me and dummy cards for all the others. I had to remember to keep watch of all their hands to keep the running count. He wound up with a twenty and seemed to take some kind of bizarre pleasure in beating the other invisible players.
An hour flew by. I was making a few mistakes here and there, but on the whole, I was getting into the groove of it.
"So what's the count?" he asked, again. We were on at least our twentieth deal using eight decks.
"Minus eleven." It came out a little more confidently than I actually felt.
"Very good, Raven." He straightened up in his chair and began rubbing his lower back. "I think you're going to do just fine."
I sighed, mentally exhausted. I couldn't remember the last time my mind had been whirring like that for a full hour. It had required calling on parts of brain matter that had long since been abandoned, but I was enjoying a strange sense of accomplishment.
"Does it get any easier?" I asked.
"You bet it does. Once you get good at it, it's impossible not to count the cards, even if you're just playing for fun. Second nature." He was pushing all the cards together on the table and arranging them in the shoe.
I chuckled, recalling an ancient memory. "My plastic surgeon said the same thing. Well, kind of."
Dan stopped arranging the cards and flashed me a puzzled look.
I stood up. "He said once you start rearranging people's body parts, you can never appreciate beauty again. You're always evaluating people. Do they need a smaller nose, bigger boobs, fuller lips, a rounder ass? He said it's exhausting."
I looked down to see Dan giving me the once-over, no doubt trying to guess what kinds of work I'd had done. Dr. Ruiz had given me the best rack money could buy, but apart from that, I was 100% Raven.
"I'm all natural," I said, "except for the…obvious." He was staring at my chest.
Dan stood up, his chubby cheeks flushed with pink. "Of course," he said, coughing nervously. "None of my business."
"So when do I start?" I asked. My phone had been unusually slow all week, so I was eager to get cracking.
"First, we'll try you out in a real casino under battle conditions," he said, happy to change the subject away from plastic surgery.
"Battle conditions?" I asked.
He smiled. "We're a little melodramatic, I admit. But when you're being spied on by a dozen cameras and security guards, it feels a little like battle."
"Got it," I said.
"I've got to get home tonight, or my wife will think I've got a girlfriend. I'm already kind of nervous about that, actually." He coughed again.
"About what?"
"When she sees you, she's going to flip out. Let's just put it that way." He spread his hands apologetically. "I mean, you look like…uh, who's that actress?" He started snapping his fingers impatiently, the name on the tip of his tongue.
"Julia Roberts?" I asked hopefully.
He smiled. "No. Lucy Lawless. That's it."
"Xena, the Warrior Princess?"
"You could be her sister," he said.
"I'll take that as a compliment. But why would your wife ever have to see me?"
He smiled. "She's on the team."
"Ahh."
"In fact, she's kind of the boss." He smiled sheepishly. "Anyway," he said. "Does tomorrow work for you?"
I nodded, and we agreed to meet in the afternoon at Bally's, a big old casino right on the Strip, about a half mile from my condo.
After we parted ways, I closed up the office, headed out into the cool October night, and then drove myself down to Cougar's, a gentlemen's club—and I use the term loosely—where I made most of my money. Opening up a private detective shop was my ticket out of the skin business, and at the moment, I had one high heel out the door. But the money was still too good to walk away entirely, and (I told myself) I needed to build up a stash of money for when I finally cut the cord and became an ex-stripper.
Wednesday nights were a hit-or-miss proposition. I definitely still went in to work on Thursdays and the weekend because that's where the most money was. But Wednesdays were weird. Half of Las Vegas revolves around the convention business, and I was no different. Some Wednesdays were duds, while others, like tonight, would no doubt see a flurry of activity from not one but two technology conventions in town for the week. Technology meant men, twenty and thirtysomething men, and not surprisingly, they wanted to experience the full panoply of entertainments Vegas had to offer.
I wasn't disappointed. Arriving just after nine, I had to share a locker with someone named Darcy, a new dancer I'd never met. Darcy had the most amazing fingernails I'd ever seen—iridescent pink with tiny little red hearts inscribed in the middle. She didn't know who I was either. Didn't know that seven or eight years ago, my picture had been plastered all around town on thirty-foot billboards and that men lined up to get a five-minute lap dance from me. But that was the nature of the beast. When you rely on looks and nothing else, it's a here-today-gone-tomorrow kind of business, and I was fine with that. Or so I told myself.
None of my regular customers were in the club that night. Or if they were, they weren't seeking me out. But I had managed to catch the eye of an entire table of app developers from Sweden, and I ended up giving private dances for half the table. Apparently, I looked enough like a famous Swedish reality-TV star that the guys opened their wallets more than I would have expected. They proved to be a very well-behaved bunch, all things considered, and I managed to make enough money from them to rationalize quitting early for the night, by which I meant two thirty.
The next day had me meeting up with Dan, my client, at Bally's. On principle, I should have suggested a different location. You see, I'm a member of a fledgling group of eccentric locals call
ed the Apostrophe Society, and it's our mission to get Caesars Entertainment Corporation to add apostrophes to the names of Caesars Palace and Ballys, both of which it owns. To us, the giant illuminated signs on the casinos are an affront, a grammatically incorrect scar on the otherwise beautiful Las Vegas skyline. The truth was, I had only been to one Apostrophe Society meeting, which had proven to be little more than an excuse for a bunch of weirdos to get together and drink. I did enough drinking with weirdos already, so I had steered clear of them since then. But still, I had my principles.
I was waiting near the blackjack tables when a complete stranger tapped me on the shoulder. He had a full build, ruddy beard, dark glasses, and a camouflage John Deere hat.
"Yes?" I asked hesitantly.
He was smiling. "Ready to go?"
I crunched up my face, confused.
"It's me. Dan." He was smiling now.
I chuckled, finally seeing behind the disguise. "I get it now. Nice beard. Is that really necessary?"
"Heck yeah it is," he said. "I'm not even going to play blackjack, either. But I'm banned from every casino on the Strip, so I have to do this nonsense every time I come."
I shrugged. "Seems like a lot of effort."
"Tell me about it. But it pays off." He gestured with his hand. "Let's go find a table."
The two of us made a leisurely circuit around the casino floor. Bally's had two banks of blackjack tables, for a total of twenty-four, but in the middle of the afternoon, only half were in use. Most of them had table minimums of ten dollars, with a couple at twenty-five. Dan was subtly checking out the dealers.
"It's not what you'd think," he murmured. "These young ones are the most gung ho about card counting." He was looking at a twentysomething Asian woman who seemed to have a permanent frown etched on her face. "The old guard, that's what you want. Some guy who's been dealing for twenty years. In the union. Doesn't care too much—just wants to get through his shift."
I nodded, looking around. "How about that guy?" I asked, glancing two tables down the line.
"He's perfect. And the table looks good too. Not too crowded but not empty either," Dan said.
"Why does that matter?" I asked.
"You can't play alone because when you change bets, it'll be obvious. So it's good to have some cover. And when other people increase their bets, you can just pretend you're playing along."
"Okay, I think I'm ready," I lied. My heart was pounding for some reason. It was only blackjack, I told myself, a game I'd played hundreds of times. I knew how to count and how to play basic strategy, so why was my nervous system acting like I was about to storm Omaha Beach on D-day?
"You got the money?" he asked.
I patted my pocket where ten crisp hundreds were folded neatly.
"Then get in there, soldier! I'll be off by those slots over there, watching." He patted me affectionately on the shoulder and turned away.
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