I opened my mouth to share my insight with Eugene. I closed it before the words escaped. Licensed Heroes really ought not go around talking about erections. It was undignified. I understood that instinctively even though the subject had not come up in my Heroic training. “Come up.” Good Lord above—I should have been fully focused on looking for homicidal supervillains, and I was instead nervously distracting myself with penis puns. I really did need a drink to settle my nerves.
“It ever occur to you a penis pun both sounds like a penis pump and is equally likely to make your partner groan?” I asked Eugene.
“What?” he said, startled.
“Never mind,” I said. Wow. I had sunk so low I was both thinking and talking about penis pumps. I really did need that drink.
I shut the vehicle’s engine off. I was carrying my nine millimeter Remington in a hip holster. I knew I would not be allowed to bring it into the casino. There had been a shooting at the Golden Horseshoe a year or so before. Since then metal detectors had been set up at the casino entrances to check for firearms. I hesitated before getting out of the SUV. I thought about smuggling the gun in as I had at the museum days before. Unlike Ginny, Eugene did not carry a purse, but I was confident I could find another way to get the gun into the casino that did not involve purse smuggling. The conversation I had had with Ginny about following the rules and setting an example still rang in my mind, though.
I pulled the hip holster containing my gun off my belt. I leaned over to put the gun into the glove compartment. I locked the compartment. I sat back up and looked at Eugene.
“At the risk of sounding like a broken record,” I said, “going into a crowded public place unarmed when you know a Metahuman is targeting you is a terrible idea. For that matter, going into a public place armed to the teeth when a Meta is targeting you is not such a hot idea, either.”
Eugene grinned at me again.
“I think you might have mentioned something along those lines before,” he said. “I’m willing to risk it. For one thing, I have you with me to protect me. You’ve proven yourself to be more than capable. For another thing, the casino has more security and cameras than the prison I was in. I’ll probably be safer there than if I had stayed at home. Third, if it turns out one of us is in need of a weapon, don’t forget I have the power to conjure one if I need to. Though I haven’t used my power in years because I’m not legally allowed to, that doesn’t mean I won’t use it if my life depends on it. I’m sure the cops and the Heroes’ Guild would understand.”
We got out of the car. I still was not mollified. The comforting weight I usually felt at my side due to my gun was gone. I felt like I was walking in public naked. Actually, being naked would have been better than being clothed and unarmed. At least if I were naked, there was a good chance I would get arrested for indecent exposure and spend the night in a nice, safe jail cell. Plus, if I were naked, it would be easier to pee on an approaching supervillain. It might not prevent her from killing me and Eugene, but at least it might slow her down. It would me. Not too many people outside of certain fetish communities enjoyed being urinated on. Besides, though I was not looking for a superhero code name, Golden Shower was not a bad one.
We made it through the parking garage and down the elevator to the ground floor without incident. As far as I could tell, no one I saw paid us the slightest bit of attention. I could not fight the foreboding that weighed down increasingly on me, though. I told myself I was being a worry wart. I told myself Eugene was right about the casino being a very secure place with a state of the art surveillance system. I told myself this casino would be the last place an assassin would try to make her move in. I told myself everything would be just fine. Telling myself those things did not make me feel better. They only made me worry I was talking to myself too much. Supervillains, penis pumps and puns, feeling naked, golden showers, and now an emerging personality disorder. It was always something.
There was a short line at the main entrance to the casino due to people having to go through the metal detector single file. A large sign mounted next to the casino’s glass and chrome doors read: “No admittance under the age of 21. No firearms or other weapons. No smoking.”
In short order after waiting a bit in line, Eugene and I walked through the metal detectors after emptying our pockets of metal such as change and keys. The security guards looked like they were too sharp to let me sneak into the casino with a sword clenched between my teeth like an oversized metal toothpick. That was a shame. Since I couldn’t bring a gun in, a sword had been my backup plan.
“I’m old enough to remember a time when a naked toddler could walk into a casino smoking an unfiltered cigarette and armed with an Uzi like a free and proud American,” I said to one of the casino employees manning the metal detectors. He looked to be around my age. He wore a grey and black security guard uniform. “My how times have changed.”
The burly man nodded with a slight smile.
“It makes you wonder what the country is coming to,” he agreed.
Unlike me, the man and his fellow identically dressed security guards were armed. A large caliber black gun rested on the man’s right side in a holster. A pang of gun envy ran through me as I looked at the big guard. Sigmund Freud would make much of that. If Freud were alive, I would tell that filthy-minded charlatan that sometimes gun envy was simply gun envy.
The security guard seemed friendly. I wondered if he would let me borrow his gun if I said “pretty please, with sugar and a cherry on top.” If he knew I had mental conversations with dead psychiatrists, he would probably say no out of fear I was unstable. Who was I kidding? He would probably say no regardless. Stingy, gun-hoarding bastard.
A cacophony of lights and sounds assaulted my ears as Eugene and I made our way across the crowded casino floor. Casinos were the streetwalkers of big businesses—they did not believe in subtlety. In light of how scantily clad the cocktail waitresses were, lack of subtlety was not the only thing the casino had in common with streetwalkers. I had heard the casino had a policy of not hiring a waitress—and yes, they were all waitresses, no men allowed—unless she had a face like Helen of Troy and the measurements of Marilyn Monroe. The casino had been sued once for sex and appearance discrimination because of its hiring practices, but the case had gotten dismissed on a technicality. It was my understanding the true technicality was the fact the casino had paid a few of its waitresses to sleep with the presiding judge before he made his ruling. But, perhaps I did the casino and the judge an injustice by being too cynical. Dealing with criminal Metahumans, the most recent of whom had tried to run me and my client over, tended to have that effect. Call me crazy.
From all of the flashing lights and computerized voices excitedly announcing winners, you would think everyone on the crowded casino floor was a winner. That was the impression the casino wanted to give you. No machine flashed and no artificial voice shrieked in excitement when people gambled away their last dollar. Those people were forced to slink away without fanfare.
There were over forty-three hundred slot machines and electronic table games in the casino, and almost two hundred live table games including blackjack, roulette, craps, baccarat, and others. Though not every game and table were occupied, most of them were. Business clearly was booming.
“You’re a stockbroker,” I said to Eugene as we threaded our way toward the poker room, located on the other side of the building from the entrance we had come in. I was still trying to watch everyone. It was hard to do with only two eyes without spinning around like a top. “Think I should invest some money in casino stock?”
“There are worse investments,” Eugene said. “After all, the cliché ‘the house always wins’ is a cliché for a reason.” Eugene gestured at the surrounded gamblers vaguely. “Everything on the casino floor is a sucker’s game, with the odds tilted in favor of the casino. Sure, you might win something every now and then. But over time, the casino will come out ahead. It’s as inevitable as taxes
and as certain as death. You’ll never catch me playing anything out here. I only play poker. Although the casino takes a small percentage of each pot, at least there I’m playing against other people who have the exact same chance of winning and losing I do. It’s an equal playing field where skill wins out in the end, unlike in the rest of the casino.”
“I agree,” I said. “Poker is the only kind of gambling I ever do too. I played semi-professionally for a while when I was still fighting MMA. Before I stood for the Trials and became a licensed Hero.”
“You did?” Eugene said, looking and sounding surprised. “I have a hard time picturing you sitting still at a table day after day hunched over cards. Too sedentary. And, no offense, but poker is a thinking man’s game. You seem like more of a man of action.”
I nodded, still looking around. No one seemed to be paying us an unusual amount of attention.
“I’m smarter than I look,” I said. “Just barely maybe, but still smarter.” The fact I was trying to protect someone by bringing him into a casino full of thousands of strangers made me question if I really was smarter than I looked. I wished for the umpteenth time I had put my foot down with Eugene over this foolhardy excursion.
I could not shake the foreboding, a feeling of impending doom. I hoped the feeling was wrong. I had gotten such a feeling before, more times than I could remember.
I knew it rarely was.
CHAPTER 11
A professional poker player once said that poker, properly played, consisted of hours of boredom punctuated by moments of sheer terror. The same could be said of being a Hero.
I was in the hours of boredom portion of being a Hero. Eugene was in the high stakes area of the poker room, playing $50/$100 no-limit Texas hold ‘em at a table with eight other players. I alternated between sitting and standing near him, alert to any danger while keeping half an eye on the game and how Eugene was doing. If I had better business sense and a worse moral sense, I would have also kept an eye open for an opportunity to slip into my pocket some of the high value chips the players in the high stakes area were tossing around like they were pennies. As I watched, dollar amounts average people would have been proud to call their yearly incomes passed back and forth among the high stakes players in seconds without them batting an eye or breaking a sweat. Though they seemed completely unfazed by it all, watching that kind of money changing hands so rapidly made me vaguely nervous even though the money was not mine. It reminded me of what F. Scott Fitzgerald said: the rich are different from you and me. Yeah, they have a lot more money. And, the people in the high stakes area were not afraid to lose it.
The high stakes area only contained eight tables. It was on the far end of the fifty-five table poker room, separated from the masses in the rest of the large rectangular room by a waist-high, gold-plated railing. I normally was a part of the masses, but since I was with Eugene, I was allowed to hang out in an area my net worth would not permit me to if I were there by myself. In light of the amounts of money that were being won and lost in the high stakes area, it would not have surprised me if the railing was actually made of gold as opposed to being merely gold in color. I spent some of the time I was bored daydreaming about ripping it up and smuggling it out under my jacket. But, I could not figure out how to do it without being spotted. There were a multitude of domed security cameras mounted in the room’s high ceiling that looked like flies’ eyes. There were also armed security guards posted in the high stakes area. I would have to give stealing the railing further thought later. If real, I could retire on the gold that railing contained. It was good to have a retirement plan. Relying on a 401(k) was too dull. A Hero’s retirement plan really ought to involve more pizzazz.
The $50/$100 I mentioned earlier referred to the stakes of the game Eugene sat in. The minimum buy-in at the table was ten thousand. Eugene had bought in for twenty thousand. I really should have charged him more to protect him.
Having played semi-professionally, I often watched and enjoyed poker being played on television. But, on televised poker, either sensors embedded in the cards or cameras under the table informed the viewer what everyone held. The television viewer could therefore play along at home, rooting for the players to raise or fold. Watching people play poker live when you could not see their cards, though? I would say that was like watching paint dry, but that would be an insult to drying paint.
To keep myself from falling asleep, I practiced a new application of my powers I had started toying with shortly before Clara Barton died. Since such a large percentage of the human body was water, my powers allowed me to sense things like blood pressure, someone’s pulse, and the rate at which they were sweating. Lie detector machines did the same thing to determine if someone was lying. The principle behind them was that your body reacted one way when you were telling the truth, and another way when you were lying. So, I had recently been using my powers as a method to determine if someone was lying. Since a poker bluff was a form of lying—you were pretending your hand was strong when it was actually weak—standing around watching poker seemed like a golden opportunity to hone my new skill. Once I had observed the people at Eugene’s table long enough to determine the baseline for their bodies’ reactions, I found I could predict with uncanny accuracy whether the people at Eugene’s table were lying or telling the truth about the strength of their hands. I was Truman Lord, the Human Polygraph. Cheating spouses had best beware. I might never be able to ethically play poker again. It would be like taking candy from a baby.
I stood from my seat behind Eugene. I stretched, feeling my joints pop. We had been here for hours. There had not been the slightest hint of any potential danger to Eugene. I was tired of practicing my lie detecting skills and was bored to death. But, being bored to death was better than being shot to death by a Metahuman. Every cloud had its silver lining.
I looked out to survey the poker room yet again. That was easy enough to do as the high stakes area was on a large dais that was a foot or so higher than the rest of the room. The gold railing and the dais separating the high stakes area from the rest of the room said loudly, clearly, and undemocratically, “That part is for you; this part is for us.” Looking out, I felt like Marie Antoinette surveying a mob. It was weird because normally I was a part of the mob being told to eat cake.
Like the rest of the casino, the poker room was packed, and almost every seat at every table was filled. High definition television monitors were imbedded into the brightly colored walls. A few displayed a list of the people who were waiting for a seat to open up at a poker table; most were tuned to various sporting events from around the world. The televisions were all on mute, so the only sounds in the cavernous room came from the players themselves and the casino employees. Players talked, laughed, and cursed. Dealers yelled out for floor managers. Masseuses massaged the stress out of players, or tried to. Waitresses who looked like they had stepped out of the pages of Playboy flitted about in their black and white tight dresses from player to player and from tip to tip like bees flying from flower to flower. They handed out alcohol like it was water. Drinks in the casino were free. The casino wanted to encourage the bad decision-making and reckless spending that went hand-in-hand with alcohol. My mouth watered at the thought of fortifying myself with a drink. The headache I had been suffering from the last few days had not gone away. I had not had a drink since Eugene hired me. I very badly wanted one, especially since I had a bird’s-eye view of the people in the poker room drinking like fish. I thought a drink would settle my nerves and dilute the irrational feeling of foreboding I still had not been able to shake. Surely a drink or two wouldn’t hurt.
I shook my head, trying to shake loose the though. I needed to tune out my body’s cravings for a drink. I tried to focus on something else. I continued my survey of the room. About a dozen people were clustered on the outside of the railing surrounding the high stakes area, watching the action they no doubt could not afford to play in. Such onlookers were so common, poker had a term
for them: railbirds. Railbird was not a half-bad name for a superhero. “Fear my locomotive-like strength or I’ll peck you to death! Caw!!!” might be his catchphrase.
On second thought, that was a terrible superhero name and worse catchphrase. Lack of a drink was affecting my creativity. A shockingly high number of people already thought I was not funny. I feared if I did not get a drink soon, I would open my mouth and prove those haters correct.
I shook my head vigorously again, clearing it of thoughts of lame catchphrases if not of thoughts of a drink.
I resumed looking at the railbirds. Most of them were not noteworthy. No one held a sign reading “Danger: Metahuman Assassin.” It would be most helpful if Metahuman assassins were polite enough to hold such signs. Sneaky bastards.
A few of the railbirds were noteworthy. A woman caught my eye. I realized with a sudden start I recognized her. I did not know from where. My heart started to race. Was she a threat? She was a light-skinned Indian woman with hazel eyes and raven black hair. She was dressed in a red outfit that hugged her slim but curvy body like it was trying to smother her to death. Actually, to say it was a dress was a bit of an overstatement: it was more of a cross between a dress and a particularly large postage stamp. The woman’s nipples and genitals were not visible, but just barely. Her towering heels matched the color of her dress. Walking in those shoes must have taken the balance of a gymnast. Shoes like that were not really designed to be walked in anyway. They were designed to be looked at, and to lengthen the legs and stick out of the butt of the wearer so they would be looked at too.
I could not figure out where I knew the woman from. Though she appeared to be about as dangerous as a model on a catwalk, looks can be deceiving. I regretted not smuggling my gun in. The woman I recognized was standing next to another woman I did not. Her companion, a blonde white woman, was similarly attired, though in black instead of red.
Superhero Detective Series (Book 3): Killshot Page 8