She appeared to grit her teeth.
“It’s like ancient Rome. There’s the Temple of Archives where a wise old avatar locates your document files. And the Amusement Coliseum where the games are kept, and the Factory where the applications and control panels are kept. Oh, and there’s the Library, and the Art Museum, but that’s only the beginning. All around, there’re the Net-bookmarked locations to fly to. . . .”
“You’re attracting attention. Stop,” the girl who looked like Joya said.
“I just want to tell you this one thing, but it’s complicated. See, the bookmarked locations are all freed from the Windows metaphor and become underwater cities and planets and wonderful cities on vast plains. I was already designing some of these permanent locations. Imagine the eBay marketplace, the camels bringing in their loads, the avatars jostling up against each other and bidding—and it would have been cheap for users—that was the real beauty of it.”
“I said, leave me alone,” she said, and for the first time, he realized she was frightened. Of him? Or someone else?
He looked around, blinking. “I’m sorry,” he said.
“Forget it. Just—”
“My company went bankrupt.”
She played like the hounds were behind her and would eat her up if she didn’t play, play, and play some more.
“I lost everything. I’m a complete and total failure.”
“You’re drunk.” The frown deepened. She looked around nervously, then turned to face him long enough to say, “Why don’t you go home and sober up?”
“It’s just that—and I will definitely not bother you after this—I just had to tell you—you look just like someone I am in love with, someone who isn’t even real—isn’t that stupid! Actually, it’s one of the avatars I was explaining to you about!” He couldn’t stop himself now, he started roaring with laughter and dropped his glass and watched the foaming liquid pour out of it while the glass bounced harmlessly onto the red carpet, soaked into the rug like blood, his blood, so soon to come.
She straightened her shoulder strap and started to slide off the stool.
“No, really, don’t go, I’ll shut up. I’m done. I am really, well and truly done.” He stopped, which left his mouth just hanging there. He reached into his pocket and found it empty.
He had no more money. There was no reprieve.
He felt for the Glock. Still there. Cold, hard, not a dream. His punishment. A final spiraling out and away, away from his contemptible downfall, the pain of his parents, the destruction of his family.
He looked up but his glasses needed another rub. The girl was still sitting there.
She made a sound, a mewing sort of sound. She was staring at her screen bug-eyed, absolutely motionless.
Then he watched as she spread her arms and fell backward, and if he hadn’t been there to catch her she would have fallen right off the stool and maybe cracked a vertebra. Was she having a heart attack? He wasn’t too sure about his CPR, how many breaths per minute was it? But fortunately, her eyes were wide open. She was conscious and breathing. Lifting her hand limply, she pointed up at the video screen of her slot machine.
Kenny’s blurry eyes followed her hand—
And saw the three banks.
Three banks, lined up precisely right across the pay line. Right down the middle. Little brown banks with little white pillars.
They were in a frozen universe. She was trying to draw a breath—he could see the tendons in her closed throat, and he made the observation in a sludgelike way. He held her like that, right arm supporting her warm back so she didn’t fall off the stool, left hand trying to push up his specs and look again.
Three banks. Three credits in.
The thought formed at last.
She had hit the jackpot.
At that moment, a light on top of the machine began to twirl and emit shattering yelps, irritating and mindnumbingly piercing like a fire alarm.
He pushed the girl back up on the chair.
“Oh, my God!” she said. Then she said it again. He recognized something in her voice. Fear.
The world descended into chaos as the first people came running.
“Jackpot! Jackpot!” he heard as he was poked and crowded from behind. The bells rang and rang, attacking his ears and shredding his sanity. He was still supporting her back, his fingers sticky against her sweater. She steadied herself and stood up. He looked at the machine again. The three banks were still there. None of them had slipped off the line.
Somebody had a flash camera and the screech of many voices formed into one mighty roar in the stale air. There were shrieking notes and bellowing notes, and he had to stand up too or be suffocated by the people who were goggling at the monitor with its three banks like the Israelites goggling at Moses’ tablets. All the while the machine caterwauled as if it were crying for help.
Kenny looked up at the numbers which a moment before had been streaming by on the display board above the bank of machines. They had stopped moving. She had stopped the great machine. It seemed impossible, but she had won whatever number was up there.
Yes, it had stopped. Stopped at a long series of numbers which he struggled to comprehend. Seven-seven-six-seven-three-three-nine-point-six-four.
Seven million, seven hundred sixty-seven thousand, three hundred thirty-nine dollars and sixty-four cents.
She had won that.
“You hit!” Kenny yelled.
She raised a hand to her forehead and closed her eyes. “I’ve got to go,” she said. “I can’t do this.” She shouldered away a man leering close to her and wedged herself into the crowd. She pushed hard. In a moment she would be gone forever.
She was leaving! Without thinking, Kenny grabbed her.
“Let go!” She tried to wriggle away but many hands touched her now, wanting to commune with her magic. Her eyes hunted back and forth through the crowd.
Two men materialized beside her, accompanied by Kenny’s waitress. Behind these people, two more men in Prize’s security uniforms. Behind them, pushing and shoving, tourists and change people and locals. The wheelchair girl was back. She studied Joya, the boyfriend’s hand on her shoulder. The suited guys in front were grunting from the effort of getting through the crowd, which was now celebrating like the millennium was happening all over again. The whole casino was trying to jam into their aisle.
The casino officials stood next to Joya, muttering with each other and scrutinizing the numerical display. The security men in their blue uniforms were busy clearing the aisle now but didn’t bother Kenny, who worked at remaining upright on his stool.
Finally a very big man with a gray crew cut, who was wiping his forehead with a handkerchief, turned to her and smiled. His smile was notable in itself, Kenny decided, sharky, jealous, staggered. “Let me be the first to congratulate you!” he shouted.
Joya looked from one side to the other, as if searching for a pathway out. The crew cut lost it. Turning to the crowd, he shouted, “Jackpot!” The crowd screamed back.
The cocktail waitress was beaming and the other man in the suit continued to look at the machine and shake his head. He couldn’t take it in. None of them could.
They were all looking at Joya, or whatever her name was, who had in this instant transformed into an uncanny being who could strike them dumb right now with the merest twitch of her finger, that terrifying finger which had pressed the button at the inconceivably right time.
Joya, a goddess! He half expected her to unfold a set of wings and take off.
“How much?” came the mighty roar. “How much— how much—how much!”
A familiar face pushed its way through the crowd. Kenny’s ex-neighbor had returned at last.
“What the hell!” he screamed, first at Kenny, then at the girl. The gush of harsh obscenities that flew off his tongue blended into the cacophony of the crowd. No one was listening. He got to within two feet of Joya, his big fists balled, his body poised to attack, before a security guard
stepped efficiently behind him, pulling his right arm into a half nelson. The guard marched the ranting man away from the girl, while another guard made a way for them through the crowd.
“You’re dead meat!” he shouted back at them. “Fucking dead!” His eyes roved between Kenny and the girl.
Then he was gone and the remaining guard, looking very determined, was standing in front of her, his hand on his belt holster.
Someone from the casino came up and started taking pictures. Joya backed away, hiding her face. Kenny reached for his beer and didn’t find it. He saw the empty glass still on the carpet.
“Aw, now,” said his waitress to Joya. “Give ’em that winner’s smile, honey. You’re a winner!” A slot mechanic pushed through and started sealing off the machine, and the security guard finished bulling the crowd out of the aisle. They could hear again.
“Leave her alone,” Kenny said as the photographer angled closer.
“Hey, this is big news,” said the excited guy with the crew cut.
Kenny blocked the photographer’s view. He shoved Kenny. Kenny shoved him back.
“Can’t you people take me out of here?” Joya said.
“Sure, in just a second we’ll go upstairs to the office,” said the big man. “We just need some photos down here. We can set up the press conference later.”
“No pictures!”
“You’re a multimillionaire, honey. It’s our casino and we’re gonna take pictures.” He draped an arm around her and smirked, saying, “Shoot,” to the photographer. “What’s your name, honey?” he said to Joya. She bent her head down until her hair hung down in her eyes. The camera flashed. The photographer danced around trying to get a better angle.
“She’s not feeling well,” Kenny said. “It’s a shock.”
“We’ll bring her anything she wants. Sit back down, honey.”
“Get me out of here.” Joya held her hand over her face. “Right now.”
Kenny heard the steely warning in her voice. Under these circumstances, he imagined many people, he included, would break down, weep, clutch at someone for support. Not Joya.
Her warning was not lost on the big man. “Okay. All right, we’ll go upstairs. Come on, Derrick, Chris, you go in front. Give the lady some room. Show’s over, folks. Read the papers tomorrow. So what’s your name, honey? What do we call you?”
Kenny couldn’t see her anymore. The suits had interposed themselves between him and her.
She was going upstairs to her future, like Vargas, the Brazilian dictator, whose suicide note read: “I leave life to enter history.”
With a jolt, he remembered that he was going upstairs too. He had a duty to shoot himself, also like Vargas, though it seemed to him in his drunken and fevered state that he was in love with Joya and had just lived through an eternity with her. Furthermore, even if—just as a hypothesis—he decided to live awhile longer, she had just been snatched forever from his penniless reach. Kenny gripped his slot machine to steady the room.
She, who had no gun in her pocket, had won, and he, as usual, had not. If he had been eighteen inches to the right in the space-time continuum, he would have won. With that money, triumphant, he could have saved his company, his honor, and his family, taken Joya out to the movies—
Not to mention saved his life. Epic irony. Pitiless fate.
Game Over. He’d leave the last of his beer money on the dresser as a sort of apology.
The terror came back. He wouldn’t be able to do it if he didn’t hurry. He looked for a way through the crowd at the end of the slot machine alley.
And heard his mother’s name.
Was he that drunk? He listened, and heard it again, this time distinctly.
“I said, call me Mrs. Leung.”
It was Joya. What was this outlandish mockery?
“I’m not going anywhere without him.” The broad back in front of him stepped away and they were face-to-face with each other again. “My husband, Ken. You’re coming, aren’t you?” she asked Kenny. She gave him a forceful, almost commanding look.
Kenny’s eyebrows went up, and the specs went down. The Glock pressed against his chest under the jacket. He was confused. He had a prior commitment.
“Kenny?”
“Yes?”
“You coming?”
“I’m coming, Joya,” he said.
4
THE PHONE RANG.
They both jumped. Paul stopped for a moment, then continued his minute explorations along the terrain of Nina’s skin. But the phone didn’t stop. It rang and rang. Nina thought, What if Bob has an emergency? She had left Paul’s number on the kitchen table. Bob needed to be able to reach her. He was only thirteen. Story at ten: house on fire. Kid calling in panic. Mom and lover don’t answer due to sex game in hotel room.
Mom and lover! Ugh! “Paul,” she said, starting up on her elbows. Ring . . . ring . . . ring . . .
“No.” He pushed her down.
“I have to.”
“Don’t even think about it!”
“It might be Bob.”
This potent thought dislodged him. Still, he would not allow her to answer. He reached over and grunted into the phone. Hormone-soaked silence filled the room. Nina’s senses were heightened, maybe from the blood racing around in her body, and she could swear she recognized the metallic sounds going into Paul’s ear.
It couldn’t be! She wouldn’t dare!
But it was and she had. Paul passed her the phone. “It’s Sandy.”
“I know. I know,” her secretary told her. “But it’s urgent.”
“Bob?”
“He’s fine. He was watching an old action flick when I called a minute ago. Oh, I know. Gone in 60 Seconds. Said his friend scored a copy on the Web. Said it’s majorly full of chase scenes and way better than the remake.”
“Sandy!”
“He gave me your number. Paul’s number.”
“It’s Sunday night!” Nina’s mind ran through her cases—the clients in jail, the clients in custody disputes, the clients who might have just been arrested. A frightening thought struck her. “My dad? Or Matt?”
“Relax. It’s a client.”
Paul went into the bathroom, walking slightly bow-legged, shaking his head. He looked like a swimmer from behind, his shoulders and back making a V, his butt white and indignant as it disappeared through the bathroom door.
“Grr,” Nina said.
“You’re gonna love this.”
“You may. I won’t.” As soon as she said it, she knew that this display of ill temper would cost her.
After a short silence which was like the silence of the sea just before the hurricane blows in, Sandy said, “Hey. We were playing checkers and eating nachos, and now Joseph has gone down to his workshop and I won’t see him again until tomorrow.”
“Well, I’m sorry.”
“You don’t sound sorry.”
“I am sorry.”
“Not as sorry as me.”
“Look, Sandy, I’m sorry, I really am—”
“I’m not supposed to care about being disturbed; I’m just the secretary. Socially inferior. Never should have given us the vote. Try to do the right thing, get in touch with you. I’m the sorry one.”
“Sandy, tell me right now what—”
“He’ll probably spend all night downstairs now. We were snug as a bug in a rug, but now he got away. He’s making a cupboard for the bedroom—”
“—or I’m going to hang up.” Paul came back out, buttoning a shirt. He sat down on the edge of the bed and started putting on his shoes.
Nina took a deep breath and exhaled slowly while Sandy said a few more things about the cupboard and the nachos and the checkers and the status of Native American pink-collar workers in American society. Sandy had been slightly offended by Nina’s peremptory tone, and Nina was now paying the price, and there was no way out of it.
When Sandy finally took a breather herself, Nina said in a very calm voice, “So what i
s it?”
“What is what?”
“You know darn well.”
“You mean the legal matter?”
Nina gave no response to this. She was becoming enraged. She thought she heard a muffled dry chuckle on the other end of the phone. She wondered why she hadn’t fired Sandy a long time ago. She opened her mouth to fire her.
Sandy said, “New client. Has to see you right now. Happened to know I was a legal secretary and called me here in Markleeville. She’s over at the office right now with some guy, waiting for you out in the parking lot.”
“She knows you?”
“I didn’t say that. Anyway, she’s got to get back to Prize’s soon. They’re waiting for her. She told them she was feeling sick and had to get some medicine from her car, then she drove down the highway to the Starlake Building.”
“What’d she do? Get caught cheating? Assault somebody?”
“No. She just won a slot machine jackpot. A whole lot of money. Something like seven million bucks. You still there?”
“Wow!” Nina said slowly.
“Uh huh.”
“Does she have a cell phone? Good. Sandy, call her back and tell her to go back and smile and sign the forms and collect the check and come by in the morning. About ten.”
“That’s the thing. She says she can’t sign the forms. But she does want the check.”
“I don’t blame her for being nervous but I’m busy!” This came out sounding somewhat plaintive. Paul was sliding his wallet into his hip pocket. He was fully dressed and there was no longer even a whiff of sex in the air. The party was ruined.
Sandy went on, “But, see, she says she can’t tell them her name. And she’s got this guy with her and she says she can use his name, only she doesn’t even know him, so she wants a lawyer to make an agreement between them before she goes in and does that—”
“What? The IRS won’t let her get away with that. How much did you say she won?”
“Over seven million dollars, like I said. Except she says she’s going to leave town without the check if she has to use her name.”
As the hormonal tide subsided, Nina’s brain began clicking again. “Maybe there’s a warrant out on her. This is interesting.”
Writ of Execution Page 3