by Frank Sibila
Thus, “Destinii never slept.”
Which was spooky enough without the suspicion that it was literally true.
Frank had discovered this one evening about a year earlier when a client emergency had required him to call Destinii’s contact number at about three o’clock in the morning. He’d been prepared to find out what she was like when sleepy-headed and grumpy, but had found her alert, cheerful, and eager for some middle-of-the-night overtime. On subsequent occasions he’d experimented by calling her in the early evening, in the late evening, on weekends, in the wee hours of the morning, and less than an hour after a crisis involving a randy chiropractor required the office staff to pull an uninterrupted forty-eight-hour shift. Frank had been comatose, and Max had been dead, but a quick call to Destinii had derived the news that she was still bursting with energy and ready for a late night on the town. As far as Frank could tell from all the available evidence—since simply asking her seemed to be, excuse the expression, tempting Destinii—there were only two possible explanations, the first being that she was some kind of genetic freak who never needed the REM state, and the second being that she’d had one really bottomless cup of coffee a decade or so ago and was still working it off.
Either way, it eliminated any guilt Frank might have felt over calling her from the casino’s food court, twenty paces from where Yorick sat devouring a turkey on rye and thirty from the grim-faced gamblers pumping dollar after dollar into Triple Diamonds, Little Green Men, Lucky Lemmings, and Alien vs. Predator the Slot Machine. Even with the time zone difference adding three hours to her local time, Destinii was wholly undisturbed at hearing from her boss at a time of night when only cats should be awake. She just said, “Gimme a sec,” and got away from what sounded like glass shattering to a more serene spot occupied by the sound of two men arguing in Spanish. “All right. I can hear you now. What’s up?”
“Destinii, where are you?” (See, there you go. He could imagine the Eagles coming up with that one.)
“All-night sound effects party. Like a disguise party, except with favorite noises. That doofus with the bottles has been a real pain in the ass all night.”
Frank wondered if he’d ever have a conversation of more than two minutes with either of his full-time employees without feeling the need to rub his head. “I know I’m going to regret asking this, but what are you dressed as?”
“A machine gun. Listen.” And there it was. Guerilla warfare in some location where all the buildings were shells and the most common childhood activity was working out the best vantage point for the lobbing of Molotov cocktails. “So what’s up?”
Frank summarized the developments of the past few hours, from the involvement of Monica Custer to the nature of the trap that had been laid for George Yorick. “All in all,” he concluded, “I think our lovely friend Keith talked George into this trip as a way of getting him out of town, just so he’d be free to take a shot at some private time with Yorick’s wife.”
Crashing cymbals obliterated what would have been silence at the other end of the line. “What a guy. He should replace his fly with a revolving door.”
“Not a good idea,” Frank said. “You ever get an umbrella stuck in a revolving door?”
Destinii sniffed. “All the more reason, this guy. That’s one umbrella that has seen enough rain for a lifetime. Kind of makes me wish for a strong wind capable of turning one inside out, if you know what I mean.”
Frank would have said actually not, because she had taken his metaphor further and faster than his capacity to follow at this time of night, but that’s when a sad-faced Yorick came up and indicated with thirty seconds of intense charades that he wanted to borrow a few more bucks for coffee from the gourmet java stand. The man would have made a talented mime, if for no reason other than the fact that you only needed to know him for three minutes before you felt the intense urge to lock him away in a box. Frank handed him a twenty just to make him go away, watched the back of Yorick’s head go bobbing away like a balloon on a string, and registered with little surprise that the man had wandered away from the coffee counter and toward the gaming floor. He wondered if there was some point when a headache could achieve enough critical mass to take out an entire gambling mecca. “The problem is that we’re contractually obligated to cover him, a goal that conflicts with our contractual obligation to cover Yorick.”
“I don’t see how,” Destinii told him. “Seriously. You’re there to cover for these guys, not to let the dumber one know that the sleazier’s been throwing wrenches at his head. Tell Yorick about Custer and you’ll be committing … malpractice.”
“I don’t even know if that’s the right word,” Frank said.
“It won’t stand up in court, if that’s what you’re thinking. Even breach of contract might not. But the word will still get around. Keith would see to it, if nothing else. You might as well print up new business cards reading, ‘Fake Alibi: guaranteed results, comma, unless we take moral exception to what you’ve been doing, comma, in which case we’ll work out our next move on a case-by-case basis, period.’”
“That’s an awful lot to put on a business card.”
“Not that you’ll have to worry about it,” Destinii said, “because you won’t have a business.”
Frank was in a sufficiently foul mood at the moment to wonder whether that would truly be a bad thing. “In any event, I may need some help out here, with Monica stalking me. I may have to fly back and deal with her husband before I get this Yorick guy all squared away. Do we have any operatives in this neck of the woods? Preferably a pretty female, who can lead him around by his little head if necessary?”
Destinii thought about it for a moment, a moment filled with the sound of a bowling ball knocking down ten pins. “We have a contact in Vegas. You don’t know her. She’s a showgirl, on and off, but she’s also a hundred percent reliable and willing to take an extended contract. I’ll probably be able to get her to you tomorrow morning.”
Frank would have said something else, but then a siren wailed, ooh-woo, ooh-woo, ooh-woo. A mob matched the tenor of its shriek with the kind of cheer reserved for touchdowns and home runs. Somebody yelled, “Oh my God, oh my God, oh my God!” Frank endured it all the same way he would have endured a male performance enhancement commercial or a stranger’s belch in an elevator or even another query from his mother wondering whether he’d met any nice girls lately, which is to say, with the patience of an unaffected bystander wondering just how much of it he would have to tolerate before it was over. But it kept going, and he found himself beset by a pair of nested realizations: first, that the tumult was not more background music from Destinii’s sound effects party, but rather something on his end of the connection and in his immediate vicinity and second, that the oh-Gods he kept hearing were not just oh-Gods but more properly oh-God-Frank-I-won-the-jackpots.
“I’ve got to go,” said Frank. “Get your friend out here right away. In the meantime, do what you can, to locate Mr. Custer or Mrs. Yorick in the morning. I have the sense that you won’t find either one at home.”
“Gotcha,” said Destinii. “What’s all that noise over there?”
Fearing the worst, Frank said, “Sound effects party, I hope.”
FIVE
THE LOGIC OF GEORGE YORICK even trying to hit the jackpot was as follows.
In normal circumstances, insanity is best described as the process of doing the same thing for the thousandth time and expecting a different result. In a casino, this is known as gambling. In slots, it is known as business as usual. A typical player has a night that goes like this: lose, lose, lose, lose, lose, lose, lose, lose, lose, small win, lose, lose, lose, lose, lose, lose, small win, lose, lose, lose, lose, lose, lose, lose, lose, lose, and (shall we put not too fine a point on it) lose. Though the odds favor a loss with every spin of the wheel, the illusion fostered with every fresh spin is that fate cannot possibly be cruel e
nough to produce a fresh loss on top of all the others already endured. It’s “time” to win, even though, by every scientific standard, the chances of the next spin also producing a loss are significantly higher than it producing a win great enough to compensate for all the incredibly shitty luck you have had so far.
Also, in normal circumstances, it is a very bad idea to risk everything you have on one spin. The odds are such that you may have to spin twenty or thirty times before you have a win large enough to foster the illusion that you might actually win money at this.
But if you’re in Vegas, with all your cash and credit cards gone, and if you’ve been mistaken for a serial killer, and you feel your life teetering on the edge of an abyss, and if you’re a jackass who has never really won anything, and if your day has been particularly awful in every way, and if you’re sleep-deprived, but mostly if you’re a jackass, you might be forgiven for the sudden and absolutely irrational conviction that the world has finished shitting on you for one day and that it could not possibly justify shitting on you once again.
In the case of George Yorick, handed a twenty-dollar bill when he hadn’t had his hands on so much as a penny for a full day, that blind faith came without thought as he forwent the coffee he desperately needed and found himself sleepwalking to a machine called LUKKY KASH beneath a neon sign advertising a progressive $5 million jackpot awardable when five dollar symbols came up in a V pattern on maximum bet.
There was no chance in hell of it coming to anything.
There really wasn’t.
One hour and ten minutes later, after negotiations with the casino and the front desk were done, after the publicity photographs were taken and after Frank and Yorick had been moved to a comped suite, Frank still couldn’t let it go. “That twenty was supposed to be for coffee.”
Yorick had collapsed on the couch, his eyes miniature kaleidoscopes reflecting the unparalleled wonders of a universe that had reordered itself for him. His high was so very complete, so deep a saturation of his very being, that he hadn’t noticed the supreme discomfort of the position in which he had tumbled, attempting athletic exuberance, but instead achieving something very much like an avalanche of limbs: one leg hung over the back of the couch, the other over the edge, touching the plush carpeted floor. The cherubs he seemed to see fluttering about him on little wings, covering the world around him with a garnish of rose petals, were probably just delusions. His response to Frank was the only sign that he saw anybody real in the room. “I’m sorry.”
“Yeah,” Frank sighed. “You look it.”
“You want me to apologize?” Yorick murmured. “You’ve got to imagine the life I’ve led up until now, Frank. When I was seven, my mother left me in a department store, went home, and didn’t realize I was missing for four hours. When I was in college, a frat guy tied me up and taped me, naked, inside a phone booth overnight. I once took a one-hour drive from Binghamton to Ithaca and called a tow truck that, instead of taking me somewhere local, dragged my ass all the way to Scranton, a town that then took me four days to escape. Whatever else you have to say about me, Frank, I’m due.”
Somewhere in this town a desperate, red-eyed man was pounding on the counter of an all-night pawnshop, with the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor he’d won in more fortunate days, crying, “It isn’t a bowling trophy, for crying out loud! You’ve got to give me more than ten dollars for this! How about forty?” Somewhere a woman was waking up from a deep drunk next to a man sleeping facedown, whose back and buttocks were easy to mistake for a bearskin rug, and whose methane emissions made it difficult to see the door to her motel room. Somewhere a guy was detoxifying just enough to look at the woman he’d met, wooed, and married, and realize that she’d been born sometime before his grandmother. Frank could have been helping any one of them. He was here with Yorick—though, admittedly, $40,000 richer, since Yorick had been so effusive in the first few seconds of his victory that he’d ordered that much of his payout to be given directly to his “best friend in the whole world, man”—but still, here with Yorick, and what profits a man to gain the whole world if in the process he’s required to lose his mind? Frank rubbed that familiar spot at the bridge of his nose, which was probably halfway to being worn down to a nub by now, and said, “Due has nothing to do with it, George. This changes nothing. We still have to get you home without your wife finding out.”
Yorick urped. “Home’s not where I want to be now. Gimme Tahiti!”
“With or without the wife?”
“She’ll like Tahiti. She loves umbrella drinks. Which brings up a question. Why do those cocktails have umbrellas in them, anyway? Are the ice cubes afraid of being rained on or what?”
Frank had honestly never thought about it. “I think they’re supposed to be beach umbrellas to go along with the tropical theme.”
Another urrrp from Yorick, who had just found the remote control for the TV. “That makes sense. An ice cube would want some protection from the sun.”
“Actually, I’m not sure the ice cubes are supposed to be the—”
“And sunblock,” Yorick said with relentless logic, “would just make the drink all greasy.” He clicked the remote control, immediately obtaining a vivid HDTV image of a fireball billowing up an elevator shaft. “Oooh, Die Hard!”
The segue jarred Frank just long enough for the pause to be significant. “You’re not going to start watching that now, are you?”
“Why not? I was stuck in that room all day and had nothing to do but sleep.”
The prospect of either continuing this conversation or trying to sleep in one of the suite’s two bedrooms with explosions and machine-gun fire reverberating from the HDTV screen was as awful as anything else Frank had experienced today. So he sighed. “Listen to me, George. It’s wonderful that you’ve had such a good night after everything you’ve been through, but you really do need to focus. I haven’t had such a great day. I’m exhausted, my brain’s turning off, and I’m going to need a couple of hours of sleep if I’m going to concentrate on squaring you away in the morning. If I go and get another room, will I be able to trust you to stay here, enjoy your movie, not return to the casino floor, get some sleep, and wait for me to get you tomorrow morning? Am I going to be able to trust you to do that?”
Yorick turned up the volume. “Sure. It’s not like I’m an idiot or something.”
Frank’s current state of exhaustion could be best measured by the willingness with which he let that one slide. He rewarded Yorick with a complicated nod, grabbed his bag, and, hesitating just the slightest bit at the door—any number of doomsday scenarios raging through his already paranoid consciousness—moved on, for the moment more motivated by sleep deprivation than common sense.
The door clicked.
Yorick turned off Die Hard, a movie he had never really enjoyed all that much, and, addressing nobody, announced, “I thought he would never leave.”
This is the thing.
George Yorick had come to Vegas to get laid.
He had come to get laid by somebody glamorous, somebody not his wife, somebody capable of providing him with a few minutes of forbidden fantasy. That had not just failed to work out, but spectacularly failed to work out. He had been left mortified and depressed and feeling like a wart on the sole of somebody’s foot. Somebody’s bare foot. Walking on concrete. Ouch. Ouch. Ouch. Ouch. Ouch. Like that.
Now, against all odds, he had been rescued by an honest-to-gosh miracle, restoring his faith in a universe that, up until this moment, had seemed to be stacked against him. It signaled a new life in which he would not be the wart on the sole of somebody’s foot, but the foot itself, clad in socks as fine as silk and shoes that … well, there the metaphor failed, because he knew next to nothing about rich men’s shoes. He also had a fantasy, vague in the extreme, of beautiful women pouring champagne on his feet and rapturously licking it off, preferably without ruining th
ose socks.
For Yorick, Frank’s departure was a perfect license to fulfill at least some of that fantasy. After all, what was the alternative? Suddenly becoming a zillionaire and not doing that?
He found the adult entertainment flier he had picked up on his first afternoon in town and turned his attention to Escort Agencies….
Frank would not have left the room had he known that his ordeal ditching Monica Custer had been a total waste of time.
Monica, whose sources included access to her husband’s “secret” e-mail, already knew that Keith had talked somebody named George Yorick into a spree in Vegas and had further recommended Frank’s services as a means of covering for same.
She also knew, from further investigation, that Yorick had gotten into trouble in Las Vegas and had called Frank begging for help.
The nature of Frank’s mission in Vegas had therefore never been a mystery to her. The second Frank’s taxi succeeded in positioning a red light between itself and the one carrying her, disappearing into the neon-soaked distance where only pursuers blessed with helicopter support could follow, she’d just sighed her superior little sigh and leaned farther back against her seat cushions, telling her helpful driver that her snoogie-wuggums was being a little naughty today and that it probably made more sense to just go directly to the Excalibur, where she could meet him and where (it went unsaid) she did, in fact, already have a reservation.
She told the cabbie, “He’s not getting rid of me that easily.”
He, of course, took this as a declaration of undying love. “That man don’t deserve you.”
“He sure does,” Monica said, meaning something entirely different.
The cabbie brushed away a manly tear.
Those who have followed the tale this far will not be surprised to know that Monica was sitting at a nearby table when Frank gave George Yorick a twenty to go away, that she saw George Yorick hit the jackpot, that she heard him excitedly crying for Frank and saw Frank arriving with mingled shock and dismay, calling him George, that she found this to be a very interesting development, that she saw Yorick being comped to a nicer room, that she spent some time after that trying to figure out a good way to separate Yorick from Frank so she could talk to the little man separately, that she was very happy indeed when Frank came back down alone, and that a twenty pressed into a bellman’s eager palm proved invaluable at tracking down where Yorick must be.