They Say
By Patrice Stanton
copyright 2013 Patrice Stanton
Cover design & glyphs also copyright 2013 Patrice Stanton
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This book is a work of fiction and any similarities within it to other persons (living, dead, or fictional), businesses (public, private, non-profit, or fictional), places (actual or fictional), or events (current, historical, or fictional) are purely coincidental (except for Las Vegas, NV, which of course is real and actually has casinos). The work (and therefore all elements it consists of) are products of the author’s imagination, so are used fictitiously.
Midpoint
About the Author
They Say
They say your 40’s are pretty cool. I’ll never know...
I’m hoping my mistake will forewarn others.
My phone started beeping. I knew it was well enough past midnight that anywhere else outside my current location - Vegas - most folks were asleep. Wouldn’t have even realized Saturday had melted into Sunday. But I was here, so technically, then, it was June 16th and the party was over. Literally. As the biggest loser of the bachelorettes, I was still drinking as I shuffled solo, towards a dimly lit bar just off the one and only casino on the main floor of our smallish hotel. The return shuttle driver had been an understanding senior-sort of woman; had allowed me aboard with a still unfinished drink clutched in my free hand. It was now nearly empty, like the bar, which was patron-free, with only a bartender standing silhouetted in the side door shadows.
I flopped onto one of his tattered barstools, violently rifled my purse for the loathsome device. The bride-to-be. The third time in the last hour. Ignore. Her faux fears and nit-picky complaints were beyond tiresome. Oh, and her increasingly frequent bad-dreams. Even about this dump. I looked back at the casino and its sorry array of tables, advertised as “a myriad of gaming opportunities,” and the depressing decor that even more “drunk” couldn’t improve. Could I make it another week until the wedding? I turned the volume down. It’d be ‘Off’ if not for the other bridesmaids.
“So,” the shadow said, “you wish somebody would forget your phone number and instead give you a good-luck number, right?” It was halfway to dawn and I’d picked his bar because I was fresh out of chit-chat. I glared up at him forgetting he could be the scary bartender in the bothersome bride-to-be’s nightmares. Nope. At least 1/2 Basset Hound. Not at all like her luscious dream-demon.
Once again I was in the final countdown of another tedious all-hail-the-glorious-bride weekend. Meaning my face hurt from smiling, my head from attempting full-on “witty,” and I was virtually broke. Hours earlier the gaggle of us - along with a good portion of the rest of our hotel’s guests - had waited for and ridden shuttles over to the real Las Vegas strip. Judging by how deserted the bars were back here now, most were likely still at those posher establishments.
I’d been forced to return since, once again, all the glamorous pre-brides – as we sidekicks called ourselves - had found nightly playthings. Alas, for me, there’d be no more blackjack or roulette, my favorite, nor even much drinking in this cut-rate dive: my friends were typically an excellent source of can-we-buy-you-girls’ drinks, so their absence meant French champagne elegance reverted with a Poof! to domesticated beer forbearance.
Constantly replaying the bride-to-be and her real-life super-sweet un-scary hunk-of-a-former-Vegas bartender’s fairytale meeting - at another bachelorette bash - the prior year didn’t help. Yes, I was thankful they’d won the love lottery and then the state’s, too, so paid for this trip insisting we pre-brides could find our own soul mates if we were “open” to it. But zero-for-four was quite a downer and the bride had left for the airport before sundown.
Okay, so I wasn’t much to look at but I had hopes. No, I wasn’t exactly holding my breath a knight would suddenly appear but Vegas had come through before. But this time was different. An evil “9,” whose avoid-me spell was identical to the albatross that dogged that ancient mariner, had glommed onto my “30.” Damn getting old. Damn it to Hell.
“Miss?”
Damn the bartender, too. Sure, I’d had a few too many drinks, but him? If besides being annoying he was trying to flirt...I looked over my shoulder. Nope. Still nobody but me. I turned back and got a touch dizzy. Maybe I should be nice. It’s my last night here and he is talking to me. At these prices even with a tip my sitting here this late hardly seems a very good reason for ‘friendly.’ Maybe ‘annoying’ is too negative. Sensitive, I thought, or insightful.
“Damn straight I need some luck.”
“Not luck…” he motioned with his head to indicate the casino, “a lucky number. For the tables, the wheel.”
I’d picked his dark corner specifically so I wouldn’t have to look out there at losers “having fun.” I could pretend to intently study each and every bottle on his mirrored shelves. But why not?
“In that case…anything except ‘9’,” I laughed weakly; he did too or at least mimicked me convincingly. He’d said ‘the wheel’ though. How’d he know?
I threw back the melted remains of the strawberry-something I’d taken from the glitzy Strip casino and ordered something “similar” from him. I was quiet; let him launch into a soliloquy, which he happily delivered - over the whir of his blender. Didn’t pay attention to the ingredients as he droned on about some number-system he’d developed and tried out a few times. Bottom line? There weren’t many who could hold to his “don’t tell” policy.
“Thanks.” I took the drink carefully; it would slosh over otherwise. My first tentative sip proved this was no girly-libation like the other. It was potent with a capital-P because despite the icy slush it seared the back of my throat. I looked up at the guy suspiciously. I was about to chastise him but…Somehow. I. Couldn’t. Now, his eyes twinkled or his teeth gleamed or the dregs of that last concoction were pure grain-alcohol and I was suddenly beyond smashed because the guy looked delicious and my now-sqooshy brain decided - without me - that it wouldn’t just allow him leeway it’d be eight-lanes’ worth and at the same time it-plus-me would hang on his every word, droning or not.
“So theeez winnerrzzz, why don’t you juss-ss tell me a name or two and I’ll call-lemm up and--“ Oouu, I was feeling the booze now alright.
He lowered his voice, “They’re, well, incommunicado…”
“Huh?”
“Celebrities, musicians…and, uh, politicians mostly, so…you know.” He winked.
I swiveled around carefully, scanning the casino. The dump had not only seen better days but better decades. I’d bit my tongue earlier to avoid hurting the bride, but here, with this guy, it didn’t matter. “Thizz joint’s so old it coulda bred the Rat Pack...” The only celebrities this 40-something had met were in his dreams and now I was struggling not to picture him like that.
“You’re right…” he said, laughing for real, then whispering, “but I get around.”
I smirked, “Yeah, you an’ the Beach Boys, but you broad-dit-up, wire you playin’ coy? Juss spiddit oww--” I stopped, realizing I was too eager, looking too easy or just plain drunk. I stalled, swirling the drink. “Whutts sum-buddy gottadoo…I mean, to youuzz that trick uh yours?”
He reached below the bar and brought up an e-book
reader or a similar device.
“You put your palm here,” he pushed a button on one side to power it on I figured and set his own hand down on the still-dark screen, “Like this and…see?” a bar of light traveled up the screen like any copier, “See? It makes a scan of all the lie--” I cut him off because even in my condition I knew what was coming.
“Yeah, yeah,” I said, “it reads line-zonn yur palm like a forchunn-teller.” I wasn’t impressed. When I was growing up my mother and her friends had made a hellacious lot more than spare change doing that. For years. Also claimed they believed in things like auras, healing crystals, and past life regressions. I knew the truth though. Overheard them talking, first when I was eight or nine and supposedly asleep.
They were about two steps beyond my room’s paper-thin walls, in our little dining nook. They liked to drink and smoke and play card games on Sunday nights. They could hardly hold all the cards they were dealt. They sure couldn’t hold their liquor which was why I knew they pretended all that New-Age crap. For the cash, pure and simple. “Income without the income tax,” my mom said and they’d echo Amen’s. Sometimes she’d also say “the man” didn’t need to know about it cuz she’d already given “him” her fair share. I thought she meant my dad.
Same “man” was why she hated me getting birthday checks. She hated the things, well, except for her big fat monthly divorce checks. So, the psychic work on the side was strictly for cash. Me? I never got her talent for “pretend.”
“I don’t know,” I said, trying to focus on the idea of actually having a spin of the wheel pay off for a change, “then I’d have to deal with the IRS, so—“ He cut me off with a laugh.
“I swear,” he said, looking one way then the other, melodramatically, then stared straight into my eyes, “no feds, no cops, no Vegas tough guys. The man won’t know a thing. Just me to you. Cash,” then he leaned towards me so swiftly I jerked backwards. My bag fell from my lap and bounced off the stool’s cross bars and onto the floor with a heavy clunk. Our eyes remained locked, “I promiss-s-s,” he said.
What can I say? I thought we had a connection. Plus I was under the influence: of alcohol; near-poverty; and the guy’s eyes. By then they sparkled, at me, like Elizabeth Taylor’s entire collection of diamonds.
From the jumbled contents of my bag came a piercing voice: the bride. This time I’d accidently answered her call. Then she was screeching, “Answer, dammit!” again and again. I was thinking about the lucky number plan even with that distraction. I’ll call her later, I promised myself half-heartedly. I muffled the device then demanded the first number, at least.
He acted surprised; went silent. “Oh…all right,” he said slowly. We were still alone but as insurance he turned off the lights behind the bottles, removed his logo’d-apron, and only then scanned my palm. I was surprised when he read off the first promised lucky-number without asking for at least a verbal agreement, instead babbling on about how the results would speak for themselves.
Sure, it was on an inebriated impulse that I emptied my wallet of my remaining $28 in cash right then and there, and slapped it into his hand. And sure, all I won with his system were chips. But that first number alone netted me several handfuls of colorful plastic. With colorful double-digit numbers. I was hooked.
Thumbing through the chips I went directly to half-sober; a light bulb moment narrowing my focus for the first time all weekend, it seemed.
I knew I’d caught on to his scam. “Wait a second...” I told him to stay put and trotted more or less in a direct line towards the wall of cashiers.
Mine gave me greenbacks, alright. Security strips and that weird changeable ink…so he, and his machine, were legit after all.
Still, I tried to postpone my commitment; with my head clearing by the second I sputtered, “But what about another casino?”
Maybe these employees were in on it and they all wanted me rolling in dough for the rest of the night and by dawn I’d end up “Taken,” trapped in a white slavery ring in Vegas’ back alleys. I demanded the second number. Demanded we go elsewhere, like back to the posher big-name casino I’d left earlier.