Secrets of a Shoe Addict (7 page)

“I was just trying to remember my PIN.” Loreen put her card in the ATM slot and entered her PIN—Jacob’s birthday, which she’d never forget—and felt a twinge of guilt. No, it was more than a twinge. It twisted around her stomach and heart like a boa constrictor, and made her feel sick.

She pushed
WITHDRAWAL.

She bypassed the offered amounts of twenty, forty, sixty, eighty, and even up to two hundred dollars, which she’d
never
taken out at one time but always wished she could. Now, punching in the
I-O-O-O
and
O-O CENTS
, she hoped she’d never see an ATM again.

There was a moment while the machine rattled and blinked, and she felt like she was playing check-card roulette. Would it give her the money or wouldn’t it? It was up to fate.

The rattling stopped; a receipt popped out. The screen, and the receipt, said,
YOU CANNOT WITHDRAW MORE THAN $500 AT THIS TIME
.

“Sorry,” she said to Rod, who looked pretty irked. His eyes had turned to little black pieces of coal. “Apparently there’s a cash limit.”

He sighed heavily. Dramatically. She suddenly wondered if he
was actually gay. “There are cash advance windows, you know. You can just get money from your credit card.”

“Oh.” The embarrassment just wasn’t going to end, was it? “Where can I do that?”

He gestured, another flamboyant movement that made her question his sexual preferences. “They’re all over the place. There’s one right there, behind the blackjack tables.”

For the second time in fifteen minutes, she followed his indication to a place that could make her life just a little worse.

When she got to the advance window, the woman there—about thirty or so, with a hard, colorless face—looked behind her and said, “Hey, Rod,” before turning her flat gaze back to Loreen. “A thousand?”

Oh, God, she wasn’t the first one to do this. The woman knew
exactly
what had happened; she knew
exactly
what a fool Loreen was. How could the embarrassment increase? Loreen had thought she’d reached the bottom, yet here she was, falling further.

At least she had the comfort of knowing that she had, indeed, been charged the going rate. He hadn’t found her so awful that he had to charge her extra. That was . . . good.

Plus, she was able to say, “Five hundred, please,” and imply that he had, in fact, found her
so
attractive that he’d given her a discount. A mere five hundred bucks for a twenty-minute fuck—yes, it was an awesome fuck, but no wonder! He was a
professional
! And a bottle of champagne and foreplay, to boot.

Oh, wait.
She
had to pay for the champagne. “Make that six hundred and forty, please.”

The woman looked at Rod, and Loreen heard him say, “Cash-machine limit.”

Asshole.

Loreen dug out her Visa and handed it over. “Can we just get this over with?”

“I’ll need to see your license.”

Loreen dug through her purse, looking for her license. “I’m not sure I have it,” she said, pushing tampons, pennies, and an open lipstick aside in her frenzy to find the license and
end
this.

“No license, no cash.”

For a moment, Loreen considered this. If she couldn’t pay him, what was he going to do? He couldn’t get blood from a stone. Then again, she wasn’t a stone, and she most definitely had blood, and in an unsavory town like Las Vegas, the chances of spilling some over a debt seemed greater than usual.

“Come on, Deirdre,” Rod said to the woman. “I trust her.”

Deirdre snorted. “Sure you do, it’s no skin off your nose—”

An expression Loreen had always despised.

“—
you’re
the one who benefits from this. Not Loretta or me, huh, Loretta?”

Loreen looked up. “It’s L—”

“Lorena,” Rod corrected, then frowned and said, “it
is
Lorena, isn’t it? Or is it—wait a minute—what’s your name?” Apparently as soon as the job was finished, the hard drive that had contained her name for the purposes of romancing her was wiped clean.

She felt like he was shouting it, calling attention to her, though he was probably using a normal voice. “Loreen,” she said hurriedly, “it’s Loreen. Now, does my thousand bucks at least buy me a little discretion?”

Rod looked surprised. “Sure.”

Truth was, she was surprised at herself. Loreen was always so damn polite, no matter what the situation was. When her boss had tried to
kiss her at work, she’d given him a peck on the cheek and pretended that she’d misunderstood his intentions. When a guy had rear-ended her in traffic on the beltway, then come out yelling at her for letting her car drift backwards into his, she’d
apologized
(though her insurance money had won the claim from his).

Loreen had good manners. Even in bad times.

Maybe someday she could be proud of that.

At the moment, though, she was a woman who had just spent a thousand dollars in one night, for the first time in her life, and she wanted her money’s worth. “I’d appreciate it,” she said calmly, “if you could just keep our transaction between us. And, of course, Deirdre here.”

Deirdre nodded, as if she were really in on this deal, and—hallelujah!—Loreen found her license. She handed it to Deirdre, horribly conscious of the fact that she was handing a lot of personal information over to a stranger who knew she’d just hired a male prostitute. “Looks okay,” she said, handing the license back to Loreen.

What was she supposed to do, thank her?

Deirdre ran the credit card, had Loreen sign a slip that had enough carbon copies to make her imagine them arriving anonymously in her parents’ and other relatives’ mailboxes, then asked—Rod, by the way, not Loreen—“Hundreds okay?”

“Fine,” he said.

“Wait a minute,” Loreen said, foolishly up in arms about this one small detail. “Shouldn’t you be asking
me
?”

Deirdre looked bemused. “But it’s for him, isn’t it?”

Loreen shook her head. “As far as you’re concerned, it’s for
me
. I’m the customer, or the cardholder, or whatever you want to call it, and if you have a question about this transaction, you ask me.”

Deirdre was totally unfazed by this. “Are hundreds okay?” she asked, in
exactly
the same tone she’d used to ask Rod that question a moment before.

“No.” Where was this coming from? Loreen probably shouldn’t be antagonizing a guy who had this kind of information on her, but then again, it wasn’t like she was some sort of public figure who had to worry about the story coming out the night before the New Hampshire primaries. She was no one. She’d remain no one, too, so if he wanted to blackmail her, he’d have to get pretty creative to make her really care. “I want ones,” she said, nodding definitively.

“What?”
Rod and Deirdre asked simultaneously, though Rod’s cry was far more vigorous.

That was satisfying. “Ones,” Loreen said again. “Is that a problem?” she asked, keeping her gaze on Deirdre.

Deirdre shrugged. “No.” She opened a drawer and took out stacks of one-dollar bills.

“Come on, Lorena,” Rod said, his voice sharp and a little bit shrill. “Loreen, I mean. This is ridiculous. I’ll just get in line behind you and change them back to bigger bills.”

Loreen turned to him. “Yes, but Deirdre will have to count them out. Both times. Am I right, Deirdre?”

“That’s right.” Deirdre was counting them out right now, with a deliberation that was probably painful to Rod, who was eager to move on to his next mark.

“Time is money, right, Rod?” Loreen asked him.

He narrowed his eyes at her. “Sometimes it’s not worth it.”

“Do you want to cancel the transaction?” Loreen asked. “Because I’m fine with that.”

“No, I just don’t want six hundred and forty ones.”

“Do you know what some people would give for six hundred and forty one-dollar bills?”

He dipped his head in acknowledgment. “But you have a choice here, and you can get hundreds. And save paper,” he added, like it was a trump card.

“I don’t think Deirdre is actually
manufacturing
the money to my specifications, so that argument doesn’t hold water.”

“Here,” Deirdre said, pushing over what must have been twenty-five bundles of ones.

“Oh, my,” Loreen said, a small laugh in her voice despite the horror of the situation. That was a lot of bundles. They’d probably be heavy. Lord, she hoped so. “Hold your hands out, Rod. I’ll pile them on.”

“This is ridiculous,” he intoned.

She looked him dead in the eye. “I could not agree more.”

“Is it my turn?” he asked Deirdre.

Loreen looked to her for the answer, and Deirdre shook her head. “I was about to take my break . . . but I guess . . .”

It was hard not to smile when Loreen turned back to Rod. “You’re in luck.”

He shot her a hostile gaze. Something told her she wouldn’t be a repeat customer, even if she wanted to be.

Then again, something told her he
knew
she wasn’t going to be a repeat customer.

The tan was fake, Loreen decided, watching him step up to the counter.

And no one was that muscular and ripped without spending hours every day in the gym. And frankly that kind of vanity just didn’t strike her as all that attractive.

So, good riddance to Rod.

She turned to leave.

“Couple months ago, someone asked for pennies,” an older, nondescript woman said as Loreen passed.

Loreen stopped. The woman was wearing a name tag like Deirdre’s—one that said
WILHELMINA
—and was obviously employed by the same cash counter. “What?”

The woman’s dull features formed something like sympathy. “Seems like a lot of women don’t know Rod has a price. Sometimes they get mad, like you. One got a thousand dollars in pennies. It took ages to get it all, and even then I had to give her two hundred in bills because we didn’t have enough.”

Pennies. Loreen only wished she’d thought of it. “He seemed nice,” she said wistfully, without really even meaning to say it out loud.

“That’s his job,” Wilhelmina said without inflection.

Loreen looked at her. “Well, I think it stinks.”

Wilhelmina’s expression softened. “Everybody’s got to make a living. But sometimes it ain’t fair to everyone else.”

Loreen nodded her agreement. “You said it.”

Loreen walked away, thinking she had to get back to the hotel, and Jacob, and put the pieces of her self-esteem back together somehow. But she couldn’t shake the notion that she was now a thousand dollars poorer than when she’d come to Las Vegas, and she just wasn’t able to get by that way.

It was when she was passing the roulette tables that the answer occurred to her. She could earn the money back, bit by small bit, at the roulette table. After all, you could bet on red or black. It was a fifty–fifty chance of winning. Where else in the casino was she going to find those kind of odds?

Nowhere, that’s where. She’d majored in statistics in college, and her professor had gone on and on about a statistical strategy on the roulette table called the “triple martingale.” She remembered it well—you just bet red or black and doubled your bet every time it was the opposite. Though each go-round was technically a Bernoulli trial, and had equal odds independently, Professor Jellama had contended that there were more mystical, universal laws of mathematics, and roulette was a prime example of how, in fact, the odds build from trial to trial.

It had made sense when he explained it, even though he’d given disclaimers about its scientific veracity in order to keep his job.

But Professor Jellama had been a smart guy, one of her favorite teachers, and she was going to trust him now, when it mattered most.

She went to get chips and discovered she had only fifteen dollars on her, so she went back over to Deirdre’s window—now that they’d formed this tenuous bond of sorts—and asked, “Can I get another hundred, or did I reach my limit?”

Deirdre took the card from her. “Until the credit card company says you’ve reached your limit, you haven’t reached your limit.” She dragged the card through the magnetic reader and punched in some number. Then she handed Loreen a paper to sign again. “Went through.”

Loreen signed, and Deirdre handed over the cash.

“Thanks,” Loreen said, meaning it a lot more this time than she had last time.

She meant it just as much the next five times she went, too, each time taking a greater amount to make up for her losses, until eventually she hit the limit on the card and found, from her receipts, that she was down five thousand dollars.

That was counting Rod’s fee, of course, but still. Five thousand dollars.

She couldn’t afford
one
thousand dollars!

But she also couldn’t afford to throw more good money after bad, and, despite four thousand evidences to the contrary, Loreen
did
know when to call it quits. Professor Jellama was an idiot. She hoped he’d been fired for planting such crazy ideas in his students’ heads.

What was she going to
do
?

She’d get a night job, that’s what. Real estate wasn’t all that steady, and until school let out in a month, things were still sluggish, so she’d supplement her income with a steady salary, even if it was at a retail store in the mall. Or maybe waitressing. If she could get a job waitressing at one of the high-end restaurants in Bethesda or Northwest, she could pay this off in no time. It would mean leaving Jacob at home while she worked, though. But Tiffany lived three houses away. Maybe Loreen could get a baby monitor system and put them around the house, and leave the receiver with Tiffany, so she could “babysit” while Loreen went to work.

It wasn’t a perfect solution, but it was better than nothing.

And the alternative was nothing.

Chapter
        
4