Shelly's Second Chance (The Wish Granters, Book One) (9 page)

They went to work on her hair
first and then sat her down at a manicure station.

“What have you been doing?”
the girl asked her. “Looks like you’ve been working as a brick layer or
something. I suppose you want acrylic?”

“Yes,” Shelly studied her
haircut in the mirror behind the manicurist’s head. “And I want a really hot
red.”

“Big date?” asked the woman.

“Yes,” Shelly nodded. “I have
a date with success.”

The woman giggled. They got
all kinds in the salon. Winners who wanted to congratulate themselves and
losers who wanted a new beginning. Tourists who came for the shows and threw a
few dollars at the roulette wheel, retirees who drove campers cross country and
stopped in Vegas to gawk, and families who came for the spectacles and
specials. There were also the down
-
and
-
outers, the ones who’d lost everything and
were looking for a job just to make enough to get back in the game.

“Maybe you’ll find it,” the
manicurist said. “Not everyone does.” She held up a bottle of nail polish. “Is
this the color you want?”

Shelly studied it and nodded
slowly. She was feeling the loser’s low now.

“Well this one’s empty so I
have to go to the back room to find another bottle while your nails are drying.
I’ll just be a few minutes. It’s kind of a mess in there. We got a huge
shipment today.”

Shelly reached into her purse
and found her cell.
It was
two a.m.
back in Virginia.
Ben had
finally
stopped
texting and calling. She
lly
tapped in his number and the message:
in
vegas miss u 2 suite @bellagio really great
.

When she dropped her phone
into her purse, she looked at her new acrylic nails, plain as pudding in the
fluorescent light, waiting for their red lacquer. She sighed and thought, poor
Shelly. Tired of always running and never getting there. She wondered if Joe
and Alanna were watching her. Maybe they were really guardian angels. No, she
thought, not in this glitzy fake palace of a place. This was not the place to
separate the real from the fake. And there was no way
a girl like
Alanna could
ever understand
Shelly
who’d always operated on the assumption that when you have nothing, faking it
is all
that’s left.

*****

This time Joe wasn’t
surprised to find Morgan at the small juice bar.

“Hmmm,” Morgan was saying as
Joe looked up at the menu above the juicers. “She’s not doing too well, is
she?”

“That’s not our fault,” Joe
protested. “She’s playing slots. No one wins big at slots.” He parked himself
on one of the tall stools flanking the counter and Morgan placed a mug in front
of him, which Joe ignored for the moment. “I mean how much are we supposed to
do for the person we’ve been assigned? She chose slots. I can’t actually make a
machine pay out.”

“That would be nice, wouldn’t
it?” Alanna sat down on the bar stool next to him and picked up a mug Morgan
gave her. She drank it down hungrily. After that dinner where everything had
tasted like cardboard, this not-drink was a heady treat.

“Where’s Shelly?”

“Had her hair and nails done
and now she’s gone up to bed. Finally.”

Morgan refilled the mug from
a pitcher and Alanna drank that one, too. Immediately she felt refreshed and
the minute she put it down, asked, “What’s in these anyway?”

“Whatever you need,” Morgan
answered.

“I mean, what are the
ingredients?”

“Whatever you need them to
be.”

“Hold it there, barkeep,” Joe
broke in. “It’s a legit question.”

Morgan just wiped the counter
with a small towel and tilted his head to one side, a little smile on his lips.
“Ah, you wish granters. Always wanting answers. I can tell you one thing. If it
helps you at all. If you choose, you can make yourselves invisible to everyone
but Shelly. That could help you carry out your assignment.”

Joe thought of about a dozen
more que
st
ions
and was about to start probing for answers when he felt a rush like a cold
chill and an image flashed through his mind so quickly he almost didn’t catch
it. A dark night, a man standing under a street lamp
.
R
ain
.
A
car pulls up. And then it faded but as it
did, Joe had a feeling of remorse so strong that he had to gasp for air as if
something was pushing on his chest.

“Better take care of him,” Morgan
nodded towards Joe. “He’s looking a little shaky.”

Alanna turned just as Joe was
getting his breath back. “What is it?”

“I think I had a memory. But
it wasn’t clear enough to make any sense out of it. Like something bad was
about to happen. But not to me exactly. Man, I wish I could remember my life.”
He looked at Morgan. “Is that how it works? If Shelly gets to be a big winner, we
can get back to our lives? Because if that’s
the way this world works
, then I have to show
her how to play a game where the odds are a whole lot better for her.” Joe
downed his not-drink.

“Maybe you need to tell her a little more,” Morgan
suggested.
“You certainly want your
questions answered.
Don
’t you think she feels
the same?”

Alanna nodded, looking down
at the tankard and wondered again what was in these things. They certainly made
her feel great, and in just that moment a mist surrounded them and they felt as
if they were spinning slowly and then floating in warm air until they manifested
in the hall outside Shelly’s suite. The sun had come up and a waiter was
wheeling a breakfast cart out of the open doorway.

Chapter Seventeen

“So you want me to believe
that you are—what did you say—not alive but not dead? What do you think I am,
an idiot?”

Shelly was already dressed.
She’d eaten a hearty breakfast and was ready to get to the casino. “Maybe I
should try another hotel’s casino. Maybe I’d have better luck somewhere else.
Luck’s a funny thing, you know. It’s not like you can find it just anywhere.”

“Shelly,” Joe used a stern
voice. “Sit down for a minute. What we’re telling you is important.”

“Joe’s right. It’s absolutely
true. We don’t understand it all yet ourselves but for some reason we’ve been
partnered, and for some reason we’ve been sent to help you. If we can help you,
we help ourselves. See?” Alanna sounded just a bit desperate.

“No. I don’t see at all. But
I don’t really care as long as you can get me out of my predicament. I don’t
care if you were sent from heaven or hell.” Shelly picked up her purse and
slung it over her shoulder, then turned to Joe with a second thought. “You’re
not the devil, are you? Because I may be a gambler and a sinner but I would not
stoop that low.”

“I’m not the devil,” Joe
assured her and took her by the arm, propelling her gently toward the door.
“Think of me as your instructor. Now one more thing. When we get outside this
door, no one will be able to see or hear us but you.”

“But what about dinner last
night? You ate with me. The waiter saw you. The check was for three of us. I
saw the bill. ”

“I know but forget about
that. It’s not important. What’s important is that we get you off those slot
machines and you start playing something where you can actually win.”

Shelly’s lip protruded like a
sulky child. “I like slots.”

“It’s a sucker game. I
wouldn’t even call it a game. Have you ever played poker?”

Shelly sighed. They had
reached the elevator. “Back in college sometimes we’d have a girls
’
night but it was
kind of lame. There were always too many players. It was just an excuse to get
together and drink or smoke dope without guys there.”

“We’re going to play for real
here.”

“Yes,” Alanna added. “And
you’re going to win. Joe’s going to help you.”

“What are you going to do?”

“We’re going to be invisible
and play along with you, right behind you.”

“Are we going to cheat?”

“No,” Joe said emphatically.

“That’s too bad,” Shelly
laughed. “If I were invisible I’d cheat at everything.”

“Not if your life hung in the
air like a cobweb,” Alanna told her. “Not if you knew you were being watched
and everything you did was being recorded somewhere.”

The elevator doors opened and
they all stepped in. Shelly looked downright serious for the first time since
they’d met her.

“So my grandmother was right?
Someone up in heaven is watching everything we do all the time?”

“I don’t know if I’d call where we were heaven, but they
sure seem to know a lot about what’s going on down here. They knew about you
and your little problem.
And t
hey knew you
were digging yourself into a great big hole.” Joe pushed the number one button
and the elevator began its slide down to the casino floor.

*****

Shelly traded her remaining
vouchers for chips while Joe found a table where they were playing Texas Hold’em, a game Shelly claimed to have watched on TV. She approached the table
cautiously. She could see Joe, who was standing right behind her, holding out
the empty seat, but apparently no one else at the table could see him. Alanna
seemed to have disappeared once again, which was fine by Shelly. That girl
seemed a little snooty to her, always fading in and out like that, and acting all
high and mighty about tawdry Vegas.

“Joining us, miss?” the
dealer asked, as she slid into the chair and briskly nodded. It was a ten
dollar table with four other players seated, all men. They did not acknowledge
her arrival at all, a fact that stung Shelly’s ego a bit. She was wearing,
after all, a hot pink slip dress and she thought she looked pretty cute. Shelly
stacked the chips in four careful piles in front of her and slowly exhaled.

“Yes,” she said it calmly as
if she’d sat in at Texas Hold’em games for years. “I’m joining you.”

“What he’s implying is that
you need to ante up,” Joe whispered in her ear standing right behind her now.
“Put a chip on the square in front of you.”

“Only one?” she asked.

“As many as you’d like,” the
dealer said, and while his voice was polite and professional, it was obvious he
was slightly annoyed to have a novice at his table.

“Take it easy,” Joe said in
her ear. “They can’t see me, but they can hear you. “Yeah. Start with one.”

Her confidence shaken, Shelly
slid a chip onto the square and settled back as the dealer shuffled with
lightning fast hands. How many decks were they playing at once? Five, six,
maybe more? The dealer crammed the cards into a dispenser and handed Shelly a
card-shaped piece of black plastic.

“Lady’s cut,” he said.

“Stick it somewhere in the
middle of the row of cards,” Joe told her. “He’ll start dealing from the point
where you divide the deck. That’s how they prove he’s not cheating, you know,
stacking the deck, and be prepared to do this often. A lot of poker players
think it’s good luck to let a female cut the deck and you’re the only girly
girl at this particular table.”

Now that she understood his
voice was always going to be right at her ear, Shelly felt a bit more sure of
herself. She slipped the black plastic into the middle of the stack and then
leaned back in her chair while the cards were dealt, using the pause to survey
her fellow players. It was a mixed group, to put it in the most polite terms. A
man with a two-day growth of beard wearing a black cowboy hat and a black shirt
with turquoise embroidered trim. A young kid of about twenty-two in a T-shirt featuring
a picture of a Grateful Dead album cover. A guy well past middle age wearing a
nest of gold chains tangled around his neck. A thin black man who looked like a
jazz musician Shelly had once seen at a club. And Shelly.

Chapter Eighteen

While Shelly played poker,
Alanna wandered through the
over
street
mall
that
connect
ed
the Bellagio to the other hotels on the
Strip. A walkway of shops and restaurants, one after the other, it was a chain
of pretty places where a woman could browse all the baubles anyone could
imagine. She’d been relieved to see that, once you got out of the clanging,
awful casino, Vegas was actually rather attractive, and here was an upscale
mall where she felt perfectly comfortable. Was this another clue to her past?
She wandered past Gucci, Prada, Versace, Jimmy Choo and found herself humming
as she strolled. It felt good to be back in the world, to squint against the
bright sunlight that came in through the broad mall windows, to hear the
piped-in voice of Beyonce. The food looked better out here too, once you got
away from the casino and that overdone old-fashioned type of restaurant where
they’d been the night before. She stopped for a gelato and smiled down at the
vats of beautiful pale colors lined up within the case. Pink pomegranate, green
pistachio, all the different shades of berries. But when she finally decided on
hazelnut and the man handed her the doll-like tasting spoon it was exactly like
the food last night—flat and flavorless. She sighed and threw it into the nearest
trash can. This didn’t make any sense. How could she enjoy colors and textures
and sounds, but have lost her sense of taste?