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Authors: William Lashner

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7

C
ASINOLAND

The casinos on the boardwalk stood bright as silver dollars and high as pipe dreams on a line fronting the utter blackness of the sea. The Castle. The Seaside. Diamond’s Alhambra. Diamond’s Pyramid. Parade Parade. LondonTown. How Fat’s House of Luck. And in the middle, higher than the others, grander, lit brighter, topped by twin domes of shimmering gold surrounded by full-color statues of Greek gods, rose Diamond’s Mount Olympus.

Mount Olympus had the largest casino floor space, the greatest number of rooms, the most slot machines, the biggest jackpots, and the highest table drop and table win of any casino east of the Rockies. It was a palace of profit and pleasure, with gold trim on every fixture and gold rims on every glass, with air cooled by Freon and doped with oxygen, with cocktail waitresses in black high heels and little gold tops that covered just the bottoms, with second-rate singers in the lounges and first-rate acts on the main stage, and a soundtrack like the voice of Daisy Buchanan on speed, overdubbed a hundred thousand times. Diamond’s Mount Olympus.

“Good to see you, Mr. Scrbacek,” said a greeter at the first of two sets of doors.

“Way to go, Mr. Scrbacek,” said one of the men brushing cigarette butts into a dustbin in the foyer.

And then he was past the second set of doors, into the impossible flash of the casino. Every time he stepped inside Mount Olympus, he couldn’t help the quickening of his pace, the jiggling of his fingers, the sense of expectation that stole upon him like a burgeoning erection. He was always after something in the casino—sometimes luck, sometimes money, sometimes the thrill of losing more than he could afford, sometimes a quiet drink, sometimes a noisy drunk, but most times, like tonight, Dolores.

Even late on a Tuesday night, the floor was mobbed with gamblers, and the minimums were jacked high. Scrbacek stood amidst the sea of gaming tables, examining the waitresses as they paraded by with their full trays and skimpy tops. As he searched, he sidled up to one of the blackjack tables.

“Hey, Chris,” he said.

The dealer, short and thin with hands quick enough to hide his boredom, glanced up from the table for just an instant. “J.D.” The table was full, all except one place with a clear chip over its betting spot. Chris continued dealing while he talked. “Heard there was some excitement down at the courthouse.”

“Some,” said Scrbacek.

“Congrats, dude.”

“Thanks.”

“I thought the bastard was finally cooked. You’re some kind of a magician, you are.”

“My client was innocent.”

“Not since the day he was born. But I’ve been telling everyone for a long time now—I ever get in trouble, I’m going straight to J.D. Scrbacek.”

“Have you seen Dolores?”

“She’s on tonight, somewheres. And how about that car blowing up like that?”

“How about it?”

“Kaboom. I heard someone was inside.”

“That’s right.”

“Son of a bitch. Tough way to go. Whose car was it, anyways?”

“It wasn’t a car, it was a Ford Explorer. And it was mine.”

“You’re kidding me.”

“Unfortunately not.”

“And the guy inside was turning the key instead of you?”

“That’s the way it looks.”

Chris paid the winners, scooped up the cards still on the table, and looked straight at Scrbacek. “You want to sit, there’s a seat open. I’ve been saving it for some joker who’s been gone past his time.”

“No, thanks. I’m just looking for Dolores.”

“Hey, J.D., I don’t know about you, but if I won a case with the DNA against me and then my car blew up with someone else inside, I’d figure it was my lucky day.”

Scrbacek looked at Chris for a moment and then down at the sign on the table. Twenty-five-dollar minimum. He thought a moment more before taking his wallet from his pants, pulling out what he had—six twenties, a five, two ones—and dropping it on the table.

Chris spread the bills out before him and said loudly, “Change one hundred twenty-seven.”

Scrbacek stood behind the open seat as Chris jammed the bills down the cash slot and gave him five green chips and two white.

“Good luck,” said Chris.

Scrbacek bet a green chip and pulled a three and an eight. Chris showed six. Without a word Scrbacek placed a second green chip beside the first and Chris slipped Scrbacek’s third card beneath his others, facedown. When the deal came back to him, Chris pulled out his bottom card, a jack, dealt a nine on top, and just like that Scrbacek was up fifty bucks.

“Maybe you’re right,” said Scrbacek. He took off his raincoat, hung it over the chair, and sat. He pulled two greens back into his stack, leaving two for the next hand.

What followed was uncanny. Whenever he stayed pat with a twelve or thirteen, Chris would bust. Whenever he squinted and took a hit, the right card, like magic, flipped atop his others. With a hand of fifteen, he pulled an ace and a five; with a hand of fourteen he pulled a seven; twice when Chris had a twenty, Scrbacek pounded his hand into a twenty-one. And the pile of greens he placed before him grew until they turned to blacks, and then they grew some more.

He toked Chris a few chips every couple of hands, first the greens then the blacks, and when Chris was replaced by a woman named Thuy, he tipped her, too, because toking kept the luck moving through him, and it was moving through him like a current. The cocktail waitress brought him a stream of scotches on the rocks and another pack of cigarettes after he ran through his first, supplying as he was not only his own vile habit but the vile habit of the guy sitting next to him, who was cheerily bumming Marlboros even as his losses mounted. Scrbacek drank and smoked and tried to keep his hands steady as he placed his chips before him and signaled his plays. He won with a fourteen when Thuy pulled an eight to her six-jack. She placed three black chips in front of him as he turned his head to the left just in time to spot another cocktail waitress coming toward him, her round tray full of gold-rimmed glasses.

She had long thin legs, breasts bursting out of her top, black hair falling in waves around her pretty face. She smiled at Scrbacek, and he smiled back and took a long, satisfied drag of his cigarette.

“When did you get in?” said Dolores.

“A few thousand dollars ago.”

“Up or down?”

“Up.”

“Good for you.”

“Farther up since you showed.”

“How sweet.”

She searched the glasses in her tray and pulled out a scotch on the rocks. “I’m working craps, but the guy this is for only tips when he’s winning, and the tables have been ice all night.”

“Not this one,” he said before sucking down a long draw of the scotch.

“I heard you were having quite a day. You want to celebrate tonight?”

“That’s why I came. Do you have the kid?”

“She’s with her father.”

“That’s good. That’s great. When do you get off?”

“It’s your play.”

Scrbacek turned back to the table. He was showing an ace-five. The dealer had a jack. He took a card, another five, and nodded, like it was the easiest thing in the world.

“I can get there by two,” said Dolores.

“I’ll be waiting.”

“Good,” she said, and then she leaned in close to whisper. “But J.D., don’t climb up to your loft before I get there. Pretend I’m worth waiting up for.”

Before he could answer, she sashayed off.

He watched as she carried her tray away, the twitch of her rear in that skimpy gold skirt bringing him hard. He had a burning for Dolores that he found inexplicable. Her perfect breasts were false, her red nails were glued on, the lavish frizz of black that framed her face was a fall pinned to her lank brown hair, her pouting lips were injected, her cute pinched nose was carved, her straight white teeth were corrected. Even her orgasms, as she squirmed atop of him and squeezed her own breasts and let out that hungry moan, were false, or at least he hoped so. Somehow he found all this artificiality so erotic he could barely think straight around Dolores until after he twisted inside her and let loose his desire, before lapsing into a sweet and lonely sleep.

When he turned back to the table, something had changed. Where before there had been a current, now there was a dead calm. He bet three hundred and pulled a jack to his twelve and knew that whatever had been with him at the table had disappeared. Normally, he’d try to force it to come back to papa, keep betting against the deadness, waiting for the current to turn live again. Something inside him didn’t like to win, but tonight his luck held. The scotch and the long day with its traumatic coda finally hit him all at once with a sickening weariness. It was time to go. He tossed another black chip at Thuy, gave the man beside him the rest of his cigarettes, slipped on his raincoat, and gathered his chips into a pile to take to the cashier.

Twenty-one hundred and seventy-five dollars.

He was too tired to let out a cheer or pump his fist as the cashier counted out the bills. He had thought a win like that would somehow make him happier and was disappointed that it didn’t. He put a hundred seventy-five dollars into his wallet and folded the twenty remaining Ben Franklins in half and stuffed them into the top of his boot. On his way out he stopped at a bar in one of the lounges.

“I need a bottle of champagne,” he told the bartender.

“What table you at?”

“I need it to go.”

“Sorry, pal. No bottles to go. House rule.”

“Well, you see, I got this girl coming over.”

“I know the story.”

“And she’s been feeling unappreciated lately.”

“What else is new.”

“And she’s had the best surgeons money can buy.”

The barkeep glanced around. “All right, this once. You want the good stuff or the very good stuff?”

“I want the hundred-and-fifty-dollar stuff.”

On his way out of the bar, holding the brown paper bag like a football, he heard the man sweeping the foyer say, “Good evening, Mr. Scrbacek.”

He
heard
the
doorman
say, “Hope you had a good run, Mr. Scrbacek.”

And then he was back outside, surrounded by the cool of the brightly lit night. He walked to the edge of the boardwalk, heard the uneven but steady roar of the waves in the darkness that crouched beyond the reach of the casino lights, breathed in the sweet salty-rot scent of the sea. He turned around and faced the gaudy grandeur that was Diamond’s Mount Olympus.

Between the two golden domes was a post with a flag flapping in the wind, the word
SINGAPORE
printed upon the rippling fabric. The owner of Mount Olympus and three other casinos on the boardwalk, James E. Diamond—billionaire, high-flying jet-setter, author of three ghostwritten books detailing his brilliant business strategies—was such a famous personage that the patrons always wanted to know where he was. Management had taken to putting up a flag each morning to announce his location. Sometimes it was Hong Kong, sometimes London, sometimes Vegas or New York or Hollywood. And then, on those special days when he came to inspect his flagship casino or to work on his grand plan to put a mammoth casino resort on the swath of land on the northern bay of the city, known as the Marina District, they put up a great red flag that simply said
I
N THE
H
OUSE
.

So, thought Scrbacek, the great James E. Diamond is in Singapore this evening. Singapore. Sweet. But I’ll bet he didn’t have a day like mine. I’ll bet he didn’t single-handedly whip the government in a court of law with nothing but his wiles and his wit. I’ll bet he didn’t feel death brush past his cheek and land on someone else’s shoulder. I’ll bet he didn’t take all his ready cash and increase it twentyfold in a game of chance with the odds set dead against him. I’ll bet he’s not looking to a long night of champagne and sex with a surgically enhanced cocktail waitress with magic hands and a mouth like velvet.

He raised his brown paper bag and said out loud, “You might be a billionaire, Mr. Diamond, but tonight I kicked your ass.”

And then, alone, he headed home.

8

F
INAL
C
IGARETTE

As Scrbacek climbed the stairway from his office to his apartment, he thought about how nice it would be to keep climbing, to shuck off his raincoat, his shirt, his shoes, his pants, to keep climbing and keep shucking until he was in his sleeping loft, naked, feeling the pressure of the blankets on his body as slumber caressed his brow. One of his favorite things in the world was being awoken for sex by Dolores when she came in after her shift, the smoky taste of scotch in her mouth, the urgency of her hands as they kneaded him to wakefulness. It all took place in a hazy netherworld of pleasure. And afterward he would drift back into sleep as if he had just passed through the most perfect of dreams.

But he stopped short of the loft. He put the champagne in the freezer and dropped onto his couch. He was too tired even to take off his raincoat, but he would wait for Dolores as she had asked.

He just needed to keep his eyes open.

If he could keep his eyes open, then he would be ready for her when she opened the door with the key he left behind a loose brick, and made her way up the stairs. His smile and a glass of very good champagne would act as salve upon all the slights that had marred the strange thing that had grown between them—an acquaintanceship charged with random bouts of goatish sex but always, at heart, an acquaintanceship. Their relationship was as convenient a thing as he could ever have hoped for, but it left her, he could sense, more than vaguely disappointed. Maybe tonight would be different. Maybe tonight he would kiss her gently without trying to rip off her shirt. Maybe tonight he would ask about her day and listen to what she said and feign real interest in how wonderfully her daughter was doing in school. Maybe tonight he would try to make her a little happy.

He just needed to keep his eyes open.

A cigarette. He could use a cigarette. He patted the pockets of his raincoat—nothing. He had foolishly given what he’d had left to the cheerful man sitting next to him at the blackjack table, and now Scrbacek had zilch. He rose and quickly searched the apartment, coming up empty before he dropped down again in his chair. He didn’t need to smoke, he just wanted to. He knew the difference.

He had quit smoking once, for a girl. Jenny Ling. Everybody has one great failed love, and Jenny Ling was his. She was an earnest, liberal help-thy-fellow-human type who found the stink, the stray litter of ash, the yellowed teeth, the cancerous tumors, found all the by-products of Scrbacek’s habit decidedly uncool. Despite the startling banality of her insights into smoking, he had given it up for her, and had felt decidedly virtuous. It was his virtuous epoch, his time with Jenny Ling, but that love had failed, decidedly so, and he had taken up the practice once again.

Now, trying to stay awake for a different lover, he could use a cigarette. But Dolores would bring him one, sweet Dolores—she was always good for a spare. He closed his eyes and thought about the way Dolores would purse her pretty lips as she tossed him her pack of Benson & Hedges. He would tap the pack against the arm of his chair, shake out a single slim cigarette, place its smooth surface within his lips, flick to life his lighter, bring the flame close to his face, breathe in the fire, fill his nose and throat with the rich dark pleasure of the smoke, redolent of the burning leaves of autumn, the crackling hearths of winter, the sparks of a campfire spiraling into the summer night. He inhaled deeply, the warm tug of the nicotine suffusing into his blood, the heat of the red glow upon his fingers, filling his lungs and turning his dream into a gorgeous chiaroscuro of smolder and smoke.

He woke with a cough.

The smoke of his dream was surrounding him, thick, warm.

He sat up and coughed again.

“What the . . .”

There was only smoke. The lit digital displays on his stove, his cable box, his stereo, all were lost in the haze.

He stood and coughed, dashed to his window, pushed up the bottom sash. Fresh air washed upon him. He punched out the screen and looked down. The glow of flame within his office on the bottom floor danced upon the darkened street. He yelled for help, but nothing outside moved except the dance of the firelight.

He took a deep breath and rushed halfway down the spiral stairs. The heat hit his face like a fist. A carpet of flame covered the floor of his office. Fire danced wildly up the stairway. He stepped down farther into the roar as a tongue of flame shot high enough to lick his boot. He wrapped the coat around himself in preparation for a race through the fire to the safety of the street and took a deep breath. It felt like raw flame had leaped into his throat and seared his lungs. The pain buckled his legs. As he gripped the handrail, a cinder burned into his palm. He threw up his hand and collapsed down the circular stairwell, twisting until he lay in a curve, facing the steps. Fire danced about him as if he were the guest of honor on a funeral pyre. He took another breath. The pain was beyond pain. He fell into a fit of coughing as the heat overwhelmed him.

Slowly, desperately, hand over enfeebled hand, he dragged himself back up the stairway and into his apartment.

On his knees he crawled to the window, grabbed the sill, pulled himself up, stuck out his head. He gulped at the air. He knew the air he breathed to be cool, delicious, sweet, but still each inhalation burned as if he were again breathing in the hot smoke of the fire. He had to get out, somehow. He thought of jumping; it was only the second floor, but still. There was a drainpipe leading from the roof just a few feet from the window. That could be his ticket. He turned to take a look back into the apartment. What did he need? What must he save? What in his life was absolutely essential? A suit? His flat-screen? The diploma he was awarded by his law school? No, nothing. Nothing worth saving. He leaned back through the window and lunged for the pipe.

It groaned audibly when he grabbed hold of it. His burned right hand slammed into a brace, and the metal sliced his skin, but even so he whipped his other arm around to grab the drainpipe with both hands. It wasn’t as steady as he had hoped, nothing more than folded sheet metal, but he saw no choice except to hold on tight and swing his body out of the window, away from the fire.

He steadied his grip, took a painful breath, swung.

His legs hung loose. He scrabbled at the brick wall with his boots, trying to find purchase, as if to climb up instead of down. Suddenly he stopped moving altogether, as if suspended in time as well as midair. With a groan and the sound of snapping braces, the pipe broke from the building, falling away even as it collapsed in on itself.

And Scrbacek fell with it, shouting, shouting.

The bending and collapsing of the metal slowed his fall just
enough so that when he hit the asphalt unevenly, his left leg jammed but did not shatter. He lay on the ground, stunned. Slowly he raised
his torso so he could stare head-on at the wall of fire inside the plate-glass win
dow of his office. With much effort he stood, took a step forward and then another, and stopped before the flames, watching his entire career incinerate before his eyes. He wondered what he had done to cause the fire, what appliance he had forgotten to turn off, what combustible he had left too close to a source of heat. He wondered why the fire alarm hadn’t gone off, tried to remember when he last changed the batteries. He thought for a moment of the twenty-six years remaining on his mortgage.

There came a rustling sound from behind him, and then something else.

“Scrbacek.”

It was less than a whisper, as soft as a thought. He turned his head, and in that instant the fire before him was linked in his mind with the explosion behind the courthouse and he knew, with all certainty, that the car bomb had been meant for him and the fire had been purposely set and there was someone behind him intent on finishing the job.

He dived to the left at the same time he heard an insect buzz by his ear. He rolled along the ground and rose, running as fast as his jammed leg and seared lungs would allow, running, gasping for air, running, running for his life.

He pumped hard with both fists until he felt something like a baseball bat slam into his left arm, knocking him to the ground, and when he rose and started running again, the left arm refused to move, just hung there, lifeless. But he kept running, gasping and running, pumping now with one fist only, the singed tail of his raincoat sweeping behind him as he kept running, kept running.

He came to a cross street and turned quickly right. He grabbed his left biceps, and his hand came away slick—his arm was bleeding and the blood was coming fast—but he kept running.

Until he came to another intersection. Where he slowed. And then stopped. Bent over, grabbing again his bloodied biceps, gasping for breath. Gasping. For breath. Gasping. He coughed out a gob of black phlegm and searched desperately around him.

To the right, the neon glow of Casinoland beckoned. Within the reach of that light were the police, the hospitals, the Department of Human Services, whole industries designed to track and help a man in trouble. Within the reach of that light were friends, colleagues, Dolores. To the left were the hostile shadows of Crapstown.

Our brains have evolved over the eons by growing up and out. It is the forebrain, a rather recent addition, that controls all the higher
functions: reason, mercy, love. In contrast, the hindbrain is a vestige of the lower-order mammals out of which we rose in the far recesses of the misty past. It sits at the base of our skulls like a rat, with a tail that runs down our spines, and controls our involuntary functions: heartbeat, breathing, vomiting, the release of adrenaline at the scent of danger. Our forebrains wrestle with the grand unanswerable questions of existence
—our places in the world, the interconnectedness of all things, the intricacies of the infield fly rule—but when the worst dangers rear their ugly heads, it is that little rat at the base of the skull that takes control.

Put a rat between light and darkness, give it a shock, it will always, always run to the dark. Always. J.D. Scrbacek was marked for death for no reason he could fathom, his vehicle was gone, his home and office were destroyed, he was leaking blood with every step, and there was no one he could trust. J.D. Scrbacek was in mortal danger, and the rat at the base of his skull knew exactly what to do.

Scrbacek took off to the left, running as fast as lungs and legs would allow, running away from a killer, away from the light, running dead straight into the heart of darkness that was Crapstown.

BOOK: The Four-Night Run
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