Double Deal Page 2
“Well, well Canada. That’s not your room.” Jilly was smiling at me, leaning up against her doorframe like some ingénue from a black and white film. She blew smoke out of her nostrils, looked at me in a knowing way.
“Sorry to disappoint you, Jilly, but I don’t think I’ll be going there again. Some people have too much baggage.”
“Ahh, yes, and you travel so very lightly.”
“Lighter than some. See you Jilly.” My hinges squeaked as I pulled my door shut.
I saw Sheila the next day, still wearing the dark wraparound glasses, but looking surer on her feet, not as unsteady as yesterday. She was looking towards my door, like she was waiting for me, maybe. I didn’t leave until she gave up, walked down the sidewalk to whatever she did with her days. I ran through the streets to work. I would never get used to the dryness of this city. After growing up next to Lake Ontario, it was hard to imagine a place that had no humidex, that never had to deal with the lake effect making summers cool and winters warm. It was another world down here, and I yearned to return home. I missed that big stinky lake.
Sheila was waiting for me when I got home. I tried to brush past her, pretend like I didn’t notice her, but she got up in my face, I couldn’t get by without knocking into her. That’s when I noticed her eyes.
“What the hell?” I asked. Her eyes looked up at me, perfect blue, like Lake Ontario on a sunny day.
“Can we talk?” she asked. I let her into my room.
“Sorry about the squalor,” I said, motioning her to use the one chair that was not covered in dirty clothes. “It’s just that I’m squalid.” She sat and faced me.
“So, you can see I’m fine,” she said by way of an introduction.
“I can see it, but I am really confused. Yesterday you had no eyes. Today you have eyes. There’s a disconnect here.”
“Would you believe a bat shit crazy story?”
“From the woman with the disappearing eyes? Probably.” I sat on my bed, shifting some laundry out of the way to do so. She took a deep breath, and started.
“To begin, yesterday when you saw me, I was fine. My eyes were fine, they were just invisible.” I snorted involuntarily. “No, I’m serious. Look.” She held up a milk white hand, one far too pale for the Vegas sun. Slowly her skin faded away, and I was left looking at the inside of her hand, the muscle, then the bones, until they too faded from view. I could see a cross section of her wrist, as though her hand had been cleanly sliced off. Just like Luke Skywalker in The Empire Strikes back, but with no lightsabers. I reached out to touch where her hand should be. I felt flesh, warm and real as the rest of her. Suddenly she faded from view, leaving an empty shell of clothes. “So, I can only assume you believe me now,” she said, as she became visible.
“How is this possible?” I asked, feeling a little sick to my stomach. Watching a living autopsy is unnerving. Totally unnerving.
“Have you seen those ads to take part in research studies?” she asked me. Las Vegas University and some companies offered test subjects a few thousand dollars to be guinea pigs in drug research, product testing, things like that.
“Yeah, you can make some good money on those. I wanted to sign up, but you need to be a citizen.”
“Let’s just say that you shouldn’t be in several of them at once. There can be complications.”
“You’re shitting me.” If I hadn’t have seen her go invisible right before my eyes I would have called bullshit on her.
“No, I’m really not. I’ve been like this since I exposed myself to a mixture of a new psychotropic drug, a slight dose of radiation, a little immune suppressor, and a new HIV compound, plus whatever other crap that was in my system from the last few years of testing. Some people get acne for side effects, I got this.”
“So the eyes, what was the deal with that?”
“Sometimes I can’t control things, bits of me go invisible when I’m not paying attention. Yesterday it was my eyes. I couldn’t see shit, scared me.”
“You couldn’t see?”
“Not a thing. As far as I can figure, when my eye goes invisible, my retina does too. What I’m seeing can’t be processed by the retina, so I’m blind.”
“This is too cool,” I said. My mind was racing. She could be rich. A person in Vegas with this talent, living in this dump, it made no sense. I told her as much.
“You think I can start up some big Penn and Teller style stage show?” she said barking out a laugh. “Think about it.” Her features hardened once again into a mask of seriousness. “You know those movies where a group of scientists are looking for an interesting specimen to poke at for years? I don’t wanna be that specimen.” I nodded, understanding her logic, as B movie as it was. Then it struck me.
“Want to help me cheat at poker?” I asked. She smiled at me.
“Now that I think I can get behind,” she said.
I broke it down for her over coffee. Most casinos are noisy, crowded affairs, packed with people trying to win the American dream. Crowds breed excitement, excitement gets people all hot and bothered, dropping more and more money on bigger and bigger bets. Crowds are the key, winners shouting and carrying on, losers shuffling back to their antiseptic rooms for the night. Crowds are money for the casinos, except in the poker rooms.
Every casino has a few places for high rollers, walled off from the hoi polloi, places where gentlemen and ladies can play a civilized game of serious, high stakes poker. Sheila’s talents would be perfect in that setting. She could check the other players’ cards, let me know when to bet and when to fold, without worrying about being bumped by a bunch of tourists for the Ozarks.
“Only one problem,” I said. “Those tables have pretty high buy ins, usually a few thousand dollars. I don’t have a few thousand dollars. Do you?” Sheila just laughed at me.
“I don’t know anyone with that kind of money. We are screwed. Unless we can get, what, three grand? Four?”
I nodded grimly. “At least.” I rolled my coffee mug pack and forth in my hands, thought back to the days when I was on top of my game. If I was going to get out of Vegas, I would have to play again. I knew what I had to do. “Let’s try something,” I said, jumping up and leaving the diner. Across the street was a run down casino. “How much do you have right now?” I asked her. She handed me over about thirty bucks. I had fifteen. “Let’s see what I’ve got.”
We walked into the hotel casino, bought forty bucks worth of chips. The casino was trapped in the seventies. Calling it a casino was an exaggeration. Just a room attached to a strip motel with a handful of tables and a few rows of slot machines. Sheila and I made our way over to the Texas Hold ‘Em table with five dollar blinds. The dealer smiled at us, resplendent in his shabby suit. I nodded to the other players, obviously regulars, not tourists. I waited to be dealt in, examined my opponents. They were sharp, that much I could see. They were not tournament types, didn’t play the big casinos, but they looked like they knew their way around a deck of cards. The betting started, I threw in my blind and waited to be dealt my pocket cards. I tried to focus myself, put my head in the game. I checked my hand. I couldn’t believe it, I had the bullets. Twin aces. It doesn’t get much better than that. I relaxed slightly, settled into my seat, felt it dig into my back. The board was a standard hodgepodge of cards, nothing interesting, nothing that could help. We all stayed in, raising the bet, making a tidy little pot. Then the dealer turned over the river. Aces. Nice. I won that one, and kept on winning. When I made it to two thousand dollars, it was time to move on.
“We need to go to the Strip,” I told Sheila. “This place is a little small scale for our needs.”
“Are you sure you need my help?” she asked. “That was some serious poker playing there.”
“Right now, I’m on a streak. But you’re insurance, you’ll make sure I don’t go off it.” We walked quickly to the strip, fou
nd ourselves a real casino, one with showgirls, marble statues, and enough in the bank for our needs. “Don’t forget, I need ten grand, minimum. You’re in for two thirds of the winnings, so I need to win at least thirty thousand. The difference between two and thirty is amazing when you are talking thousands.” I carried our chips over to the table, Sheila leaned into me to hear the plan. “Here is the drill, if I’m winning, you excuse yourself, standard Vegas headache, invisible yourself, and meet me in that poker room.” I pointed to one near the back of the casino, not too busy.
“I’ll have to go to the ladies room first, get changed,” she said. I looked at her quizzically. “I’ll have to get rid of my clothes. I go invisible, my clothes do not.”
“So, you’ll be naked in there?” I asked her.
“Naked, but invisible. So it balances out.”
“Interesting. Wait, wait. I just thought of something. The whole point of this is to get you to see the cards, right? I think we have missed something.”
“What?”
“You’re totally blind when invisible, remember?”
“I’ve been thinking about that. I’m pretty sure I can control things enough to make sure my retinas are visible. Visible retinas will mean an image will get processed by my eyes.”
“You really think this will work?”
“Do we have anything to loose?”
“I guess not.” We settled in at a fifty dollar