The Grand Tour (20 page)

It was a lark. For a while, they were able to re-create the way it had felt in San Diego—that nothing mattered and everything was fun and would go on being fun forever. But the holidays came and went, then Casey went again, this time back to Fresno, having gotten tired of screwing around and secretly applied to nursing school. Cindy found herself without a plan, this time not in the good way, and wound up waitressing the rest of the next year in the vague hope that something new would present itself and for a third time prevent her from returning to Fresno in utter defeat. (She imagined writing a memoir—like
The Red Badge of Richard,
as her mother referred to her father's putative war memoir—a slim volume entitled
Returning to Fresno in Utter Defeat.
)

Something new presented itself in the person of a pit boss named Brian, who was eighteen years her elder and twice divorced at thirty-nine. But he was good-looking in a deceptively clean-cut way, and he knew the difference between Burgundy and Beaujolais, and he could improvise plausibly on the lounge piano and wear a suit and Italian loafers the way other men wore cargo shirts and Crocs. She moved into his condo in Henderson, and three months later they got married in a little ceremony attended by their closest friends, mostly other casino employees, that was held in the chapel of the Venetian, which everyone agreed was the nicest of the casino chapels.

It was a good couple of years. Brian called in a couple of favors and got her a job working for the casino surveillance team. It was a nine-to-five gig, mostly spent staring at a cluster of video feeds, piped up to the office from the innumerable black-domed cameras mounted every thirty feet or so on the casino-floor ceiling, like the nests of alien hornets. She looked for any sign of malfeasance—pocketing of chips, collusion between players, card counting, or simple outright theft—and called back down to the pit bosses, who meted out the appropriate punishment, usually lifelong banishment. It was tedious, meticulous work that most people would have hated, but she loved it. She loved the sense of disembodiment, of being a pair of invisible eyes hovering over thousands of unwitting people. It was voyeuristic and exciting. That some of the casino's patrons were, in fact, witting and furthermore despised the unblinking electric eye overhead (at least once an hour, some soused smartass would lift a bird to the camera) meant nothing to her. She liked it, actually: they had no choice; when they set foot in the casino she was their companion—unditchable, unrejectable, undeniable.

It helped that she was good at it, too. In her first eight months on the job, she personally identified thirteen different incidents, all of which were verified after the fact. Her supervisor—an elderly bulldog of a man who seemed to live in the surveillance office—took her aside and told her she had eyes. This was the highest compliment in the business. At the same time her marriage was imploding (inconsideration, incompatibility, infidelity), she was being steadily promoted up the ladder. By the time the divorce came through, she was third-shift supervisor, which ran from midnight to eight.

This was considered the most important shift, as it was the time of day when theft and cheating were most likely to occur, and it was, therefore, the best compensated. By twenty-five, she was divorced and making nearly six figures. Her life had a shape now, though an odd one; she was charting her own destiny, free of both of her parents. Eileen still didn't approve, still wanted her to come back home and go to college, but that was a joke. She was making more money than she'd ever imagined making, having fun in Fun City, doing her own thing—why on earth leave? Her plan was to bank most of the money until she was thirty, then travel for a few years, unencumbered.

But over the next few years, the money in her account disappeared like water through a sieve. By the time she was twenty-six, she had only managed to save eight thousand and change. Where had it all gone? Shopping, dinner, drinking, drugs, and, in the last couple of years, gambling. She lived in reverse time from the rest of humanity and needed a form of diversion and relief after getting off her shift in the morning. Slowly, this diversion had taken the form of stopping at Binion's or the Nugget on her way home and playing roulette for an hour or two. She was often kept company by interested—and always uninteresting—men, frat boys on an all-night bender who assumed the chick by herself at the wheel of fortune was looking for company. That was okay; she didn't mind putting them off, watching them fumble their chips uncertainly as they placed what they thought were large bets (
I've never seen a hundred-dollar chip before!
) on their unlucky lucky numbers, trying and failing to impress her. Eventually they would sulk away and leave her to the cool, relentless clicking of the wheel and the hands of the croupier, first gently releasing the ball, then just as gently passing over her turreted stacks, like a rainstorm over ancient ruins, and sweeping everything into the dark slot of the chip dump.

Sometimes she won, too—once, seven thousand on a two-hundred-dollar thirty-five-to-one shot. But that didn't matter, really. What mattered was the calm that sitting at the table brought her, a sense of completion that let her go home afterward and sleep through the haunted desert day with no dreams whatsoever.

Over the last couple of years, as though via some kind of occult math, her meager savings had multiplied into vast debt. Five different credit cards, the needle buried deep in the red. She didn't know what the exact figure was—she strenuously avoided adding up the numbers—but a ballpark sum floated around in her head like a cloud of noxious gas. A hundred thousand. Around this time, Mikhail had asked her to meet him at the Monaco Club, a dive bar he owned a tiny percentage of. She didn't know why he wanted to meet. They had dated each other, very briefly, but she hadn't seen him in over a year. Mikhail was one of those characters the city seemed to collect like unusual but worthless coins. He had a photographic memory, a computerlike ability to calculate odds, a magician's sleight of hand, and nothing whatsoever to show for it. An inveterate and degenerate gambler and grifter, he'd been banned from almost every casino in town, including hers. In early April, she'd sat down across from him in a booth at the Monaco. Even though it was nearly ninety degrees, he still wore his leather jacket, sweat dotting the upper reaches of his high forehead.

His proposal: If she looked the other way when he and two of his partners were working the floor, they'd cut her in on 20 percent of the take. He said her end would probably be worth at least ten thousand a month, maybe more. He told her it wouldn't involve any actual law-breaking, just a certain amount of nonvigilance on her part. She told him to get lost. He told her to think about it. Sitting in her apartment later that day, she did, despite herself. It was an obvious no, the kind of plan, with the kind of people, that announced itself as a BAD IDEA in capital letters. No, it wasn't just a bad idea—Mikhail's plan entered the room in a neon clown suit, wearing big, red, floppy shoes, already soaked with seltzer water and banana cream. She sat down and added up her credit card statements, then called him and told him yes.

It worked for three months. Finally, on a Saturday in July, one of the new surveillance hires spotted something in Mikhail's hand. Security took several magnets off him that he was using to rig the craps table along with iron-lined dice. Mikhail and his partner were pinned to the floor and photographed and dragged shouting out of the casino by their collars, a minor brouhaha that made page 3 of the
Las Vegas Sun.
She slept a total of maybe four hours the following week, but no one reported her.

Then came the voicemail from Mikhail saying she owed him ten thousand, that the last payment he'd given her was really an advance payment for the next month and that, since she'd been responsible for keeping them out of trouble, she owed the money back. Plus, he said, he had to hire a good lawyer, and she had a vested interest in making sure the whole thing went away, didn't she? She didn't see the need for the elaborate justification—it was blackmail, of course, pure and simple. They met again at the Monaco, and she told him she had no money, that all of it had gone straight to the kneebreakers at Capital One and Citibank. Stooping to the straw of his tequila sunrise, he told her that she'd better figure something out.

So for the last few months, he'd been intermittently harassing her, and she'd been slowly paying him, in tiny increments. Half of her knew the whole thing was ridiculous and that she could and probably should tell him to fuck off. But the other half—smarter or dumber, she wasn't sure—knew Mikhail could, in fact, make trouble for her. Even if he had no evidence of her involvement, he could talk to her supervisors and implicate her in the whole mess. Tapes could be reviewed that showed Mikhail and his partners skulking into the casino whenever she was working. She could be fired, or worse. It could be bad for her.

But it already was bad for her. She'd had to change her phone number twice to temporarily elude the debt collectors that, for the last year, had been hounding her constantly like a pack of hormonal teenage boys. Her financial problems hadn't stopped her from blowing money constantly; if anything, her spending had accelerated—the week before, she had stopped at a blackjack table at the Sands on a whim and blown a cool thousand on one bet. It felt bracing, like a blast of cold air had swept into the casino from the desert. The next day, she'd tried to buy a sixty-dollar pair of black work flats at Aldo, and her card was declined.

She'd been considering killing herself lately, in the same vague way she'd previously considered visiting Greenland or the ruins at Chapultepec. She was only twenty-eight, but she felt so much older. The years between eighteen and twenty-eight—between sitting down in the passenger seat of Casey's Mustang and where she was now—felt like a wall of bricks she'd painstakingly laid. She'd Amontilladoed herself into her own life.

Richard pushed heavily into the Monaco Club. Despite its name, the place was not affiliated with any casinos and at a glance featured no gambling, other than the one you took with your life upon entering. Richard had been in plenty of dive bars in his day, had even worked in one until recently, but he grudgingly admired how the Monaco took the concept of diviness to another level. In one corner of the trapezoidal room, the ceiling had partially collapsed where a pipe had burst. The rusted pipework jutted down like a hernia through a ruptured abdominal lining. The rest of the tiles were sodden and brown and looked ready to go at any second. An incongruous candy machine near the entrance contained what looked like tiny plastic bananas. A grim pair of blondes sipped drinks from plastic cups and smoked by a pay phone next to the bathroom, waiting for a call that would almost certainly not come for them. They were immediately identifiable as prostitutes from their shared bearing, a singular brand of avid hostility. A trio of dodgy-looking men at the bar craned their necks around at him as though he was intruding on a private function. One of them featured a neck tattoo that read
STRANGE DAYS
in gothic script, with a curlicue extending up over the jawline like the leg of a hidden spider. Richard approached him.

“Is Mikhail here?”

“Who's asking?”

“Richard.”

“Who's Richard?”

“I am.”

“What do you want.”

“Jesus. To talk to Mikhail.”

The men looked at one another dubiously. One of them pulled out his phone and sent a text message. Richard waved off the bartender and sat alone at the end of the bar, aware of the trio watching him. He thought how if there was ever a time it seemed reasonable to get a drink, waiting at a bar to confront your daughter's loan shark or blackmailer or whatever the hell he was seemed like the time. But he didn't, he just sat there. That was the trick: you just sat there and didn't do it.

While he sat there not doing anything, he thought about Cindy, sleeping, or unconscious anyway, in the car outside with Vance. She'd been about to speak but nodded off, and they hadn't been able to fully rouse her—some combination, it seemed, of the pills she'd taken plus a more or less complete nervous breakdown. Eventually, they pried her off the couch, to some murmured fussing but no real resistance. On the way down the stairwell, they passed by a man who did the best he could to pretend he wasn't seeing two other men carrying an unconscious woman down the stairs. Not entirely unconscious—she took little shambling steps, helping them move her to Vance's car. Eyes still closed, she scooted into the backseat, where Richard fastened her in place with the seatbelt while Vance went back to retrieve the suitcase he'd hastily thrown clothes into. She lolled as he felt behind her for the strap—her condition oddly reminded him of when they'd gone to Knott's Berry Farm when she was four. As a long day of standing in lines, eating bad concession food, and standing in more lines, all under a vengeful July Central Valley sun, had progressed, so had Cindy progressed through some toddlery version of Maslow's stages of grief: from excitement to an overstimulated stupor to hot frustration and subsequent sobbing meltdown to an exhaustion so pure as to render her infinitely pliable, holding his hand and trundling toward the car with her eyes closed. The closed lids had fluttered then as they fluttered twenty-four years later, like a butterfly in delicate, momentary equipoise.

Eventually, Mikhail pushed in from outside, in the process letting in a bit of weak sunlight, which seemed to take one look at the inside of the Monaco Club, turn around, and leave immediately. Mikhail sat down next to Richard, exuding fatigue as well as sweat. The bartender, without being asked, set up a tequila sunrise in front of Mikhail and a moment later impaled it with a straw.

“Where's your valet?”

“Outside, in the car. He's also my chauffeur.”

Mikhail stared at him blankly. Richard said, “Tell me what's going on.”