Street Smart

2

She had her car—a “used though still in excellent condition” Grand Cherokee. A single woman on her own didn’t need anything so big, but Francesca didn’t know how much stuff Autumn had accumulated in the two years she’d been gone. A shopping cart full?

Her half sister had called her mother from a pay phone. For anonymity? Or because that phone on the street was her home phone?

Just before eight on Saturday morning, Francesca drove slowly down the Strip, only minimally distracted by the visual cacophony of fantasyland elite mixed with the gutteresque. The opulent signs and landscaping stood beside parking lots filled with potholes and garishly lighted marquees advertising souvenir mugs for ninety-nine cents, beer and three T-shirts for twelve dollars.

Already older couples strolled the sidewalks hand in hand, stepping aside periodically as the occasional man hurried from one casino to the next, exuding an air of desperation—and the desperate hope of someone who’s broken free.

Did they ever eat, those occasional men? Francesca wondered. Or did they live on anticipation and the free cocktails offered so readily at the blackjack tables?

Traffic wasn’t too bad, but she moved slowly, taking in as many loitering places as she could. Autumn had made that call just a few blocks from here.

Spring Mountain Road. Sands Avenue. The streets followed one after another, just as her map had indicated they would. It all had a “Twilight Zone” feel to Francesca, not only unfamiliar but completely outside the bounds of reality. Was this surrealistic place her sister’s stamping ground?

The thought of her beautiful now-seventeen-year-old sister living somewhere on these streets was just too painful to hold on to. Francesca glanced once more at the written directions and highlighted map on the console at her right elbow. The police had said there was nothing they could do with the phone lead. There’d been nothing to trace. Francesca understood that runaways were a dime a dozen in their fine city. And the police had a hell of a lot more to do than Francesca did.

She could sit by that pay phone booth all day every day for the next year if that was what it took to get a lead on her sister’s whereabouts. Sit there holding the camera she’d unpacked that morning and tossed in the back seat just so she’d look as though she had some purpose, something to do.

One more intersection and she had to turn right. And then take an immediate left. She’d been in the city a little more than twelve hours. Long enough to buy the car and get some much-needed sleep—via the help of potent prescription sleeping pills given to her by a sympathetic Italian doctor who’d been unable to ease her pain. He’d offered the escape of powerful drugs instead.

There were nights when Francesca cried out of sheer gratitude to him.

Her first impulse was to ignore the ringing of the cell phone plugged into the car’s power outlet. But there was only one person who’d be calling. And as much as she didn’t want to talk…

“Hi, Mom,” she said, without looking at the caller ID on the phone’s display.

“What did you find?”

She should’ve kept her number private.

“It’s barely past dawn, Mom,” she said, her eyes filling with tears for the sad woman who, living all alone, had aged ten years in the one Francesca had been away. After the death of her first husband, Francesca’s father, Kay Stevens’s life had gone inexorably downhill. The sudden heart-attack death eighteen months before of the bastard who’d been her second husband—Autumn’s father—should’ve made things at least more bearable.

But it hadn’t.

“You don’t sleep a lot,” Kay said softly, but with the barest hint of the steel she’d instilled in her older daughter sometime before her second husband had come on the scene and attempted to beat it out of both of them. “In the three weeks you were home, you never slept more than four hours a night. Something happened in Italy. I know it did. Why won’t you tell me about it?”

A bus stop caught Francesca’s eye—an uncomfortable-looking bench with a couple of panels overhead, to block out rain, maybe. It certainly didn’t offer much shade.

No one was sleeping on it. Had Autumn ever?

“There’s nothing to tell.” The response drained her, but not nearly as much as the truth would have.

As much as she craved her mother’s nurturing hand, she just didn’t have the capacity to talk about the year in Italy that had changed her life forever. Not her brief time in Milan with Antonio. Not the long, slow and frightening birth of her son. And most especially not the moment she’d reached into his crib that last afternoon at Sancia’s, not the autopsy, nor the grandmother she’d left behind.

Nor did she believe her mother any longer had the wherewithal to offer a nurturing hand.

“I think you should at least try to call Antonio,” her mother said again—a suggestion she’d made many times in the month since Francesca’s return. “Let him know you’re back in town.”

“No,” she said, as she had every single time. “I went to Italy because I found out he’d been married the entire two years I dated him. Why on earth would I look him up on my return?” Other than these reminders from her mother, she didn’t think about the man who’d fathered her child. Not anymore. He’d been buried right along with the rest of her heart.

“You said his wife was brain-damaged from that accident….”

“Which doesn’t make him any less obligated. Any less married. And if we’re going to continue to discuss this, I’m hanging up.”

Kay’s sigh was heavy. “Will you call me as soon as you get to the phone booth? Let me know what you find?”

“Unless Autumn left a calling card or some graffiti on the side of the booth, a vacant piece of property owned by Sprint isn’t going to tell us much.”

“I just thought there might be some homeless person around who’d know—” Kay broke off. Into the silence that followed, she muttered, “I know, I’m being presumptuous.” For a brief moment she sounded again like the confident and capable college professor Francesca had known during the first ten years of her life. “This initial phase is your job. Mine comes when we get her home.”

She’d find her sister. Francesca couldn’t think any further than that. If life required more than one step at a time, she’d be paralyzed.

Inching past a red sign with white blinking lights—at eight o’clock on a Saturday morning—proclaiming Welcome to the Candlelight Wedding Chapel, and then, next to it, a big hot-dog placard, Francesca had to wonder if it was an all-in-one deal—nuptials and a wedding supper without leaving the parking lot.

“I’ll hang up now,” her mother said after another pause. “Call me as soon as you know anything.”

“I will, Mom.” I told you I would.

“Anything,” Kay repeated. “Anything at all. I think—”

Francesca’s thumb flipped to the off button just before she dropped the phone back to the console. If asked, she could always say they got disconnected.

Circus Circus was offering free chips and salsa with the purchase of a drink. Francesca made her turn, paying more attention as she got closer to her destination. The phone booth, only a few blocks from the Lucky Seven, could have been reached through backstreets if Francesca had known how to navigate them. With all the construction going on around and behind the Strip—another new casino, road repair, a golf course apparently being shoved in somehow—she hadn’t bothered to try.

Another block, and there was the phone. Right in front of a billboard advertising the Striptease Gentlemen’s Club.

And across the street, a McDonald’s—an old-fashioned rendition of the famous hamburger joint with the ground-to-ground golden arches that were hardly seen anymore. A return to yesteryear? A sign that things were going to be okay again?

Shaking her head, she turned off the engine and settled in, staring at the corner across the street. She knew there was no going back. Ever. Not for her.

And not for Autumn. Her sister had been gone for two years. No matter where she’d been, what she’d been doing, there were bound to be irrevocable changes.

Francesca understood that.

She wasn’t sure her mother did.

Fifty-five-year-old Sheila Miller, blackjack dealer extraordinaire, sat at the kitchen table in her little breakfast nook Sunday morning, phone in hand. She’d dialed three times.

And just as often, pushed the disconnect button.

She had to call. If anyone would know who was behind the recent series of big wins at the tables, Arnold Jackson would.

Stomach growling, Sheila gave a cursory glance at the mass of notes and bills strewn across her table where breakfast would’ve been if she weren’t so desperate to lose weight. No matter how she looked at it, she was in deep shit.

With sweaty fingers, Sheila slowly pushed in the numbers she knew by heart.

Her friend and co-worker, Angie Madden, had asked all up and down the Strip for information on the wins. It had to be an inside scam, but no one was talking. That would make sense if Sheila’d been the one asking. She was the straitlaced fuddy-duddy among them. But not Angie. She’d been the queen of scam for years—someone another scammer would trust—or want to brag to.

The home Angie owned didn’t come from her ten-year-old divorce the way most people thought. It had been purchased, instead, with money she’d slowly siphoned off her table—and from the cut she took helping others do the same. She’d developed a solid reputation among the old-timers. Most of them had either used her help or were friends with someone who had. They didn’t take a lot. And only when they were really in a bind. The well would dry up if they got too greedy.

Most times the take wasn’t much at all by casino-loss standards—an electric bill here, an engagement ring there. More often than anything else, it covered the huge medical deductible on their health plan.

The silver-haired Angie Madden had helped more dealers on the Strip than Sheila could count, and not a single one of them was talking.

Just Sheila’s luck. The first time in thirty years she wanted to know about the seedier side of a blackjack dealer’s life, and she was coming up empty.

Arnold answered on the fourth ring, his voice more gravelly than usual.

She paused long enough to swallow. “I’m sorry, did I wake you?”

“Who is this?”

Feeling the heat come up her face, Sheila stared at the floor. Though Arnold had only been around a few years, he’d quickly become known as the most sought-after bachelor among the dealers. He was smart. Good-looking. And completely true-blue honest.

Which was what made Sheila crazy for him in a way she hadn’t been crazy for a man since the end of her disastrous first marriage thirty years before.

She might be attracted to Arnold, but she wasn’t ready to deal with that. She still had ten pounds to lose.

“Oh, sorry.” She tried for a chuckle and ended up with a cough that probably made her sound as embarrassed as she was. “It’s Sheila Miller. We served together on the dealers’ continuing education committee last year.”

It had been shortly after the holidays. She’d been good and fat then.

“Sheila. Yes, I remember. You were the one who came up with the final justification that clinched our funding.”

He had a good memory. That probably meant he remembered the fat, too.

“I was just calling to find out what you know about this series of big wins. My friends and I are getting concerned. Until we know who’s behind them we’re all suspect. I figured you’d make it your business to find out, especially since most of them are happening at the Bonaparte.”

“All I know is that they’re happening,” the man said. She heard some rustling, wondered if he was getting out of bed. If he slept in the nude. Or if he’d just snuggled deeper beneath the covers.

Alone?

“I’ve been at this job for thirty years,” Sheila told him, folding back the corner of her most recent financial analysis—the one that had kept her up most of the night. If she didn’t figure out who was behind this scam—and get in on it—she was going to lose everything. “And not once in all that time was a series of wins this big ever a coincidence.”

So it had been stupid to use her entire life savings to buy some land outside the city and contract to build a little house on it. She’d thought she could afford it. And after thirty years of sucking up rich jerks’ smoke and developing varicose veins standing at a blackjack table, she deserved something more for herself.

“I’m not happy about the situation,” Arnold said. “As you said, whether it’s an inside job or not, it makes us all look bad.”

And every single night when she came home there were more messages from her builder letting her know about additional expenses. Permit fees and truss calcs and engineering expenses. She’d borrowed—twice—against the condo she’d bought twenty years before, hit up every friend and almost-friend she knew.

“At the Bonaparte they’re running extra security checks on all of us,” Arnold continued.

Shit. Just what she needed. If the Bonaparte was running checks, so would all the casinos. Her debt was going to turn up and she’d be a prime suspect. Double shit. How could she get in on the scam, assuming she found the source, if she was a prime suspect at the same time?

Sweat trickled between her breasts, gathering uncomfortably at the under-wire of her D-cup bra beneath the white blouse she wore to work.

For years she’d watched the others run scams with absolutely no accountability. But the moment I even think about it, they’re suddenly running extra security checks.

Her rotten luck.

Which was why she was a fifty-five-year-old, slightly plump single dealer in Las Vegas with the reputation of being straitlaced and definitely not up for a game.

“You want to have dinner tomorrow night?” What the hell. She was in debt. She was fat. If the wins were an inside job, Jackson would eventually find out. And for the first time in thirty years, she had the hots for a guy.

“I’m working tomorrow night.”

Yeah, well, it was as good excuse as any. At least the man was nice enough to preserve her pride.

Hanging up the phone, Sheila went over to the counter to cut up some fruit.

Sunday night, when the darkness had grown to the point that the strangers she approached on the street corner could no longer see the picture she had to show them, Francesca gave up for another day. Gave up, but couldn’t go back to the Lucky Seven as she had the previous two nights. The black spots on the walls were beginning to take on the image of climbing bugs. She had to keep getting up to make sure they hadn’t really moved, that she didn’t have to kill them. And she was wearing socks at all times in case the stains on the carpet were from something gross.

Socks in 105° F temperature.

How she ended up at the Bonaparte, Las Vegas’s newest casino, and touted as the most opulent, Francesca didn’t know. It was a fantasyland. And she needed to escape.

She’d been in the casino almost an hour, no longer aware of all the loud and unfamiliar sounds consuming her brain. She’d found a nickel video slot she was slowly beginning to figure out as she continued to spend two dollars and twenty-five cents with each push of the button. She still wasn’t sure how she kept racking up credits, but she knew now that when the genie said “yes!” three times in a row, that was a good thing.

Bells rang around her. A recorded voice periodically called out “Wheel of Fortune!” not too far away. She was pretty sure she kept hearing Alex Trebek call out his famous “Let’s play Jeopardy.” Another slot machine based on a TV show?

“Cocktails?” asked a waitress whose breasts were falling out of the purple piece of fabric that was supposed to be a top. It was the fourth time she’d been around.

Instead of politely declining as she had previously, Francesca requested a bottle of water and was relieved when the scantily clad woman responded cheerfully as though the request was quite normal.

Wondering how much the water would cost in a place that had marble casements for its slot machines, Francesca pushed the button again and jumped back, heart pounding, as a siren went off and a light on top of the machine started to flash.

Great. Her first time gambling, first time in a casino, and she’d screwed up the machine.

Could you go to jail for that?

Of course not, she immediately answered herself, fighting back her automatic sense of gloom and doom. But you didn’t have to be in Las Vegas for more than a couple of hours to know that the city took its security seriously.

In the two seconds it took her to consider slipping away, a distinguished-looking man, wearing a three-piece navy suit with a navy-and-white-striped tie that had to be real silk, was by her side, blocking her escape.

“Congratulations!” he said, sticking a card into the machine after which the alarming noise immediately ceased. “Eighteen thousand coins. Not a bad win!”

Eighteen thousand coins? How much was that in nickel land?

“Someone will be here shortly to take care of this for you.”

His voice was pleasant, reassuring, though his smile was as empty as her heart.

“Take care of it?” she asked, wishing now that she’d stopped back at the motel to change out of the tight skirt and skimpy top and knee-high black leather boots she’d worn that day as an attempt to blend into her corner.

“Any win above a thousand coins is paid by an attendant,” he explained.

Francesca was still trying to figure out how much money eighteen thousand nickels really was.

She kept coming up with nine hundred dollars. But that couldn’t be right. She’d only been playing nickels.

“I’m Luke Everson,” the man said, his smile a bit more genuine. “I’m the head of security here. If you have any problems, don’t hesitate to let us know.”

“Problems?” Had she just won nine hundred dollars?

“You looked scared to death when that machine went off.”

“It was a siren.” And the genie hadn’t even said “yes” once.

“I take it you haven’t done this much before.”

He’s not much older than I am. He’d seemed so much older at first. “Uh, no, this is a first.”

“Is it your first time at the Bonaparte, as well?” The conversation was routine, uninvolved, as though she were one of a million of the same cloned human being.

She nodded.

“Well then, I’m glad we’ve given you such a warm welcome. I hope you’ll be back to visit us often.”

There was nothing personal about the invitation. Nothing personal about his manner. Despite his blond good looks, the man somehow managed to exude absolutely nothing. Did he have that much control, or was he just as empty inside as she was?

Either way, his reticence put her more at ease than she’d been in a month.

“Thanks,” she said. Relaxing against the high back of her stool, she glanced up at him. “Did I just win nine hundred dollars?”

“Yes,” he said, grinning down at her in a way that left her confused. He was empty. So was she. This wasn’t supposed to have happened. “And I have to tell you,” he added, “you’ve got to be the least excited winner I’ve ever seen. Doesn’t make for great PR, you know?”

She might have apologized if people hadn’t descended on them. The waitress with her water—turned out it was free—and the attendant with her money. Before she noticed, Luke Everson, head of security, was gone.

And she’d won nine hundred dollars. As she headed out into the brightly lit night with her money she wondered if the stack of bills in her shoulder bag meant her luck was changing. Did this mean she’d find Autumn tomorrow?

Or had she just wasted what little luck was coming her way?

If so, she wanted to give the money back.

All those steps to climb. Autumn Stevens started up the six flights of concrete steps Sunday night, viewing the task as good exercise. She had to. If she allowed even one second of negative thought, she’d never make it up them at all.

And she had to get up there. Her bathroom was in the apartment on the sixth floor and she had to puke. Praying she’d make it in time, dying at the thought of having to clean up her own barf again, especially through six flights of open stairs, she tried to calm her stomach as she lifted one foot and then the other.

As always, calming thoughts rested on her big sister. Francesca was her knight in shining armor, never mind that she wasn’t a man. She was strong. Resilient. She could do anything. Or at least, that was how Autumn had viewed her when she was younger.

Hadn’t Francesca proved her knighthood by getting away from the bastard who’d fathered Autumn—and then proceeded to beat the crap out of all three of the women in his care?

Bile rose to her throat and Autumn quickly switched focus. Last she’d heard, Francesca was in Italy. Antonio had told her. Back when she’d thought him dear and sweet. When she’d felt certain there’d never been a kinder man. Or one more in love.

With the same woman Autumn adored above all others. Her big sister.

God, she missed Cesca. It had been the worst part of leaving the hellhole she’d grown up in—missing her sister’s occasional visits.

If she wasn’t such a chickenshit she’d ask Antonio if he knew of a way to contact her, if she was allowed to do so. Life looked pretty damned hopeless at the moment, but Cesca would know what to do.

Autumn reached the fifth flight. Had to stop for a second to swallow. Rub her stomach. Calm herself. As soon as she got upstairs, she’d be alone, in her own space, with no need to keep up appearances or tell half truths. No need to lie.

She started up the last flight with the contents of her stomach still in place. There was no point in calling Cesca; Autumn wouldn’t tell her anything.

She couldn’t.

Not if she wanted to live.

And so far, in spite of everything, that was the choice she’d made.