Joe Haldeman - Work Done for Hire

Trying to look casual, half expecting some cop to appear out of nowhere, I strolled into the slots area and sacrificed a few tens and twenties, keeping track. I put in $210 and got back two hundred. A little slow, and the machine wouldn’t take anything bigger than a fifty. It paid back in metal-and-plastic medallions, of course, and dollar coins. They weighed down my left pocket as I walked toward the table games.

Kit had a small stack of gold and silver chips in front of her. We waved, as prearranged—there were cameras all over the place, and they probably had our names and Social Security numbers locked in before we bought a chip. The probability that the casino’s computer knew we had come in the same car was high enough that ignoring each other might be suspicious. We didn’t want to play at the same table, though, two people who knew each other flashing G-notes together.

I went on to a smoking table, since it had a couple of empty chairs and I could stand the smoke for a little while. It would also be a good cover if I wanted to leave early, coughing.

“Hundreds,” I said, and set down two bills. The dealer didn’t blink and slid over two short stacks of silver chips. The G-notes went straight into a slot without being scanned, good.

We had agreed that the best strategy would be the least conspicuous, simply “by the book.” I knew that a lot of high-rollers played with dramatic sloppiness, either not knowing better or demonstrating how little money meant to them, or for some peculiar thrill, but most of them knew the basic algorithm and won or lost more slowly. Hit sixteen unless the dealer shows less than seven; stand on seventeen or more, always. Split any pair under nines, and nines if the dealer has between three and eight. Double down on eleven, or on ten if the dealer has shit.

There were about a dozen exceptions to those rules, but we weren’t playing to win. We wanted to appear mildly interested for a short while and then leave with a handful of high-denomination chips.

The casino was quite happy with people who played this way, bleeding customers by transfusion rather than amputation. Some places even handed out business cards with the strategy printed on the back, which is how I learned it as a kid, a souvenir that Dad brought back from Mississippi.

Even careful players presented less of a gamble for the house than putting money in a savings account. A bank can fail, but hope is constantly reborn—not to mention greed.

I was down three hundred when the dealer played out the shoe and shuffled. Feigning impatience, I tossed out three more notes. “Gold, please,” I said, and he gave me twelve chips. They did have platinum thousand-dollar chips, but I didn’t want to hemorrhage all over the table.

With the fresh shoe I had a disconcerting run of luck betting the gold chips, but then bet heavily and lost three times in a row. Just a little behind, I said I wanted to take a walk, and went to the cashier window and cashed in all my chips. So I’d gotten rid of five of the G-notes, and still had $4,900 in a thick roll in my pocket, mostly hundreds. Headed for Kit, I took a detour through the slot area and turned ten of the C-notes into twenties, a separate roll in the other pocket.

I panicked a moment when Kit wasn’t at her place at the table, but then she came up behind me: “Hey, sailor! New in town?”

I turned and asked her sotto voce how she was doing.

“I could leave,” she said with a broad grin. “Have you cashed in?”

“A hundred behind.”

“My hero.” She took my arm. “Let’s not go straight out to the car.” She steered me into a bar area, and ordered two Heinekens. We sat at the bar.

“You’re drinking beer?”

“Oh, yeah.” She touched the back of my hand with her little finger and opened her palm for a second. On it she’d written with eyeliner: WATCHED PICK U UP EXACT 5:17. “What time you have?”

I checked. “Quarter to five.”

“Good.” She launched into a long anecdote about her Aunt Betty going to Vegas, which I’d just heard. I made appropriate responses, ignoring my watch until she said she had to go to the “little girls’ room,” a phrase she never used.

I finished my beer and left a good tip and carried her bottle out with me. Sat and played poker machines until 5:11. Wandered toward the entrance, stopped to take a leak, and stepped out into the wall of dry heat at exactly 5:17. She pulled up and I got into the car and we rolled away.

I exhaled heavily. “So you were being watched?”

“Who knows. Probably just a casino cop; maybe they check you out when you flash a thousand-dollar bill. Maybe he was a gigolo, about to make a move. Or I might just be paranoid.”

“Paranoid is good.”

“I changed tables twice and he followed me like a shadow, not even trying to be subtle. Smiled at me all the time.”

“Maybe he was just interested in rich beautiful women.”

“Oh, stop it. If he wasn’t trying to scare me, he would have made some small talk. Not just stalking.”

“Think you got rid of him?”

“Went in the ladies’ room and straight out the other door, then out the exit and walked halfway around the building. He didn’t follow me out through the parking lot, for whatever that’s worth.” She checked her mirrors.

“Yeah, he could—”

“Hold on!” She crossed three lanes without signaling, gunned through a left-turn light as it turned red, and spun the car in a fast U-turn and accelerated through another yellow light, then braked sharply and pulled into a side road and parked.

I was still clinging to the seat. “That… that should do it.”

She mopped her face with a balled-up tissue. “Whatever ‘it’ is.” She turned on the radio and tapped the search bar until she got some classical music, and turned it up to maximum volume.

She leaned against my shoulder and whispered in my ear: “What now?”

I turned on the car’s dash map and tapped it till it showed all of Illinois and part of Indiana. I touched the border town Oak Grove and raised eyebrows at her. She nodded and put it into gear.

I took a page out of her paper notebook and printed big capital letters as she drove along.

WORST CASE: THERE’S A NANODEVICE IN OUR CLOTHES OR ON OUR SKIN OR HAIR. MY CLOTHES ARE NEW AND RANDOM. ARE YOURS? She shook her head.

Another page. ASSUME THE CAR IS BUGGED. WE’LL LEAVE IT AT A MOTEL W/A NOTE TO THE OWNER & SOME CASH. Another page. WALK TO THE BUS STATION & GET A TICKET TO NOWHERE. Another page. LIE LOW FOR A YEAR & WATCH THE NEWS.

Meanwhile, we talked about music, art, and science. She liked Mozart, Monet, and math. I was more like Van Halen, Vermeer, and voodoo. But we already knew all that about each other.

For some reason—perhaps not to avoid the obvious—she asked me about the desert, about being a sniper. “You said it bothered you less when you were actually doing it.”

“Well, yeah,” I said. “Partly it’s tit for tat; they’re shooting at you, so you shoot back.

“But it wasn’t like an even exchange. I was only seriously shot at twice before the one that got me. I mean, they sometimes mortared us at night and all, but that’s just weather. Most of the first six months I was there, the death rate was higher for troops stateside, like drunk driving. I was a mile away from the people I was shooting at, and they usually had Marines fucking with them a lot closer.

“It was like that woman said in the book about killing. Without the scope, you could hardly see the targets at all. You squeeze the trigger, bang, the guy falls over three seconds later. If you get your sight picture back you might see him go down.”

“You had a spotter watching with a more powerful telescope?”

“Usually. Sometimes we just did targets of opportunity, fuck with them long-distance. Even if you miss, it’s not by much. ’Course they do it back. That’s how I got hit, I think.”