Dealt to Smoke: A Dark Stalker Romance

Keep your hands where the sky can see them.

That’s the first rule they teach you at dealer school, before they teach you how to riffle a deck or pitch a card or count down a rack of chips without looking. Hands flat. Palms up when you clear them. Every motion big and slow and stupid, so the cameras in the ceiling can watch your fingers and know you aren’t palming a hundred-dollar chip into your sleeve.

The cameras live in black glass domes. The pit bosses call them the eye in the sky, like it’s cute. There are forty-one of them over the main floor of the Silver Shoal Casino Resort. I counted them my first week and I count them again every shift, because I count everything, and because I like to know how many people are watching me at any given time.

Tonight it’s forty-one, plus a man in a gray suit at third base, plus whoever is sitting upstairs in the monitor room with a thermos and a headset and nothing better to do.

Go ahead and sit down. Twenty-five minimum. Cash on the felt, not in my hand. I’m not allowed to touch your money until I’ve changed it. Don’t touch the cards either, sweetheart. This is a shoe game. You get to look.

The shoe is six decks of red-backed cards in a plastic sled at my left. I slide the first card out with two fingers and burn it, and the second card is already turning over in my head before my fingers reach it.

Seven of clubs.

I pitch it to first base. It lands face up. Seven of clubs.

I never get used to that part. The flicker. It’s like a television in the next room that I can hear but not quite see, and every so often the picture comes through clear. The cards are the worst, or the best, depending on what kind of night I’m having. Numbers in general. Receipts, license plates, the digital clocks on the slot banks, the little red totals on the chip counter. They don’t sit still for me. They crawl. They swap places when I’m not looking, and sometimes they spell things.

I call it the noise, because I had to call it something, and the only other word I ever heard for it came out of my mother’s mouth in a motel bathroom in Shreveport, and I don’t use her words when I can help it.

“Dealer has six,” I say, and turn my hole card like I’m surprised.

I’m not surprised. I haven’t been surprised by a card since I was nine.

First base is a sunburned couple from Ohio who are splitting a strawberry daiquiri the size of a fishbowl. Second base is empty. Third base is the man in the gray suit, who sat down at nine-forty and has not moved since. He plays the way rich men play when they want you to know they don’t need to win. Black chips, a hundred dollars apiece, stacked in neat towers of ten. A glass of bourbon with one big ice cube. No ring, no watch, cuffs that cost more than my car.

His name is Grant. I know because he told me, the third night he sat down, and he told me he was from Houston without my asking, and he asked me how long I’d been dealing like he actually wanted the answer.

“You have very steady hands,” he says now, watching me sweep the Ohio couple’s chips.

“They make us practice in the mirror,” I say.

“Do they.”

“Every morning. Then we brush our teeth.”

That gets me the smile. He has the kind that has been told it’s a good smile, and he uses it on me about twice an hour, which is either a compliment or a strategy. I give him nothing back. A dealer’s face is a wall. You don’t lean on a wall.

The next card turns in my head. Ten of hearts. It’s his.

He has fourteen against my six. Any book in the world tells him to stand. I want him to stand, because the ten is coming and I’d rather not watch him bust and be gracious about it.

He taps the felt for a hit.

I give him the ten of hearts. He busts. He smiles.

“Unlucky,” I say, and take his black chips, and think about how many hundred-dollar chips I have touched in four years of this job and how many of them were mine.

Zero. The answer is zero.

My mother had exactly one rule, and she said it so often that I hear it in her voice even when I’m the one thinking it.

Never win.

She meant it literally. Don’t place a bet. Don’t pick the number. Don’t scratch the ticket, don’t pull the lever, don’t get lucky in front of anybody, ever. People who win get looked at, and people who get looked at get looked at again, and eventually somebody comes knocking with a business card and a very generous offer.

She learned that the hard way. When I was eight she bought a keno ticket at a truck stop outside Shreveport, just to see, she said afterward, just to see if it was real. She marked eight numbers. All eight came up. Forty-eight thousand dollars. The man at the counter shook her hand and took her picture for the wall.

We left Shreveport three weeks later, in the middle of the night, with the money in a gym bag and my shoes on the wrong feet. After that it was motels. Weekly rates up and down I-10. Lake Charles, Beaumont, Mobile, Pensacola, back again. She paid cash and used other names and checked the parking lot through the curtain before she let me go get ice. She never told me who she thought was coming. She just told me, every time I got good at something, every time a teacher said I was gifted with numbers, that I was going to have to learn to be bad at it on purpose.

So I learned. I got a C in algebra I could have aced in my sleep. I lost at Go Fish to kids who couldn’t count to ten.

And then she died when I was nineteen, of something slow and ordinary that had nothing to do with anybody knocking, and I took most of what was left of the keno money and paid for dealer school in Gulfport, because if you can’t ever win, the next best thing is to stand on the side of the table where the house does it for you.

It’s a joke. I know it’s a joke. I’ve had eight years to hear the punch line.

Two-forty in the morning. The Ohio couple wanders off toward the buffet with the last of their daiquiri. A cocktail server named Kiki sets a paper cup at the edge of my table, outside the betting area, where I’m allowed to have it.

“From Ike,” she says.

I look past her to the center bar. Ike is behind it, the way Ike is always behind it, a big quiet man in a black shirt with his sleeves rolled to the elbow, slicing limes. He doesn’t look up. He never does. I didn’t order coffee. I never order coffee. Every night around this time, a cup shows up anyway, black, no sugar, exactly hot enough that I can drink it in the thirty seconds between shuffles without burning my tongue.

I have spoken maybe forty words to Ike in the year he’s worked here. Twelve of them were “thank you.”

I lift the cup in his direction. He keeps slicing limes.

“Friend of yours?” Grant asks.

“Bartender,” I say. “He’s nice to the help.”

“And who is nice to you?”

“The help,” I say, and he laughs, a real one this time, and puts another black chip on the felt.

The noise gets worse after two. I don’t know why. Maybe I’m tired; maybe the room is. The slot machines sing the same eleven notes over and over, and somewhere behind me a carpet cleaner runs in long slow lines, and the lights in the ceiling hum at a pitch I can feel in my back teeth. Numbers start sliding off things. The clock over the cage says 2:47 and then, for a second, 4:72, and then 2:47 again. The chip tray in front of me has the denominations stamped on the edges, and they won’t stay put.

I deal. Grant loses a little, wins a little, loses a little more. He’s not here for the cards. I know what he’s here for, or I think I do, and it’s the same thing half the men at my table are here for, which is the sight of a woman in a bow tie who has to stand there and look pleasant while they talk. I can manage that. I’ve managed it for four years. You keep your face still and your answers short and you let them think they’re funny.

“Do you ever play?” he asks.

“Employees can’t gamble on property.”

“Off property, then.”

“I’m not much of a gambler.”

“No?” He turns his glass so the ice cube knocks the side. “You strike me as a woman who always knows how things are going to turn out.”

My hands don’t stop. That’s the training. A card is in the air when he says it, and it lands exactly where I meant it to land, and my face doesn’t do a thing.

“That’d make me a terrible dealer,” I say. “Nobody likes a know-it-all.”

The card I just dealt him is a five. I knew it was a five two seconds before I touched it.

Across the aisle, a woman in a sequined top is feeding twenties into a slot machine called Pharaoh’s Fortune. I’ve been aware of her the whole shift the way you’re aware of a dripping faucet, the chime of her credits going up and going down. I glance over while I’m shuffling. The reels are spinning. They slow. They stop.

There are no pictures on them.

For half a second, maybe less, the five reels show five letters, white on black, sharp as print.

S. O. L. D.

The fifth reel is still spinning.

Then the screen flashes gold and plays its little cascade of coins and it’s a scarab and two pyramids and an ankh, and the woman in sequins says, “Shit,” and feeds it another twenty.

I look down at my hands. They’re still shuffling. Riffle, bridge, riffle. Nothing is wrong with my hands.

You’ve done this, haven’t you. Seen a word in the steam on the bathroom mirror, or a face in the wood grain of a door, and told yourself your brain was just doing what brains do, finding patterns, making shapes out of nothing. That’s the explanation, and it’s a good one, and it’s true for you.

It isn’t true for me. It never has been. When I see a word, it’s because something put it there.

Sold.

I think about my mother checking the parking lot through the curtain. I think about the man at the truck stop taking her picture for the wall.

“You all right?” Grant asks.

“Dry eyes,” I say. “They keep the air on in here for the machines.”

That much is true. It’s a hundred and two degrees outside in the shade of the parking garage and they keep the floor at sixty-eight, and I’ve had goosebumps under my vest since nine o’clock.

But it’s colder now.

I notice it the way you notice a draft in a room with no windows. A thin cool line along the back of my neck, under the knot of dark red hair the house makes me pin up. Then down my spine, inside the starch of my shirt. It doesn’t move like air conditioning moves, in gusts from a vent. It settles. It stands there.

I have a rule about my back. I don’t turn around at the table. You never turn your back on the rack, and you never take your eyes off the layout, and you never, ever look over your shoulder like something is behind you, because the eye in the sky is watching and the eye in the sky doesn’t like a nervous dealer.

So I don’t turn around.

I burn a card. I deal Grant a nine and myself a king.

The cold settles closer. It isn’t touching me. I want to be very precise about that, because later I’m going to need to know what was real. It isn’t touching me. It’s just there, the way a person is there when they stand right behind you in line, close enough that you feel the heat coming off them, except it isn’t heat.

Grant’s eyes move, very slightly, to a point over my left shoulder, and then come back to my face.

“Something wrong?” I say.

“No,” he says, and smiles, and doesn’t look there again.

At the podium at the end of the pit, the phone rings.

The pit phone only rings for three reasons. A player wants a marker. Somebody’s been caught cheating. Or the monitor room upstairs has a question about something on a screen. It’s two-fifty-one in the morning, and nobody at this end of the floor wants a marker, and nobody’s cheating, so I know which one it is before Hal picks up.

Hal is the shift manager. Fifties, a tan that comes out of a bottle, a cologne that comes out of a bigger one. He answers the pit phone like it owes him money. He listens. His eyebrows go up.

He looks at me.

Then he looks behind me, at the spot between my chair and the slot bank, where there’s nothing but carpet and a velvet rope and the edge of Pharaoh’s Fortune.

He looks at it for a long time.

The cold doesn’t move.

Hal says something into the phone that I can’t hear over the slot machines. He listens again. Then he puts the receiver against his chest, the way you do when you don’t want the person on the other end to hear, and walks over to my table, and leans in close enough that I can smell exactly how much of that cologne he put on tonight.

“Rory,” he says. “Surveillance wants to know who’s standing behind you.”