by Ivy Oliver
“Should I get in cash?” he says, “In a briefcase?”
Sandy swallows hard.
“He'd have to pay taxes on that up front when he cashes out,” she says. “They're going to ask for ID…”
“Let me carry that for you,” I say.
Then I stuff roughly a million dollars in casino chips in my pocket. Matt takes a $250,000 placket and tosses it back onto the table.
“Tip for the dealers,” he says, grinning.
“Let's get the hell out of here,” Sandy says, shoving her sunglasses back up her nose.
The chips rattle in my pockets as I walk, almost holding Matt on his feet as the attendant lets us past the velvet rope. I need to get him outside. Right. Now.
When we hit the dry, hot desert air, he lurches and almost vomits until I pull him up straight.
“Don't be a wuss,” I snap in his ear.
He laughs, but in a gurgly, uncomfortable way.
Sandy gives me a look.
“What did you promise him?” she says softly.
Matt starts to answer, and I cut him off.
“We need to sober him up. Breakfast.”
“He almost vomited.”
“Haven't you ever been on a bender?” I say, surprised.
She glares at me.
“Just because I'm a porn star doesn't mean I'm high or drunk all the time. As a matter of fact, I don't drink.”
A little stunned, I stare at her.
“Hey guys,” Matt says, “why is the ground like that?”
I motion for the valet, shove a random chip in his hand for a tip, and ignore him staring at it while I lift Matt bodily into the back seat of the car.
“Don't throw up,” I say.
“Okay, I'll throw up.”
“I said don't throw up!”
He flinches. “Oh, yeah, I probably shouldn't.”
“He needs breakfast,” Sandy agrees.
Getting there is the problem. The Vegas Strip has one overwhelming, defining characteristic: Gridlock. Never-ending, relentless, crushing gridlock. It's almost faster to walk from one end to the other.
I maneuver as best I can through the crawl, cursing the lumbering size of the Tahoe, and turn off.
At the first opportunity, I turn off and park in an IHOP, then carry-walk Matt inside, Sandy in tow.
The hostess gives us an odd look before seating us in the back corner, near the bathroom. I order a glass of cranberry juice direct from her and make Matt drink it when the waitress brings it.
“Coffee,” I say, “for me and him. Sandy?”
“I'll just have water.”
Matt stares at the menu until the server comes back with a carafe and sets a glass of water in front of Sandy. Sitting next to him, she constantly has to lift his head off her shoulder.
When it's time to order, he mumbles something, and I dismiss it and order him a big stack of pancakes. When it arrives, he slathers it in raspberry syrup and begins eating it with the voracious hunger that only someone drunk off their gourd can register.
I order something out of obligation and barely touch it. Sandy eats a carb-free platter.
Matt grows subdued as he eats until he's choking down the last few bites and looks about to face plant in the detritus of marginal pancakes.
“What do we do with him now?” Sandy asks.
Matt mumbles something.
“Put him to bed and keep an eye on him,” I say. “We'll check into a hotel.”
“What about the chips?” she says.
“If he cashes them in, he'll have to present ID and fill out a tax form. If one of us does it, we have to report the income. I'm not paying taxes on three quarter mil in lottery winnings for him.”
“I've got ID,” Matt mutters, fumbling for his wallet.
Sandy gently catches his wrist and pats his head.
“Just hold onto that for right now, okay?”
“Kay,” he mutters.
Sandy sighs. “What's a little light tax fraud between friends?”
“I've been shot at on two continents, but even I'm not stupid enough to take on the IRS.”
“You got shot at?” Matt says, dully slurring his speech.
I catch the waitress and ask for the check. Sandy leaves a fifty for the bill and then tip. Matt has sobered up enough to walk most of the way to the car before I have to catch him to keep him on his feet and lift him inside. Sandy climbs in the back with him while I drive.
“We have to make sure he doesn't drown in his own barf,” she says, resigned.
“That's love,” I say.
She snorts. Matt ends up slumped over on her shoulder, snoring.
The Strip is all glitz and glam, but Las Vegas is one of the largest travel destinations in the world and could never accommodate every visitor in the big hotels, even if they all doubled in size—plus, not everyone comes here to live large. It's a reasonable drive from LA, after all.
So, off strip, there are plenty of motels. I pull into the first one with a lit vacancy sign and head into the office.
A bored woman sitting at the front desk watching Netflix on her iPad doesn't look at me when I walk up.
“Help you?” she mutters.
“I need a room. Two beds.”
“Check in is at four,” she says, still without looking up from her tablet.
I slap some of Matt's winnings on the counter and she stares, wide-eyed.
“Okay, I can get you into something right now. First floor okay?”
“First floor is perfect.”
“Need ID and all that.”
I fill out the tedious forms, swipe my own damned credit card to rent the billionaire's kid a room, and stuff the receipt in my pocket to file later as an expense. She snatches the placket and hands me a key.
Matt almost faceplants a handful of times as we haul him into the room and lay him on one of the beds on his side. I lift his head while Sandy slips a pillow under it. Then I slump in a chair, feeling the fatigue of waking in the middle of the night to go on a drive through the desert.
“We need to get our story straight,” she says.
“Story?”
“Explanation for what we're doing here,” she says. “Margot is…overprotective,” she says.
Matt snores steadily. For someone totally wasted on rum and cokes, he looks damn near angelic. Even when he belches loudly in his sleep.
“I'll say it was my idea,” she says. “He saw I was going, decided to tag along, you came with.”
“I'm supposed to keep him out of trouble.”
“I seduced you,” she says wryly.
I snort.
“As long as I can talk her into putting the blame on me, we'll be fine. Margot and I are tight. We go way, way back.”
“That so?”
“Probably doesn't seem that way now—she's been under the knife more than I have, if you can believe that—but we used to look so alike people mistook us for sisters. Made for an interesting, uh, act.”
“What happened?” I say.
She shrugs. “Margot married up. I didn't. She didn't forget me, though. Mostly.” She looks at the loudly snoring Matt and turns to me, lowering her voice.
“She's a cheapskate skinflint bitch,” Sandy whispers, her voice cut through with dangerous fury. “I'm the reason she wasn't sleeping in a car when… Did she remember me on her way up? Not really.”
“Then what are you doing here?” I say.
“She needed a lead actress that was willing to do a lot of nudity,” Sandy shrugs. “Don't fucking ask me. This whole thing is a joke, and if you ask me, it's a little fishy.”
I raise an eyebrow.
“That's it, Mister Giraffe. Get all the marmalade,” Matt mutters in his sleep.
We both stare at him for a second.
I glance back at Sandy.
“What do you mean, about the production?”
She shrugs.
“Look, I'm not that old. I probably look a lot older than I am.”
�
�I don't think so,” I say.
She smiles warmly. “That means a lot to me, because from you I know it's not a half-baked attempt to get me to sleep with you.”
I roll my eyes.
“Anyway, when I first got into the industry it was…different than it is now. But it was the tail end of all that stuff. I talked to a lot of the older girls. There used to be a lot of mob stuff, you know? There was a lot of honest money in a dishonest business, and you know what that means.”
I nod a few times. “People used the production companies to clean money.”
She smirks. “You should be a detective.”
“I sort of am. I'm not just a thug with a gun.”
“I didn't think you were. If I did I'd have come looking for Matt myself and let you get fired. So tell me something. Have you two…” she trails off.
“Have we what?” I say.
She gives me a flat, knowing look. In this instant she does look older, but not in a worn way, in a wise way. As a matter of fact, her expression—even though she looks completely different, physically—perfectly mirrors the well-worn, exasperated look my mother used to give me when she knew I was bullshitting her and it was time to stop.
“I say yes, what are you going to do?”
“Well,” she says, “I say, if you hurt him, I'll fucking kill you. I don't care how big you are.”
I laugh softly.
“You think I'm joking,” she says, but she half-draws a compact pistol from her purse, just enough for me to see, and slips it back inside.
I arch an eyebrow.
She shrugs. “I came up in a rough business. Had to watch out for myself.”
“You've got a real soft spot for this kid,” I say. “Why's that?”
She stares at the sleeping Matt for a while.
“I look at him and I see the life I might have had but didn't.”
“Married to a dot-com billionaire?”
“A family,” she says. “Can I give you a piece of advice?”
“Sure,” I say.
Again, she looks older than her years, but this time she reminds me of some of my comrades at arms. Old eyes in a young face that have seen too much.
“If you see what you want in life, go for it. If you don't, one day you'll turn around and find that you can only see it behind you.”
Sandy stands, gently brushes a stray lock of blond hair from Matt's face in a tender, motherly gesture, and rolls onto the other bed.
9
Matt
My head feels like someone took an axe to it, then rubbed bees in the wound. When I roll over, I half expect my skull to just pop off my neck and flop off the bed. To my utter surprise, it does move with me, but my brain feels like a soup of pencil erasers and paint thinner sloshing around in a bucket.
A brief, nightmarish possibility flickers to my mind when I look over at the other bed and see Sandy passed out, snoring softly.
Lucas clears his throat.
It sounds like thunder. I grab the sides of my head and yell, “Not so loud.”
Except I didn't yell, I whispered. Lucas stands up, rolls me onto my back, and sits me up. He presses a cool glass into my hand. Cranberry juice. I tip it back and it burns going down. My mouth and throat feel like dry, peeling wallpaper in a decaying mansion. He makes me drink three full glasses, and that only reduces the papery feeling to a constant, dull burn.
He hands me a bottle of water, only to push it down and say “easy” when I drink too fast.
“I don't want you throwing up all over the bed.”
I lay back and close my eyes.
“What time is it?”
“Six in the evening.”
“What day is it?”
“Saturday.”
I groan.
“He's awake,” Sandy says, yawning. “Good, it'd be a hot mess if we had to call an ambulance.”
Lucas stares down at me like a judging king seated upon a throne.
“Underage drinking. Underage gambling. How many felonies did you commit in what, eight hours?”
“Oh, hey, my winnings,” I mumble.
Lucas dumps one of my socks on the bed. The chips clatter inside. I pull it open and examine it, then whistle softly only to regret it as the sound from my own lips slices into my skull like a saw.
“I won all this?”
“You're lucky we got you out in time,” Lucas says. “You realize that underage gambling is illegal, right?”
I yawn. “If it's fun, it usually is.”
He glares at me and shakes the sock.
“I don't know what you expect to do with this. You can't cash them in.”
“Why not?” I yawn.
“Taxes,” Sandy says. “Identification. You'd have to show them you can't legally gamble for another eleven months, bucko.”
“Well shit,” I mutter, falling back into the bed.
I ball up the sock and push it towards Sandy.
“You take it,” I say.
She blinks a few times and says, softly, “What?”
I shrug. “Not like I need it. You can cash them in, right? It doesn't matter about the tax or whatever if you just keep the rest.”
Sandy swallows hard. “I could really use this money.”
“Don't get excited,” Lucas says. “They might not even let you cash them out if you took them from the casino.”
Sandy frowns, deflated.
“Oh. Right.”
“If that's true, you just cost me like half a mil,” I mutter.
“That you couldn't claim anyway.”
Sandy stands up and puts the sock back on my bed.
“I think we should donate it,” she says. “Give it to a charity.”
I blink a few times. Even Lucas seems shocked.
“What? Why?”
“Your mom is already paying me enough to set me up for life for this dumb movie. I feel selfish keeping it if I don't need it.”
I press my eyes shut. “Don't let Mom hear you say the S word.”
“S word?” Lucas says.
I crack a sardonic smile. “Mom has a very low opinion of people who worry about being selfish.”
Lucas glances at Sandy, who nods.
“I gave it to you,” I say. “It's your decision what to do with it.”
Sandy holds the sock in her hand and looks at Lucas.
“Do you want to split it?” she says.
He shrugs.
“Count it up,” I say.
Sandy lays out the chips and counts them up.
“I could pay off my house with this,” she says softly.
In my hungover, head-pounding haze, I ask, “Sandy, are you in some kind of money trouble?”
“No,” she says weakly.
Lucas narrows his eyes and folds his huge arms.
“I make good money, and it's a lot easier than it used to be. I'm just not, you know, rich or anything.”
“I know,” I say, “I follow you on Twitter.”
Sandy goes pale.
“Shit,” she mutters.
“What's on her Twitter?” Lucas asks.
I glance at Sandy and she gives me a tiny little “please shut up” head shake.
“So what do we do now?” I say, sitting up as I change the subject.
“I take you back to camp and put you back where you belong. You know, my job.”
I plunge my head into my hands.
“You want me to sit in a big aluminum can in the desert doing nothing when the world's paradise of hedonism and delight awaits?”
“The world's paradise of hedonism and delight is for patrons age 21 or over.”
“We could go see Cirque,” I say weakly. “I could give you money and watch you gamble.”
Lucas's lip turns down in a sloppy half frown.
“I just don't want to go back,” I say weakly.
Sandy clears her throat.
“Didn't you drive here?”
Lucas's eyes widen.
“What did you d
o with the car?”
I groan. “I left it with the valet. At the casino.”
“Caesar's?”
“I…think?”
I fish through my pockets until I find the ticket tucked in my wallet.
“I have an idea,” Sandy says, “Why don't we split up. I'll take one of them back to the film set, and you guys can stay here and enjoy the weekend.”
Lucas stiffens, eyeing her. She returns his look with an enigmatic smile.
“I like that idea,” I say.
Lucas folds his huge arms. I swear to god, his biceps are as big as my head. Immediately, I regret thinking about it. Any diversion of blood flow between my legs causes an instant, ringing hollow pounding in my skull.
Sandy clears her throat.
“Shall we?” she says.
I can walk, but the world feels out of sync with my movements, like my brain is two steps behind my body. I manage to get out to the car and climb into the front seat, next to Lucas.
The sunlight is an atrocity. I press my eyes tightly shut until we get back to the casino. I hand off the valet ticket to Sandy, who still has the sock full of gambling winnings carefully wrapped up in her hand.
“You might want to take that out of the sock before you hand it to the cashier,” Lucas says dryly.
“Oh thanks,” Sandy says. “I'll take the other car back. I'll call if Margot is pitching a bitch about you two being gone.”
“Don't count on it,” I mutter.
Sandy offers a wry smile and departs into the casino, pausing every few feet to glance into the sock.
Which leaves me with one sock. I pull the other one off and stick my feet back in my shoes.
“So,” I say.
Lucas glances at me, irritated.
“What's to stop me from just taking you back?”
“If you'd stopped at ‘just taking you’ I'd be a lot happier.”
He rolls his eyes.
“The traffic, for one thing,” I say, smirking. “When we get stuck on the Strip, I can just hop out and run off.”
Lucas slowly turns his head to look at me, and I feel a flicker of dangerous arousal.
“You think you can outrun me?”
“I was a pretty damn good sprinter,” I say.
“I can run ten miles in full MOPP gear with a ruck.”
“I don't know what a ruck is, but why would you run with a mop?”
He palms his face and pinches the bridge of his nose.
