Doubled or Nothing

by Warren Esby

  And then I did lie because you can’t leave a cell that you didn’t belong to, but I couldn’t tell them that so I said, “I wanted to get away from them for a while because I didn’t like what they did, and I had a job to come to out here and I was not happy with Anya, so I just left. But Anya and I are together again, so everything’s okay for now.” Actually some of this statement was true as I thought about it. I had wanted to get away from them, and I did have a job to go to and Anya and I are together again after a few days apart, and everything is okay for now. The rest of the statement was ambiguous enough to make the whole thing a lie.

  “So why did you kill Igor and Vladimir?”

  “They knew I had the information that they needed to get back to Russia and wanted it and threatened to kill me if I didn’t give it to them. They must have seen me talking to you too, and that put my life in further jeopardy since they figured I might be trying to defect. They were correct of course. You had made your offer by then. When they confronted me and started to draw their weapons, I had no choice but to kill them, which I did.” Most of this last statement was pure fabrication of course except for the part of having no choice but to kill them. They were firing their weapons at me for shit’s sake.

  I knew my story satisfied Ben and Jerry because that was the scenario they had expected and Igor and Vladimir were dead and couldn’t refute it, although Anya could. I just hoped she wouldn’t say anything to them that would contradict what I had just told them, but she had no reason to.

  “Well, that’s about how we thought it happened too.” They both looked pleased with their cleverness.

  And then I reached into my pocket, and as I took out the little Beretta, I said, “You’ve been asking for this for a long time and now I’m going to give it to you.”

  Well, Ben’s face turned white and he said, “Wait. Please wait. I have two more flavors to go. There’s only two I haven’t tried.”

  Jerry looked at him and said, “That’s your own fault. You could have had a double scoop of those two flavors last night like I did. But no. You had to order another banana split and we had banana splits just the day before.”

  I just ignored both of them and picked up the table knife and started unscrewing the little hand grip panel on the Beretta. They watched as I got it off and the little memory chip dropped into my hand.

  “This is what you wanted me to give you. It’s right here. So what do we do with it now?”

  They looked at each other and then Ben said, “Wait until I call Herb and find out. I’ll do it right after we eat.” He was looking over my shoulder so I knew the waitress was coming with our order. I put the Beretta in my lap and covered it with my napkin until the waitress left.

  “What should I do with the chip?” I asked when she left.

  “Just put it back where you had it. It looks like as good a place as any to keep it hidden, so just keep it until we get an answer.”

  I put the chip back and screwed the hand grip panels back on using the table knife as a screwdriver. We ate breakfast and went back outside where Ben called Herb and explained that they now had the information that the Russian cell had stolen. I could tell by the big grin on his face that he was being congratulated. I later learned that they both got another big raise and promotion as a result. They were certainly benefiting by their association with me.

  Ben then turned to me and said, “They want me to send it by courier to NORAD in Colorado Springs for evaluation. NORAD stands for North American Aerospace Defense Command and is located inside Cheyenne Mountain next to Colorado Springs in case you didn’t know.”

  I didn’t. Why would I? “Why not just overnight it?” I asked. I was anxious to get this whole ordeal over with and see if I could get something that Anya would be satisfied with.

  “No, the regulations say by courier so we have to send it with a courier, but it can be a courier of our choosing,” Jerry explained.

  “I really want to get an answer as soon as possible,” I replied.

  Ben said, “Well why don’t we let you be the courier then? You have as much incentive in getting an answer as we do and we consider you part of the team now. Let me check with Herb again.” He did and apparently Herb said it was all right with him since it was their show.

  Jerry continued saying, “Why don’t you take Anya with you. Have a little vacation on the way. You’ve earned it. And you can leave tomorrow. Tell those guys you work for at the Salk Institute that you have a family emergency or something.”

  Might as well, I thought. I would mail my packages first thing in the morning after holding out enough money to buy Anya her Porsche, of course. I really didn’t care if the Salk Institute or HypeTech fired me at this point, but I didn’t think they would. I thought that I would have to quit, which I ended up having to do.

  Chapter 32

  The next morning after a trip to the post office, we left to go to Las Vegas. It was an easy but boring trip. Anya slept most of the morning and then we tried to get some music on the radio, but every station we tuned to had a guy named Rushbo on it ranting and raving about the Federal Government and how fifty percent of the people in the country paid all the taxes and fifty per cent just took money from the government. So what was wrong with that I thought as long as you were in the right fifty percent like I was? And then he said the government was just printing money to pay for everything and that forty percent of it was coming from the Chinese. Well, that just confirmed what Ben and Jerry had told me, and they had just let me believe they were giving me some big government secret. I just turned off Rushbo. He was just telling me things I already knew and I didn’t need to be educated anymore. After all I had a Ph.D. I was determined after that to get some good music to listen to at the next town, but we didn’t find any music we liked until we got to Las Vegas.

  We wanted to check into a hotel with a casino since neither of us had seen one before. We were lucky and the first one we tried had a casino. We later found out that they all did. It was late afternoon and we went upstairs and took showers and Anya said a few words that never fail to excite me, I don’t remember the exact number, and then we took another shower afterwards and went downstairs to check out the casino. It was just like in the movies. It had roulette tables and craps tables and places you could play blackjack. It was really cool. It even had a room filled with puppets playing slot machines. They were almost life-like. They had programmed them to take coins from a pile in front of them with one hand and feed them into the slot while the other hand was pulling the lever. They did it repetitively and it was really well done, but you could tell they were not alive because they just stared at the slot machine without moving, and their eyes were not like real eyes; they looked dead and glazed over.

  I had taken ten of the hundred dollar bills with me and exchanged them for hundred dollar chips. I gave Anya five of them. She went to the blackjack table, and I wandered around to try my luck at something else. We had agreed that after we lost the thousand dollars we would quit, and we did, but it took a lot longer than I expected. I went over to the roulette table and made a very daring bet. You could put a chip on a number or a place that said red or black. Half the numbers were red and half were black. If it landed on the number you chose they would give you a lot of money, but if you guessed the right color they would give you double what you bet. I thought I’d start off slowly by betting on red while I watched to see how others were doing. The number came up red and they put another chip on the one I had left there. So I left it there and the next number that came up was also red so they added two more chips to my pile. Now I had four. I glanced over to the blackjack table to see how Anya was doing and when I looked down again, I had eight chips in my pile. I said this is silly. If I really want to lose my money I had better move the chips to some other location so I put the pile on the black, and then I had sixteen chips.

  Now I know most people would be happy with that outcome, but what did I care about sixteen hundred dollars when I had thre
e million a year in tax free income. So I looked around the table and saw there were five other people sitting there. I asked each one what their lucky number was and took five chips from my pile and gave each one of them a chip to place on their lucky number. Well they had all lied. Not one of them had a lucky number and instead of getting rid of five of my chips, I now had twenty two chips in my pile. I had forgotten to take my chips off the black. We tried it again, but they were just as unlucky as before and lost the chips I gave them while I now had thirty four chips. Thirty eight if you count the four I hadn’t used. By this time, four other people had wandered over to watch so I gave each of them a chip and gave an additional chip to each of the original five. I was smart enough to pick up the rest of my chips, but there were twenty nine of them and I dropped one by accident on the red. No one else won, but the number had come up red before I could pick up the dropped chip and I now had thirty of them, so I quit.

  I did give the croupier the required one chip tip and went over to see if Anya was having any more luck than I was. She wasn’t. She had a big pile of chips in front of her too. I asked her about it and she said she was trying out her new system. She said whatever she was dealt she didn’t look at her cards and just said hit me when the dealer asked if she wanted an additional card. She only looked at her cards after the deal was over. The suspense of not knowing until the end whether she won or lost was more fun to her than watching during the deal. She called it her ‘no peeking’ system and it had worked. She had won almost every hand. But we were both very hungry and wanted to get something to eat so we left her dealer a chip and went to cash in the rest and found out we had to give a social security number to get our cash since casino winnings are considered taxable income. I guess the government is now taxing fun. I knew they had a sin tax, but I didn’t think having fun was a sin, but maybe having fun is a sin to the government.

  I don’t pay attention to politics so I don’t keep up with the latest laws that are passed. I usually only hear about them when I break one. Since I didn’t want any more taxable income, we went around the casino and handed out all the chips we had to whomever we ran into, but that didn’t make people happy either because a big crowd of people started running after us and chased us out of the casino yelling something at us that sounded like, “Me, Me, Me,” and waving their hands. We thought we were going to be surrounded and trampled so I took the remaining chips and threw them into the middle of the crowd, and they started dropping on the ground and fighting with each other over the chips which gave us the opportunity to get away. We ran upstairs and got into a taxi and asked him to take us to what was considered a must see show in Las Vegas. I said to Anya as we left in the taxi, “Now we know what happens when you spread the wealth around. It isn’t very pretty, is it?” She agreed.

  We apparently were in luck, the cab driver told us, because it was a slow night and we probably could get into see Wayne Newton. We asked the cab driver who Wayne Newton was but all he said back to us was an accusatory, “You don’t know who Wayne Newton is?” He made it sound like we were stupid not to know who Wayne Newton was, but he was the stupid one. We wouldn’t have asked him who Wayne Newton was if we had known who Wayne Newton was so accusing us of not knowing who this Newton was, was just plain stupid. If we had known we wouldn’t have asked. Any person who was halfway smart would know that people don’t ask about things they already know. It’s bad enough getting them to ask questions about the things they don’t know. We did go into the show since we found out on the sign outside that Wayne Newton was Mr. Las Vegas and he really looked good on that poster, but when we went inside he didn’t look at all like the poster. He looked like an old fat man and was singing old fat songs and his audience was filled with old fat people. We really didn’t fit in since we were both young and thin, so we left and went back to our hotel and ordered room service and went to bed early. The next day we were going to Mesa Verde and planned to stay at an inn there and view the famous Indian ruins the following morning before leaving for Colorado Springs from there later that next day.

  We did get some music we both liked and listened to it most of the way and sang along with some of it when we knew the words. Anya knew more words than I did. It was a pretty uneventful day, but the scenery was different from what we were used to both back east and in California and it was relaxing. We made a brief stop at Four Corners where Utah, Colorado, New Mexico and Arizona meet at a single point, and you can stand on all four states at once or you can stand on two states at once and put two hands down and have a hand or foot in four different states or run from state to state to state in no time at all or go from Utah to New Mexico without touching Colorado or Arizona. You get the picture. Anyway, that was good for about five minutes of entertainment, and then we both went to pee in different states and then were on our way. We got to Mesa Verde in the early evening, and the accommodations at the inn were very accommodating as most inn accommodations usually are.

  We got up the next morning and took a tour. Apparently Indians had lived there centuries before and had built high rise apartments into the side of a cliff well before New York City had them and claimed to have invented them, which we found out was an obvious lie. Anyway, you could live on what looked like a shelf or ledge carved out of the side of the mountain, and they showed us the low rent district where people actually crawled into a hole on the ledge floor if they didn’t want to live in one of the little houses on the shelf level. Apparently they didn’t have elevators back then. Mr. Otis hadn’t been born soon enough, so they had to climb ladders. You would think if they could carve apartments and ledges, then they could have carved a staircase, but they didn’t. They said they chose to live up there so they would be safe, but it didn’t look very safe to me. I bet a lot of people fell off those ledges or ladders and got hurt or died. And if they were crowded like it is in New York, and if people were rude like in New York, and pushed and jostled like they do in New York, then some of those people could be jostled straight off the side of that ledge. I didn’t see where that was safer than living on the valley floor and just using the caves that were down there, especially if you wanted to live in an underground hole as some of them seemed to want to do.

  We saw all that on our tour, but I wasn’t at all impressed with our tour guide. He didn’t answer half the questions that people asked, and I thought they were pretty reasonable questions to ask. For instance, one person asked him what age a deer had to be before it became an elk. He just gave him a strange look and didn’t answer. Someone else asked him how many undiscovered sites there were in Mesa Verde, and he treated him with the same silent stare. I actually was interested in that last question, too. We left Mesa Verde after lunch. We both thought it was a just a so-so experience and didn’t plan to return any time soon.

  We went through Durango just to say we’d been but there wasn’t much there. Frankly, I was a little bit disappointed. I always had the impression that it would be a rough and tumble western town since you associate the name Durango with towns like that. It seems that just like Santa Fe, all the wild places had been replaced by gift shops. It was too bad. The U.S. was losing part of its heritage. They didn’t even make western movies any more or have programs on the radio or TV about cowboys like they used to. I remember when I was growing up hearing stories from my dad about famous cowboys like the Lone Ranger and his trusted companion Tonto, and the Cisco Kid and his trusted companion Pancho, and my dad told me about one of his favorites named Red Ryder who had a trusted companion Little Beaver who was an Indian like Tonto and not a beaver like the little animals that build dams. I don’t know why he was named Little Beaver, which is a silly name for a male Indian. It might have been more appropriate if Little Beaver was a female Indian and someone with a sense of humor had denoted her by one of the slang names for female genitalia, but that would not have been politically correct back then. Anyway, I think that there is still a line of BB guns named after Red Ryder. I seem to remember seeing them at a toy
store.

  And then I remembered that I had heard of a Durango Kid as well. I think his real name was Don Coyote and his trusted companion was Sancho Pancho, who I think was the cousin of the Cisco Kid’s trusted companion. I seemed to remember that the Pancho family provided a lot of trusted companions for those early cowboys. And these early cowboys were rugged and not like some of the more wimpy cowboys like Roy Rogers who could only get his wife Dale Evans to be his trusted companion, and they never took the rough trails or sad and lonesome trails in their films like the other old cowboys. They only took the Happy Trails the others left for them. And Roy Rogers didn’t refer to Dale Evans as his little beaver either, although what he called her in private no one knows. I didn’t want to think about Hopalong Cassidy, either. I didn’t like to make fun of people with afflictions. But I did like to think of those days of the old west as being those good old days of the old west. Even though they were probably not real, they still represented the days when the west was not just a bunch of gift shops. Actually, I think Red Ryder may have been real. I think his great, great grandson started a truck rental company. I wondered if Wyatt’s great, great grandfather knew him. I made a note to ask Wyatt when I saw him next.

  I started to think a little more about beavers since in fact the beaver was the mascot of MIT because it is considered to be the engineer of the animal world, although I never knew any beaver that was considered good at math. The beaver is on the face of the MIT class ring instead of some random stone that’s on the class ring of most colleges. When you get the ring as a junior, you’re supposed to wear it with the beaver’s rear end facing you as a symbol that the world and especially those at MIT are shitting on you as a lowly undergraduate. Once you graduate, you are allowed to turn the ring around so that the beaver’s rear end is facing away from you as if to say you are ready to shit on the world since you are now a graduate. I never could afford to buy one of those class rings since they were made of gold. That’s probably why the world has never stopped shitting on me, even though I graduated with two degrees. Nor have those little white laboratory rats, especially when I put them on my shoulder.