The Thousand - Kevin Guilfoile [25]
“Are you kidding me, Nada?” he said afterward, exhaling into the dark. It felt good to make her laugh.
The occasion was repeated only twice. She and Wayne soon arrived at a business arrangement, and that’s when Nada explained to Wayne her immutable rules of sex.
She preferred to call it a “philosophy of sex,” one that made future intercourse with Wayne Jennings impossible. “I can have sex if it’s truly meaningful, and I can have sex if it’s entirely meaningless,” she said. “But I always avoid the area in between.” Wayne would have quickly rescinded the business offer in order to be with her even once again, but he knew he couldn’t bear it if Nada had to spell out the subtext that she’d rather come to his casino than return to his bed.
Now once-banished Nada Gold played blackjack at the Steve Rhodes Colossus Casino and Hotel eight times a month, and when Wayne Jennings, associate director of security, walked over for a visit, she occasionally called him “lover.” No doubt she was teasing, but he still liked hearing her say it.
“Okay, next time,” Wayne said to her now. “I’ll come over just to say hi.”
“I’d like that.”
“But right now, I’m cutting you off.”
For the first time, she looked up from her cards and gave him a wide smile. “I knew it. Liar.”
“I wasn’t lying. You’ve probably played three dozen hands since I sat down.”
“Forty-two.” Nada reached over and tugged hard on his ID. “It figures you’d cut me off just when the count got to plus twelve….” She winked and let him free.
“I thought you didn’t count cards,” Wayne said.
“I don’t. It’s beneath me,” Nada said. “But that doesn’t mean I don’t know what the count is.” She puckered her lips into a red circle smaller than a dime.
Wayne straightened the cords on his lanyard. “Give me a break. This is the last decent casino that lets you play at all.”
“Fair enough,” she said, but absent another signal, Jimmy continued to deal. “It doesn’t matter. I was going to quit in twenty minutes.”
One at a time, Wayne cracked the knuckles on his left hand with the palm of his right. “How do you even know what time it is? You don’t have a watch. No cell phone. There aren’t any clocks on this entire floor.”
“It’s nine-thirty-seven,” she said without looking up from her cards.
He pulled his sleeve off his Timex and adjusted the minute hand by three ticks.
“I’m meeting somebody at ten.”
Wayne couldn’t be sure what his reaction looked like. Nada touched him warmly, but also chastely and briefly.
“At the bar.” There were eleven bars and nightclubs at the Colossus, but she didn’t have to specify which one. “Relax, he’s not a surfboard model. It sounds like a job. I’m pretty sure he’s a geezer. Name is Jameson.”
“What kind of job?”
Nada shrugged. “I’m not so picky these days.”
“Maybe I should go with you.”
“Um”—she laughed now—“no.”
“He could be a perv or something.”
“Would you even know a perv if you saw him?”
“I don’t know. Would you?”
“From miles away, lover. Heck, that’s how I first spotted you.”
The bug clipped over his ear squawked and Wayne adjusted the volume in his pocket. Every moment of the working night, Wayne was plugged into a wireless network that included voice, Internet, text, and video, all coordinated through a device in his jacket barely bigger than a pack of ladies’ cigarettes. He called it his “phone” because he didn’t have another word for it, but his mother wouldn’t recognize it as a phone any more than her great-grandparents would have recognized his Ford Mustang as a horse. Wayne’s entire professional life was inside this device. Every note he made, every address, every appointment, every colleague, every gambler, every single bit of minutiae pertaining to this casino, this hotel, or any other aspect of his job was accessible through his phone.
As Nada continued to play, Wayne looked to one side and tuned in to the chorus of voices that followed him through the casino. One