The Thousand - Kevin Guilfoile [28]
“You didn’t think that was worth mentioning before?” Wayne asked.
She sniffed. “You don’t have anything to worry about. They suck. It’s like it’s their first day. You got Blondie, Pizza Face, and Reverend Moon there. Blondie and Pizza are doing the counting. She’s in way over her head. Moon’s your whale.”
“Yeah, I’ve had my eye on him.”
She touched her chin to her chest, hiding her expression. “Bullshit.” Nada handed her stacks of five-and ten-dollar chips to Jimmy so he could exchange them for higher denominations.
“I did. He’s been …” Wayne paused for the word. “Conspicuous.”
“You’re a regular one-man Interpol, Wayne. That’s why you need me in here twice a week.”
“My eyes aren’t as good as yours, that’s true.”
“It’s not my eyes, lover.” She tapped her forehead. “You don’t see with your eyes any more than you screw with your hips.”
Wayne took a breath and rapped the table with his knuckle. “I remember,” he whispered to her. Out of the corner of his eye he saw Jimmy waiting for an instruction, and Wayne gave it with a nod. Before paying them out, Jimmy passed a few high-denomination chips under the table, a barely perceptible motion that any player could mistake for one of the many practiced gestures—the knocking and waving and showing of palms—always incorporated into a Vegas deal.
Most people never noticed. Nada almost certainly did. Whether she knew its significance—or if she cared—Wayne didn’t know.
Standing, Nada tipped Silent Jim with a black chip and dropped the rest in her yellow purse as six waiting players pressed forward to occupy the table. She squeezed Wayne’s hand awkwardly and he marveled again at how weightless she seemed. The first night they were together, when she turned the switch in her head and fell asleep in his arms, he felt the mass return to her body, and that’s when he understood what it was: balance.
A trainer for his college football team had explained it to him once. “When your body has balance, it’s in harmony with gravity and you can move like someone half your size.” The trainer tested all the players and calculated what he called their “moon weight.” He told them a player whose balance was good enough—his moon weight low enough—could almost defy gravity. He could change directions in a blink, leap a wall of tall linemen in a single bound. According to the test, Wayne’s balance was so poor that his moon weight turned out to be twenty-five pounds heavier than the one assessed by the locker room scale. The other players got a laugh out of that.
Wayne figured Nada’s moon weight was next to nothing. But he also knew that on top of that perfectly balanced body was a head full of worry.
Nada’s mind was a hell of a lot heavier than most.
10
KERRY MEADOWS was right where Nada had said he would be—lying on the couch, watching baseball on a plasma TV in a pair of drawstring pajama bottoms and a Stanford T-shirt. All Jerry had to do was knock on the door. Kid didn’t try to rabbit or anything.
“That’s the thing about rich kids,” Jerry told Bea on the phone. “When you got so much to lose, you can’t run very far away from it.”
Meadows said he didn’t know anybody was looking for him, if you can believe that. Said he didn’t even know his best buddy, Phillip, had been charged with a crime, even though the story made page three of the San Francisco Chronicle, rich as Truman’s daddy was. Guess it was true what they said about young people not reading the papers. Didn’t offer any reason he’d been crashing on a couch in Marin, but he said he’d be happy to cooperate. Said he wanted to make a phone call first. Jerry told him to go ahead. The police wouldn’t be there for another ten minutes.
The police. That made his eyes sweat.
Kid made two calls. The