f13.net forums - Christmastime in New York City

Here's something else I've been working on. I'm either going to throw it out or use it as a first chapter for a novel I am writing, depending on how I wind up feeling about the character of Charles III:

1. Know When To Walk Away

Charles W. McCoy III drove his Lexus IS F down into the desert with a wad of cash, a fifth of Grey Goose, and a bottle of Vicodin riding shotgun. He’d read in the Bible that miracles happened in the desert, and a miracle was something Charles III needed very badly. He had Jimmy Buffet playing on the high-end Bose stereo system, to soothe his nerves, but the music didn’t help much; the pills worked better.

Two years earlier, he'd seen a program on television about how to make a fortune by taking advantage of easy credit to buy condominiums and flip them for a profit. For him, it was a revelation; he was born again. Here, at last was a way to transcend the indignity of his cubicle-bound existence, a way to give himself all the things he'd always known he deserved. He was a clever entrepreneur; he had a marketing degree, after all. From the Ivy-fucking-League.

The problem was that he was the only one who could see his potential. But that was going to change. It had to.

"This is it for us," he had told his wife, Helen. "It's so simple. We get a second mortgage on our house here, and we use it to buy a condo in Florida. Vacation homes there will double in value in less than five years. Then we take a second mortgage the on the condo to pay for renovations and the down payment on another property, and we take in rental income until we can sell for a huge profit."

She had not been convinced. "That's our savings to send the kids to private school," she reminded him. "Don't they have hurricanes down there?"

"Only one of us went to business school," he told her. "I don't want to live a life ruled by fear, and I won't let your emotional terrorism hold me back. Why don't you shut up and let me make the decisions. Then, when I'm rich, maybe I'll buy you something nice."

McCoy had a tendency toward nastiness when his pride was wounded, but pride was a sacred thing to him, a thing held closely in his family for generations, and bitterly parted with. He'd grown up in Westchester County as the scion of a line of austere patriarchs that traced its roots in America back to 1679. He was heir not only to his family’s name and legacy, but to its robust and renowned jaw-line, which jutted forth like the prow of an unusually petulant yacht. The house where young Charles III spent the gossamer days of his childhood was built from sturdy granite, hewn from the bosom of good Mother Connecticut, with twenty-three sprawling rooms, not including the servant's quarters, on seven acres, shaded by oak and elm trees.

In the fall, the property was painted in vivid scarlet and gold as the leaves and twirled slowly to the ground, as if the forest itself was casting rose petals in the thoroughfare in celebration of the exploits of the conquering Prince Charles III, who strolled triumphantly amongst them. In the winter, the trees were sentinels with white epaulets on their thick branches, and young Charles III would gaze imperiously upon his slumbering kingdom through his bedroom window, the steam from a cup of hot cocoa fogging the glass.

In the summer, the forest's verdant canopy was so thick that sunlight pierced through only in golden shafts, and young Charles III scampered among the knotty roots and fallen logs, chasing squirrels and chipmunks with a good-natured old bloodhound named King, who, like his young master, was bred from a line of champions.

As a pup, the hound had garnered prizes worthy of his line from the American Kennel Club; the judges had been awed by his supple, flawless red coat and smooth gait. It was assumed that Charles III would likewise bear out the promise of his pedigree.

There was a guest lodge at the edge of the property where the writer Tom Wolfe had stayed for a week one summer when Charles III was very young. Wolfe was a friend of Charles III's grandfather, the family patriarch, who everyone called Big Chuck. Wolfe and Big Chuck would later have a falling-out over a fictional character the guest would name after the host. Charles III never really found out what that was about. He wasn't much of a reader.

Still, he thought of himself as being exceptionally bright, despite a thoroughly unremarkable prep school career. When it came time to cement his prestige, the American Kennel Club’s equivalents for young men of Charles III's class, Harvard, Yale and Princeton, disapproved of his qualifications and declined his applications, even after calls to the admissions office from his grandfather and some of his grandfather's influential friends. Big Chuck ultimately managed to get Charles III into the University of Pennsylvania. His mother once told him in a moment of anger that even his admission there had been conditioned on a substantial gift to the university.

At a family gathering the summer before he went to college, the three generations of Charles W. McCoys were gathered together for what would be the last time. Big Chuck put on a show of displaying jovial spirits, even though the doctors had recently found terminal cancer blooming in his guts. Only when Charles Jr. said something about Charles III carrying the family name to Penn did the old man seem to be in pain.

However, his grandfather’s gastric difficulties notwithstanding, Charles III liked Penn, and he found that the prestige of his name served him well in Philadelphia. He joined Sigma Alpha Epsilon, which had also been Big Chuck's fraternity at Yale. He quickly tapped into a network of nubile young social aspirants willing to sexually gratify the sons of the right sorts of families in hopes that they might be seen, preferably by a photographer or a gossip columnist, on a well-bred arm at a Manhattan benefit or an exclusive party in the Hamptons.

Charles III thought, at the beginning of his academic career, that his pedigree might carry him to elected office, and he started out with a concentration in political theory. But, during the first semester of his sophomore year, he commented in class that anyone whose ancestors didn't come over on the Mayflower was, more or less, an illegal immigrant. The students laughed at him, and the professor asked him to leave the class and not to return. Charles III found that he was no longer taken seriously in the department after that, so he switched his major to business.

As it turned out, despite his consummate mediocrity, Charles III was not destined to be his family's great failure. Big Chuck passed on to his big reward the summer Charles III turned twenty-one, and President Clinton's stirring eulogy for the fallen titan had barely ceased to echo on the solemn walls of the National Cathedral before Charles Jr. began laying waste to the old man's legacy with frivolous spending and horrible business decisions. By the time Charles III graduated from Penn's Wharton School with a marketing degree and a middling academic record, his inheritance was gone and his father’s toxicity had severed all of Big Chuck's connections. The name Charles W. McCoy was synonymous only with his Charles Jr’s failures, and Charles III's interviewers from the major investment banks regarded him with mostly with indifference or pity, but occasionally with the kind of repulsed fascination with which a child might regard an unusually large, foul-smelling insect. The banks all mailed him rejection letters.

So Charles III fled West, away from the East Coast business establishment that had shunned him. Just as his name no longer served as a password into the boardrooms, it failed to get him into the sort of bedrooms he had frequented in college, and he settled into a job and a marriage that he felt were beneath his station.

His venture into real estate speculation dashed his hopes as badly as his banking interviews. Buying Florida real estate in 2005 was not the sure bet it seemed; in fact, the timing could barely have been worse. The ever-rising housing market Charles III was trying to tap into had been driven by a clever shell game that packaged mortgage debt into securities, and sold it off to investors. But even though the risks seemed to have dispersed among the investors, they had only been concealed, and when the growth of the market stalled, it triggered a rash of unexpected foreclosures among "subprime" borrowers who took high interest rates to offset poor credit. This sent a shudder through the credit industry, causing the collapse of a major investment bank and general chaos on Wall Street

The housing market caved in like a bad soufflé, and Charles III was holding six heavily-leveraged condominium properties in Florida, with real-estate prices in free-fall. Potential buyers could not get loans to buy houses. Meanwhile, the adjustable interest rates on the mortgages Charles III had used to finance his acquisitions were resetting to higher rates. He couldn't borrow more cash against the condos, he couldn't sell them, and he didn't have money for the payments. He was about to lose all the investment property, all his money and his home in California as well.

The McCoys decided to enroll Charles IV, age six, in public school. It wasn't that they couldn't afford the private school Helen had picked out, he'd told her, it just wasn't a good value. His hard work and business savvy allowed them to live in a fine part of town, and the public schools were rock solid. Rock. Solid. End of discussion. Rich people didn't get that way by blowing twenty grand a year on overpriced private schools when the public schools were as fine and wholesome as the granite walls of the ancestral estate.

When his wife asked, with concern, how they were doing financially, he could barely stand to look her in the eye, not that he had particularly enjoyed looking at her even in the best of times. He lied to her, of course. His pride would never allow him to admit how desperate their situation had become. He told her that the credit situation she was hearing about on television had nothing to do with their investment properties.

"Do you think I'm stupid?" he asked her "How can you have so little faith in me? I'm out here making us rich, and I don't want to have to explain this to you. Let me worry about the money."

And, as the situation grew more desperate, Charles III began to worry more and more. He went to the banks that had rejected his job applications, and each of them rejected his loan applications as well. He slashed the asking prices on his
condos, and still found no buyers. And as his options dwindled, the desert began to beckon.

So, one night, Charles III told his wife he was going out for a bit, brushed his lips against her forehead, and peeled out onto the dark stretch of highway between Los Angeles and Las Vegas, the aluminum-block V8 under the hood of the Lexus bringing destiny closer at 6600 rotations per minute. Charles III set his jaw and squinted through the windshield like Clint Eastwood at the neon in the distance rising like a heat haze into the sordid night. Vegas, Baby. Just because he was a bit down on his luck didn't mean Charles W. McCoy III wasn't still sharp as a motherfucking razor blade. He still had his wits, he reminded himself emphatically as he reached for the Grey Goose and the pills.

Charles III sold the car at a lot called Cactus Pedro’s, where he drove a hard bargain with a salesman wearing a short-sleeved dress shirt, a clip-on tie and a sombrero. He got seventeen grand in cash for the Lexus, which was about a quarter of what he'd paid for it six months earlier. It would be enough.

As his taxi pulled away, Charles III thought he saw the lot manager give a high five to the sombrero guy in the rearview mirror, but he preferred not to dwell on the implications of that, or let it shake his confidence. McCoy was, after all, the best card player he knew. He'd take his seventeen to the poker room at the Bellagio, fleece some fat, drunk tourists and walk out with seventy-five or a hundred, which would cover all the payments until he could unload one of the condos. He was a cagey fighter, he told himself. Resourceful when backed into a corner. Someday, when he was flying in his private Gulfstream jet, he'd look back on this leap of faith into the neon abyss, and laugh.

Under the golden lights on the casino floor, he felt Olympian, and he strode with confidence to the poker room, and was swiftly shown to a table. The game here and at most of the tables at the Bellagio, was Texas Hold'em poker; a variant that had eclipsed traditional stud and draw games in popularity because it had been featured prominently in televised “World Series of Poker” events and in the James Bond movie “Casino Royale.” Each player was dealt two cards, face down. Then three cards were dealt face up as community cards that all the players could use, there was a round of betting, another community card was dealt, another bet, and the final community card was dealt, followed by a last bet, and the player who could make the best five-card hand from his two cards and the five community cards won.

In his first hand, Charles III was dealt a couple of bullets; a pair of aces as his two down-cards, and he knew he’d made a smart, bold decision in coming here, and that it would pay off. Over the next three hours, his luck and his nerves held, and he made about $5000, a victory he celebrated with a complimentary breakfast at an expensive restaurant in the casino that served Eggs Benedict with lobster meat instead of Canadian bacon. They called it a “Terry Benedict,” after the fictional owner of the Bellagio in the film “Ocean’s Eleven.” Charles III thought this was a tacky touch for a place with white tablecloths, but he was satisfied because the restaurant used top-shelf vodka in the Bloody Mary, and at three in the morning, the place was empty except for the conquering prince.

Charles III’s contemplative musing over the eggs and lobster was interrupted by a soft spoken gentleman from casino management, who informed Charles III that neither his skillful play nor his sizable stack of chips had gone unnoticed, and that the casino wished to extend a special invitation to participate in a private, high-stakes game. Charles III accepted, attempting to conceal his excitement beneath an unperturbed mask. But he left the lobster unfinished as he followed the casino guy to a private elevator, with key access only, which swiftly and silently carried the two of them to the thirtieth floor of the hotel tower. A soft chime announced their arrival, the doors opened.

The sets of double doors along the hallway were spaced very far apart, and Charles III knew the villas must be huge. At last, the casino manager stopped in front of one of the suites, swiped his keycard through the reader on the door handle, and threw open the doors. They revealed a grand marble staircase which led down into the enormous sunken sitting area of the largest hotel room Charles III had ever seen. There were a half-dozen flat panel televisions mounted on one of the walls, so wealthy business vacationers could watch all the news channels and high-roller gamblers could keep tabs on every game at once. One of the walls was glass, from the floor to the vaulted ceiling, at least twenty feet high, revealing a stunning panorama of the Vegas Strip. Charles III could see the Eiffel Tower, the Statue of Liberty, the Great Pyramid, all through this window. Here was the world laid out for him to seize. And, sitting at a poker table set up in the middle of the room were the guys he’d seize it from.

The table seemed to be dominated by a loud, drunk in a rumpled suit. He had a huge mountain of chips in front of him. The others were quiet and sullen, nervously eyeing their dwindling resources. There was an Asian guy, maybe thirty or thirty-five, wearing plastic Elvis Costello glasses. He looked like a tourist who had stumbled into this massacre. Next to him was a monstrously fat man with manicured and polished fingernails, wearing the largest cashmere sweater Charles III had ever seen. Charles III thought, with amusement, that, if it stretched a little, he could probably use that sweater to cover a compact car. The thought reminded him of his Lexus, and his amusement turned bilious. He could taste the lobster and eggs in the back of his throat for a moment, and he set his aristocratic jaw and reminded himself, silently, that he would reclaim his car on the way out of town.

To the cashmere mountain’s left, a black guy in a leather bomber jacket and Oakley athletic wraparound shades, and, next to him, a redneck, shit-kicker dude with a handlebar mustache, wearing a “wife-beater” undershirt to show off an elaborate sleeve tattoo that depicted the devil consuming the souls of what appeared to be a high-school cheerleading squad.

The fat guy beamed an open, friendly smile at Charles III.

“Howdy,” he said, enveloping Charles III’s hand in his meaty paw. “Nice room. These are your digs, right?”

“No,” said Charles III. He gestured at the casino manager. “This gentleman invited me up from downstairs.”

“So if it ain’t his room, whose is it?” asked the guy with the mustache.

“I’ve been asked to invite you all here,” said the casino manager. “The Bellagio doesn’t divulge the identities of its valued guests without their consent. He may be joining you later.”

The fat man’s smile faded, and he looked momentarily confused. “So why is he hosting a poker game for strangers in his villa?”

The casino manager said nothing.

“Fuck it,” said the drunk in the suit. “Let’s play cards.”

The suit looked like a good mark to Charles III; taking money from drunks was easy and this guy, Jake Stone, was on an epic bender. He'd been in town for three days, and had gotten himself pleasantly soused on the flight out from New York and could not recall being in a room since that was not spinning. His suit looked like he had slept in it, because he had. Twice. The top several buttons of his shirt were missing; there was a pinkish-purple splotch of lipstick on his collar and a yellowish food stain of indeterminate origin on his left shirt sleeve. His tie hung loose around his neck. The parts of his eyes that were supposed to be white had taken on a pinkish tinge, and his green irises were shot through with red.

There was blood all over the table; the two and the seven of hearts the three and king of diamonds, and it looked to Charles III and the other players like Jake was working on a flush. Two of them had folded, and, with the last card still to be dealt, the other two guys seemed hesitant to risk contributing further to Stone's mountain of chips, even though the odds were not in favor of him getting his flush on the last card.

Stone had raised the pot, the black guy in the leather jacket folded, and it was down to the drunk and the handlebar mustache. Charles figured the guy had maybe a pair, possibly two pair and was pretending he wasn't hoping for the full house. Indeed, he had a king down, and therefore, a pair of kings. It was not a bad place to be sitting, and statistically, the man concluded he should see the bet and the last card. Charles III thought this the correct choice, but maintained a rather
low estimation of the man based on his appearance.

More blood on the table. Ten of hearts. Jacob Stone's expression didn't change. Charles III knew immediately that Stone had just been handed the flush on the last community card, the river card. Charles thought he saw the mouth underneath the handlebar mustache react just a little; not quite a cringe, but more than a twitch.

The redneck bet. Stone raised. There was a pause, as the mustache drooped a little and the devil on the gambler’s bicep seemed to writhe in indignation as the man’s muscles flexed; an involuntary tell. Charles III thought, with amusement, that a shirt with sleeves would have been a sound investment. The man took a long look at the cards, a longer look at the chips in the pot, and a short look at the dwindling stack in front of him. He folded his kings.

"Behold," Jake slurred softly, to himself. "I will smite with the rod that is in mine hand upon the waters which are in the river, and they shall be turned to blood." This victory added another turret to the castle Jake was building with his chips.

Charles W. McCoy III, with his twenty-two thousand, joined the game. There was enough money on the table to bail him out of all his troubles, and none of these clowns could stop him from taking it. As Charles III pulled his chair up to the table Jake looked at him for a moment, and the bloodshot eyes seemed almost lucid for a moment.

“My ex-girlfriend left me for a Penn guy. Penn sucks.”

“Fuck you,” said Charles III.

“SAE sucks too,” said the drunk.

“Fuck you twice.”

Over the next three hours, Charles III learned that the Asian hipster Elvis Costello kid had been a paper billionaire with a dot-com startup when he was nineteen, and had moved enough of his money out of his company and into the analog economy to coast for the rest of his life. But he was only twenty-eight, and being knocked to his knees from his perch astride the world had aged him prematurely. Charles III sympathized with Elvis Costello at first, appreciating the analogies between their lives, but when Elvis Costello pushed all his chips in behind three-of-a-kind, and Jake Stone beat him with a jack-high straight, Charles III decided this guy’s failures had been the product of his own mistakes. So no analogies there.
Stone and Elvis Costello, both apparently frequent visitors to the Bellagio, seemed to know each other, and the kid showed no hard feelings. He slapped Jake on the shoulder as he walked away from the table.

“Off to get some sleep,” he said. “That’s enough cards for the week. If you’re drinking tomorrow, I’ll be at Pure.”

“I’m always drinking,” said Stone, clinking his glass.

“We’ll see if we can’t find some girls,” Elvis Costello said. “After this, I need to fuck somebody.”

“I don’t know,” Stone said. “After drilling your ass all night, I’m pretty satisfied.”

Elvis Costello laughed a nasal laugh, and walked up the staircase to ask the casino manager, standing silently by the door, where to find a cocktail waitress. The manager pointed out that the villa had a fully-stocked bar, but Elvis Costello was of the opinion that the bar in the room was unsatisfactory because it contained no pussy. The casino manager smiled uncomfortably for a moment, but, in Vegas, no need was unattended for those with ready cash. Something could be arranged. The two of them left together through the double doors. The casino manager returned ten minutes later. Charles III did not see Elvis Costello again.

The black guy in the Oakleys turned out to be a semiprofessional poker player. He’d made it to the finals in a World Series of Poker event in 2004, but had not been able to earn enough playing quit his day job. He trounced the fat man in the cashmere, who turned out to be a middle-manager from Milwaukee, gambling like a high roller on the proceeds of a quarter-million dollar slot machine jackpot he’d hit the night before over at the Mirage. He shrugged indifferently at his night’s losses; easy come, easy go, he said. Charles III politely kept his contempt to himself. The fat man toddled over to the casino manager, talked with him briefly, and, shortly afterwards, a room service waiter appeared at the door, pushing a cart laden with sumptuous goodies from one of the celebrity-chef restaurants downstairs. The casino manager helped the waiter carry the cart down the marble stairs, while the fat man hovered impatiently nearby. It was almost four in the morning, and Charles III remarked that he was surprised that a chef was on call. The casino manager replied that the Bellagio treated its guests well; no need went unattended for those with ready cash. The players took a break for a few minutes, to pick at the food. The fat man chatted amiably over several platefuls, and then the casino manager arranged a suite for him, and he left.

Charles III wiped out the redneck mustache guy, beating two pair with a better two pair. As the night progressed, Charles III’s twenty-two grew to thirty-five grand on a series of victories, before the black guy crushed him for ten thousand on a single hand.

Only a few minutes later, though, the black guy bet all his chips on a king-high flush in hearts, and Stone took it all with the ace.

That left only two men in the game; Jake Stone was the only thing standing between Charles III and redemption. Stone picked up a deck of cards and tried to shuffle it, but he was extremely drunk, and scattered the cards across the floor and the table. The casino manager was at his side at once, with a fresh pack. Stone thanked him and began fumbling with the cards.

“Maybe I’d better do that,” said Charles III. He allowed his glee at this development to twist his thin lips into the slightest smirk. In his mind, he was already sipping champagne on his Gulfstream.

Two hours later, he left the Bellagio, hopeless and penniless. There had been no dramatic finale, no Clint Eastwood showdown. Charles III’s last stand ended with an anticlimax. When the cards were in Charles III’s favor, the drunk hadn’t bet enough, and when the cards were in the drunk’s favor, Charles III had bet too much, and the money dwindled, and then vanished.

In his jacket pocket, Charles III found his bottle of Vicodin. He swallowed a couple, dry. The sun was coming up over the desert, and even though Vegas was a twenty-four hour town, the Strip was quiet; most vacationers wouldn’t stay up so late or get up so early.

Filled with a strong urge to get away from the Bellagio, Stone crossed the street, stuffing more pills into his mouth as he walked. He turned for a moment toward the Wynn, surrounded by lush foliage and artificial waterfalls, before wandering instead toward the Venetian. The shops lining the casino’s replica of the Venice canals were all closed, but to Charles III’s surprise, the Madame Tussaud wax museum was open. He bought a ticket with a credit card, and wandered inside.
There was nobody else there; he was alone among the impassive replicas of the rich and famous. George Clooney, who had ripped off the Bellagio in the movie “Ocean’s Eleven” stood by in a tuxedo, with his arm out, so tourists could pose for photographs as the bride of the famous bachelor. His wax lips turned up, and his glass eyes radiated artificial joy. Charles III considered him for a moment, and reached for the Vicodin again.

He lingered with Tiger Woods and Princess Diana and George W. Bush, all unmoving and uncanny; the likenesses so recognizable, and yet just flawed enough to be alien and inhuman and creepy. Vegas was like Madame Tussaud’s; it seduced with promises of access and proximity to wealth and power and romance. Charles III had operated on the same lies at Penn, and tried to be that way when he interviewed at the banks, but up close the likeness wasn’t quite right. It was all fake. Vegas, the wax museum, and Charles III; a city of bogus dreams, a collection of bogus celebrities, and a shabby aristocrat with no money or talent.

In a corner of a room Charles III saw a poker table. He sat down in the empty chair and stared icily at the wax man on the other side of it. It was Ben Affleck, an actor who had become beloved in Vegas because he’d entered a few World Series of Poker events, gamely lost his money, and, in doing so, helped raise the profile of the professional poker tournaments, to make it the ESPN draw it had become. This tableau was set up so tourists could pose as if they were playing cards with the movie star.

The fallen scion and the wax celebrity shared a long silent moment over the cards. “This is about right,” said Charles W. McCoy III, and he ate all the pills in his bottle. Madame Tussaud’s faded from focus around him, Ben Affleck and George Clooney and the Venetian and the Bellagio melted away, and Charles III slipped back to Los Angeles, and the job he hated and the moisturizer-lotion smell of his wife and the grassy, sweaty kid climbing into the Lexus when Charles III picked him up from soccer practice. And then, Charles III was back in Philadelphia, in his student apartment, in the SAE house, and then that was gone as well, and Charles III was back at home, at the granite manor. Big Chuck was in control and his parents were happy, and the conquering prince could play all day in his forest with King the bloodhound. Charles III wanted to stay there, but Connecticut slipped into the enveloping darkness at the periphery of his consciousness, and all was still in the wax museum.

After the other players had left, Jake Stone watched the sun rise over the Strip and savored his victory while lounging on one of the plush, white sofas in the suite. The room service waiter had delivered some very good coffee in a silver pot, with expensive-looking china mugs. Stone poured a cup, black, and savored it pensively. Its flavor was strong and complex, not too bitter, but not mild either. Jake felt, however, that it was missing something. He considered for a moment, the cream and sugar on the room service display, before dismissing them and heading over to the bar to find something more helpful.

The casino manager surveyed Stone from his post by the marble staircase.

“So I guess the guy who paid for the place is going to want to talk to me?” said Stone.

“Yes,” said the casino manager, barely concealing his distaste for the drunk. “He’ll be here shortly.”

Stone sipped at his coffee and said nothing. The casino manager eyed Stone’s winnings, still piled on the table.

“I’ll have those sent downstairs, so you can have the money wired to your account,” said the manager. He was hoping for a significant gratuity.

Stone was not feeling gracious, however. “You can go,” he said.

The manager left, and Stone sprawled on the luxurious white sofa and stared out past Paris, Venice, Monte Carlo and Manhattan, to the yellow expanse of desert and the lavender morning sky, and then he realized he wasn’t alone anymore. A man in a dark suit had entered the room; Stone wasn’t sure if he’d come in from outside, or if he had been somewhere in the villa. He had come in silently, a hard thing to accomplish in a room with marble floors.

“This is your suite?” asked Stone.

“It’s not a suite, it’s a villa, and I am Alexander Revenant.”

Stone squinted. Revenant’s face was unlined and inexpressive. Stone couldn’t tell the man’s age; he could have been in his late twenties or his early forties, but his hair and his short goatee were completely white. Stone recognized Revenant as formidable, however, and struggled to clear the booze-haze from his mind.

“Do you make a habit of renting villas for ten grand a night, and hosting poker games in them that you don’t attend?” Stone asked, carefully shaping his consonants and trying not to slur.

“I make a habit of doing whatever I want. The game was for your benefit. I wanted to keep you amused while I attended to some other business, and I kind of wanted to see how you’d handle the desperate Mr. McCoy. Quite ruthless of you.”

“He thought he was better than me,” said Stone

“And you destroyed him,” said Alexander Revenant. “I want to offer you an opportunity.”

“No thanks,” said Stone. “I like women.”

Revenant paused for a moment. “You know that’s not what we are discussing.”

“You make a habit of discussing what you want to discuss, right?” Stone laughed at himself.

“You will not turn down this job.”

Stone scoffed. “What is that? The Jedi mind-trick? I made a lot of money tonight. I have a lot of money. Why would I be interested in your action?”

“Cheating at cards isn’t a very ambitious use of your talents.”

“What talents?” Stone asked, sharply. He rose quickly to his feet and tried to hold himself erect, but his head spun and he collapsed back onto the sofa.

“I know about you, Mr. Stone. But I don’t have to tell you. You already know what I know. And that is, of course, why you are so very valuable.”

“My God. How?” Stone held his head in his hands. He was starting to feel sick.

“We took every precaution. Expensive, of course, but the potential upside of finding a man who can read minds is enormous. I’ve got nothing against robbing tourists and sad-cases at the card table, but we live in exciting times, and the world is filled with so many wonderful things for us to steal.”

“What if I don’t want to?”

“I’ll make you want to, because I want to. Like I told you, I always do whatever I want.”

“Oh,” said Jake Stone. His eyes unfocused and his mind gave up struggling to maintain coherence. “That makes sense.” And he vomited on the marble floor of Revenant’s ten thousand dollar hotel room.

“Feel free to sleep it off here, Mr. Stone. We’ll fly back to New York on my jet this evening.”

“Okay,” said Stone, burying his face in the white sofa cushions, smearing puke and spittle on the spotless upholstery. “Get that guy to come back and clean this up.” Then he passed out.

Alexander Revenant stepped around the puddle on the floor poured himself a cup of coffee from the silver pot on the room service tray. It was still hot, and very good.

Revenant could see an ambulance parked in front of the Venetian, its lights still on. Two police cars, also with their lights flashing, were coming down the Strip, and behind them, a van from the Clark County coroner’s office.

“Some people shouldn’t gamble,” he said to himself.