Street Smart

As much as she craved her mother’s nurturing hand, she just didn’t have the capacity to talk about the year in Italy that had changed her life forever. Not her brief time in Milan with Antonio. Not the long, slow and frightening birth of her son. And most especially not the moment she’d reached into his crib that last afternoon at Sancia’s, not the autopsy, nor the grandmother she’d left behind.

Nor did she believe her mother any longer had the wherewithal to offer a nurturing hand.

“I think you should at least try to call Antonio,” her mother said again—a suggestion she’d made many times in the month since Francesca’s return. “Let him know you’re back in town.”

“No,” she said, as she had every single time. “I went to Italy because I found out he’d been married the entire two years I dated him. Why on earth would I look him up on my return?” Other than these reminders from her mother, she didn’t think about the man who’d fathered her child. Not anymore. He’d been buried right along with the rest of her heart.

“You said his wife was brain-damaged from that accident….”

“Which doesn’t make him any less obligated. Any less married. And if we’re going to continue to discuss this, I’m hanging up.”

Kay’s sigh was heavy. “Will you call me as soon as you get to the phone booth? Let me know what you find?”

“Unless Autumn left a calling card or some graffiti on the side of the booth, a vacant piece of property owned by Sprint isn’t going to tell us much.”

“I just thought there might be some homeless person around who’d know—” Kay broke off. Into the silence that followed, she muttered, “I know, I’m being presumptuous.” For a brief moment she sounded again like the confident and capable college professor Francesca had known during the first ten years of her life. “This initial phase is your job. Mine comes when we get her home.”

She’d find her sister. Francesca couldn’t think any further than that. If life required more than one step at a time, she’d be paralyzed.

Inching past a red sign with white blinking lights—at eight o’clock on a Saturday morning—proclaiming Welcome to the Candlelight Wedding Chapel, and then, next to it, a big hot-dog placard, Francesca had to wonder if it was an all-in-one deal—nuptials and a wedding supper without leaving the parking lot.

“I’ll hang up now,” her mother said after another pause. “Call me as soon as you know anything.”

“I will, Mom.” I told you I would.

“Anything,” Kay repeated. “Anything at all. I think—”

Francesca’s thumb flipped to the off button just before she dropped the phone back to the console. If asked, she could always say they got disconnected.

Circus Circus was offering free chips and salsa with the purchase of a drink. Francesca made her turn, paying more attention as she got closer to her destination. The phone booth, only a few blocks from the Lucky Seven, could have been reached through backstreets if Francesca had known how to navigate them. With all the construction going on around and behind the Strip—another new casino, road repair, a golf course apparently being shoved in somehow—she hadn’t bothered to try.

Another block, and there was the phone. Right in front of a billboard advertising the Striptease Gentlemen’s Club.

And across the street, a McDonald’s—an old-fashioned rendition of the famous hamburger joint with the ground-to-ground golden arches that were hardly seen anymore. A return to yesteryear? A sign that things were going to be okay again?

Shaking her head, she turned off the engine and settled in, staring at the corner across the street. She knew there was no going back. Ever. Not for her.

And not for Autumn. Her sister had been gone for two years. No matter where she’d been, what she’d been doing, there were bound to be irrevocable changes.

Francesca understood that.

She wasn’t sure her mother did.

Fifty-five-year-old Sheila Miller, blackjack dealer extraordinaire, sat at the kitchen table in her little breakfast nook Sunday morning, phone in hand. She’d dialed three times.

And just as often, pushed the disconnect button.

She had to call. If anyone would know who was behind the recent series of big wins at the tables, Arnold Jackson would.

Stomach growling, Sheila gave a cursory glance at the mass of notes and bills strewn across her table where breakfast would’ve been if she weren’t so desperate to lose weight. No matter how she looked at it, she was in deep shit.

With sweaty fingers, Sheila slowly pushed in the numbers she knew by heart.

Her friend and co-worker, Angie Madden, had asked all up and down the Strip for information on the wins. It had to be an inside scam, but no one was talking. That would make sense if Sheila’d been the one asking. She was the straitlaced fuddy-duddy among them. But not Angie. She’d been the queen of scam for years—someone another scammer would trust—or want to brag to.

The home Angie owned didn’t come from her ten-year-old divorce the way most people thought. It had been purchased, instead, with money she’d slowly siphoned off her table—and from the cut she took helping others do the same. She’d developed a solid reputation among the old-timers. Most of them had either used her help or were friends with someone who had. They didn’t take a lot. And only when they were really in a bind. The well would dry up if they got too greedy.

Most times the take wasn’t much at all by casino-loss standards—an electric bill here, an engagement ring there. More often than anything else, it covered the huge medical deductible on their health plan.

The silver-haired Angie Madden had helped more dealers on the Strip than Sheila could count, and not a single one of them was talking.

Just Sheila’s luck. The first time in thirty years she wanted to know about the seedier side of a blackjack dealer’s life, and she was coming up empty.

Arnold answered on the fourth ring, his voice more gravelly than usual.

She paused long enough to swallow. “I’m sorry, did I wake you?”

“Who is this?”

Feeling the heat come up her face, Sheila stared at the floor. Though Arnold had only been around a few years, he’d quickly become known as the most sought-after bachelor among the dealers. He was smart. Good-looking. And completely true-blue honest.

Which was what made Sheila crazy for him in a way she hadn’t been crazy for a man since the end of her disastrous first marriage thirty years before.

She might be attracted to Arnold, but she wasn’t ready to deal with that. She still had ten pounds to lose.

“Oh, sorry.” She tried for a chuckle and ended up with a cough that probably made her sound as embarrassed as she was. “It’s Sheila Miller. We served together on the dealers’ continuing education committee last year.”

It had been shortly after the holidays. She’d been good and fat then.

“Sheila. Yes, I remember. You were the one who came up with the final justification that clinched our funding.”

He had a good memory. That probably meant he remembered the fat, too.

“I was just calling to find out what you know about this series of big wins. My friends and I are getting concerned. Until we know who’s behind them we’re all suspect. I figured you’d make it your business to find out, especially since most of them are happening at the Bonaparte.”

“All I know is that they’re happening,” the man said. She heard some rustling, wondered if he was getting out of bed. If he slept in the nude. Or if he’d just snuggled deeper beneath the covers.

Alone?

“I’ve been at this job for thirty years,” Sheila told him, folding back the corner of her most recent financial analysis—the one that had kept her up most of the night. If she didn’t figure out who was behind this scam—and get in on it—she was going to lose everything. “And not once in all that time was a series of wins this big ever a coincidence.”

So it had been stupid to use her entire life savings to buy some land outside the city and contract to build a little house on it. She’d thought she could afford it. And after thirty years of sucking up rich jerks’ smoke and developing varicose veins standing at a blackjack table, she deserved something more for herself.

“I’m not happy about the situation,” Arnold said. “As you said, whether it’s an inside job or not, it makes us all look bad.”

And every single night when she came home there were more messages from her builder letting her know about additional expenses. Permit fees and truss calcs and engineering expenses. She’d borrowed—twice—against the condo she’d bought twenty years before, hit up every friend and almost-friend she knew.

“At the Bonaparte they’re running extra security checks on all of us,” Arnold continued.