Page 32 of Betting Blind
“How can I help you?” The sharp voice of the man behind the front desk startles me. He doesn’t move a single muscle to greet us, only stares at us with lifeless eyes.
Jack doesn’t bother answering him. Instead, he turns to the right, forcing Derrick and me to follow his lead. “Aren’t you going to say anything to him, Jack?” I whisper, grabbing onto his bicep. This place is already giving me the willies.
We stand before a large, golden elevator, and I turn my head left and right, surveying the silent hallway the elevator resides in. “It’s code. If you’re here for the casino, you don’t speak to the clerk.”
“Did you see how creepy that guy looked?” Derrick says with a shiver from beside me as Jack presses the bright white button to call the elevator car.
The doors open with a pinging sound, and Jack takes my hand, leading us inside the mirror-lined box. We look simple enough in our regular street clothes, but I’m terrified of drawing unwanted attention. From the way Jack is acting, it’s high up on the possibility list.
He presses the call buttons 7-6-9-2-5-7. The numbers glow orange in their glass setting, and Jack winks at me in the mirror. “Relax, Cass.”
My eyes widen slightly at his reflection.How often must he come here that he knows the secret code?
The car jolts, sliding down slowly, and the momentum pushes me forward into Jack’s broad back. Instinctively, I wrap my arms around him and feel the warmth of his hands resting securely over mine.
I trail my eyes over our reflection in the mirror to my right. Jack stands a foot taller than me with his head bent toward the ground, arms covering mine as I breathe in his scent. For a moment, I allow myself to feel what it would be like to look at us this way—happy and together—but I can’t shake the feeling that I don’t recognize this man in the mirror.
Derrick has gone uncharacteristically silent as the double doors slide open to reveal a dark room. Two lamps are built into the wall on either side of a large metal door, dimly illuminating a man standing beside it. He’s in an all-black suit, and the sunglasses he wears gives him a secret agent vibe that sets the hair on the back of my neck on edge.
Jack greets him and he curtly asks for our identification, placing the IDs under a blue-light scanning device. After handing them back to us, he stands to the side and opens the solid metal door that leads out to the casino floor.
A rush of bells and other noises coming from slot machines assault my ears as we’re transported into a different world. I gape at the giant, all-glass waterfall fountain that’s placed in front of us. A largeRis etched into the center of the frosted slate, which is imbedded in a concrete base full of slick black stones.
“This way,” Jack tells us, guiding us around the art toward the main floor. My eyes widen slightly at the sights and sounds of people yelling with excitement over their wins while others shout angrily about their losses. I turn my attention to a woman—whose dress is barely more than a scrap of fabric—draping herself across a man at a card table. He puffs on a cigar with a devilish smile set on his lips, sifting through his cards as everyone at the table glares at him.
Jack’s voice snaps my head back around to him. He hands me and Derrick each fifty dollars and says, “We’re going to split up for a bit. I’ll meet you guys by the back bar in forty-five.” He points back in the direction of an incredible, all glass bar. Every inch of it is see-through, and it spans almost the entire length of the far back wall.
“If we don’t find Ben by then, then he isn’t here. Derrick”—he locks eyes with his friend— “keep an eye on her.” His eyes touch mine briefly before he starts to turn away.
“Wait, where are you going?” The trust I’ve freely given him begins to waiver. His body is rigid as he opens and closes his fists, and I wait for a response that never comes.
The untruths begin to lie like lead between us, and I take a step away from him. I don’t know this man at all.
My silent dismissal has a frown forming on his full lips, but with no time to waste, he quickly disappears into a section of slot games beside the card table we’re standing in front of. I watch him for as long as I can before turning my attention back to the space before me. There are a total of six card tables, with three on each side of the room, and each one has a different game associated with it. Derrick winks at me before he saunters off toward one of them, seemingly unaware of my exchange with Jack.
Wandering around for a bit, I float between the various machines. I have no idea what they mean or how to play, so I go to the opposite side where Jack was and sit at a machine that has colorful cartoon cats on it.
I play ten of my fifty dollars, and when I lose that, I play ten more. It’s surprisingly fun to watch the cat characters run across the screen, doing cute little things that the game is programmed to do. The colors flash and noises sound every time I make a dollar or two of my money back and soon, I’m smiling, fully entranced.
When I’m down to only twenty dollars, I blink several times to break the spell I’ve been under. After stepping away from the addictive game, I make several passes through the slot machine aisles and card tables. “Damn,” I whisper to myself when I realize I’ve somehow lost Derrick.
I step up on my tiptoes to get a better view of the room, but either Ben is really good at hide-and-seek, or he isn’t here. I pocket the last bit of cash I have and glance at the big red numbers on the clock on the wall by the bar. It’s been exactly forty-five minutes, but I don’t see Derrick or Jack at our meeting place, so I take a left for the restroom.
As I’m washing my hands at the sink, I stare at the woman looking back at me. I’ve got my hair hanging in a ponytail through the back of Derrick’s baseball cap, and the jacket he gave me swallows me whole. I lean forward to trace the worry lines between my brows and around my eyes, attempting to smooth them.
BANG!
I gasp, spinning around toward the bathroom door, and I grip the sink behind me tight enough to break a nail. I hear distant shouting, and I expect someone, or maybe a group of people, to come investigate, but then… silence.
Tiptoeing out of the bathroom, I glance down a dark hallway to my left at a bright green exit sign and a set of solid-black double doors.
Grunts and shouts sound from behind them, and I duck back, trying to stay hidden in case someone comes to see what all the fuss is about. After a few minutes, I creep out of my hiding spot, quietly stepping down the hall, and crack open one of the doors enough to peek out into an alleyway. The rancid smell of garbage slips through the door, making me sick, but not as sick as what’s behind the commotion.
I reach up, biting my knuckle as hard as I can to keep from screaming. The two men that Juliana and I saw by her car that night at the diner are standing over a man who is crumpled into the fetal position on the concrete. One of them holds a cigarette between his lips, while the other continuously kicks the man on the ground in the stomach.
They look menacing dressed in black, and I’m squinting hard, trying to commit more of their features to memory. The man with the smoke is nearly as thin as the glasses situated on his crooked nose, and moonlight shines off the bald spot on the top of his head. The beefier guy has dark hair and big hands, but that’s all I can make out in the near-lightless alley.
I cover my mouth with both hands in an attempt to keep quiet as the man on the ground grunts and places his hands underneath him. Lifting himself off the ground slightly, he spits out thick, dark blood at the thinner man’s feet. My eyes fall to the markings covering both of his arms.
