The Amanda Pepper Mysteries: Bundle #2 by Gillian Roberts

Author:Gillian Roberts [Roberts, Gillian]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Mystery
Publisher: Untreed Reads
Published: 2015-03-15T00:00:00+00:00

Eleven

FOR A NANOSECOND MY EMOTIONAL tank registered empty, but that vacuum, being abhorred by nature, was immediately replaced by a depression that barreled in with the force of a typhoon. I could barely drag myself through the enormous front doors of the hotel.

If I’d been asked to design the atmosphere I least desired, it would have been the one I was now in, the bustling, bemarbled commercial palace’s. The building was much fancier than its mostly elderly tenants dressed in the nondescript pastel knits and cottons that are supposed to camouflage middle- and post-middle-aged indignities, but instead advertise that they’re there.

There’s a comic who claims that the average age of Atlantic City’s visitors is dead. It always gets a big laugh.

And among the average-aged gamblers was Lala, straight ahead and waving to catch my attention. I refused to let it be caught. This was the worst possible time to hear her version of the war between the sexes. I simply couldn’t.

My only available escape route was the casino, into which I hustled, sure that I could make a quick detour and lose her in its blinking, dazzling interior.

And I did. Until, that is, I decided to get on with my life and reemerge, and there she was again. I turned and reentered the casino’s inner recesses.

I watched a determined, jaw-set elderly man pull the handle of a machine edged in blue light. The machine twinkled a message: COLUMBUS TOOK CHANCES, TOO!

Columbus was a better gambler. He found a new world. The man I was watching lost a dollar, stared blankly, put more coins in and pulled again. GOOD LUCK, the machine responded with a flirty twinkle of lights.

I walked down the row. The opulent, almost hysterically exuberant surroundings were in depressing contrast to the players, most of whom looked as if they needed those quarters and nickels—an elderly and frail woman on a walker—a thin man in threadworn work clothes and floppy hat, a young woman who could be Lucky’s mother. Their faces and movements had the grim resignation of people working on a factory line.

I moved to the craps table, where there was a little more life but even less sense. I had assumed that I could comprehend anything Nathan Detroit understood. Yet another wrong assumption. I tried to decipher the many meanings stenciled on the table, the source of the muted excitement of the people gathered around, but quickly gave it up. It would take too long to understand. Besides, I felt a certain urgency about getting my belongings from upstairs quickly, before they locked up for the night. But as I turned, there was Lala again. The woman was really good at dogging a person. She could have bailed herself out financially by becoming a P.I. instead of Tommy’s wife.

I slipped out of her line of sight and found myself having another unasked-for reality check outside the baccarat salon. Somebody had told me that baccarat was the one card game that required absolutely no skill, and in fact couldn’t utilize it, because it was based on pure chance.

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