Read Black Glass for Free Online Page B

shape in rosy velvet; three men soon converge. An elderly couple playing craps look limp and jaundiced so Milk softens their light, gives them a shot of oxygen. Any reminder of death, that futureless place where loot counts for nothing, must be banished.
    In the Mahogany corner a tall Caucasian in a charcoal Savile Row suit observes the roulette wheel, hands behind back. Deep-set Spanish eyes, slight stoop, bony shoulders poking at the fine wool of his jacket. Money. Milk studies the man’s gold wedding band, his watch.
    (But the cameras can’t penetrate the cloth of those well-cut trousers; the sensors miss the tiny creak of the prosthetic limb strapped, not quite comfortably, below the man’s knee joint.)
    This one could absorb a decent loss: an extraction is called for. But first the entire room needs an extra push. Milk picks a young, good-looking group playing blackjack for a laugh; amateurs with university degrees and expensive clothes, slumming it amongst the tracksuits and perms, the gold flash and grim jaws.
    When a caramel-blonde solicitor draws twenty-one twice in a row, winning enough to buy the silk dress she saw downtown this morning, Milk magnifies their whoops, flicks an acoustic pulse through the air and fills the whole room with scent 42: Competition. It smells like the start of a race. The room turns to watch — the young woman’s head thrown back, laughing; her friends touching her arms, shouting wordless delight. Adrenaline ripples across the floor. People lean forward, chips hit felt, cards flip. The casino’s take spikes sharply.
    But Milk sees he’s overdone it. Some of the croupiers have lost their detachment: they’re dealing too fast, calling too loud. One young dealer, eyes too bright, scrapes away chips like a squirrel scooping nuts. A punter protests, a supervisor hovers. It takes Milk half a nervous minute to restore calm. A slow, subterranean heartbeat issues from his fingers; the pattern shifts slightly, the fright dissipates. Angles dissolve into curves. The room steadies. Focus .
    Carol calculates her credit burn and lets herself choose a third cocktail, a Silver Bullet — the nickname, she recalls, of the star of some cop show she watched as a kid: stocky guy with a crew cut, patrolled the badlands, always got shot at, never got hit. Good-looking guy who lingered in your head long after the TV was turned off.
    Now something calls Carol outside. With the dark swirl of alcohol in her blood, she disengages from her barstool, weaves through the jangle and flash, across the coin-spangled carpet, out to the balcony. She lights a cigarette and watches the car park, the koala sweeping the night with its searchlight eyes, people streaming up escalators and trudging down stairs.
    Out on the perimeter, in the gloom beyond the floodlights, she spots them again: a small shadow huddled against a dumpster, and further along another thin little figure, hesitantly approaching a couple as they head for their car. More undoc beggar kids, the city’s lost causes — nothing to be done for them. Carol turns away. It all fades out. In a quiet corner of her mind sits something to dream about, something private.
    Milk lets her go. He zooms in on the tall man in the fine suit.
    [Intercept: internal msg system: casino owner | operations manager]
    To: [email protected]
    From: [email protected]
    Subject: Re: Fw: proposal
    Heard about this stuff. Couple of big joints in Japan use these guys to mess around with the room, minipullate the lights whatever. But dunno sounds like bullshit. Paying enough staff already.
    [Mahogany corner, Double Six Casino: Milk | unidentified male patron]
    The tall man hunches over the roulette table, right hand in his pocket, twirling his wedding ring on one bony finger. Since the crash, his wife farewells him from the porch whenever he leaves the house; arranges the specialists’ bills on the table, neatly marked up with a yellow