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no-questions-asked excuse to bar her from the premises. Not that they needed one. They could expel anyone, and would, if they thought the player was too successful at the blackjack table. It hardly seemed fair-they only allowed people to play the game if they weren’t very good at it. Forget the signs saying the dealer rests on seventeen; the signs should read: SUCKERS ONLY.
    Like many of her fellow students, Annabel considered herself a freedom fighter, not a card cheat. But she knew the casino would take a different view. Dark rumors circulated throughout the MIT campus about what happened to card counters in the back rooms of Vegas gambling emporiums. Since they were private property, they could ban anyone they wanted, and if you violated their ban, you could be charged with trespassing. But this was the town the mob built, after all, and casino bosses were known to employ means not sanctioned by law to convey the message that card counting was disfavored. She’d seen more than one MIT hotshot return to class on Monday morning looking as if he’d lost a fight with a tractor. And a few had disappeared altogether-never to return.
    Trying to remain calm, Annabel strolled into the blackjack pit and scanned for an open seat. She was wearing her best DKNY
Sex and the City
black dress, and for an MIT math major, she looked pretty damn hot, if she did say so herself. Not that she wanted to attract attention-she just wanted to look as if she belonged there. Because everything depended on her having a successful night. Everything in the world.
    She saw her mother’s face on an overhead TV in the bar and froze. If her mother found out what she had done…
    God. Annabel didn’t even want to think about it.
    A zombie dressed in tattered rags bumped into her backside. Clumsy, or copping a feel? Hard to be sure, but she was not inclined to give a guy in tatters and black eyeliner the benefit of the doubt.
    “Sorry about that, ma’am.”
    Well, at least he was a polite zombie. “No problem.”
    “Can I get you something? Drink? Change?”
    She suspected he really wanted to give her something altogether different. Damn those horny zombies. “I’m fine, thanks.”
    He moved on down the aisle, dragging his leprous skin and putrescent sores with him, brushing aside a cobweb and blending into the crowd of ghosts, witches, and assorted ghouls.
    Welcome to Transylvania.
    Not that she was an expert, but in her mind a casino should be sleek and elegant, like the ones in James Bond movies, where the men wore tuxes and the women wore beaded floor-length gowns with décolleté bodices. None of that here-this joint was pure Disneyland. Dolorous Victorian décor and bar stools that creaked when you sat on them. Your “ghost host” checked you in; the bell captain wore a long black hooded robe and carried a scythe. The gambling pit was decked out like a haunted house, with shutters blowing in the wind and tombstones with corny epitaphs. A Vegas casino with a Halloween party motif-it was enough to make you barf. And there were cops swarming everywhere, which also made her nervous. Apparently some horrible crime had taken place in one of the ballrooms; an entire wing of the hotel was roped off. But like it or not, this was the only house in town that still dealt a six-deck shoe all the way to the sixth deck. So here she was. Anyone want to suck her blood?
    She found a stool at a hundred-dollar blackjack table and slid onto it. She liked sitting at the far left-Position Three, they called it at MIT. It gave her the most time to count cards before she had to play. Most amateurs thought the game of blackjack favored the dealer. It didn’t. The dealer was stuck hitting sixteens and standing on seventeens whether it was smart or not. He didn’t have the luxury of sitting pat on a twelve and waiting to see what happened. The only advantage the dealer had was that he played last. If you went bust, he collected your bet and kept it-even if he later