Read Queenpin for Free Online Page A

one. I could feel the way it was going the minute I saw him losing his shirt at the tables. Loose and easy grin and a gambler’s slouch, a back-patting, hand-shaking way of moving through a room. But when his eyes narrowed on me, his smile disappeared and I could feel him. I could feel him on me. My palms itching, I rubbed them together. I could feel it everywhere, something sharp pulsing under my skin. I’ll crawl on hands and knees for this one, I thought. I can feel I’m going to be on my hands and knees for this one. He saw it on me too. He figured fast he had the upper hand. He was the first man I ever met.
    Things got pretty crazy right off. I couldn’t help myself. I let him do whatever he wanted. Who was I to say no. There was nothing he could do that I didn’t want. Not even that.
    Okay, I’ll tell you how it went. I was making my rounds at a new casino running in the lower level of Yin’s Peking Palace. It was my last stop of the night and I was tired. She was on a plane east that night for the kind of big deal I wasn’t let in on yet. Now that she had me around, she had a lot more time to do fancier jobs for them. Once, one of the jewelry fences told me they had her flying to Switzerland, but that seemed like movie stuff. I didn’t buy. The operation was big but it was still small potatoes compared to the networks running out of Chicago, New York, Miami. I knew my bosses had bosses and even they had bosses.
    Point was, I had no place to go and it was only one o’clock. I figured myself for a whiskey sour and a walk around the joint to see what was flying. Maybe I’d stumble upon something. I’d been hoping the furrier might pop up. It’d been three weeks since the deal went down and maybe she had something new cooking.
    What was great about walking around these places was that, by now, people started to know who I was. At the track, I had to be discreet, blend in. But at the casinos, I was there to show myself. And people took notice. The men and women both. Sometimes, you’d hear the regulars trying to explain who I was to one of the newer marks.
    “She’s Gloria Denton’s girl. She works for Gloria.”
    And if they didn’t know who she was, they weren’t worth anybody’s time, might as well be in the back alley with the dishwashers, giving up their coins at three-card molly.
    That night, there was a lot of action at the roulette wheel in the back. Somebody had a real spinner going. Larry, the manager, was standing by the table, which meant whoever was winning was winning big enough to demand a close eye.
    I slipped through the crowd of spectators, all eager to catch some of the luck. That was when I saw him standing at the table, eyes on the felt. All black mick hair and sorrowful eyes and a sharkskin suit cut razor sharp. He had some candy on his arm, a sometimes-pay broad I knew from the lobby of the Fabian Hotel.
    Spin after spin, he must have pulled in close to a grand, big money in these parts. It was like he’d set off some kind of crazy energy in
    the air around him. I liked it, but not that much. Not yet.
    “Golden numbers,” Larry said to me, quietly. “Would you look?”
    “Gaffed wheel?” I said, eyeing the croupier, who was sweating the
    attention from his boss.
    Larry shook his head. “That’s Vic Riordan. He’s no worry of mine. He taps out here every night. He practically pays my salary. And yours. Or he would if he ever had more than a red cent when he came in the door.”
    “Looks like his luck’s changed.”
    “Don’t count on it.”
    And Larry was right. Just when everybody was urging him to stop, to walk away while the table was still hot, the guy gave the crowd a smarmy smile. “What, I’m gonna rathole after this streak? If I’m gonna lose, it’s gonna be here with Mama,” he said, winking at the dealer.
    Sure enough, he did start to lose. And then he kept losing. The gaudy-colored stacks got smaller and smaller, the crowd slowly drifting away, and before