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pool? No tennis?"
     "Hell, not even any grass."
     "What do you do for a living?"
     "I'm a blackjack dealer. Run roulette wheels sometimes."
     "You work regularly?"
     "When I need to."
     "When the drinking doesn't get in the way?"
     "When I can," Joey amended, remembering his promise to himself to deal with all of this truthfully. "Pays well, with the tips from the players. I can save up for when ... when I have to take some time off. I do okay."
     "But with your work record, always moving on, you don't find jobs in the new, flashy casinos very often any more."
     "Not often," Joey agreed.
     "Each job is in a seedier place than the one before."
     "For a man who sounded so compassionate a minute ago, you sure are showing a cruel streak all of a sudden."
     Kadinska's face reddened with embarrassment. "I'm sorry, Joey, but I'm just trying to make the point that you're not exactly in a position to walk away from an inheritance."
     Joey was quietly adamant. "I don't deserve it, don't want it, won't take it. That's flat final. Anyway, nobody would buy that old house, and I sure as hell won't move back here to live in it."
     Tapping the documents in the open file folder, Kadinska said, "The house has little value. You're right. But the house and its contents aren't the meat of this inheritance, Joey. There's more than a quarter of a million dollars in liquid assets - certificates of deposit and money-market accounts."
     Joey's mouth went punk dry. His heart began to pound fiercely. The lawyer's office harbored a terrible darkness of which he had been dangerously unaware, and now it was rising up around him.
     "That's crazy. Dad was a poor man."
     "But your brother has been a success for a long time now. For about fourteen years, he's been sending your father a check every month, just like clockwork. A thousand dollars. I told you how it drove P.J. crazy that your dad wouldn't spend more than a little of it. Dan pretty much just banked check after check, and through what bankers like to call the miracle of compound interest, the principal has grown."
     Joey's voice was shaky: "That's not my money. That belongs to P.J. It came from him, it should go back to him."
     "But your father left it to you. All to you. And his will is a legal document."
     "Give it to P.J. when he shows up," Joey insisted, and he headed for the office door.
     "I suspect P.J. will want whatever your dad wanted. He'll say you should keep it all."
     "I won't, I won't," Joey said, raising his voice.
     Kadinska caught up with him in the reception lounge, took him by the arm, and halted him. "Joey, it's not that easy."
     "Sure it is."
     "If you really don't want it, then you have to renounce the inheritance.'
     "I renounce it. I already did. Don't want it."
     "A document has to be drawn, signed, notarized."
     Although the day was cold and the office was on the chilly side, Joey had broken into a sweat. "How long will it take to put these papers together?"
     "If you'll come back tomorrow afternoon-"
     "No." Joey's heart was jackhammering almost hard enough to shatter the ribs and breastbone that caged it. "No, sir, I'm not staying here another night. I'm going to Scranton. A flight to Pittsburgh in the morning. Vegas from there. All the way out to Vegas. Mail me the papers.'
     "That's probably better anyway," Kadinska said. "It'll give you more time to think, to reconsider."
     At first the lawyer had seemed to be a gentle, bookish man. Not now.
     Joey no longer saw kindness in the man's eyes. Instead he perceived the slyness of a bargainer for souls, something with scales under the disguise of skin, with eyes that in a different light would be like the sulfur-yellow eyes of the dog that had confronted him on the