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name?”
    “Jack Lightfoot.”
    Valentine felt the cold from his drink shoot straight into his head. Harry Smooth Stone hadn’t mentioned that Jack Lightfoot was missing. Normally, casinos didn’t like it when their personnel went AWOL, and got downright panicky when their dealers started disappearing. Yet Smooth Stone had said nothing.
    “You say you know this kid?”
    “That’s right.”
    “He involved in anything? You know, like drugs.”
    “Not that I’m aware of.”
    “What are the people at the casino saying?”
    “Head of security is a guy named Harry Smooth Stone. The Micanopys aren’t the most communicative bunch. Harry isn’t saying much of anything.”
    Valentine finished his drink and tossed it into a trash receptacle. Jack Lightfoot didn’t sound like the kind of kid who would become a cheater, yet Harry Smooth Stone had said a player at Lightfoot’s table had won eighty-four hands in a row. Something wasn’t adding up. “Maybe I should pay the Micanopys a visit,” he said.
    “You don’t mind?”
    “For you? Never.”
    Higgins thanked him. He was not prone to dramatics, and Valentine was surprised when Higgins offered to get him a comped suite at the Bellagio the next time he was in Las Vegas.
    “Sounds great,” Valentine said.

5
    Valentine got back on the Alley. A sign said, MICANOPY CASINO , 20 MILES . He’d told Smooth Stone he’d meet him at seven. Which gave him plenty of time to sniff around the casino unobserved.
    The best way to walk around a casino was as a tourist. Tourists were considered suckers by casino people and rarely aroused suspicion. Only, looking like a tourist wasn’t easy. People were always pegging him for a cop, which he supposed had something to do with his penchant for black sports jackets and thick-soled shoes. It was his persona, retired or not.
    He came to the Alley’s only gas station. It contained a small convenience store, and he was soon inspecting a rack of cheap clothes. A gaudy floral shirt and floppy hat set him back fourteen bucks. He changed in a lavatory stall, then appraised himself in a mirror. He looked like a schmuck. Great.
    At six he pulled into the Micanopy casino’s parking lot. The public’s appetite for losing money knew no bounds, and the lot was filled with out-of-state plates. He found a space behind the main building and killed the engine. It bothered him that he still hadn’t talked to Kat, and he powered up his cell phone and punched in her number. It rang for a while, and he was about to hang up when a man’s voice said, “Yeah?”
    “This is Tony. Is Kat there?”
    “Kat’s busy right now,” the voice said.
    Valentine could hear Zoe yelling at her father in the background.
    “When’s a good time for me to get back to her?”
    “Never,” the voice said.
    The line went dead, and for a long minute Valentine stared at the phone clutched in his hand.
It’s over,
he thought.
So get over it.

    Parked by the casino’s entrance were six orange tour buses. Bingo junkies. It was a time killer for people who’d just about run out of time. Yet more people played bingo than all the state lotteries combined.
    Inside, he was hit by a blast of arctic cold air. The casino was rectangular and high-ceilinged, with raised floors that broke up the monotony of the layout. The acoustics were unfriendly, the sounds of people gambling painfully loud. He went to the cage and bought a twenty-dollar bucket of quarters.
    Casinos watched everyone who came through the front door, at least for a minute or two. Normally, people immediately started gambling or got a drink. If a person didn’t do one of those things, the folks manning the eye-in-the-sky cameras would follow them for a while. He found a slot machine and quickly lost his money.
    Then he strolled over to the blackjack pit. The game was two-deck, handheld. That was rare to find in a casino that had only recently introduced blackjack. Usually, the cards were dealt from a shoe, which