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$2 million.
    Kate’s adrenaline drip had slowed to barely a trickle, and she was thinking more about cheese puffs than blackjack.
    “Do you think the buffet is still open?” Kate asked.
    “You’re hungry?” Nick asked.
    “Ravenous,” she said. “I could eat two million dollars’ worth of crab legs and tiny key lime pies.”
    “I like this side of you.”
    Goodwell approached the blackjack table. “Pardon me. If you’re done for the night, Mr. Trace would like to invite you to his private dining room for drinks.”
    Nick glanced at Kate, then back at Goodwell. “If he’ll throw in a couple of steaks, we’ll be there.”
    “How do you like your steaks prepared?” Goodwell asked.
    —
    Trace’s private dining room was behind an unmarked door near the high-limit parlor of the casino. Goodwell opened the door for Nick and Kate and waved them through. They stepped into an atrium that was filled with tropical plants and flowers. A sleek Plexiglas-bottomed bridge arched over a koi pond and into the wood-paneled dining room decorated with contemporary artwork. Kate looked down at the pond as they walked over the bridge, taking note of the silver-green fish. They were about five inches long and had red bellies. Piranha, she thought. More appropriate to the setting than koi.
    Trace was waiting to greet them on the other side of the bridge. He wore a midnight blue silk tux jacket, a white dress shirt, skinny jeans, and black crocodile loafers.
    “I’m so glad to meet you. I’m Evan Trace.”
    “We appreciate the invitation,” Nick said. “It was an unexpected treat.”
    “I could say the same about the two of you,” Trace said, smiling at Kate, his attention momentarily caught by the red dress. “It’s not often that people we don’t know walk in off the street, book our best suite, and gamble millions of dollars.”
    “Surely you don’t know everyone with money,” Kate said.
    “Everyone but you,” Trace said.
    A table near the atrium was set for three, and a bottle of red wine had been decanted.
    Trace pulled out a chair for Kate. “I’ve taken the liberty of choosing a bottle of wine from my private reserve. I hope that’s okay.”
    “I’m sure it’s lovely,” Kate said.
    Lovely,
she thought. She had actually said
lovely.
Good Godfrey, she sounded like a lady.
    She was facing the dining room and looking across the table at the artwork on the walls. All large abstract paintings and a familiar painting of seven dogs sitting around a table playing poker. She’d seen the picture a thousand times before. It wasn’t something she’d expect to see in Trace’s private dining room.
    “I like that you’ve included the painting of the dogs playing poker,” Kate said. “It adds some whimsy to your collection.”
    “A print of that painting was on the wall in the motel room I rented when I first came to Vegas. But what you see there is the original oil painting, created in 1903 for a cigar advertisement. I bought it to always remind me of how I got started.”
    “How did you end up in the casino business?” Nick asked.
    “I like to say it was a sign from God,” Trace said. “I’d gone bust as a gambler in Vegas, so I headed for Palm Springs to be a tennis instructor. I was driving across the desert when my Chevette broke down. It was a thousand degrees outside. I had to walk miles to the nearest gas station, which was this wooden shack in the middle of nowhere run by this grizzled old Indian. I staggered in, sunburned and thirsty, and the old coot welcomed me to the sovereign Chuckwalla Indian nation, total tribal population: one. I had a revelation then and there.”
    “You saw a vision of a casino,” Nick said.
    “That’s right, my sign from God. My burning bush. Once I proved that the old coot’s obscure tribe was real, that his barren patch of desert was truly their ancestral land, and that he was the one Indian left, raising the money to build a casino there was no problem.”
    The