The Four-Night Run by William Lashner Read Free Book Online

that skimpy gold skirt bringing him hard. He had a burning for Dolores that he found inexplicable. Her perfect breasts were false, her red nails were glued on, the lavish frizz of black that framed her face was a fall pinned to her lank brown hair, her pouting lips were injected, her cute pinched nose was carved, her straight white teeth were corrected. Even her orgasms, as she squirmed atop of him and squeezed her own breasts and let out that hungry moan, were false, or at least he hoped so. Somehow he found all this artificiality so erotic he could barely think straight around Dolores until after he twisted inside her and let loose his desire, before lapsing into a sweet and lonely sleep.
    When he turned back to the table, something had changed. Where before there had been a current, now there was a dead calm. He bet three hundred and pulled a jack to his twelve and knew that whatever had been with him at the table had disappeared. Normally, he’d try to force it to come back to papa, keep betting against the deadness, waiting for the current to turn live again. Something inside him didn’t like to win, but tonight his luck held. The scotch and the long day with its traumatic coda finally hit him all at once with a sickening weariness. It was time to go. He tossed another black chip at Thuy, gave the man beside him the rest of his cigarettes, slipped on his raincoat, and gathered his chips into a pile to take to the cashier.
    Twenty-one hundred and seventy-five dollars.
    He was too tired to let out a cheer or pump his fist as the cashier counted out the bills. He had thought a win like that would somehow make him happier and was disappointed that it didn’t. He put a hundred seventy-five dollars into his wallet and folded the twenty remaining Ben Franklins in half and stuffed them into the top of his boot. On his way out he stopped at a bar in one of the lounges.
    “I need a bottle of champagne,” he told the bartender.
    “What table you at?”
    “I need it to go.”
    “Sorry, pal. No bottles to go. House rule.”
    “Well, you see, I got this girl coming over.”
    “I know the story.”
    “And she’s been feeling unappreciated lately.”
    “What else is new.”
    “And she’s had the best surgeons money can buy.”
    The barkeep glanced around. “All right, this once. You want the good stuff or the very good stuff?”
    “I want the hundred-and-fifty-dollar stuff.”
    On his way out of the bar, holding the brown paper bag like a football, he heard the man sweeping the foyer say, “Good evening, Mr. Scrbacek.”
    He heard the doorman say, “Hope you had a good run, Mr. Scrbacek.”
    And then he was back outside, surrounded by the cool of the brightly lit night. He walked to the edge of the boardwalk, heard the uneven but steady roar of the waves in the darkness that crouched beyond the reach of the casino lights, breathed in the sweet salty-rot scent of the sea. He turned around and faced the gaudy grandeur that was Diamond’s Mount Olympus.
    Between the two golden domes was a post with a flag flapping in the wind, the word SINGAPORE printed upon the rippling fabric. The owner of Mount Olympus and three other casinos on the boardwalk, James E. Diamond—billionaire, high-flying jet-setter, author of three ghostwritten books detailing his brilliant business strategies—was such a famous personage that the patrons always wanted to know where he was. Management had taken to putting up a flag each morning to announce his location. Sometimes it was Hong Kong, sometimes London, sometimes Vegas or New York or Hollywood. And then, on those special days when he came to inspect his flagship casino or to work on his grand plan to put a mammoth casino resort on the swath of land on the northern bay of the city, known as the Marina District, they put up a great red flag that simply said I N THE H OUSE .
    So, thought Scrbacek, the great James E. Diamond is in Singapore this evening. Singapore. Sweet. But I’ll bet he