Tats Too (29 page)

Nothing. “I think you’re supposed to get all the same kind of fruit in a row. Like three apples in a row. Or limes. Or cherries.”

“I know that much, Lee, I’m not totally stupid.”

“Sevens are wild. You could get two cherries and one seven and still win. But they have to be in a row.”

“Ssshhh,” she admonishes me. “I’m concentrating here.”

She laces her fingers together and cracks her knuckles.

“You got nine more spins,” I say.

“Shut your piehole,” she says, shoving me back behind her chair. She taps the yellow play button with her fingernail. The reels spin again.

Tick, tick, tick… Nothing.

She blows on her hands and hits play again. They spin.

And tick. And nothing.

“You only got seven more spins, Viv,” I say.

“I only need one.”

She does it again.

Nothing.

“Six,” I say.

“You’re bad luck,” she says, waving me away. “Go stand over there behind that old lady.”

I back up a couple of steps and stick my hands in my pockets. I can’t believe we’re standing here in a casino playing slots. Everybody knows what a sucker game it is.

It spins again. She has five left.

Five bucks blown in less than one minute. It’s not like ten dollars was going to get us anywhere, but—

Two lemons and one apple. She got close on that one.

—that’s not the point. I guess there really is a sucker born every minute because—

A seven and a cherry and a lime. Three left.

—there’s lots of suckers in here. Most of these people look like their rent money is going in the slot machines—

An alarm rings. Holy shit, that’s loud. I stick my fingers in my ears and see that a policeman’s light on the top of Viv’s slot machine is going round and round and lights are flashing and bells are dinging and the alarm is whooping—

—Vivian jumps up and down and grabs me around the neck, screaming, “I won! I won! I won! Can you believe it?”

What the hell?

People surround us and a few cameras flash and Vivian is still hopping and I go over to get a closer look at her machine. Lights are blazing round and round and the machine is vibrating back and forth like a…I don’t know…like a vibrator, I guess. Where’s the coins? If she won, where’s the coins? I thought they were supposed to tumble out of the machine. Aren’t they?

“A quarter of a million!” I hear somebody yell. “Hey, Martha! Look! She won a jackpot!”

I turn around and a couple of camera flashes go off in my face.

“Jackpot!” Somebody else yells.

Vivian grabs me again and grins. “I just won a quarter million dollars! How d’ya like them apples?” she says, pointing to a straight line of red apples on the slot machine.

“A quarter million?” I gasp.

A crowd five people deep surrounds us and I happen to look over their heads and see a giant video screen up on the wall. And there we are. Me and Vivian standing in front of the whooping slot machine with a crowd of people circling us. The video is live. I know it’s live because when I wave at myself, my video self
waves back.

A big, beefy security guard worms his way through the crowd and grabs Vivian by the elbow, saying, “Come with me, lady.”

Vivian starts to leave with him, but I grab her other elbow and stop them. “Where you taking her?”

“To the cashier to get her check,” he says, then laughs. “What’d you think, a quarter of million in coins is going to come outta that machine?”

“No!” I shout maybe a little too loud.

“What do you mean, no?” Vivian asks.

“Give us a sec,” I say to the guard. I pull Vivian aside and whisper, “They’re gonna need your name and social and all kinds of shit to cut you a check. We can’t be giving that information out. This whole town is Mafia owned. Your name pops up like that and we’re sitting ducks.”

Vivian turns to the security guard and asks, “Can I have an IOU?

“No,” the guard bullies, “you want your money or not?”

I glance over their heads back to the screen and see something I really don’t like. A couple of Goodfellas in silk shirts unbuttoned to their navels are working their way toward us and whispering hard at each other. They keep looking at Vivian and then talking into their big gold watches like how those Secret Service guys do. One guy picks up a walkie-talkie and speaks into it. A second later the security guard turns his back on Vivian and holds his own walkie-talkie to his ear.

Shit, we’ve been spotted already.

“We have to go now,” I say, grabbing Vivian by the back of her shirt and pulling.

“What…?” she sputters.

“The Mafia,” I say, pointing to the video screen. “They see us.”

Vivian looks to the screen just in time to see the Goodfellas and the security guard rushing toward us. At the same time, Vivian and I turn and run, hell-bent on getting ourselves lost in the golden bowels of the Bellagio.

Like Olympic hurdlers, we jump over old ladies towing oxygen machines and little Japanese tourists rolling suitcases. I run headfirst into a cocktail waitress and watered-down drinks spatter everywhere. “Sorry,” I mumble, disentangling myself from the waitress and hurling my body after Vivian.

Vivian throws open a pair of flapping double doors and darts inside. I’m just a few seconds behind her, but a few seconds is just enough time for the doors to whack me in the face. I spin in a couple of circles before I undiscombobulate myself and realize I’m in a kitchen.

A great big Italian chef with a Pillsbury dough boy hat and belly yells and points his big meat knife at me.

“
Che diavolo?”
the Chef spits.
“Prendi l’inferno della mia cucina!”

“Which way did she go?” I pant.

The chef aims his blade down the aisle and says, “
Donna dai capelli rossi pazzo!”

I don’t know what the hell he just said, but I sprint in the direction of his knife point. I find another pair of flapping double doors still flapping and burst through those just in time to see Vivian hauling ass around a corner.

I hear the chef scream in Italian again and when somebody else yells back in Italian, I know the Goodfellas are right behind us.

Shit.

I round the corner and don’t see Vivian. Where the hell did she go?

Suddenly, a door marked
storage closet
opens right next to me and Vivian’s hand reaches out, grabs the back of my shirt and yanks me inside. She quickly closes the door behind us.

It’s pitch-black in here. I close my eyes so they’ll adjust to the dark.

We both lean against the far wall, panting hard. We hold our collective breaths as a stampede of leather soles run down the hall on the other side of the door. I hear the slap of leather head down the hall and skid around a corner.

After a long moment, I chance a whisper, “This may have been the worst idea we ever had.”

“What d’ya mean?” she whispers back through the dark.

“We’re running from the Mafia and we go straight to Vegas? Everybody knows Vegas is crawling with Mafia.”

I hear a click. The lights come on, showing Vivian holding a hangy-downy chain connected to a bare light-bulb in the ceiling. The lit bulb dangles just inches over her head.

“I have an idea,” she says.

Uh-oh. Every time Lucy said that to Ethel, it spelled trouble. I ask anyway, “What’s your idea?”

“Call up your new friend Mikey. Tell her to get as many dykes on bikes here as she can. They can help us get out of here alive and get the diamond. We’ll pay well.”

“Okay,” I answer. “If we can get outta this closet alive first.”

Suddenly, Vivian looks over my shoulder and her eyes widen. I jump and spin around expecting to see somebody with a gun or at least a tarantula or something. But all that’s there are some posters tacked to the otherwise bare wall.

I follow her eyes to one poster. It’s a picture of a sensuous, gorgeous woman. She has long red hair, like Viv, and humongous tits. The poster reads:
Lulu sings Broadway at the Bellagio
.

Vivian walks up to the poster and shakes her head, saying, “You know who that is?” She taps her fingernail right on one of the poster’s tits and says it again, “You know who the hell that is?”

“My God, is that your brother?”

She chuckles. “That’s her. He’s still here in Vegas!”

Vivian opens the door a tiny crack and peeks out.

“What’re you doing?” I ask.

“Ready?” she asks back.

“Where we going?”

She answers like it’s the simplest thing in the world, “To find Lulu, my transsexual lesbian sister.”

“Oh.”

Vivian opens the door and quick-looks to either side, then takes off running.

I glance back at Lulu’s poster before I follow Vivian out the door. There’s some righteous tits running in that family tree. I name them Victor Victoria.

Score. Lulu’s hot.

***

“What’re you disguised as?” I ask maybe just a little too snippy.

Vivian found us disguises just around the next corner in another closet, and the reason I’m snippy is because she’s making me push the rolling bucket and mop. Her reasoning is that I look more like a janitor than she does. She gets to wear the aviator sunglasses that were in the lost-and-found box.

“I am a hotel guest,” she replies using a haughty tone. “And, can you, puhleez, stop splashing that shitty water all over my shoes?”

“Well, you don’t have to act all huffy puffy about it,” I snip back. “Just because you’re a paying guest and I’m a hard-working, underpaid janitor doesn’t give you the right to be all persnickety with me.”

She turns to me and lowers her sunglasses to the tip of her nose with her index finger. “One more huffy puffy or persnickety out of you and I will complain to the manager and get your underpaid ass fired.”

She flips her hair over her shoulder, hitches her purse up high, snorts through her nose like she’s Paris Hilton and keeps walking. I’d like to say something really smart-ass back to her, but I can’t think of anything right now. So, I just keep pushing and slopping dirty water.

She guides us away from the casino, down a maze of halls and through an unmarked door. We step through the door and find ourselves in a roomful of people.

I’ve heard of those sixth sense kinds of people who can bend spoons with their minds or dogs that can find missing people just by sniffing their underwear, and other people that can manifest parking spots on demand. Vivian manifests us right into the theatre of the Bellagio. True, it’s the lobby and not backstage, but it is within spitting distance of her sister.

All the people in the lobby do double-takes at us like they’ve never seen a janitor or a fancy hotel guest before. Then they all back up and form a loose circle around us and a few even aim their cell phones and snap off a couple of quick pictures.

Vivian and I look at each like “what the hell?” and the crowd mumbles among themselves and, holy shit, I hear one obese woman say to her skinny husband, “It’s Lulu!” That lights the crowd on fire and like a string of Black Cats popping, I hear, “Lulu, Lulu, Lulu!”

The crowd moves in toward us with their
Children of the Corn
faces and our space bubble gets smaller and smaller. Cameras flash and eager hands hold out paper and pens and the crowd chants: “Lulu! Autograph?” over and over.

One man actually grabs Vivian’s flannel shirt and pulls her toward the cavernous maw of the crowd. Thank God, for all my mad stick training. I clutch the mop handle, pull it out of the bucket and swing it around at knee level.

“Back off!” I yell. “Get the fuck back or I’ll bust all your kneecaps!”

The man turns loose of Vivian and she backs her ass up to the wall behind us just like she did with the billy goat. And, just like she did with the goat, she screams, “Get the fuck offa me!” puts her head down a like a battering ram and linebacks her way through the crowd.