Nobody Dies in a Casino by Marlys Millhiser

But that wasn’t what was important right now. “I told you there was trouble.”
    She stressed the last word of that sentence and tried to gesture with her eyes toward the gray-tinged curls beside her chair.
    Either Richard Morse, a man with incessant nervous tics, trembled with anger or her quaking chair caused her to move, which made it seem as if he moved. “I got news for you, Greene—”
    Charlie never heard the news, because she looked past him to the screen to see a live Patrick Thompson in the pilot’s seat of a small, cramped aircraft. The cameraperson sat in a rear seat and the hunk turned with a gorgeous smile, his eyes electric with excitement. She hadn’t seen how truly hunky he was when he had exchanged threats with someone at McCarran International on his cell phone. He hadn’t been happy and excited then. He hadn’t when walking, dazed, out of Loopy Louie’s either. Charlie hugged herself so hard, it hurt her elbows, trying to not remember the thing he had become in the gutter.
    The next shot showed Charlie in a rear seat, throwing up her Yolie’s lunch into a plastic bag.
    Richard still whispered from the floor in front of her, but the low voice to the side of her chair cut through her haze of fear, revulsion, and indigestion.
    â€œThere any trouble in this town you don’t have a piece of, lady?” The Thug rubbed the deep cleft in his chin with his left hand. He wore a turquoise ring similar to that of the floorman at the Hilton.
    Why would Evan invite you here? “I came here for a vacation. I just want to play blackjack.”
    The plane’s shadow crawled up and over a low sullen mountain range and dove down the other side.
    â€œAnd Lazarus keeps hinting you’re going to jump ship for ICM. I’ll sue your socks off, Greene,” her boss threatened, unaware she hadn’t been listening. Lazarus Trillion was Mitch Hilsten’s agent. “He’s also worried Hilsten will switch to you if you do. Then I’ll sue more than socks.”
    â€œRichard, I don’t know what you’re talking about—but this guy right here is the one who—” Now, wouldn’t you know, her boss wasn’t listening to her. He’d turned when everybody else gasped and “whoa”ed and someone even swore at the sight of runways many times wider and longer than those at Denver International Airport. At immense shedlike buildings and a row of unmarked 737s parked at the edge of a runway near huge hangars. A series of rapid-play still shots showed full-sized buses with blackened windows moving in odd jerking paths toward the jets, some already unloading passengers, others driving off presumably empty. All seen through a faint orange haze.
    Amid a few jeers of “Area Fifty-one” and “Dreamland,” delivered with a mixture of amusement and discomfort from the assembled, Richard said, “Listen, I want to know the minute Hilsten hits town. I mean it. And I’m through with this. Call a taxi, we gotta leave early.”
    â€œWhere are you going? You can’t leave me here.”
    â€œBradone’s got a date with the high rollers. Baccarat. I want to watch—what’s your problem?”
    â€œRichard, this man wants to kill me—you’ve got to listen.”
    â€œWhat man?”
    Charlie, still seeing orange, could see through it well enough to determine that the floor beside her chair was empty of thugs.

CHAPTER 12
    R ICHARD M ORSE , B RADONE McKinley, and Charlie’s murderous thug missed the highlight of Evan Black’s screening—the casino robbery at the Las Vegas Hilton.
    â€œAnd now, ladies and gentlemen, for your eyes only, the proof of the pudding,” he said, introducing it with relish.
    If the audience had been disturbed but dubious earlier, it turned downright hostile now. Yet no one got up and left. No outright jeering, but you could feel the exasperation in