Saint Oswald by Jay Bonansinga (always you kirsty moseley .txt) 📗

of recognition down the back of Billy’s spine as he stands there, planning out his evening. The feeling is not exactly pleasure. Pleasure for the gambling addict is fleeting, deadened, just out of reach. Playing the slots now serves more of a compulsive, utilitarian purpose for Billy Elgart. He plays the slots every night now as one might pick at a scab or self-pleasure one’s own genitals. It is a baboon behavior better suited for a cage at the zoo.

A pear-shaped man in his middle years, with a tuft of graying hair around his balding pate, Billy Elgart wears the casual garb of a teenager: parachute shorts, Kobe Bryant Reeboks, North Face backpack, a netted wife-beater and a backwards Raiders cap. The only signs of his age and reprobation can be found on his face. Tanned by sunlamps, deeply lined, with deep-set pewter-colored eyes, he looks like an aging porn star from the days when dirty movies were shot on film and had stories. One would never expect this sad, feckless specimen was once the king of the fantasy football rackets along the South Shore—doing eight figures a year for the Chicago Outfit.

Of course, that was a long time ago, long before Billy’s little “problem” got him into hock for over 250 large with the mob.

Now Billy goes about his pre-gambling ritual with the impassive stupor of a Catholic going through the motions at mass. He hauls his backpack over to the cashier window and changes the sock full of loose stuff for quarter-rolls. The room thrums noisily behind him as he waits for the cashier to stack the rolls.

The casino consists of three main corridors. To Billy’s right, a soaring atrium of fake foliage and inverted lighting rises over endless rows of green felt, the tourists milling about the blackjack tables like pigs at feeding troughs. To his left, an endless mall of restaurants stretches practically into the next county, lined with roulette wheels and video games. But the shank of the casino—for Billy, at least—is a vast honeycomb of slot machines down the center of the facility.

Like a giant ant farm, the slots are ceaselessly pinging and clanging—their zombie patrons pulling levers and dipping into change buckets with zero emotion.

Now Billy bops down the main corridor to his favorite row of one-arm bandits. Next to a vending machine selling nothing but mouthwash he finds his favorite floor waitress, a long-in-the-tooth matron named Delores.

“How’s the action tonight?” he asks her with a tip of his hat.

“Oh, you know,” she says in a non-committal monotone, her mossy green eyes everywhere at once.

He asks her when she gets off work.

“You ask me that every time, Billy.”

“I know, so...?”

She gives him a deadpan stare. “As you know, I’m not allowed to fraternize.”

He offers her an empty smile. “But with me you’ll make an exception?”

She sighs. “The usual, Billy?”

“Please.”

She wanders off. She knows what to bring him (two Rusty Nails, easy on the Drambuie) and where to find him (third row of the God-Bless-America machines, ten machines down, lucky number thirteen).

When he finds his machine, Billy is appalled to discover a little blue-haired old lady in a shaded visor and White Sox jersey in front of bandit number 13. The old crone has her change pail in her lap, a cigarette hanging off her prune-colored lips, and her cat’s-eye specs riding low on her ulcerated nose. Every few seconds, she jacks the lever with the vigor of a stockyard worker bleeding a hog.

“Excuse me, ma’am.” Billy taps the lady on the shoulder.

“I’m in the middle of something,” the old woman snaps as she yanks the lever.

The machine is an electronic job, with a digital window, showing various colored shapes and icons: a bald eagle, the hand of God, an American flag, a crucifix. At each yank of the arm, the icons flicker in syncopated rhythm, and then settle on a final array. An uncommon match—such as three bleeding hearts—can pay as much as 2,500 quarters on a single quarter.

“I’m just wondering,” Billy says, keeping his tone light and genial and polite, “how long you think you’re gonna be on that machine.”

The old woman waves him off, not taking her droopy eyes off the display. “Plenty of slots for everybody, kiddo. Now please leave me be.”

“This one is mine.”

The old woman blinks, then turns and looks at the balding gentleman. “Could you repeat that? I ain’t sure I heard you correctly.”

“Never mind,” Billy says with a sigh. “Take your time.”

The old woman turns back to the slot, and then drops another coin.

The arm slams down.

Icons flicker.

Billy waits.

In a private crow’s-nest room, high above the casino, scores of twelve-inch video surveillance screens record everything. Each monitor features a different grainy black-and-white angle of the casino floor. Every conceivable perspective is represented: an overhead shot from the center chandelier, isolated aerials of individual craps tables, extremely close zoom-ins of Blackjack games, deep-focus shots down rows of slot machines, and on and on.

During the course of a normal evening, two security guards are usually stationed in the worn swivel-chairs in front of the monitors. Tonight one of the guards is out sick, so the job has fallen to an elderly African American guard named Theodore Baskin—T-Bone to his pals—who usually plays solitaire while he absently surveys the screens over the top of his greasy horn-rimmed glasses.

This evening, however, T-Bone’s horn-rims lie on the console, folded up and forgotten amid the spray of playing cards and half-eaten Spam sandwich.

The guard slumps, unconscious, his head resting on the intercom buttons.

A tall Russian gentleman with an eye-patch stands behind the guard, putting a hypodermic needle back into its black leather case.

Trim and gaunt in his black turtleneck and crisp black slacks, Bernard Ivan Wachowski—Ice Man to his clients and associates—estimates the duration of the Amobarbital to be about thirty minutes.

Which is more than enough time to get a fix on the target down on the main floor and go finish the job before last call at the Paddle Wheel Show