Chapter Three #3
She raised both eyebrows. “That supposed to scare me?”
“No,” I said. “It’s supposed to tell you I’m not na?ve.”
Glitz steepled her fingers. “You’re building a club. Zeke’s building an army. Why do you think the IRS won’t just shut you down?”
“Because I’ll have the best financial brains in Vegas working for me,” I said. “Brains like yours.”
She smiled, but it didn’t reach her eyes. “You’re good, Selene. Almost makes me forget how easy it is to run a Ponzi in this town.”
“I don’t want a Ponzi. I want clean books. Or, at least, books nobody can open without a blowtorch.”
She considered, then nodded to the ledgers. “You know I embezzled a million from the Russians and made them thank me for it?”
“I read the trial transcript,” I said. “You made it look like a clerical error, then paid it back with ‘interest’ before anyone could get wise.”
She snorted. “Most fun I’ve ever had in a skirt.”
We both laughed, and it felt like the first time I’d done that in weeks.
She swept her hand, indicating the mess. “You think you can afford me?”
“If I couldn’t, I wouldn’t be here.”
Glitz dug through a drawer, fished out a napkin, and produced a black marker from somewhere in her cleavage. She drew three intersecting circles, labeled them “Dirty,” “Clean,” and “Charity.”
“You got cash?” she said.
“A little.”
“You got charity, as in, a place to launder said cash?”
I nodded. “Mary’s brothel. She runs it off the books.”
Glitz smiled, wolfish. “Good. Now, you need a pipeline—some way to convert the first two into the third, without tripping a flag.”
She drew an arrow, then, on the napkin, scribbled a formula so arcane it looked like algebra. “That’s how you hide a hundred grand a month, easy.”
“You ever teach a class?” I said.
She shrugged. “You don’t get tenure for cooking the books.”
I tapped the Treasurer patch again. “You in?”
Glitz looked at her desk, then at me. “Only if I can keep my office.”
“Deal.”
She grinned, and in a single, fluid motion, opened the club’s ledger, inked a fancy “G” next to the current date, and then, from her purse, produced a custom embosser.
It was heavy, old school, with her tattoo design on the die.
She stamped the bottom of the page, hard enough to leave a mark that would last forever.
“My books are always balanced,” she said, “even when they’re crooked.”
I nodded, picked up the napkin, and tucked it into my jacket.
Three days left, and my accounts were finally in the black.
***
The thing about server rooms is that they’re never really dark.
Even in the guts of Aces Wild, three floors below the strip, past the maze of boiler pipes and empty liquor cases, there was always the flicker of blue, green, and orange from the racks.
The air was colder than the casino floor, but heavy with the stink of overheating circuit boards.
Nines ran the place like a crypt, and she dressed for it in an oversized hoodie, black leggings, and combat boots with neon pink laces.
Her face was heart-shaped, eyes huge and unblinking behind prescription lenses that caught every byte of light.
Her hands moved in a blur over the keyboard, typing like she had six fingers per hand.
She hunched in a folding chair, surrounded by towers of monitors and battery backups that hummed like a hive of mechanical bees.
She never turned around. “You walk heavy, boss,” she said, voice echoing off the servers.
I pulled up a crate and sat. “That's supposed to be an insult?”
She shrugged, barely audible under the whirr of cooling fans. “Just means you’re not here to bullshit.”
I watched the monitors. One showed the casino floor in grainy grayscale; another scrolled lines of raw code, while a third ran side by side security feeds from three different properties.
She had a fourth screen that showed nothing but network traffic, the numbers pulsing in a way I couldn’t pretend to understand.
“You’re in,” I said.
Nines finally glanced over, eyes magnified behind the glasses. “I’ve always been in.”
“No, I mean you’re in the club. Secretary. You run intelligence, digital, all of it.”
She pursed her lips, almost smiling. “You need a secretary because you suck at email?”
I grinned. “Because I don’t trust anyone else to keep Zeke out of my system.”
“Zeke’s an amateur,” she said, never missing a keystroke. “You’re more worried about the Turkish mob, or maybe Metro. Or maybe the Feds.”
“Why not all three?” I said.
She liked that answer. “You know I used to work for Caesar’s? Until they found out I was running a side hustle selling slot algorithms to the Chinese?”
“I heard,” I said. “You banked a quarter mil before they caught on.”
“Three hundred, but who’s counting?” Now she grinned for real, flashing a chipped incisor.
I watched the code scroll, hypnotic and endless. “What’s your price, Nines?”
She stopped typing, turned in the chair, and fixed me with those alien eyes. “Full autonomy. You don’t question my software, and you don’t ask how I get things done.”
“I can do that,” I said. “Within reason.”
“And I want new gear. Not the shit they left in here after Buck died.”
“I’ll order it today.”
She went back to her screens, satisfied. “You want to see something fun?”
“Hit me.”
She tapped a key, and every monitor in the room, at least two dozen, lit up with the Royal Harlots logo, stitched in pulsing red and gold. Even the security feed showed it in the upper right corner, like it was always supposed to be there.
I let out a low whistle. “Nice.”
“I can get into any system in Clark County,” she said, almost bored. “You want an escort service off the books, a money drop that never leaves a trail, or even just a backdoor into Zeke’s digital, I got you.”
“Why’d you pick the name Nines?” I asked.
She shrugged. “It’s the last card in the deck before the whole thing goes wild. You hit a nine, and the rules change. I like rules that change.”
“Same,” I said.
She pulled a USB stick from her lanyard and handed it to me. “Proof of concept. Plug it in anywhere and you’ll have admin in sixty seconds.”
I took it, feeling the weight of her trust. Or maybe just her confidence.
“Nines,” I said, “we’re going to need you tomorrow. Ghost the casino’s financials for Glitz, then start a sweep on Zeke’s club. Anything suspicious, you flag it.”
“Already on it,” she said.
I stood to go, and she said, “Selene?”
“Yeah?”
“Next time you walk in, knock first. I’ll know it’s you.”
I left her in the glow, the logo burning bright on every screen, and knew that when shit hit the fan, I’d have the best hacker in Vegas in my corner.
Two days left. The deck was stacked.
***
The Unlucky Tiger was the kind of place where even the roaches walked in pairs.
The windows were blacked out with duct tape, and every surface was sticky with a patina of ancient beer and shitty decisions.
The regulars clung to their corners like barnacles, and the only sign outside was a flickering tiger that looked more like a possum with mange. I loved it instantly.
Tempest was easy to spot. She sat at the center of the storm, broad shoulders hunched over a battered Formica table.
Her hair was shaved close on the sides, the top spiked up, and dyed a violent blue.
Her arms were slabs of muscle, bare except for a faded Airborne tattoo and a latticework of scars that crisscrossed her forearms and hands.
She wore a sleeveless leather vest—no colors yet, just the raw hide, already stained with something redder than ketchup.
At her table, three men were shouting, faces purple and veins bulging.
One took a swing. Tempest ducked, caught the wrist, and twisted until I heard the bone pop.
The man howled, but she used his own momentum to drive his face into the table.
The second guy tried to grab her from behind, but she elbowed him in the gut, then head-butted him for good measure.
The third, smarter than the rest, just backed away, hands up, muttering something about "fucking psychos" and "dykes with death wishes. "
The bartender didn’t even look up. This was Tuesday, after all.
I watched the show with a bourbon, savoring the violence like a good ballad. When the noise died, I walked over, bottle in hand.
"Nice moves," I said.
Tempest didn't look up. She pulled a rag from her back pocket and wiped the blood off her knuckles. "You here for the floorshow, or you just stalking me?"
"Both," I said, sliding into the seat across from her. "I’m Selene. I run Aces Wild."
"I know," she said, voice low and slow. "The suits keep talking about you. Say you’re putting together a crew."
I poured her a shot. "They’re right. I want you as Tail-Gunner."
She snorted. "You need muscle, get a gorilla. Or better yet, buy a gun."
"You’re not muscle," I said. "You’re a force of nature. You don’t just fight, you protect. There’s a difference."
She finally looked at me, and her eyes were dark brown, almost black, with a glitter that said she’d seen too much to ever be surprised again. "You know what happens to protectors in this city?"
"They get killed, or they go numb," I said. "But you don’t strike me as the numb type."
Tempest downed the shot, grimaced, and poured herself another. "You ever lost someone worth fighting for, Selene?"
"Everyone," I said, meaning it.
She rolled her wrist, flexed her bloody fingers. "You got a code?"
"Don’t fuck over the family. Always pay your debts. Never snitch, never whine. Loyalty over everything."
She grinned, showing a chipped front tooth. "Not bad. Most people just say ‘get rich or die trying.’"
I shrugged. "That’s the end of the code, not the start."
A silence, but not the awkward kind. More like the eye of a storm. She pushed her empty glass toward me. "You ever take a punch, Selene?"
I thought about my mother, my father, the river, the men who tried to take what wasn’t theirs. "More than I can count."