Pretty In Ink by Karen E. Olson Page B

Trevor a warning through Eduardo. That would make the most sense. Kyle said he didn’t remember Lambert having a tattoo, but he could’ve easily gotten one in the time since he’d last been at the club.
    Something bugged me, though, about this roulette guy. The ink was in the right place; it was the same design I’d seen. And he knew my name.
    I had to get back to my car, which was in the self-parking garage. The sun was blasting, and even though late September isn’t as steamy as, say, July, the asphalt absorbed the heat and sent ribbons of it into the air.
    The chips made little clicking noises in my bag. I wondered how much they were worth. I pushed the glass doors to the casino open, and as I passed the escalator I noticed a couple of stray chips on the up side, the ones the guy had dropped. For a second, I had a crazy thought that I could go back and collect them, adding to my winnings.
    I knew I shouldn’t be so greedy. Technically, the chips I won might not even be mine because I wasn’t playing with my own money. And considering what had just happened with that guy, I was uncomfortable with the whole situation.
    Still, I found myself at the cashier window, pushing the chips through the little slot. While I waited for the cashier to count them, I looked around at the fake trees, the fake brownstones, the fake New York City. I missed the city. The real one. There was something vibrant about it that no other city could match.
    I was distracted by my thoughts enough so when the cashier pushed the wads of money through the slot, it surprised me. I glanced at the receipt.
    I’d won more than sixty thousand dollars.
    I stopped breathing for a second.
    The cashier grinned. “Congratulations,” he said.
    “Thanks,” I said, carefully putting the bills in my bag next to the smashed bagels. I needed to get to a bank before I got mugged.
     
    “Where have you been?” Bitsy demanded when I walked into the shop about an hour later.
    I didn’t answer right away. I wasn’t quite sure how to explain everything so it wouldn’t sound like I was nuts.
    My eyes skirted around the shop, my home away from home, checking everything out, sort of like when a cat goes on the prowl to make sure everything’s still where it was an hour ago. The blond laminate flooring was sleek; the mahogany desk near the door was shining. A spray of light pink orchids from Bitsy’s greenhouse gave the place elegance, as did Ace’s new paintings we’d just hung: comic-book versions of Caravaggio’s Lute Player , Dürer’s Adoration of the Magi , Holbein’s Henry VIII , and Corot’s View of Venice —which offset the canal and gondolas and St. Mark’s Square just outside our shop at the Venetian Grand Canal Shoppes.
    Four private rooms were closed off in the middle of the shop, and a waiting area fitted with a black leather sofa and glass-topped coffee table was behind the rooms to the left. A staff room was to the right, and an office off that. It was classy, no flash—stock tattoos—lining the walls like in a street shop. We prided ourselves on the custom designs we created. And since Charlotte had arrived, we’d bought a new Apple computer for even more design options. I didn’t have a background in computer graphics—I was a painter—but Charlotte had been teaching herself and had begun to show us some of her tricks. Joel was getting into it more than anyone; he’d started in street shops and didn’t have formal art training like Ace and me, but he somehow managed to take his raw talent and transfer it to the computer.
    “So?” Bitsy asked, following me into the staff room, bringing her small stool with her. She needed the stool to compensate for her height, but her habit of dragging it along the floor caused it to squeak in that fingernails-on-the-blackboard kind of way that made me cringe.
    “I had to go to the bank,” I said, trying not to meet her eyes as I pulled the bag of bagels out of my messenger bag and set it on