Chapter 16: 16. A New Target Appeared, And It’s An Actress. (This Is The Challenge I Loved!)

Mike walked the space first.

Not conspicuously, but just a man’s instinct of getting his bearings, which everyone does when they walk into a new place. He clocked the exits, the camera positions, and the general distribution of staff and then filed all of it away because old habits didn’t ask for permission before operating.

’Not a lot of good security up in here...’

’I can fuck in the casino, which is good, but still finding a gem here is like trying to find fresh water in the ocean.’

He settled at the blackjack table.

The dealer was a woman in her thirties with the professionally neutral expression of someone who had seen every variety of human optimism across a green felt surface and had opinions about none of them. Mike bought in with enough to play properly without looking like he was trying.

’The dealer is not my type... skip..." Mike thought while focusing back on the table.

He was not a gambler by nature. Gambling required surrendering control of the outcome to variables you couldn’t influence, which violated something fundamental in how he preferred to operate.

But he understood probability, he understood reading the table, and he understood how to watch a dealer’s rhythm without making it obvious that he was watching it.

He won three hands in a row, lost one on purpose to avoid looking like a machine, then won two more.

Not enough to draw attention, but enough to be ahead.

’This is so fucking easy...’

’Maybe I’m just so good at taking any chances that even a rigged game can’t beat me.’ Mike leaves the blackjack table.

He ordered a drink he didn’t really want and watched Gerald across the floor.

Gerald had found his machine. He’d been on it for forty minutes now.

Mike couldn’t see the numbers from here, but he could see the posture. The slight tightening of the shoulders after a loss.

The forward lean after a small win that was trying to feel like confirmation. Gerald’s hand hovered over the button between pulls, as if hesitation could change the outcome, which was unnerving.

"It seems like the machine was winning, but that bum Gerald was losing."

Mike had seen the pattern before, in different countries, at different tables, with different people. The tells were the same across languages.

The slight backward head tilt occurred when the screen didn’t land as you had hoped. The hand reached for the drink faster after a bad run than it did after a good one.

Gerald was not a gambler because he enjoyed it. Gerald was a man who gambled because standing at that machine gave him a feeling of being on the verge of something, and that sensation was more available to him there than it was anywhere else in his life at the moment.

Mike looked at his chips and sorted through the information.

’So, about this fucking bum’s absence patterns... he wasted three nights a week, four to seven hours at a time.’

’The money came from somewhere illegal because the apartment didn’t look like a place experiencing genuine financial strain, which meant either Gerald had his own income stream or the building’s profit margins were wide enough to absorb it...’

’The habit had apparently been running for five years... Petricia knew, said nothing productive about it, and had stopped expecting it to change.’

’What that meant, practically... was that fucking bum had somewhere between twelve and twenty-one nights a month where he was not home.’

’Where he was here, at this machine, feeding something that the rest of his life wasn’t providing.’

’And Petricia had those same twelve to twenty-one nights of sitting in an apartment in a building she ran alone.’

Mike stopped his thought just to play another hand, and he won it easily without having to lose money.

He was about to look away from Gerald when the room changed temperature.

Well, not literally. However, there was a noticeable shift in the air, similar to how it changes when someone enters a space, capturing everyone’s attention without permission.

The door from the main entrance opened, and a woman came in with many bodyguards.

The casino floor didn’t stop moving, but it slowed down slightly, the way crowd movement slows when something interrupts the peripheral vision of everyone in the room simultaneously.

Two of the staff looked over.

The bartender straightened up without meaning to. Even the dealer across the table from Mike glanced toward the entrance for one professional half-second before returning her attention to the cards.

The woman was tall and blond in a way that appeared different from a distance compared to up close. She was dressed casually, as if she hadn’t made an effort to impress anyone at the casino, which ironically made her stand out more than anyone else in the room.

She was carrying a small clutch bag and walked across the floor with the completely unbothered stride of someone who was used to walking into rooms that noticed her and had decided, at some point, to stop caring.

She appeared to be in her early thirties, possessing a bone structure that was striking from any angle. Her beauty could be attributed to either fortunate genetics or the advantages of years spent in front of cameras, or perhaps a combination of both.

"That’s Madison Reed," Gerald said.

Mike turned. Gerald had apparently abandoned the slot machine and appeared next to the blackjack table with his drink.

"You know her?" Mike said.

"Everybody in Erosyne does know who she is," Gerald said. "She comes in Thursdays and has done it for about a year."

"She’s between productions right now, I think."

"Ahh, I see... an actress?" Mike said.

"Yeah, you know, she did that show, the legal drama, she was in it for two seasons. And she did a film last year that was at the festival circuit." Gerald said this with the familiarity of a man who had looked her up at some point, probably on his phone, probably at this machine.

"She’s a good actress."

"She comes alone?" Mike said.

"Usually," Gerald paused. "She plays poker, but only in the private room, which is exclusive to her."

’Good information from this fucking bum... I’m surprised.’ Mike thought. ’And yeah, she looks smoking hot, but I think actresses always have dark secrets that haven’t been revealed yet.’

Mike watched Madison Reed cross the floor.

She paused once, at the bar, to order something, and while she waited, she scanned the room with the effortless professional efficiency of someone assessing their surroundings.

Her eyes moved past Mike without stopping. Which meant she had logged him and moved on, which was not the same as not registering him.

She took her drink and went toward the poker room.

’She saw me—’

[NEW PROFILE DETECTED.]

[MADISON REED, ACTRESS. AGE: 32. DESIRE LEVEL: 0/100.]

[CLASSIFICATION: HIGH-VISIBILITY SUBJECT. PUBLIC FACING. SIGNIFICANTLY DIFFERENT APPROACH REQUIRED COMPARED TO CURRENT PRIMARY TARGET.]

[NOTE: DO NOT SIMPLY DO WHAT YOU DID WITH PETRICIA. THIS ONE HAS SEEN EVERY VERSION OF THAT.]

’Finally... a worthy challenge. I’ve been waiting for something hard.’

Mike folded the current hand, cashed in his chips at a net positive that he had deliberately kept modest, and stood up from the table.

"Where are you going?" Gerald asked.

"Poker room," Mike said.

Gerald looked at him. "The buy-in there is—"

"I know," Mike said.

Gerald blinked. Then, with the expression of a man recalibrating his initial assessment of someone, he nodded once. "Alright, suit yourself."

"I’ll be at the machine."

"Don’t stay for too long," Mike said, a request Petricia had asked him to manage.

He realized he had just exhausted his quota on that as he walked across the casino floor toward a poker room he had deemed, in the last ninety seconds, the more intriguing part of the evening.

How is Mike going to get in the private room...?

He bribed, and it worked.