Lady Boss Takes on Vegas Bullies! novel · Chapter 3 of 24

Chapter 3: The High Room

A guest grabs a server and Desmond tells her to smile, so Lucy dumps the ice bucket in the guest's lap; Reuben takes the guest's chips and tells her to come see why he signs the slips.

The high room was on the twelfth floor behind a door with no number.

I had walked past that door a hundred times as a girl and never once gone in.

My grandfather kept it for his friends, a quiet room with leather chairs and a bad clock.

Desmond had turned it into a stage.

There were four tables of private poker, a bar lit from underneath, and a velvet rope.

The air smelled like cigars and old money that had gone off.

"Birch," he said, the moment I walked in. "Stand there."

He pointed at a spot beside the ice machine, in view of every table.

"Don't move. Don't speak. If a guest wants something, you hand it to him."

"I'm a janitor, Mr. Finnegan."

"Tonight you're furniture."

He smiled at me, and I understood the room.

It wasn't a job.

It was a lesson.

I stood by the ice machine for two hours.

I counted eight servers in black dresses moving between the tables.

I counted nineteen men, three women and one dealer who looked about to faint.

At 1:40, a man in a cream blazer put his hand on a server's hip.

He did it without looking.

She was maybe twenty-three.

She froze with a tray of champagne in her hands.

Her eyes went to Desmond.

"Smile, sweetheart," Desmond said from the bar, not even loud. "This gentleman is a very important guest."

The man in the cream blazer laughed and slid his hand lower.

The server smiled.

It was the worst smile I have ever seen on a human face.

I took one step, and then another.

I thought about my cover and the careful list of evidence I was supposed to be collecting.

Then I thought of her smile and picked up the ice bucket.

It was a heavy silver one, full to the lip.

"Excuse me, sir," I said, loud and polite. "You dropped something."

He turned around.

I tipped the bucket over his lap.

Ice and water went everywhere, down his pale trousers, over his shoes and across the leather chair.

He shot to his feet with a bellow that stopped every conversation in the room.

"You stupid cow!"

"I am so sorry," I said. "It slipped."

The server was already gone.

I heard the service door swing behind her.

The guest was sputtering, plucking at his soaked trousers.

Desmond rushed over to me.

"Do you know who that is?"

"A man who can't keep his hands on his own cards."

His face went the color of raw ham.

He grabbed my upper arm hard enough to bruise.

"You are done," he hissed. "You're finished in this building. I'll have you in cuffs in ten minutes."

"Take your hand off her, Mr. Finnegan."

The voice came from the door.

I had not heard it open.

Reuben Lowry stood there with his hands loose at his sides, and behind him were two uniformed guards.

His eyes were on Desmond's fingers around my arm.

"This building has a policy," Reuben said. "No staff member is touched by a manager. It's in the handbook, page nine. You approved the page."

Desmond let go.

"She assaulted a guest."

"I saw a guest touch a server," Reuben said. "I saw it on camera, from three angles. I'd like to watch that footage with the guest. In my office. With the gaming commission's number on the desk."

He turned to the man in the cream blazer.

He said it politely, almost warm.

"Sir, I'm sorry about your evening. Your chips are cashed out at the cage. Your room is comped through tonight. Your player's card is closed, and you won't be welcome here again."

"You can't do that," the man sputtered.

"I just did," said Reuben.

He nodded to the guards, and they walked the man to the door, trousers dripping.

Nobody in the high room said a word.

Desmond looked at me.

He looked at Reuben.

There was a number in his eyes, and he was adding it up.

"Forty thousand dollars a year," he said. "That's what he was worth. Birch, I'm docking you a week's pay. Lowry, you can explain to the owner why we lost him."

"The owner doesn't read my reports, Mr. Finnegan," Reuben said. "You know that better than I do."

He sounded tired.

He walked out and took the guards with him.

I stood there with the empty bucket and my arm throbbing.

The server who had fled came back through the service door ten minutes later.

She didn't say anything.

She just walked up to the ice machine, took the bucket gently out of my hands, and squeezed my wrist.

Then she went back to work.

At the end of the shift, I climbed the back stairs to the loading dock for air.

The dawn over the parking structure was pink and ugly and wonderful.

I heard boots on the concrete behind me.

"You're a terrible janitor," Reuben said.

"I know."

"That bucket was fifteen pounds. You threw it like you'd been practicing."

I didn't answer.

He leaned on the rail beside me, six inches away.

His hands were big and scarred across the knuckles.

The left pinky had healed crooked at the second joint.

"I signed your discipline slip last night," he said.

"You said you'd lose it."

"I signed a second one tonight, because Finnegan put it through the system himself." He turned his head. "You think I'm the man who fires people."

"I think your name is on thirty-one forms."

"Then come see why."

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