Lady Boss Takes on Vegas Bullies! novel · Chapter 1 of 24
Chapter 1: Mop Water
On her first night as a janitor in her own casino, Ronnie is ordered to scrub a spilled drink on her knees and hands the rag back to the general manager in front of the high rollers; the head of security's clipboard shows thirty-one firings, all signed by him.
At 2:10 in the morning, my general manager poured his whiskey onto my floor.
He did it slowly, looking straight at me.
I owned the floor.
I owned the carpet, the lounge, the forty-one stories above it and the man's salary.
Nobody in the building knew that, and that was the whole point of the gray smock I was wearing.
"Birch," Desmond Finnegan said. "You missed a spot."
The spot was a puddle the size of a dinner plate, soaking into the Garnet Lounge carpet.
Eight high rollers sat around the baccarat table ten feet away.
They had stopped playing to watch.
I had been a janitor for three hours and forty minutes.
In that time I had emptied sixty ashtrays and found two people crying in stairwells.
One was a dealer.
One was a cocktail server who would not tell me why.
That was why I was here.
My staff had been leaving for a year, and every exit survey I read said the same careful nothing.
So I took a mop and a fake name and came down to see for myself.
"Sorry, sir," I said, and bent to blot the spill with my rag.
"No." Desmond tapped the carpet with his shoe. "On your knees. Do it properly. These gentlemen came for a show."
Somebody at the table laughed.
His cologne reached me before his shadow did, sweet and heavy.
He wore a navy suit that cost more than the night crew earned in a month.
A gold ring flashed on his little finger.
I had signed his contract myself, four years ago, with a pen my grandfather gave me.
I looked at the puddle.
Then I looked at the faces behind him.
A server by the bar had gone white.
A pit boss stared at his shoes.
Every one of them had seen this before, and nobody had stopped it.
That told me more than a year of surveys.
I stood up instead of kneeling.
"You spilled it, Mr. Finnegan," I said.
My voice carried farther than I meant it to.
"I'll be glad to clean it. After you apologize to the lounge for the mess."
The baccarat table went completely silent.
Desmond's tan turned a shade darker.
"What did you say to me?"
"I said you spilled it."
I held the rag out to him.
"Everyone here watched you do it."
He took a step closer.
He was a heavy man, and he used all of it.
"You're a night temp with a six-hour-old badge," he said, low enough that only I heard.
"I'll have you flagged no-rehire before your break. Do you know what that means?"
"It means nobody in this town will hire me."
"It means you'll be mopping the Greyhound station."
He raised his voice again for the audience.
"Security!"
I kept the rag in my fist and did not look away from him.
My hands were shaking, and I let them.
I had imagined this a dozen ways, and none of them involved wanting to hit someone.
"Mr. Finnegan."
The voice came from behind me, flat and unhurried.
"Camera 14 is looking at this carpet."
I turned.
The man in the doorway was six foot three, with a shaved head and a black suit.
An earpiece curled behind his ear.
He had a clipboard in one hand and the stillest face I had ever seen on a living person.
His eyes were hazel and went straight past me to Desmond.
"Camera 14 has audio," he said. "The high rollers can hear it too. Do you want this on the floor tonight, or do you want me to walk Ms. Birch downstairs and leave the footage alone?"
Desmond looked from him to the table.
The eight high rollers were suddenly very interested in their cards.
"Take her out of my sight," Desmond said.
"Yes, sir."
The man did not touch me.
He turned his shoulder toward the service door and waited.
I walked.
In the corridor the door sighed shut behind us and the casino noise dropped away.
My knees were weak, and I was furious that they were.
"Thank you," I said.
"Don't," he said.
He wasn't unkind about it.
He was reading something on his clipboard, a stack of pink forms, clipped and numbered.
The top one had my cover name typed across it.
It said Lucy Birch, flagged, pending review.
His signature was already at the bottom, a neat angular scrawl.
R. Lowry, Security.
I knew that name.
I had a list in my jacket, folded small, that I had gotten from the HR system under a false login.
Thirty-one workers fired in two years, every one countersigned by Head of Security.
He flipped the page to the next form, and I saw the signature again.
And again on the one beneath it.
He turned them over.
The man who had just saved me from Desmond Finnegan was also the hand that signed the firings.
I had come to catch them both.
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