Skeleton Key(81)
When she was finished, she had to look at the notepad next to her on the desk to see how much she’d taken. She had lost count somewhere in the process. Then she tore the page out of the notebook and tore it into little shreds. Then, just to be safe, she went down the hall to the ladies’ room and flushed them down the toilet. When she got back to the office, it was still empty. She felt a shot of adrenaline up her spine—if Ruth had come back from lunch, this would all have been useless. She would have doctored the accounts and gotten nothing out of it at all. Instead, she had timed it perfectly.
She went to the cash drawer and took out twenty-five hundred dollars in twenties and fifties. There were hundreds in the drawer, too, but she didn’t want to touch those. They made her feel funny. The club usually had ten thousand dollars in cash on hand on any ordinary day. They never went through that much, but they always had it, just in case.
She tried to put the money in her wallet and found it wouldn’t fit. She stuffed it into the little inside zipper pocket instead. It still bulged. If she had known she was going to do this, she would have brought a bigger bag.
Nobody who saw her would think the bulge in her bag was twenty-five hundred dollars of the club’s own money. She knew that. They would think she was carrying tennis balls, or that she had her period. She put her bag over her shoulder and looked out over the office. Everything seemed to be all right. Everything seemed to be where it was supposed to be. It was so damned hard to concentrate.
She left the office and went down the short hall to the lobby. She said good-bye to the doorman and walked out the front door. She walked out across the parking lot to her car and climbed in behind the wheel. She was finding it almost impossible to breathe.
She got the car started and moving down the long drive to the road. She made herself think about the steering wheel and the gas pedal and the brake. She made herself think, hard, about Ledyard and the slots. That was what she was going to do today, the slots. No blackjack. No roulette. Just slots. She was going to take quarter after quarter, token after token, and hit those machines for the rest of the afternoon, for as long as it took to get the jackpot bell to ring and the money to come pouring down the chute at her, the money that she would then be able to bring back to the club and use to make everything right.
That was what she needed to do. She needed to make everything right. She needed to get her luck going for once. She had terrible luck. She had always had terrible luck. Her life had been ruined by the way her luck was always getting in her way.
Somewhere out on the highway, she began to calm down—but by then she was halfway across the state, and she couldn’t remember most of the driving she had done. She was also doing eighty miles an hour.
She made herself slow down—all she needed now was to have some state trooper pull her over and ask to go through her bag—and then she realized that there was only one way she was going to be able to get through the rest of this day, until her strategy paid off and she had money again, until she had gotten herself out of this trouble.
She forced one part of her mind to concentrate on the road, and she let the rest of it drift. She put herself squarely into the future, with the coins falling into her lap, and then with the meeting there would be in the casino’s office. She made herself see the man from the IRS and the check that would be made out in her name. She made herself see herself taking that check to her own personal bank and putting it in as a deposit. In Connecticut, the law required banks to make the funds from a local check available on the next business day. She made herself see herself in the morning, transferring the money she needed to transfer from her own account to the club’s account, and fixing all the records for as far back as they needed to be fixed.
There was only one problem with that. She couldn’t remember how much money she had taken, or from whom, or when. She hadn’t written it down, and she had done it so often by now that she didn’t know if she would ever be able to track it all down.
3
Eve Wachinsky woke up from her fever on Monday afternoon. She had actually woken up a couple of times before then, but she’d still been hot and confused. She’d only been sure that she was in a hospital room, in a hospital bed, and that people kept telling her she was going to be all right. She didn’t think she really was all right. All her muscles ached. Her eyes felt ready to fall out of her head.
Now she turned over in bed and saw a young woman sitting in a chair near the broad plate glass window, reading an oversized paperback book. In Praise of Folly, it was called, by Desiderius Erasmus. Eve had never heard of a writer named Desiderius Erasmus. She hadn’t heard of many writers at all, although she knew who Stephen King was, because she had seen him once on The Tonight Show.