Read Online The Only Girl in the Game by John D. MacDonald - Free Book Online

in private, so Hughtook him back to the office and turned on one hooded desk lamp.
    Max walked over and sat at Jerry’s desk in the far shadowy corner, sighing as he sat down. “Jerry is out of your hair, kid. I thought you’d like to know.”
    “It’s a good thing to know, Max. It makes everything a hell of a lot easier for me. Thanks.”
    “We can talk things over together once in a while, and it should all run smooth. Right?”
    “No reason why not,” Hugh said guardedly.
    “You get a hundred a month bump as of May first, Darren.”
    “Why?”
    “Don’t you think you’re worth it to the joint?”
    “I know damn well I’m worth it.”
    “Then that could be the reason you’re getting it, couldn’t it?”
    “For a minute there, Max, I had the idea you were recruiting me for extra duty.”
    Max Hanes chuckled in the darkness. “A clean-cut American boy like you, Darren? Hell, you’d write an indignant letter to the governor. We’re a bunch of thieves, like you learned all about on the TV. Dirty gangsters. Mafia, maybe.”
    “I didn’t say that, Max.”
    He heard the chair squeak as Max stood up. He came over into the cone of light. “Bill the casino account for everything on Homer G. Gallowell of Fort Worth.”
    “I saw his name on the reservation list and I checked him back and saw that he got the best, on the house, before, so I set it up that way. But I planned to check with you, of course.”
    “When you’re set on the suite you’ll give him, tell my assistant, Ben Brown, the number. I’ll have him put a one-dollar slot up there, and a hundred silver dollars to play around with.” He strolled toward the door, an apelike figure in a yellow raw silk sports jacket. “See you around, Mister Manager.”
    “Max … this is just idle curiosity, but when you put a one-dollar slot in a room like that, is it the same payoff you have on the floor?”
    “I like the way your mind works, kid. The state doesn’t like for us to rig the slots too lean. But they don’t care at all if we make one real fat. It gives a man a lot of confidence, pulling that handle, listening to the payoff crash into the scoop. It makes him happy. That’s why we’re here. This is a happy little city, full of fun and games.”
    “I know. That’s why, on some of the checkouts, I have to charge the freight to the casino account, because somehow the happy people haven’t got one dime left. They’re so happy they can’t stop smiling.”
    “You’ve got to learn that a mark is going to give it away to somebody, kid. There’s no way to stop a real mark. So when he’s ready, you just try to be first in line.”
    By the time Bunny Rice, the night manager, reported in at eleven, everything was so well under control that it required only a ten-minute briefing to catch him up on the problems in process of solution.
    Hugh had tried to make himself stop thinking of Betty Dawson, but by the time he walked down the corridor toward his room he had a good vibrant alive feeling, as though his skin fitted particularly well, as though he could do front flips all the way down the empty corridor. There was a prickling of the skin on the backs of his hands and the nape of his neck. Her burlesque bikinied strut came into his mind and it seemed to him that he was unable to take a deep breath.
    He fitted his key into the lock and opened the door as quietly as he could, and made himself close it again with the same stealth and shoot the night bolt before he let himself look at her. She lay tousled in his bed in a sweetness of sleep. She had thrown a towel over the bedside lamp, and there was a soft orange-pink glow against her sleeping face. She was on her side, facing him, both hands under the crumpled pillow, with a crow wing of her dark tumbled hair curling down her cheek and around to her throat.
    There was a note for him under the light, a sheet with large printing on it, one corner under the lamp base. SLIPPING BEAUTY it read, AWAKEN