Muzak, mostly orchestrated versions of old Sinatra sounds, kept you happy while you cranked the slots, and gave the place its class. All of it smelled of tobacco, alcohol, spoiled potato chips, sweat, cleaning fluids, and overstressed deodorant, with just the faintest whiff of vomit.

I was inside for six hours a day, thinking about painting and women, while throwing money down the slot machines. The job was simple enough, but I had to be careful: if I screwed it up, some bent-nosed cracker thug would take me out in the woods and break my arms and legs-if I was lucky.

Or, I should say, our arms and legs.

MY friend LuEllen had come along. She actually liked casinos, and I needed the help. She was also doing therapy on me: she referred to my lost love as Boobs, and had worked out a complete set of verbs and adjectives based on that root word. The day before, in the Wisteria’s fine-dining restaurant (“The best surf-and-turf between New Orleans and Tallahassee ”), she’d held up a glob of deepfried potato and said, “Now there’s one boobilicious Tater Tot.”

“You give me any more shit, I’m gonna stick a Tater Tot in one of your crevices,” I said, with more snarl than I’d intended.

“You’re not man enough,” she said, unimpressed. “I’ve been working out three hours a day. I can kick your ass now.”

“Working out with what? Golf? You’re gonna putt me to death?”

She pointed a Tater Tot at me, a little edge in her voice. “You may speak lightly of my crevices, but do not say bad things about golf.”

THE JOB: Miss Young Republican Anita Nosere-who was, from the pictures I’d seen of her, fairly boobilicious herself-got her money from her mother. Her mother was managing director of a syndicate that owned the Wisteria. Congressman Bob had been told that the casino was skimming the take, thus shorting both the U.S. government and the state of Mississippi on taxes. The skim was one of those simple-minded things that are almost impossible to spot if the casino does it carefully enough.

It works like this: the casino advertises (and reports to the tax authorities) a given return on the slot machines. If that return is even a little lower than the rate reported, the income increases sharply. That is, if you report that your machines will return 95 percent to the players, but you really only return 94 percent, and a million bucks a night goes through the slots, you’re skimming $10,000 a night. In a few months, that adds up to real money.

Of course, you have to be careful about state auditors. For a politically well-connected company, in Mississippi, that wasn’t a major problem: “Them boys is crookeder than a bucket of cottonmouths,” Bob said.

The congressman could have hired one of the big independent auditing companies to do his research, but that would have cost tens of thousands of dollars. Me, he could get for free, and get a good idea if the charges were true. If they were, then he’d hire the big auditing company, do the research, and hang the Noseres, momma and daughter together, all in the name of truth, justice, and the American Way.

EXACTLY what we did was, we dropped dollars-and quarters and nickels-into slot machines and counted the return, and then ran the results through a statistics package. We wanted 98 percent confidence that we were less than half of a percent off the true return. We therefore needed to take a large random sample of machines and had to run enough coins through each machine that we’d get a statistically accurate return on each.

I’d chosen the target machines the first night, using a random numbers program in the laptop I carried. We’d been at it ever since, dropping the dollars, quarters, and nickels, doing the numbers at night, avoiding crackers with bent noses, and generally dancing around the possibility of acts of unfaithfulness, if that’s what it would have been.

Can you be unfaithful to a mood, to a sense of guilt? I mean, the woman was gone…

But Marcy’s departure had driven me into an emotional hole. A number of good women have walked out on me, and there’s no way that I can claim it was always, or even usually, their fault. When the first bloom of romance fades away, they begin to pay attention to my priorities. Sooner or later, they conclude that they’ll always be number three, behind painting and maybe computers.

They might be right, though I still hate to think so. There was no question that as I got older, I’d become more and more involved in the work. I’d sometimes go days without talking to anyone, and become impatient when a woman wanted to do something ordinary, like go out to dinner.

That was not a problem with LuEllen. I’d known her for a decade, spent hours rolling around in various beds with her, and still didn’t know her real last name or where she lived. I knew everything about her but the basic, simple stuff.

At this point, we were not in bed. I don’t know exactly what she was doing, in her head, but I was just drifting along, dropping coins, thinking about painting and sex and listening to the rain fall on the casino roof, the car roof, and the motel roof, thinking about getting back to St. Paul and the serious work.

LuELLEN and I were staying in separate rooms at the Rapaport Suites on I-10, one of those concrete-block instant motels with a polite Indian man and his wife at the front desk, a permanent smell of cigarette smoke in the curtains, and a dollar-a-minute surcharge on the telephone. The place wasn’t exactly bleak, it was simply nothing. I can’t even remember the colors, which were chosen not to show dirt. My room was a cube with a can, a candidate for existential hell. And we couldn’t get out.

Rain had been falling since the day we arrived. A hurricane was prowling the Gulf, well down to the south, but had gotten itself stuck somewhere between Jamaica and the Yucatán. The storm wasn’t much, but the rain shield was terrific, reaching far enough north to cover half the state of Mississippi. We’d been kept inside, Noseres to the grindstone.

And life was looking grim for the mother-daughter duo. The numbers said they might be skimming two percent.

WE HAD just finished a three-hour session with the slots, and after freshening up-taking a leak, I guess-LuEllen came down to my room, pulled off her cowboy boots, and sprawled on the bed to read Barron’s.

She’s a slender dark woman with an oval face, a solid set of muscles, a terrific ass, and a taste for cocaine and cowboy gear, to say nothing of the odd cowboy himself.

“Numbers?” she asked, without looking at me.

“Yeah.” I was sitting with my head thrust toward the laptop screen, the classic geek posture, and my neck felt like it was in a vise. “How about a back rub? My neck is killing me.”

“You haven’t been very attentive to me and I’m not sure a back rub would be appropriate,” she said. She turned a page in Barron’s. “Or any other kind of rub.”

“You wanna do the fuckin’ numbers?”

“I’m not getting paid the big bucks.”

“Yeah, big bucks…”

She sighed and tossed the Barron’s on the carpet; she was basically a good sport. “All right.” She popped off the bed, came over and went to work on my back. She has powerful thumbs for a small woman. “Wanna go out for a hot-fudge sundae?”

“Sure. Keep working, let me check my e-mail.” She was knuckling the muscle along my spine, right at my shoulder, and I rolled my head and punched up the e-mail program on my laptop, and went out, at a dollar a minute, to see what I could see.

An alarm came up for one of my out-of-sight e-mail addresses. Spam, probably, but I looked. No spam-it was a note from a man I didn’t know, who called himself romeoblue.