The Boise couple couldn’t believe she was splitting tens, a stupid mistake under basic strategy rules. The dealer laid down a card on each ten, face-down. Carleen picked up the edge of the new card over one of the tens, then scratched for another. The dealer flipped her a card and let her hand stay right there, ready to scoop up the busted hand, but Carleen hadn’t busted yet.

“It’s such a fun game,” she said, uttering a totally uncharacteristic girlish giggle. “I wish my fiancé hadn’t gone over to the Sports Book.”

Elliott watched her check the new card over her other ten, and scratch again.

Standing pat, Carleen waved her hand negligently over the hands.

The rest of them went through their paces, and when they had all finished the round, the dealer flipped over her hole card. Another six. Now she was showing a total of twelve and she had to hit again.

The dealer turned over a four this time. Sixteen. The rules required her to hit again, so she flipped herself one more card.

A third six. She’d busted. “Too bad we’re not playing poker,” said Third Base from Boise. “You’da wiped us out.”

Starting with Elliott, the dealer went around the table turning over the hole cards. When she turned up his hole card, she looked surprised. “You got someone watching out for you,” Boise said as they all stared at the three cards adding up to twenty. “You hit on a soft eighteen.”

“I had a good feeling,” Elliott said. The dealer turned over Carleen’s two hole cards and they all had a look. She had taken another card on hard seventeens on both hands. Both those plays were also dead wrong against the dealer’s original twelve, according to basic blackjack-playing strategy.

But she had won. She had pulled threes on each of her hands, winning both. The dealer pushed over their stacks of chips and the pit boss came over to check out the table and spread some glowers around.

Between the two of them, Elliott and Carleen had just won almost ten thousand dollars on a single bet. The pit boss, a short thin man in a dark suit, moved in to stand next to Elliott, hanging in close enough so that Elliott could smell the cigars on his breath. Then the boss motioned to the dealer to shuffle up, wheeled, and walked rapidly back to the podium in the pit where the phone was.

Elliott gathered up his chips, passing a couple over to the dealer as a tip. “I’m out,” he said with a smile that hurt his chapped lips, it stretched them so wide. He felt eyes chasing him as he cashed in and hurried out the door.

Carleen followed him. Sitting on a bench alongside the driveway, leaning against the wall, his eyes half-closed, he was waiting for his car.

“So, Wakefield. What’s up? You following me?”

“You don’t want to be seen talking to me here.”

“You’re the one who sat down by me.”

“I mean because of the cameras.”

“Screw them,” she said, “any damage is done. I should have jumped up and left when you sat down.”

“Why didn’t you?”

“Maybe I foolishly imagined you would have more sense than to sit down beside me. Or come to Tahoe at all.” She took off her useless glasses and tucked them into a shirt pocket. “You spot two security men who were following me when I left?”

“Why didn’t your fiancé from the Sports Book take care of them? I’m sure he’s a muscle-bound freak, just the way you like them.”

She laughed. “Why, are you jealous at the thought?”

“Yeah, sure. I hate imaginary rivals. Is he from Korea, too?” They had a running disagreement about Carleen’s disguises. She liked them conspicuous, like the nasty tricolored hair she wore tonight sticking up like a kid’s paper crown, thinking that she was less likely to get made if she went bold. And she couldn’t keep her mouth shut. She chatted up the dealers, compounding lies until nobody could keep track of the latest story.

“Why’d you bet so big? If you hadn’t put up such a massive bet, we could have made the same money in three or four hands without anybody noticing. We could still be playing.”

“You bet twice what I did.”

“Well, hey, I had to, didn’t I, after you spoiled any chance for anonymity. She was going to shuffle up for sure after you bet. The pit boss made us so fast after that.”

“Ah, but it was kind of fun, wasn’t it, Carleen? Like old times. So what was all that about flying to Korea?”

“I don’t know. I just felt like saying it. God, it’s cold tonight. Wakefield, really, are you nuts? What are you doing here? Are you here with Silke and…”

“I’m alone.”

“She stayed on the East Coast after graduation, didn’t she?”

He shrugged. “Don’t know.” Best not to feed her gossip about Silke.

“Don’t know? Yeah, right. She still with Raj?”

“Challenge question.” Dr. Braun used to come up with these quizzes on a regular basis. She would recognize the allusion. “Is the square root of two still one point four one two and change?”

“I thought so. So what else?”

“I wait for my car.”

She shook her head impatiently. “Not until we talk.” She looked away, toward a white-haired man in an aloha shirt who was climbing into a limo, but Elliott still felt the force of her nervousness and interest pouring over him like sticky goo. He looked at her, at her streaky hair and the triple piercings in her ears and the discontented expression, and thought, She keeps coming back to gamble just like me.

“I went back to Seattle after graduation,” he said.

“Still living with your father, I bet.”

“And?”

“Is he still driving you into mad ambition?”

“Not at all. He’s infirm. He needs me.” Elliott was well aware that he was minimizing his father’s influence, but then, what did you say about your father to a girl who must hate you at times and who knows things you wished she didn’t know?

“I guess he probably does. You can’t just dump your family the way you can dump a lover. You’re locked up into playing along with their psycho needs for life, aren’t you?” She untucked the silk blouse she had been wearing and slouched down on the bench. “Hey, Elliott. Forget I said that. You know I’m not talking about your father.”

She had her own family problems, a brother with troubles of his own. But Elliott didn’t want to ask about her problems right now.

“So where are you working, Elliott?”

“Here, tonight.”

“You were supposed to become a professor, but you still make your living counting cards at blackjack?”

“It pays the rent,” Elliott said.

“How does your father like that?”

“He doesn’t know.”

“I never took you for the outlaw type,” Carleen said. “I’m still in good old Boston. I’m making big bucks.” She shifted a little and he felt her small breast brush his arm.

Pathetic, the fact that they were two hungry twenty-somethings in desperate need of human contact, the fact that he didn’t like her but wanted to kiss her. He sat on the bench, unable to decide what to do. She seemed to want to stay with him, though he wasn’t sure, she was so nervous, looking around like casino security might come outside for them.

“You are actually alone, aren’t you?” he said.

She wet her lips and said “Yes,” but Elliott thought maybe she was lying. Then-she was willing to walk out on her date?

But-now that he was calmer-he didn’t want Carleen to join his lonely party. He was reacting to her just as he always had. She put his teeth on edge.

“I never thought I’d see you here,” she said. “Not after the robbery and all. I thought you and Silke and Raj decided-”

“They don’t know I’m here. I’m doing some checking.”

“I was curious, since I was coming here for the gambling. I checked the Tribune archives and found out they haven’t caught the guy. Is that what you’re checking?”

“Yes. And the case that got filed afterward. By the husband. Why do you care? You weren’t even there. You quit taking trips with us months before.”