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“Where’s Smiley?”
Smiley, or Happy, or sometimes Chuckles, was Santiago. For obvious reasons.
“He’s back in Oakland doing stand-up,” Silas quipped.
“Sure he is,” Veronique’s lip curled sourly at the joke. “I’ll bet he’s killing it, too.”
I followed Silas’s lead by laying a small stack of bills on the table. Veronique called the pit boss over for verification, then slid us our chip stacks.
“Business or pleasure?” she asked casually.
Both, I wanted to say. For some reason, I didn’t.
“Actually, we’re here to see you,” said Silas.
She looked suddenly amused. “Little old me?”
“Yeah.”
“I’m touched,” Veronique replied, spreading one hand over her chest. Somehow, though I couldn’t figure out how she did it, she actually faked a blush. “The last time you boys were in town, you cut out rather abruptly.”
I nodded. “We tend to do that.”
“Broke my heart,” she said, raking in a stack of chips from another player.
“We do that too,” Silas grinned.
I looked at my cards, which were an eight and a three. Non-suited. Pretty terrible.
“Broken hearts are one thing,” Veronique said, pushing one of my chip-stacks back my way without even asking. “Not keeping promises are quite another.”
She flipped one of her community cards. A six of clubs.
“Promises?”
“That’s right,” the dealer barked. “You boys said you’d help me with my wallpaper removal problem. Remember?”
Silas groaned in apparent recollection. I shrugged apologetically.
“That’s right,” I conceded finally. “Sorry, honey. We—”
“Do you have any idea how many hours it took, scraping those walls by myself?” she demanded. “I even went out and rented a steamer, like you told me. Made my famous macadamia fudge brownies and everything.”
“Veroniqu—”
She flipped over her second card. It didn’t help anyone at the table, especially the white-haired guy at the end, who threw up his hands.
“And so there I was,” she went on dramatically, “scraping glue and eating brownies until I was sick. The sugar-high lasted till’ three in the morning. And you lying little darlings never showed.”
“Hey, at least you got the job done,” the player next to me pointed out, trying to be helpful. She was an exotic-looking woman, with earrings as big as silver dollars dangling from a pair of stretched-out ear-lobes. “Right?”
“My two puppies are more reliable than these two,” Veronique said, pointing her nose our way in exaggerated disgust. “And my puppies run away daily.”
Veronique’s dogs were her babies, I knew that well enough. I knew they were no longer puppies, as well.
One by one we surrendered our cards, and she collected everyone’s hand. Silas, at the end of the table, proudly displayed his.
“Hmmm… a pair of jacks for the jackoff!” she chuckled snidely. “Who would’ve thunk it?”
