Free Queenpin by Megan Abbott

the races, dope up all the horses but their pick, crazy stuff like that, and so if they just knew which way to bet …
    Vic, he was a dreamer, see. You had to see that in him and when you did, it had a charm that worked on you. You wished things were like he wanted them to be. They weren’t.
    “So when do you carry the most coin? Leaving the high-tone casinos? When the box man walks you out? I know you don’t do the major pickups, but you take the vig, don’t you?”
    I looked at him, rubbing my sore arms, my raw arms. Because I knew. Hell, normally it really wasn’t that much cash, and when it was, I had protection. But I knew damn well that she was going to be gone overnight on Friday and I’d be making double the betting rounds I normally did, the small track and the big one. It was more scratch than I usually carried and sure, it seemed like something they’d have a hard boy do, but she’d been burned before by crooked delivery boys. I was the only one she trusted to do it. It wasn’t thirty big ones—no one was going to let a 105-pound frail carry a roll like that— but it was enough to make a dent.
    He could see me thinking, weighing. He was trying to get a read on me, see which lever to pull to make the lights flash, make the cherries line up three in a row.
    “I mean, sugar, you gotta think about your future. Don’t you see? There’s sweets for you too. Down the line.”
    “What do you mean?”
    He smiled and cocked his head. “This arrangement’s a long game, like you said. They got two bean stalks on college basketball teams, another quarterback. I can set it up. You can bet solid the better part of the year and get yourself some fox furs, some chinchilla. I’d like to lay you out on a full-length sable, one with all the teeth still in it.”
    “What makes you think I want a piece of this?”
    He shrugged and smiled. But he didn’t say anything.
    I reached down for my shoes and slid them on.
    “I’m going for some cigarettes,” I said.
    His eyebrows lifted. “Okay. But ain’t that the fella’s line?”
    I could tell he was worried I wouldn’t come back. But he also seemed wired up, edgy, hopeful. He thought he had a line on me. Maybe he did.
    It was still early and as I walked, I was the only person in the world. All you could hear was the click of my metal-tipped heels on the pavement. It was just me and this. This thing. And I knew it had all been headed towards this from the minute she set her hooks in me, from the second I took the bit in my mouth, eager, hungry, ready.
    By the time I reached the newsstand four blocks away, the owner dragging open the rusty shutters, I knew I was going to do it. And it wasn’t the promise of bullion. It wasn’t even, or not just, Vic. Vic and the things he could do to me and the things I wanted to save him from. There was something else at the bottom of it. Something dark and swampy I couldn’t look at, couldn’t face. But it had to do with her. It had to do with her. What would it mean to try to take her on, beat her? What would it be like to smoke-and-mirror the queenpin herself?
    (And she had never opened herself to me. She had shown me what to do, how to do it, but she had never let the veil drop, the mask fall. If she had done that … if she had done that…)
    (And this too, wouldn’t it mean we’d be closer even than now, thick as blood, because it would bind us forever in some way? It would either be the secret thing, the only thing I would keep from her, or if she found out, it would be the thing that would bind us forever, like locking horns in battle, bound in blood.)
    I bought a pack of Chesterfields from the newsstand vendor. My hands shaking, he matched me and I smoked one on the spot. As he clipped the string off stacks of dailies, he glanced at me.
    “Rough night, honey?”
    “Had to make a big decision,” I replied.
    “Who’s the lucky fella?” He smiled, hands covered in newsprint “Luck’s for suckers,” I said, letting