Free The Long and Faraway Gone by Lou Berney Page B

liked the company of the dealers and cocktail waitresses more than he liked actually playing blackjack. Whenever Candace had a break, he’d buy her dinner in the food court and tell her stories of his life.
    â€œDid you know one time he had to kick Elvis Presley out of here?” Candace said. “Elvis played this big show in town, at the old arena downtown right before he died, and afterward he stopped by the Land Run because he’d heard that the music was so good. But then Elvis started talking shit about OU football, and there was almost a riot. Mr. Eddy said he just about crapped his pants. He was only like twenty years old or something, and his mom, who owned the place, was out of town.”
    Wyatt paused to do the math. Elvis had died in ’77 or ’78. “Mr. Eddy was in his early fifties when he died? That made him an old dude?”
    â€œSure,” Candace said. And then she grinned at him, a big white flash of teeth against her cinnamon skin.
    â€œI’m only forty.”
    â€œAnd six-­feet tall. I remember.”
    â€œSo you and Mr. Eddy—­”
    â€œThere was no sex!” she said. But really it was more like four exclamation points crammed into one sentence. There! Was! No! Sex!
    â€œOkay, okay,” Wyatt said, “I’ll stop insisting there was.”
    â€œI know your mind’s in the gutter just like everybody else’s. Mine would be, too, I guess. But we were just friends. No matter what Mr. Eddy’s brother thinks. Mr. Eddy always made me order some kind of vegetable at the food court, because it was good for me. He! Was! A! Sweet! Old! Dude!”
    â€œCan we stop referring to him as an old dude, please?” he said.
    â€œI was so sad when I heard that he died. I’d been wondering where he’d been. It was an aneurysm. And then when I heard about his will and that he’d left me this place . . .”
    She re-­created the moment by parting her lips slightly and letting her eyes go glassy with shock, like she’d just witnessed a vision of the Virgin Mary shimmering near the card catalogs.
    â€œI just about crapped my pants!”
    â€œBut in a good way.”
    â€œYeah! Shut up. I mean, nothing good like that ever happens to me!”
    â€œTell me about Mr. Eddy’s brother,” Wyatt said.
    Candace groaned. The groan turned into a sigh. The sigh turned into a hiss.
    â€œSay no more,” Wyatt said.
    â€œHe wants me to sell him the Land Run,” Candace said. “I told him no. I told him no like a million times! He can’t get it through his thick head why I won’t sell.”
    â€œAnd why is that?”
    â€œI don’t know. I mean, I know this is kind of a grody place and all, but . . .” She paused to take a look around.
    Wyatt swiveled on his stool and took another look, too. All in all, the Land Run was in pretty decent shape. It was a dive, but no worse a dive than it had been twenty-­six years ago. More than could be said for most things.
    â€œBut it’s yours,” he said.
    â€œYeah!” She checked to be sure he wasn’t making fun of her. “Yeah. It’s mine. And business is good! It’s hard. You wouldn’t even believe how hard. I sleep like four hours a night. But I’m the boss!”
    Mr. Eddy’s brother. Wyatt jotted it in his pad. He circled it.
    Candace glanced up at the balcony. “You can come down and say hi for a minute. He won’t bite. If he tries to bite, just bite him back twice as hard.”
    Wyatt looked up. A little girl, the five-­year-­old cutie-­pie that Gavin had told him about, stared gravely down at him from between the bars of the balcony railing. She had fair skin, blue eyes, a messy tangle of blond curls.
    â€œWhere’d you steal her?” Wyatt said.
    Candace laughed. “I know, right? She took after her dad. Not his personality, though, thank God.”
    Gavin