Free Grift Sense by James Swain Page A

rejection he'd ever tasted. What goes around comes around, he supposed.
    He felt the room tremble as the service elevator docked next door. Two Mexican chambermaids got out, chattering loudly as they pushed a squeaky laundry cart down the hall. He could hear every syllable. The phone rang again.
    “Mr. Valentine, this is Roxanne at the front desk,” a friendly female voice said. “I have a fax for you.”
    “I'll be right down,” he said. “And Roxanne, I need to be put into a new room.”
    “New room?” She sounded offended. “What's wrong with the room you're in?”
    He lowered his voice. “I found a body under the bed.”
    “A body?”
    “Yeah. I think it's Jimmy Hoffa.”
    “Well,” she said, her fingers tapping a computer keyboard, “let me see what I can do.”
    On the long walk back to the elevator Valentine took stock of the carpet's muted orange and red checkerboard design. He'd read several studies conducted by casinos to quantify the effects of really bad carpet. The goal was to find out which patterns were so upsetting to the human eye that it actually coaxed a customer into looking up from the floor and into the eyes of a dealer or gleaming slot machine. The idea was to trigger impulse play. No one had ever determined if it really worked.
    On the way down, he remembered the second message in his pocket, and he unfolded the fax that had been given to him when he'd checked in.

    Valentine,
    You old fuck.
    Take some advice from a friend and stay retired.
    No job is worth dying over, is it, pal?

    “What the hell,” he said aloud.
    The elevator doors parted, but Valentine did not get out. Over the years, he'd been threatened by several hustlers, and a couple had actually tried to do him harm. The doors closed and the elevator rose on its own accord.
    Soon he was back on the fourth floor. He punched the Lobby button and again descended, then read the fax again. Whoever had sent it knew him well enough to know he was retired. Had Bill's snitch told everyone in town he was visiting? Or had someone he'd once busted in Atlantic City spotted him at the airport and overheard his curbside conversation with Bill? Whatever the answer, he was going to have to stay on his toes or risk going home in cargo instead of first class.
             
    To reach the front desk, Valentine had to pass through the casino, and he stopped briefly to get the lay of the land. The casino floor was designed like a hub of a wheel, with the gaming tables and slots in the center of the wheel, and all other destinations flowing from that center. A person couldn't get anywhere inside the Acropolis without passing through the wheel, and, it was hoped, dropping a few dollars. Twenty-five years earlier, every casino in Las Vegas had been designed this way. He suspected that today, the number was less than a handful.
    Roxanne awaited him at the front desk. She was a vivacious gum-chewing redhead with muted brown eyes, his favorite kind of girl. She pegged him right away and said, “I thought Jimmy Hoffa was buried in Giants Stadium.”
    “That's Walt Disney,” he said.
    “I thought Walt Disney was being kept in a refrigerator down in Orlando.”
    “That's Adolf Hitler.”
    She slid the fax across the marble counter.
    “You're a real piece of work, you know that?”
    Valentine grinned. “Where're you from?”
    “I was raised in New Jersey. I came out here five years ago.”
    “I'm a Jersey kid, too. You mind the heat here?”
    “It's okay so long as you don't wear any clothes.”
    Valentine's eyes grew wide and she grinned. He sensed that she was enjoying this as much as he was. How many years separated them? At least thirty. It was nice to see he could still ignite a spark, however brief.
    “You in for a convention?” she asked.
    “I'm doing some work for the casino.”
    “You don't say.”
    “Listen, I need to ask you a favor. If my son calls, could you tell him I checked out?”
    Roxanne raised an eyebrow. Her pleasant