Free Eyes of Darkness by Dean Koontz Page B

for hours and hours, just keeps on playing like a zombie. Meanwhile, he’s drinking too much. When he does finally stand up, he moves too fast. The blood drains from his head — bang! — and he faints dead away. Blackjack blackout.”
    “Ah.”
    “We see it all the time.”
    “Bingo bladder?”
    “Sometimes a player gets so interested in the game that he’s virtually hypnotized by it. He’s been drinking pretty regularly, but he’s so deep in a trance that he can completely ignore the call of nature until — bingo! — he has a bladder spasm. If it’s really a bad one, he finds out his pipes have blocked up. He can’t relieve himself, and he has to be taken to the hospital and catheterized.”
    “My God, are you serious?”
    “Yep.”
    They stepped off the escalator, into the bustling shopping arcade. Crowds surged past the souvenir shops, art galleries, jewelry stores, clothing stores, and other retail businesses, but they were neither shoulder-to-shoulder nor as insistent as they were upstairs in the casino.
    “I still don’t see any place where we can talk privately,” Tina said.
    “Let’s walk down to the ice-cream parlor and get a couple of pistachio cones. What do you say? You always liked pistachio.”
    “I don’t want any ice cream, Michael.”
    She had lost the momentum occasioned by her anger, and now she was afraid of losing the sense of purpose that had driven her to confront him. He was trying so hard to be nice, which wasn’t like Michael at all. At least it wasn’t like the Michael Evans she had known for the past couple of years. When they were first married, he’d been fun, charming, easygoing, but he had not been that way with her in a long time.
    “No ice cream,” she repeated. “Just some talk.”
    “Well, if you don’t want some pistachio, I certainly do. I’ll get a cone, and then we can go outside, walk around the parking lot. It’s a fairly warm day.”
    “How long is your break?”
    “Twenty minutes. But I’m tight with the pit boss. He’ll cover for me if I don’t get back in time.”
    The ice-cream parlor was at the far end of the arcade. As they walked, Michael continued to try to amuse her by telling her about other unusual maladies to which gamblers were prone.
    “There’s what we call ‘jackpot attack,’ ” Michael said. “For years people go home from Vegas and tell all their friends that they came out ahead of the game. Lying their heads off. Everyone pretends to be a winner. And when all of a sudden someone does hit it big, especially on a slot machine where it can happen in a flash, they’re so surprised they pass out. Heart attacks are more frequent around the slot machines than anywhere else in the casino, and a lot of the victims are people who’ve just lined up three bars and won a bundle.
    “Then there’s ‘Vegas syndrome.’ Someone gets so carried away with gambling and running from show to show that he forgets to eat for a whole day or longer. He or she — it happens to women nearly as often as men. Anyway, when he finally gets hungry and realizes he hasn’t eaten, he gulps down a huge meal, and the blood rushes from his head to his stomach, and he passes out in the middle of the restaurant. It’s not usually dangerous, except if he has a mouthful of food when he faints, because then he might choke to death.
    “But my favorite is what we call the ‘time-warp syndrome. ’ People come here from a lot of dull places, and Vegas is like an adult Disneyland. There’s so much going on, so much to see and do, constant excitement, so people get out of their normal rhythms. They go to bed at dawn, get up in the afternoon, and they lose track of what day it is. When the excitement wears off a little, they go to check out of the hotel, and they discover their three-day weekend somehow turned into five days. They can’t believe it. They think they’re being overcharged, and they argue with the desk clerks. When someone shows them a calendar