Free Hush Hush by Steven Barthelme

the point where you can’t remember the rules of blackjack, where you have to play standing up, where you look at your cards and you’re trying to remember what the object of the game is, and how to add. I may have been seeing things, too, a little, corner of the eye stuff that wasn’t there, that sort of thing.
    Richie brought a friend, a little guy named Freddy Hylo, pronounced High-Low. They showed up around midnight. It gave me the creeps because the only time I had ever heard that name, it was in a story I heard when I was a kid, a story about a guy busting out another guy’s teeth by breaking them on a piece of sandstone in his mouth. And this guy was scary. I’m six-one, 195, and he couldn’t have been more than about five-nine, but he was sort of terrifying. I don’t know what it was, something in his face, his eyes, you looked at him and thought, this is a guy that doesn’t care about
anything
.
    We wandered around the casino for about four hours, playing table games, sitting in one of the clubs where the band was actually pretty good, hitting on the girls who looked like teenagers, without a lot of luck. By about three in the morning, Richie had found himself this blonde girl in a tiny graydress that looked like it was made out of microfiber dust cloths. I had thought she was a professional, but what do I know? I was at a blackjack table with Hylo and two other people, some drunk asshole in a leather jacket and a Vietnamese woman, who were exchanging looks when we played, complaining when Hylo hit a 12 against a dealer’s 2, a standard by-the-book draw. “Took her bust card,” the asshole would say, and the woman would agree almost imperceptibly. Hylo didn’t react, it was like he didn’t even hear.
    Richie came up behind us holding the blonde, bent over to me. “I got a room.” He pointed toward the ceiling. “In the hotel,” he said, and glanced at the girl.
    “No, Jesus, don’t leave me with this guy,” I said, as quietly as I knew how. “C’mon, Rich.” But he was already walking away with her, her wispy dress swinging back and forth.
    The drunk guy in the leather jacket was looking at me. “You gonna bet, champ?”
    I shoved a couple of greens onto my spot.
    After me, Hylo put out ten dollars, two reds.
    “High roller,” the drunk guy said. “Be a man, man.” He was betting a hundred a hand, winning most of them. The rest of us were above water, but that’s all.
    •  •  •
    I was driving the car and Hylo had the asshole in the backseat and was instructing him in etiquette with a razor. I didn’t want him in my car, but they must have come in Richie’s. Richie and the blonde girl were long gone. I could see the attraction. I wouldn’t have been in the car with Freddy, in fact I neverwould have been anywhere with Freddy if I could’ve avoided it, but I hadn’t been able to get out of it when he asked me to drive. He was not really asking, exactly.
    “Pull it over,” he said.
    “You want a Whataburger?”
    “Yeah, I want a Whataburger. You want a Whataburger, champ?” he said to his companion in the backseat. The guy, who had been giving us shit at a blackjack table, had disappeared and then later, when we stopped in the last men’s room before the parking garage, he had walked into the men’s room and said something to Freddy about the long coat he had on, something suggesting Freddy was a flasher. Freddy said, “You’re some kind of expert in that area?” and then out came the razor, and here we are now, behind the Whataburger, dazzlingly bright lights around the restaurant, some kind of service road in front of us, a strip center, dark, behind us.
    The parking lot was empty, but I parked to the side and toward the back and got out of the Citroen and turned toward the Whataburger. We were beside what looked in the dark like five thousand dollars’ worth of pointless landscaping, a Japanese garden with sand and pebbles, stone and sago palms. There was nobody in