Free You Can Call Me Lucky (Kit Tolliver #3) (The Kit Tolliver Stories) by Lawrence Block Page A

way.”
    “Oh?”
    She allowed herself a smile.
    “C’mon,” he said. “Why don’t we sit down and have ourselves some firewater.”

    They took a table in a darkened corner of the lounge, and a dark-skinned girl with braids brought their drinks. He’d ordered a Dirty Martini, and she’d followed his lead.
    “Olive juice,” he explained. “Gives a little salty taste to the vodka. But I have to say what I like most about it is just saying the name of it. ‘A Dirty Martini, please. Straight up.’ Don’t you like the sound of it?”
    “And the taste.”
    “Did you ever tell me your name? Because I can’t remember it.”
    “It’s Lucky.”
    “You’re kidding, right?”
    “It says Lucky on my driver’s license,” she said. “On my birth certificate it says Lucretia, but my parents didn’t realize they’d opened the door for a lifetime of Lucretia Borgia jokes.”
    “I can imagine.”
    “You can’t, because you don’t know the whole story. Lucretia is bad enough, but when you attach it to Eagle Feather it becomes really awful, and—”
    “That’s your last name? Eagle Feather?”
    “Used to be. I chopped the Lucretia and dropped the Feather and went in front of a judge to make it legal. Lucky Eagle’s what I wound up with, and it’s still pretty dopey.”
    “You’re Indian.”
    God, he was quick on the uptake, wasn’t he? You just couldn’t keep anything from this dude.
    “My father’s half Chippewa,” she improvised, “and my mother’s part Apache and part Blackfoot, and some Swedish and Irish and I don’t know what else. I worked it all out one time, and I’m one-third Indian.”
    “A third, huh?”
    “Uh-huh.”
    “Lucky Eagle Feather,” he said. She liked that he was willing to skip the Lucretia part, but still wanted to hold on to that Feather. Made her a little bit more exotic, that’s how she figured it. A little more Indian. And hadn’t he just finished screwing a bunch of Indians out of a few thousand dollars? So why not screw a genuine Indian for dessert?
    His name, she learned, was Hank Walker. Short for Henry, but he’d been Hank since childhood. Seemed to suit him better, he told her, but it still said Henry on his driver’s license. And he’d been born in New Jersey, the southern part of the state, near Philadelphia, but he’d moved west as soon as he could, because that seemed to suit him better, too. He indicated the Western shirt, the string tie. “Sort of a uniform,” he said, and grinned.
    “It suits you,” she agreed.
    He lived in Nevada now, outside of Carson City. And right now he was driving across the country, seeking out casinos wherever he went.
    “I guess you like to play.”
    “When I’m on a roll,” he said. “But these out-of-the-way places, I come here for the chips as much as the action.”
    “The chips?”
    “Casino chips. People collect them.”
    “You sure collected a batch at the crap table.”
    What people collected, he explained, just as others collected coins and stamps, were the small-denomination chips the casinos issued, especially the one-dollar chips. At each casino he visited he’d buy twenty or thirty or fifty of the dollar chips, and they’d be added to his stock when he got back home. He had a collection of his own, of course, but he also had a business, selling chips to collectors at chip shows—who knew there were chip shows?—and on his website.
    “Ever since the government decided the tribes have the right to run casinos,” he told her, “they’ve been popping up like mushrooms. And they come and they go, because not all of the tribes know a whole lot about running a gaming operation. You belong to the tribe that’s operating this place?”
    She didn’t.
    “Well, nothing against them, and I hope they make a go of it, but there are a few things they’re doing wrong.” She half-listened while he took the casino’s inventory, took another sip of her Dirty Martini (which, all things considered, sounded