Who: Saint Reilly. What: Research for a story goes southward. When: Recently. Where: Anonymous big casino. Warnings: Violence.
There was no indication that this time was different.
The pictures in the bathroom, the ones dangling from the string stretched high above the bath had changed. There had been a time when it had been entryways and exits; feet as they hurried along the stretch of sidewalk and the shuffling mass at an airport moving toward destinations and the weary happiness of those coming home. Interwoven were those that caught the gaudy, the glittery and those that pried up the quieter, the simpler but the more beautiful parts of any city. Now they were shadowy, the lighting was artificial and it was low. The shots were angled, and the people in them were not happy at all. They were focused, they were concentrating, shoulders hunched low and the thread of muscle through them pulled taut and tense.
The shirt was not crumpled this time and the pants were the thin wool-hybrid purchased from shops that put the price in discreet little print and tucked the tags inside where you couldn’t see. They were expensive and the shirt, threaded discreetly with thin stripes, was as well and the appearance was of a man who had enough money to lose some but not enough to become someone significant on the radar of the management. He carried his jacket loosely, over one arm with the casual disinterest of someone prepared to leave it somewhere and when Saint sat at a table, it was with a glass in his other hand, filled with something that had no color at all but with the curl of lemon that suggested vodka or something similar.
He had chips, in his pocket and he lined them up on the baize, but the hour was late enough (early, the light had dimmed well before he had entered the casino) that the tables were already half-full and Saint played one game of blackjack and then another, as if the cards were not the reason for coming at all. The croupier at the next table had neat nails, polished, and he watched them and he looked at her, at the way she wore three am like someone in a grocery store looked at midday, professional-neat and calm and tired in a routine sort of way, and he slid over to the next table, the one with a man who flicked cards over to players as if they were something to be discarded quickly.
Saint smiled briefly and he said very little, and he drank from the glass quickly as if the casino were relaxing, as if words did not sift through his head and pull themselves lazily together into groups, as if he did not look at the croupier just long enough to see the gold at his throat at the part of his shirt and wonder. He looked as if he had been there longer, as if he were both more confident and lazy in his confidence and the cards scudded over the baize, smoothly sleek to the tips of Saint’s fingers. The waitress, the one with worried eyes and her fingers twitching on the cigarette, at five the previous morning, whose voice had skipped and halted, like tape wearing thin, she had spoken of this one. Her story had come in pieces, like folded paper disintegrating. The notes were back in the apartment, pinned to the board on the wall above where a couch ought to be, along with the best of the pictures.
The camera beneath the jacket was quiet. Discreet. There had been other places, but this one smelled of new carpet and champagne, of the faint traces of perfumes from many people mixing in processed air. It was expensive and Saint lacked comfort with expensive; he liked old and he liked cheaply new, comfort that could be found in what could be handled easily. Perhaps it was that. Perhaps it was that the croupier was looking. There were all sorts of reasons. Saint did not think of danger. It was the world of a journalist, something focused and pointed, sharpened by coffee and ideas, heightened adrenaline and being on the edge of something people wished to look at, to read. It did not invite room for danger or perhaps simply, danger had a regular seat at the table, so much so that it was unnoticed when it was present but rather when absent.
He heard cheap shoes squeak on new carpet behind him as Saint laid one card carefully on top of another and the camera clicked beneath his coat. The air-conditioning was excellent, but he was cold for the split second, hairs on the back of his neck rose before a warm, very solid hand descended upon the shoulder of the expensive shirt and crumpled the fabric beneath expansive grip. The other flicked up the edge of the jacket with the tips of his fingers as if he were expecting what he found, but still did not wish to touch it. A jerk, and the chair tumbled over and Saint thought abstractedly of the chips on the table and how they would look presently, the heavy clunk of the glass toppling from the edge of the table toward the middle, and the scrape of his own shoes on the baize. The door, heavy and metal and beyond the refined reach of the new carpet and the champagne and the cling-cling-cling of the machine, slammed open with the punching sound of hydraulics rarely used, and Saint hit the cement outside, hands and knees seconds before the deliberate crunch of an expensive camera hitting hard surface from great height.
And then the first shoe swung, cheap creased leather and poorly knotted laces, and caught him where the buttons did up along the shirt, over his rib-cage and Saint saw a world without color for a split second before pain burst hot and white behind his eyelids. He could smell laundry from the hot air escaping the vents above, and food, the door nearby from the kitchen propped open to let the heat escape, and then his nose crumpled and he smelled nothing at all, his ears ringing and the copper taste spreading in his mouth and filling his throat. There was no fighting back to be done, had he known how. There was no argument, nor was there any sentiment that could be doubled-back, responded to. This was systematic, the violence both at once bored and disengaged and comprehensive, until the pants were covered in the damp drip-mess from the leak he could see dripping slowly from beneath the nearest dumpster, and blood and on and on it went until there was nothing else.