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Nevada?” asks Lady Luck.
    I nod toward Mavis Hanson, who has just busted while hitting on twelve.
    “Poor thing,” says Lady Luck. “She’s had a run of real bad luck, hasn’t she?”
    “It doesn’t look good,” I say.
    “You’re telling me,” she says, motioning toward the bar, where Death is sitting with his shock of white hair watching ESPN and sipping on a Shirley Temple.
    I hadn’t noticed Dennis before, though it wouldn’t surprise me if he’d been sitting there all along and hadn’t bothered to come over and say hi. We haven’t spoken in more than five hundred years, ever since Dennis refused to help Columbus shuffle off this mortal coil before the Italian explorer could make a wrong turn and “discover” the New World. It would have made my job a lot easier and slowed the population growth if European colonialism into the Americas could have been delayed, but no, Dennis wouldn’t bend the rules and intervene just that once. And after all I’d done for him during the Black Death.
    When humans die, they need an escort to the afterlife. Someone to show them the way and explain how Bingo Night works. Sometimes, the soul or the spirit of the human doesn’t want to go, so the soul has to be extracted from the body. Which can get a little messy.
    The thing about Death is that he’s necrophobic.
    The whole image of him in the hooded black cloak, carrying around the scythe and causing people to die just by touching them with a single bony finger? Propaganda. After all, how intimidating would Death be if everyone portrayed him as wearing baby blue mortician exam gloves and a neoprene particle mask with optional air freshener?
    At least he finally ditched the anticontamination suit.
    We see each other now and again. It’s kind of hard not to cross paths when you’re Fate and Death. But we used to be inseparable.
    We partied together while Rome burned, sacked and pillaged with the Vikings, learned how to make our own mead during the Crusades, and rode shotgun with Genghis Khan. Those were good times. Now it’s strictly business. But at least we manage to keep it professional.
    Dennis looks over at us, raises his glass to Lady Luck with a smile, then gives me the finger.
    “Honestly,” says Lady Luck, lightly brushing the arm of a woman at another slot machine who starts to scream when she hits the progressive jackpot. “When are you two going to stop acting like boys and put the past behind you?”
    “It’s not that easy,” I say.
    “Whatever,” she says, blowing on the deck of cards at the blackjack table as the dealer shuffles them. “At least stop hanging around like vultures, waiting for these poor, innocent, hard-luck people to screw up.”
    On the overhead speakers in the blackjack lounge, Frank Sinatra starts to sing “Luck Be a Lady.”
    “They’re playing my song,” she says, tapping Mavis on the shoulder moments before she gets dealt a blackjack.
    Then Lady Luck’s off, flitting from table to table, brushing against men and women, stroking their hair, whispering in their ears, delivering her pollen, making everyone happy.
    Sure, she’s having fun. But at what cost? For most of the desperate gamblers, it’s a temporary respite from their financial burdens. They’ll walk out of here today with more money than they imagined, but it won’t last. Tomorrow, the luck will be gone. Then what? Will they have learned their lesson? Or will they come back again, thinking they’ve learned how to beat the system, only to have their hopes and dreams crushed another day?
    Sometimes, Lady Luck can do more harm than good.
    But at least in the case of Mavis Hanson, it appears as though she’s going to make it to her thirty-third birthday after all. When I glance up from the blackjack table, Dennis is gone, his half-finished Shirley Temple sitting on the bar.

CHAPTER 5

    A few days later, I’m having lunch in the East Village at a local deli with Sloth and Gluttony, comparing field notes.