Royal Flush by Stephanie Caffrey Page A

were completely gone, as if they were in another world."
    "Anything else?"
    He thought for a second as we pulled up to a red light. "She looks good in black."
    I sighed. "Sounds like you guys had a really deep conversation."
    "It's impossible to say much in there. It's too loud."
    I granted him the point. "You can let me out here," I said. We were stopped at a light in front of Bally's. I could walk home from there.
    "That was two hours, by the way," Carlos said. With Carlos, the meter was always running.
    "It's all on file up here," I said, pointing to my head. "You'll get your money."
    "Plus drinks. Fifty bucks."
    I shook my head, exasperated.
    Carlos flashed me a toothy smile, and I unbuckled myself and climbed out. After my ten-minute walk home, it became quite apparent that I was starving, and that a quick snack would not suffice. I threw a couple of frozen beef patties in a pan and fixed myself a double cheeseburger with some bacon on the side. It didn't take me long to discover that a strip of bacon was an outstanding way to mop up the melted cheese left over in the frying pan, which led to some fantasizing about all the different ways I could combine bacon and melted cheese into a smorgasbord of little appetizers, something that might prove useful if I ever hosted a cocktail party. That, of course, would require cocktail party kinds of friends, which I lacked in spades.
    I wasn't normally exhausted at two in the morning, but tonight was the exception, and the heavy dinner combined with a splash of boxed white wine was enough to finish me off for the evening. I awoke at dawn in a tangled mess of blankets on my couch, the TV still tuned to Animal Planet, and then I shuffled off to bed, where I lingered, in and out of sleep, until almost eleven.
    Fridays for me were like most people's Tuesdays. Kind of mid-week, but kind of not. The big conventions were letting out, which dried up one line of customers, but the tourists and frequent visitors from LA would begin pouring into McCarran Airport around noon, providing a whole new source of revenues for casino moguls and lowly strippers alike. I didn't have much to do anymore for Melanie. I'd followed her friend Kent long enough, and I knew enough to know he probably wasn't royalty and that he had at least one other girlfriend. He also sucked at poker. Unfortunately, that wasn't the information Melanie wanted, but I sensed she already had a hunch.
    During the day I filled out some long-overdue financial paperwork and called my agent to yell at him for booking me at yet another boring cocktail party next week. Even in this sensitive, politically correct, and harassment-happy age we lived in, there were still businesses dominated by men who were only a few generations removed from apes, or worse. Auto parts and the building trades were big, but even the less manly professions like video games and web programming had a decidedly testosterone-driven approach to entertainment, and they were not shy about hiring models to "entertain" their customers and fellow tradesmen. If they would pay me to walk around in a bikini and smile, posing for the occasional selfie, I would gladly do it, assuming the price was right. But these events usually required some semblance of conversation, which was more terrifying than it sounded. There was no amount of money that would compensate me for trying to fake interest in the business of a bunch of men who talked like teenagers. I had told my agent this before, but he apparently couldn't turn anything down when it meant a ten percent cut for himself.
    The rest of the day was quiet, and I actually got bored enough that I went in to work early, which in stripperese means seven o'clock. During a break I checked Jojia's Facebook page again, satisfying a weird kind of fascination I had with her and her clubby lifestyle. I doubted that partying all the time and being a walking ATM was very satisfying, which might explain why she wanted a prince to rescue her