Blue eyes cryin in the rain…
That left him nothing to do but drink, and brood Las Vegas was a great town for doing both, he was discovering.
He hadn’t been much of either a drinker or a brooder before, not even when his marriage broke up. But then he’d drawn a mission out over the Bering Sea, come out on the short end of a dogfight with a dragon and met Karin. He couldn’t stay in mat world, but he had promised to return as soon as his tour in the Air Force was finished. The programmer/magicians there had even given him a phone number he could use to call them when he was ready.
Well, he got ready. Then the number hadn’t worked! When he tried to use it he got a visit from a couple of very serious FBI agents who questioned him about possible involvement in telephone fraud.
So here he was, left with nothing but memories. Nothing to do but remember, and drink. God, he hated himself when he got maudlin like this.
Blue eyes cryin’ in the rain…
The security guard wasn’t looking for dragons. In fact he was checking for people sleeping in their cars in the parking lot.
With hotel rooms completely unavailable it wasn’t unknown for Comdex-goers to live out of their cars. Cars were fairly easy to spot on regular rounds, as were motorhomes. Vans were special objects of attention.
As the guard came closer he heard several voices coming from the back of the rental truck. So naturally he jumped to the obvious, and wrong, conclusion.
“Hotel security. Open up in there.”
He yanked the back of the truck up and was promptly trampled by a panicked dragon.
“Ah, Mick.”
Gilligan looked up from the remains of his drink to see Ivan Kuznetsov standing at his table. He didn’t really feel like company, but he waved the Russian to a seat anyway.
Kuznetsov was a bit of a character. According to rumor he had defected from the Soviet Union a couple of years before it fell apart. Now he was using his connections in both the former Soviet republics and the West to put together aviation-related “deals” of much import but vague content Their paths crossed repeatedly on the air show circuit and Mick had found him a more congenial drinking partner than most of the executives he met.
“You have an interest in dragons, yes?” Gilligan nodded, vaguely recalling a drunken conversation one night in Brussels.
“Then you might want to look out front. Police are chasing a dragon around the building.”
Jerry, Taj, Bal-Simba and the dragon had ducked through the first open door they could find. Unfortunately that led right into the main casino.
“Oh, shit,” Jerry breathed. “Just act natural and head out the other side.”
As casually as they could, the three men and the dragon strolled across the casino floor. The slot players paid no attention, of course, but the guards started grabbing for their radios and moving toward them.
The magic field that kept Fluffy alive had some rather interesting effects on the laws of probability. The dragon waddled through the casino leaving a string of jackpots in his wake. In fact every slot machine he passed suddenly started paying off.
The effect was as instantaneous and predictable as gravity. The machines were mobbed by slot players determined to cash in on the sudden bounty. Since in Las Vegas “monomaniacal slot player” is a redundancy, not one of the converging crowd was willing to let a little thing like a dozen cops stand between them and riches.
The leading guard nearly fell over a tiny blue-haired woman in pink shorts who was making for a dollar slot still pouring out coins. She didn’t even look as she elbowed him expertly and sidestepped his falling body to beat out a Chinese man for the machine by perhaps one pace.
The guards behind fared even worse as the crowd congealed, blindly determined to reach those machines.
The police weren’t so much thrown back by the determined gamblers as they simply bounced off the writhing mass of humanity. One officer shouted into his walkie-talkie, trying to make himself heard above the din of the suddenly bountiful slot machines.