"I remember." He wouldn't meet her eyes. "A man like that has a lot of enemies," he said. " Would you believe me if I said I see this all the time?"
"Yes," she said. "People who think they're getting a payment and get shot instead, because there was never any money at all. Why did I believe you when you said there was money? I wanted so much to believe that this could actually be over, but—"
"Sasha, think about what you're saying."
"What am I supposed to say?"
" Think about how the things you say might affect other people," he said. " Think about your niece."
"I am thinking about my niece. My niece is the only reason I haven't gone to the police yet."
"Who would believe you if you did?"
"Daniel. "
"But suppose you did go to the police," Daniel said. "Suppose a troubled and unreliable woman with a long history of compulsive gambling did go to my colleagues and tell an improbable story about a detective with an impeccable record, even if that story was somehow believed, I was thinking of something earlier. That girl who was here last night, Grace. Did you know she's a runaway whose mother's in prison?"
"So?" But she understood, and she felt a chill down her spine.
"So you could turn Chloe into Grace, just by saying the word. You could take a little girl who lives happily with a mother who loves her, and you could set her adrift." He was speaking very quietly, leaning close across the table. His voice was flat but his eyes were shining. " Grace has been arrested three times, Sasha. She's a runaway living with a stripper and a drug addict. I'd say there but for the grace of God goes Chloe, but it isn't really God who gets to decide this one, is it?"
"You know that isn't what I want."
"Then let this blow over," Daniel said. "Let this go."
"Is that what you've done, Daniel? Let this go?"
But Daniel paid and left without answering her.
Sa s h a w e n t home in the morning and took two sleeping pills that held her only just below the surface of sleep. After three hours she was awake again in the silence of the basement. A troubled and unreliable woman with a long history of compulsive gambling. The sleeping pills had left her dizzy and drugged. She was aware of the weight of her skeleton, her sluggish heart. She lay still for two more hours before she gave up on sleep, turned on the bedside lamp and tried to read but her thoughts were scattered. She showered and dressed and went upstairs into the violent daylight, sat on the front step and called William. He answered through a burst of static. She knew this meant he was far out in the field, in the swamps beyond town where reception was spotty.
"Can you meet me?" she asked.
"How soon?"
"As soon as you can."
"I'm at work all day," he said. "I could be at the diner by six."
She wished she could go swimming but she was far too tired; she closed her eyes in the sunlight and thought for a moment she might fall asleep. Daydreams of swimming laps and weightlessness.
Hours later in the diner she sat across a table from William, who was still in his Parks Department uniform, and it was all she could do to stay awake.
"How was work?" she asked.
He shrugged. "I was hunting," he said. William was only supposed to track the Burmese pythons, he was supposed to log their whereabouts and report sightings, but he'd confessed to Sasha that he'd taken to killing them. He knew how dangerous they were. He thought of those kids who lived near the canals and his heart just constricted. He was afraid of opening the paper one morning and seeing that one of the snakes had swallowed a four-year-old. He followed them through swamps with the radio transmitter, a quick loop of wire around the fleshy throat. His boss was turning a blind eye.
"You seem agitated," he said.
"I've been thinking about leaving town." Sasha glanced out the window. The crime scene had been dismantled, the police tape gone from the parking lot.
"You in trouble?"
"I haven't been gambling. Just the tickets."
"That's not what I asked."
"I don't know," she said. "When you were gambling, or anytime else in your life, did you ever. " She tried to find the right word while William watched her. "Did you ever witness anything?"
"Sasha, what are you talking about?"
"I think I saw something," she said.
"Are you saying you witnessed a crime?"
"Two nights ago."
"Have you gone to the police?"
"I can't."
"Why can't you?"
"I just can't," she said. "William, I need your help."
"What can I do?" He had set his coffee cup down on the table.
"I have to leave town," she said. "I have to get out, and I only know one way to raise money."
"Don't be crazy," he said.
"Can't you see I have no choice? I saw something." But what had she seen? A man's face tilted up toward the window, something almost plaintive in his look, a possibly imagined instant of falling as she turned away. It didn't matter what she'd seen. She'd lifted her cell phone from the table and obeyed a text message that had perhaps helped send him on his way to the next world.
"If it saves me," she said, "then isn't it worth it?"
He was looking at her as if he'd never seen her before.
"When you were gambling," she said, "it was only horses, wasn't it?"
"Only," he said.
"I'm sorry. I just mean that that was the only kind of gambling you ever did."
"That was the only kind that was a problem."
"William, I need you to come with me to a poker game."
"Sasha, please."
"I need you to come with me to a poker game, and pull me away from the table if I'm losing too much."
" Think about who you're asking. I can't."
"I can't ask anyone else, William. I'm sorry." She was finding it difficult to meet his eyes. "William," she said, "I have to leave town soon, and I'm going to go to the casino before work tomorrow whether you'll meet me there or not. But I hope you'll meet me, because I need your help."
"I can't help you," he said. "You're asking too much."
I n t h e casino it was always night. Sasha stood for a few minutes near the door, afraid to go further, adrift on the wild patterns of the carpet. She had slept for only three hours after the end of her shift and then woken in tears from a dream she couldn't remember, heart racing. She felt slightly delirious. It had been some years since she'd been here and she'd forgotten the sounds of this place, the chimes and bells of machines, the voices and laughter. The slot machines, row upon row of men and women staring at screens and pulling levers, cherries and pineapples and bananas lining up and falling away before them. Beyond the slot machines she stood for a moment by the roulette table, watching the game. An impassive woman in a white shirt and black trousers spun the wheel, a dial of smooth heavy wood that gleamed under the lights.