Lucky(9)

“You’re tough, Lucky. You can handle anything.”

He was right: she was tough. The odds couldn’t stay stacked against her forever. And when they changed, she’d truly be the luckiest girl in the world.





CHAPTER THREE


Lucky stretched across the king-size bed and ran her hands over its silky sheets, searching for Cary’s warm skin. She lifted her chin and arched her back. “Morning, babe…”

No answer.

She opened her eyes. She was alone in the bed. She caught her reflection in the mirror on the wall: her hair was tangled and matted. Last night’s mascara was making its way down her face. She didn’t look like a person who belonged in a suite at the Bellagio; she looked like she’d crawled out of a dumpster. A wave of nausea hit. Way too much champagne last night.

“Cary?”

Silence.

They had set their phone alarms for four o’clock in the morning so they could be at the airport by five. Hadn’t they? Lucky rubbed her forehead, then her eyes. When they’d returned to the hotel after their night out, there had been a man in the lobby, the same one who had been talking to Cary at the bar in the casino.

“Who is that?” Lucky had slurred. Had Cary said something about the man being his new friend? If he had, in her champagne-buzzed state, nothing had seemed unusual about that.

“Go upstairs,” she hazily remembered him whispering in her ear. “Now. And only open the door if it’s me. Get our bags ready to go, then close your eyes for a few minutes. I’ll be back soon, I swear.”

She had passed out on the bed, expecting he would wake her when he came back up.

Now there was sunshine pouring through the crack between the curtains. The clock on the nightstand said it was 10:23. She was supposed to be on a plane right now. Where was he?

“Hello?”

She listened for the shower: nothing.

Maybe their flight was delayed. Maybe he was getting coffee and breakfast. She walked into the sitting room. His suitcase was still there beside hers by the door. She picked up her phone to try his number. His phone went straight to voicemail.

Her stomach roiled again. She retched as she ran to the bathroom, barely making it before she was sick. What was in that champagne? Had Cary—

No. He wouldn’t. Not Cary. Not to her. This was just a hangover.

Eventually she lifted herself from the cool marble floor. She tried his phone again but it was still off. She turned on the television and switched it to the news channel so she could double-check the time: 10:45 now.

“… David Ferguson and Alaina Cadence,” the newscaster was saying, using the names they had gone by in Idaho. “Wanted for bilking dozens of senior citizens living in Boise out of savings, and laundering money. They were posing as an accountant and a restaurateur and are suspected to have already moved large sums to overseas bank accounts before fleeing. Retirement funds have been emptied out, lives have been ruined—and now the police have announced there are suspected connections to organized crime…”

She turned. Her face was on the television. Cary’s face was there, too.

WANTED FOR FRAUD, EMBEZZLEMENT, RACKETEERING, the news banner below their faces read.

Her panic rose as she listened to the newscasters speak. Video footage showed news vans outside their house in Boise. She stepped closer. Why were they talking so much about seniors? It was a lie. It had only been the affluent, not the elderly. That’s what she and Cary had agreed on. That was what her father had always taught her: steal from the rich, give to the poor—yes, fine, a little like Robin Hood. What was so bad about taking from people who had so much more than they needed? The anchor on-screen kept talking, describing it all wrong. Lucky hadn’t done those things—at least, not all of them. Not racketeering, either.

Cary. What did you do?

Lucky turned the television off. She walked to the safe and peered inside. He hadn’t taken his passport, which meant he’d had another alias lined up, other forms of identification she’d never be able to guess. It meant he had been planning this for months, had never had any intention of escaping to Dominica with her, had always planned to leave her to atone for all this by herself.

“No!”

Her voice in the empty room was a bitter, lonely sound. She sank onto the bed and put her face in her hands. She was just as bad as all the marks her father had told her to keep an eye out for over the years. The ones who were easy to scam because if offered love, or friendship, or a good sob story, they willfully blinded themselves, they chose to trust. “Blind trust makes the world go ’round, kid,” her father would say. “And when it comes around to you, you grab that brass ring. Take what you can.”

Apparently Cary had been given that same advice. And she shouldn’t have been as surprised as she was.

You have to run, Lucky. You can’t just sit here, waiting to be caught.

She stood and went to her suitcase, opened it, dug down, searched until her hand found the zippered pouch: inside it was her cache of fake IDs, a box of hair dye, and a pair of scissors.

The lottery ticket was there, too, the one she had bought the day before, what felt like a lifetime ago. As she held the ticket up, the hope of it bubbled inside her for just a second. What if?

But that was just a dream. Nothing could get her out of this. She tossed it on the floor and went into the bathroom with the dye and scissors, where she began to hack away at her distinctive red curls, forcing her mind to go blank so she could fill it with the information she would need to develop a new identity and start running.