Loaded Dice Read Online Free

that was all that mattered.
    “Jesus!” Chance exclaimed.
    “Impressive, huh?” Valentine said.
    “I’m not talking about that,” Chance said, pointing at the picture window on the other side of the penthouse. “Looks like we’ve got a jumper.”
    The three men turned and stared. Next door was a dump called the Acropolis. On its top floor, an attractive woman stood on a balcony on the wrong side of the guardrail. They hurried across the room just as she started to cross herself.
    Valentine put his face to the glass. Then he swallowed the lump rising in his throat. The woman looked like his late wife, right down to the short dark hair and the way her dress clung to her slender frame as the wind whipped it around her body. His wife, whom he missed more than anyone in the world.
    “Call the police,” he said.
    Then he ran out of the penthouse as fast as his pants would let him.
    3
    R eaching Sin’s lobby, he flagged down a security guard on a bicycle. One of the annoying things about Las Vegas was that nothing was close. The city’s architects had somehow forgotten how difficult it was to get around in the desert, and had spaced the casinos far apart from each other.
    “There’s a jumper next door,” he told the guard. “I need your bike.”
    The guard was a red-haired guy with a face that looked like a swarm of bees. “You a cop?” he asked.
    Valentine had been a cop so long that being retired was something of a joke. “Yeah,” he said.
    The guard relinquished his bike. Valentine hopped on and sped through the casino’s front doors. As he pedaled furiously down the front entrance, he looked straight up, and saw the woman that resembled Lois standing on the edge of the balcony, getting ready to take a swan dive into the great beyond.
    He rounded the corner and rode up the Acropolis’s entrance, still staring at the sky. The woman saw him, and he waved to her, hoping to get her attention. That was key: Get her thinking about something besides dying. He’d dealt with jumpers in Atlantic City several times. A couple he’d saved, a few he hadn’t. There was no magic to it.
    He passed the Acropolis’s famous fountains and got sprayed with water. Nick Nicocropolis, the hardheaded little jerk who owned the place, had erected toga-clad statues of his voluptuous ex-wives—a stripper, two showgirls, two beauty queens, and a retired hooker who’d run for mayor and gotten six votes—and bathed them in orgasmic bursts of water. A seventh statue had been added, the beautiful Nola Briggs. Nola was a blackjack dealer who’d stolen Nick’s heart, while her boyfriend, a cheater named Frank Fontaine, had nearly stolen Nick’s casino.
    He parked at the valet stand and ran inside. The lobby was jammed, and his eyes scanned the crowd’s faces. He worked for Nick often and knew most of his security people by first name. He didn’t see anyone he knew.
    An elevator reached the lobby and opened its doors. He jumped in and held out his palm as others tried to board. “Police. This is an emergency.”
    No one argued with him. The doors shut, and he hit the button marked PH . The Acropolis wasn’t one of those fancy joints where a special key was needed to reach the top floor. Rich and poor rode together here.
    At the penthouse floor he got out. He knew which suite the jumper was staying in: It was the same suite Nick had put him in two years ago.
    The door was locked. He raised his right leg, put all his weight and momentum into his heel, and kicked it above the knob. Thirty years ago, he could take a door down with one good kick. Now it took several. He went in.
    “Don’t come in here,” a woman wailed from the balcony.
    He looked around the suite and tried to imagine where she was. He decided she was right behind the wall he was staring at.
    “I’m not the police,” he called out.
    “I don’t care,” she shrieked.
    He searched the living room for something with her name on it. The room was still furnished in