The House Always Wins

The House Always Wins 

Las Vegas, 2010

Chirp!

The low-battery cry from a lonely smoke detector echoed through the condo’s courtyard. Trinity, normally immune to the sound, startled. She rolled her eyes at her own overreaction. Just a crash cricket, she thought, and dug through her bag for her compact. Her reflection was that of a twenty-something, though she was a week away from her thirty-fifth birthday. Even natural light was kind to her. 

Trinity Parker was a breathtaking blonde with the world on a string.

And a dead body in her SUV. 

Chirp! 

Another one, maybe a different detector. Trinity sighed, and lit a Parliament.

A pesky new species had evolved during the downturn—the downturn that was reluctantly renamed  “The Crash.” Locals sarcastically dubbed the chirping invaders “foreclosure crickets”—plaintive beeps from smoke alarms in foreclosed and abandoned homes. Detectors drained of battery power let out never-ending, recurring chirps, sang the sad song that had become the Las Vegas soundtrack. 

The onsite security guards chased after phantom beeps, but pinning down the source was usually fruitless. Trinity sat pretty amidst the impending destruction of this once coveted abode. “Ovation!” was an O-shaped mid-rise, just six stories high.  It was some developer's cheesy interpretation of the Caesar’s Palace, except with community grills, firepits, a mostly empty circular pool.  Trinity laughed at the ironic perfection of this dying building's name. Ovation with an exclamation mark. Vegas seemed to be folding in on itself, yet still, the crowd stood and cheered. Planes deposited new tourists and even new residents daily—still wide-eyed like children at Disneyland. 

The chatty-cathy of the smoke alarms blended into the background of Trinity’s inner movie, a retrospective of her decade-plus in Sin City. She’d moved in during the “family-friendly” Nineties, and watched that PR campaign implode. The “What Happens In Vegas Stays In Vegas ” campaign followed furiously in it’s footsteps.

That one stuck.  Trinity had a feeling that slogan would ride out the crisis with her. 

She’d felt the crash coming, the way a war vet feels an impending rainstorm—and flipped her two remaining properties in August 2006, just weeks after a historical peak and seconds before the bottom fell out. So many locals, many her fellow service industry friends had gambled with easy no-ask credit, rolled equity into second and third loans, flipped houses as effortlessly as a short-order cook flipped pancakes.  

“Real estate is a no-lose investment,” they’d said.

“I think it’s a bubble,” Trinity had said.

No one listened to a law school reject, former stripper, and high-roller babysitter. She cashed in her metaphorical chips just before the bubble burst, then concentrated solely on her VIP Host position. She entertained “whales” at the two most exclusive casino properties in town. Even the whales are becoming extinct, she thought,  they’re more like dolphins. The crash extended well beyond her neon playground––from West Coast to the flyover states to Wall Street. She was in better shape, physically and fiscally than many of her former clients. 

Why can’t I just be satisfied then? Why can’t I stop? I won. Nothing to prove. 

She opened her laptop, scrolled through real estate listings, wrote down an address on a pink post-it note, stuck in on the outside of her wallet then deposited both, as well as her laptop, in her oversized Louis Vuitton carryall. She pulled her cornsilk hair (her real color, thank you very much) into a high ponytail and walked to the underground parking garage. Her white Rover glistened. She braced for a stench, but she’d made it in time. 

As she left the grounds, she rolled down a tinted window and flashed a toothy smile at the security guard, who leaned out the open door of his one man hut and waved. His smile beamed like a hopeful backstage groupie. 

“Have a good night Ms. Lawrence.” He called.

“Later Nicky,” she called. I should fuck him and kill him, she thought, and then, nah don’t shit where you eat. She lit another cigarette. The post-it had been relocated to her dash, though the address was already committed to memory. One more house, in a string of foreclosures, in what used to be a “desirable” location.

Trinity had studied the trends like she’d studied for her LSATs—but in less of a frenzy and slightly less cocaine. 

The pattern was reliably predictable. One house foreclosed in a prominent neighborhood, then a few weeks later a second, a third. In a matter of weeks, neighborhoods were filled with vacant bank-owned houses. Adventurous mosquitos found their way to the desert town that had never seen their likes, following the foul stench of stagnant water in abandoned undrained backyard pools. The number of empty houses in a subdivision soon matched the number of inhabited ones. That was Trinity’s tipping point. That’s when she moved in. 

She pulled into the driveway at 1527 Hummingbird Terrace. A ten-minute drive to the Strip, the airport, in one of few decent school districts. This neighborhood had been sought after, multiple and well above asking bids on new builds just three years prior. Now it was a ghost town, a literal one thanks to Trinity. 

Trinity punched the garage door opener and rolled inside. 

Easy peasy, she thought, smiling at her previous week’s discovery of this very house. How she’d rolled right up one afternoon in front of the whole neighborhood, or rather what was left of it, and walked right through the back gate, jimmied the sliding glass door, and walked inside. No one bothered to question a thirty-something (who still passed for twenty-something) blonde in a Chargers hat and pink velour sweatsuit. Despite the obvious ransacking by thieves and the take everything that wasn’t nailed down of the foreclosed owners she’d found the garage door opener sitting undisturbed on the kitchen counter.  

Trinity opened the back hatch of the SUV. 

Her 120-pound frame was lithe and athletic, but little match for the 200-plus pounds the bag contained. She two-hand tugged at the straps but it barely moved. Trinity jumped into the cargo area and put her butt and back against the bag, her feet against the back of the second row of seats, and pushed with her legs. The bag inched towards the opening, little by little, then fell to the garage floor. 

Trinity thought she heard a splat, but brushed it off. 

That’s what you get for straying from the plan, she reprimanded herself. 

She tugged the bag to the inside door of the house, pulling with two hands and walking backwards as she tugged. The process seemed slower than it was. She stopped just before the door and consulted her watch. Only five minutes had passed from the time she pulled in. She was ahead of schedule. She pulled the bag inside and flipped on a light.

How many times do you have to do this before you get it through your head—the power is the first thing they shut off dummy!

Trinity walked back to the SUV and grabbed the flashlight she kept behind the front seat, clicked it on and laid it in the door’s opening. A beam of light displayed the remains of what had once been so desirable, dingy and dusty emptiness “Fuck you B of A” in red spray paint across the nearest wall. 

Trinity unzipped the bag, flipped it over and shook out the over-ripe contents. Bisqueened and duct-taped in a fetal position. 

Michael Roman, 35, from Park City, Utah.

Trinity hadn’t known people actually lived there, thought it only a vacation spot. 

“No, I grew up there,” Michael had said, and then had said some other things and then Trinity just couldn’t stand to hear another word, couldn’t stand the thought of him in her car talking over the radio, couldn’t bear one more moment of Michael Roman sharing space in this town, on this planet, with her. She’d poured the remaining inches of Verve Cliquot into their champagne glasses and toasted him. 

“To new adventures,” she cooed.

“Absolutely,” he’d said.

A clink of glasses, then a clunk. Trinity hit him over the head with the empty champagne bottle, then finished her glass of bubbly and hot-shotted him right there in the hotel. The late afternoon crowd at Hard Rock Hotel was sparse but not comatose. Heads turned as Trinity, big-haired, high-heeled, in curve hugging devilish short dress rolled a luggage rack through the lobby towards self-parking. 

“Hey babe, need a hand?”  A familiar voice. A returning tourist? A local?

“Thanks, I’m good,” she replied but he was on her in seconds.

“Let me. That looks heavy,” He appeared to be in his late twenties, had bathed in hair gel and aftershave and wore a too-tight T-shirt with “Affliction” printed across it. Jeans with white stitching. Trinity and her friends had dubbed the look the “local douchebag” uniform. He was local.

“Thanks,” she said, as he struggled to lift the lifeless duffel-bagged body of Michael Roman into the car.

“Tiffany, right? I’m Brock,” he said, job completed. “We met a few weeks ago, at that new club, Aftershock, remember ?” 

“Trinity,” she corrected. Lying was futile. Vegas was somehow both a know-your-neighbor small town and an anonymous big city. She’d likely cross paths with Brock again, so why bother complicating things. “And I’m super late. Thanks so much. You’re a doll,” she said and hurried to her driver's side door.

“Take my card,” Brock said. “I work the door at Light. I’ll put you on the list.”

“Oh sugar I’m always on the list,” she said as she took the card from him, “But, really, thanks. I’m sure I’ll see you there.”

Brock seemed sweet. She vaguely recalled meeting him before. He’d recently moved here from Iowa? Minnesota? Someplace they grew big strapping farm-type boys. Boys big enough to be bouncers but pretty enough to be called hosts at nightclubs and strip joints. Sweet kid, but that would change. Vegas rotted from the outside in. Trinity thought you could drop Jesus Christ himself off in Las Vegas and within a week he’d have gel in his hair and clunky metal jewelry and be calling you babe. 

Locals weren’t even worth the bother, but she had tucked the card in her carryall, just in case.

Was that today or yesterday? Trinity thought as she stared down at the corpse. His eyes were open, staring at her through the thick haze of plastic. She stepped over, to the opposite side of him, out of view. Trinity wondered if perhaps it had been the night before and she’d accidentally kept the body in her parking garage overnight. No, she reassured herself, it was daylight when she went to Hard Rock and daylight when she left, and all the same day. Vegas was its own type of time warp, but she was sure it had all been that very morning. 

She was supposed to kill him here, at 1527 Hummingbird. It was risky to kill at any casino, especially a local’s haunt like the Hard Rock. You just left him sitting in your car, at your home. Trinity continued her internal tongue-lashing. She’d been so off-kilter lately, straying from her formula. Why had she gone off-script?

He was just so fucking annoying, she told herself.

She’d made it so much riskier on herself. She had a city full of empty houses that no one was checking on. Roman was her seventh kill. Or is it eight, she thought. Bodies were found but not quickly, and no one ever suspected her. Vegas was an eternal all-you-can-eat buffet of victims, and she’d found a new recipe with which to feed her unending hunger. Stick to the game plan from here on out, she warned herself and shook her head in agreement. 

“They will find you eventually,” she said to the Michael Roman blob, “Peace-out.”

She grabbed her duffel, her flashlight, backed out of the garage, and drove away. Slowly but not too. No headlights out or extra precautions. The trick was to seem totally normal. She tossed the garage door opener out the window a few blocks later, on the way to her Post-It note address. 

It was a short drive, ten minutes from one cookie-cutter subdivision to another. Trinity counted the dark houses, the bright houses. She found nine pm to be an optimal time to gauge a neighborhood. Desert Springs subdivision seemed promising, for sale signs mixed with a sprinkling of darkened houses. Old-fashioned street lamps shone down on silent sidewalks. She could make out white eviction notices on doors, some in tatters, either time-worn or ripped away by an angry owner. It didn’t matter. This neighborhood would serve as her next kill spot, and she would stick to the script next time. Trinity made a mental note to swing by some afternoon soon, and pick up a new garage door opener, then headed home to freshen up and change back into Casino Barbie.

###

“I always wondered,” James began, and Trinity prepared for the worst. She’d met his Gulfstream jet upon arrival, at the private airport appended to McCarren. Big hug, big smile and a “your suite is waiting for you” as they breezed past the commoners littering the Registration area. Trinity mixed him a “welcome back” drink in the fully stocked bar of his 8,000 square foot, two-storied, complementary VIP suite. 

James McIntyre, 57, Dallas, was one of her few remaining whales. And her favorite. On top of gambling absurd amounts of money he was always happy to see some new production, dine at a new hot spot, buy bottle after bottle at whatever nightclub or strip club she suggested. All of these earned Trinity unsolicited kickbacks from other hosts and savvy dancers and bottle service waitresses that he inevitably rained cash on. It was the unspoken vernacular of the service industry. Everyone knew who helped butter their bread and took care of each other. 

There was only one thing he’d never asked, never requested. Trinity prepared for the inevitable. James had always respected her position as host, never tried to convince her to be more, do more . Never hit on her or made an “indecent proposal” the likes of which she’d turn down until the point the offering became just to ridiculous to decline. 

“Why Trinity?” 

“What do you mean?” 

“It’s just an unusual name. It’s real right? Were your parents religious? Is it the Holy Trinity or like the Matrix Trinity or, well, I just never met a Trinity.” 

Trinity pulled a cigarette from her pack and James, already smoking, fumbled quickly for his zippo. She took a drag, considered fiction, then dismissed the idea. 

“Yes James, it’s my real name. I was a triplet.” 

“There’s three of you?” His eyes were wide. Trinity sensed his mouth watering and her stomach turned.  

“Was a triplet,” she continued. “My brother and sister died in utero, I pushed them out first and was the only one that came out alive. My mother thought it would be some sort of tribute to them to name me Trinity.”

Silence hung between them. She could see James searching for something to say. Suddenly he seemed just like the rest. Suddenly she wanted to wrap her hands around his neck and drain the life from him. She pushed down the anger boiling up in her stomach, her bubble of hospitality threatening to burst into uncontrolled rage. 

“Hey let’s do something different tonight,” James pivoted. “Show me the real Vegas.”

“Sure doll,” Trinity said, “ I’ll show you a Vegas you’ve never seen. I know a great house party happening tonight. I’ll swing by and pick you up at 11.” 

Trinity headed to her cushy pad at Ovation, made a quick mental sweep of supplies: the heroin hot shot, the duct tape, shit was she out of tarps? Flustered yet confident she’d have enough time to return to her new kill pad, find a garage door opener,  get back to the casino. Yes, she could do it.

Don’t bite the hand that feeds, she warned herself as she entered the familiar courtyard.

“Fuck you,” she replied, this time out loud. “ I can feed my own damn self.”

It was a risk she’d never taken. A client from her own casino. A whale. 

Trinity paused outside her door, kicked off her heels, lit a cigarette.

Waited.

Listened.

Chirp!

She breathed a sigh of relief, and went inside.