Hardly Never in Vegas

Salty Salt Sue met Fat Johnny Little at a card game so hot it burned a girl, the sultry Louisiana night dampening her clothes, making her tingle from the waist down. She sat next to Vinnie DeLuca, who bore a passing resemblance to Dillinger—his pencil moustache and fancy cigar and straight flush minus one—with her knee crooked over the arm of his chair like she could keep her legs anchored solid that way, keep everything from going south.

Going south was what she was doing, of course. Had been, all the way from Quebec farm country, leaving behind the rippling acres of corn and barley, the damp, whispering rustle of unbaled hay, heading for the desert from one man’s bed to the next until they all looked the same, both the men and the beds. All the way from Canada, and she’d made it only as far as Louisiana swampland.

So here she was in a roomful of small-timers, boys playing men who only heard about real mobsters on the radio, who muttered long-dead gangsters’ names like the litany singsong of prayer: Baby Face Nelson, Ma Barker, Bonnie Parker, Clyde Barrow.  They toted iron to card parties and bet on the bangtails, and talked about the big house like they’d done real time, though Vinnie DeLuca had never been north of Tennessee. He’d been named Vincent by his cold northern father and his warm Cajun mother, who pronounced it like she had marbles in her mouth: Van-sawhn. Sometimes Vinnie took a page out of his dead daddy’s book and hit his women. He thought it proved he was tough, a real public enemy, but Salt Sue just thought it proved he was mean.

That night, as the humidity got to her at last and she felt