Do Not Let Him Think
After enough improbable wins, Bob develops philosophy. It involves never leaving.
After enough improbable wins, Bob developed a philosophy. He developed it on Fremont Street.
The two of them had gone downtown on the last full day of the trip, under the big lit canopy, past the souvenir shops, the pawn shop, the pizza window and the old casinos with their bulb signs. Bob had a bottle of Bluff Beer in one hand. He raised it over his head at the canopy, tongue out, in what Bill describes as the posture of a man receiving a revelation.
The revelation was that they should never leave.
Bob laid out the case with some care. They were winning. The city clearly liked them. Rocky Rivers had one poker room, and Las Vegas had more poker rooms than Bob had been able to count. They had momentum, a word Bob had used at least once an hour since the ride to the airport. Going home now, he said, would be the only real mistake of the trip.
Bill stood beside him in his pressed shirt and said we should go.
He said it flatly and without much hope, the same way he had said no in Bob's basement in panel one. It carried roughly the same weight.
Bill admits that for one dangerous moment the argument did not sound insane to him either. That is the part he cannot get past. He has been to Las Vegas once and knows it is a trap, and the trap still got most of the way through his reasoning before he noticed it working.
That is what the city does. It had started doing it to both of them.
All of Chapter 1: The Vegas Trip →