On my break I went to the fake diner and drank a neat whiskey and ate a slab of bloody meat. Tammy as always averted her eye from my plate. Then, as if she’d just suddenly remembered something—

“Did Marvin find you?”

“Find me for what?” I didn’t get it. Marvin could have found me anytime in the last three hours, since I’d been right where he knew I always was, tucked into the green felt horseshoe of my table.

Tammy’s eyes wouldn’t stick on my face. She’d been a little shifty around me for a few days; I hadn’t troubled to wonder why. She tucked up a strand of her watery red hair, glanced over at the television, which was prattling about homeland security, I think.

“There was somebody …” Tammy mumbled.

“What kind of somebody?”

Tammy shook her head, not looking at me. The poker games under the glass countertop played red and blue flashes across the papery skin that had begun to sag a little at the corners of her mouth. The clump of meat I had swallowed fell leaden to the bottom of my gut.

“Tammy,” I said.

“I don’t know,” she said, her head wobbling almost like she had some kind of tremor. “I didn’t really see him. I didn’t talk to him. He talked to Marvin.”

And lo, Marvin was waiting for me when I headed back toward the pit. As if he wanted to tell me something but then again he didn’t.

“What?” I said.

“Guy looking for—somebody named Mae.”

“A guy.”

“A cop, maybe.” Marvin’s eyes were as slippery as Tammy’s tonight.

“With a badge and a gun?” Look at me, Marvin.

“No.” Marvin shrugged. “It wasn’t like that.” He looked toward the door. “Just a regular suit. But the shoes. He had cop shoes.”

FBI. I knew. I’d known it was coming.

“He was looking for Mae Chorea,” Marvin said.

“It’s Chorea,” I told him. “Not Korea.” Thinking—I shouldn’t have said that. That wasn’t the name on my light bill or my lease or my job application. I’d been living under the false name for so long that it had more weight than the real one.

“I didn’t tell him anything,” Marvin said. “It’s not you, is it?” Now he looked at me, hard.

“Oh no,” I said, and forced a smile. “Not me.”

I had to go back to my table then, though I felt like somebody had dumped a bucket of spiders down the back of my neck. Wait and keep dealing, until Marvin wandered out of the pit. Then I made some excuse and closed my table. I had only a couple of marks on the stools, none of them a regular.

Must act normal normal normal as I carried my chips to the cage to turn in. Eye in the sky boring down on the tippy-top of my skull. But it didn’t matter, what did it matter? Maybe a couple of eyebrows raised as I walked out.

On the steps I felt a moment of false relief, as the pale neon colors washed over me, touch of a soft dry breeze on my face, below and beyond the darkness of the desert. That Indian was coming up the steps as I went down, the one with the black hat and all the silver and turquoise accessories. Our eyes met, held each other for a moment as we passed. He seemed to look at me with pity, with compassion, even. Why, I thought, why me? Why would he look at me that way, himself a dying avatar of his exterminated race?