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Cyrus and Billy were manning the booth on that hot Wednesday night when the power cut out. It had happened over forty minutes before―the outage, a ripe opportunity for Sammy the Snake to strike. Ducking below the window lines, he squatted and walked low to the front, between the two lanes. Only the fingernail slice of the moon cast light. He giggled to himself at the mere thought of his brilliance as he passed the Oldsmobile on the right and the Caddy on the left. His slick schemes had worked for years, but this night he decided to really stick it to these “idiot fucks”. He stopped and crawled underneath the Miller’s Lincoln, slipped out his pocketknife, and on his back, began scraping the inside of the tire just enough to do the job. The jacket worn over his uniform kept it well-preserved from the oil-stained drive. It was a thoroughly-planned scheme.

The squat and pudgy Sammy Benevito had been a bellman at the Windows Casino for twelve years. Got hired when he was fresh out of high school. Knew the casino general manager’s son, Jesse, and Jesse blackmailed his father by way of his marital infidelity to get Sammy the job. Jesse was a twisted fuck, too, and that’s probably why they were friends. The two ran amuck for years, “snaking” their co-workers and the company, while Jesse’s dad looked the other way. New ownership eventually came along and purged the hotel of the “diseased” employees. Somehow Sammy remained; he’d always been the cleverest of the two.

The other employees had always been on to him, and on this night he worried he might have gone too far. Even Billy, who never made a fuss about anyone, might rat him out, so when the power came on suddenly, Sammy froze underneath the wheel of the car. “Oh, fuck me,” he whispered. “Shit. Shit. Shit.” He couldn’t take it back―the rubber, he scraped away, up to the innermost wall of the tire. He could be seriously . . . fucked.

The lights over the drive flicked on a moment after the hotel lights at eleven twenty-one p.m. His legs were sticking out with a clear view from the valet booth, and he sucked them into his gut like a baby. Security scrambled in and out of the hotel, and Sammy rolled over to his hands and knees and crawled swiftly away like a chubby cockroach to find a deep shadow or some obstacle to stand up behind. The parking lot lights glowed softly before going on full-bright. He ended up popping up over a bench when some cars’ headlights shimmered up the driveway.

Cyrus leaned his head out the booth and spotted Sammy sneaking into the hotel. “Hey, where you been? Margie’s been lookin’ all over for you.” Cyrus laughed. “Why are you wearing your jacket?”

Sammy shrugged. “Don’t worry about it, dude.” He kept walking, and wiped his jacket with his hand, removing it before he went through one of the doors of the lobby. He turned to see Cyrus still watching him. “Finished jerking Billy off yet?” he said and went inside.

“Ffffffffffffffffucker!” Cyrus brought his head back in the booth. He shook his finger. “That little prick’s up to something. Mark my words.”

Billy was playing a video game on his phone and didn’t look at him. “Yeah? What else is new?”

“Hey, when it happens to you, whatever it turns out to be . . . yeah, uh huh . . . don’t say I didn’t warn you.”

Billy chuckled and glanced up. “Got the time?”

Cyrus checked his watch. “Eleven-thirty-one.”

“Hell, only seven and a half hours to go.”

Cyrus turned to see cars coming into the valet drive. “Come on . . . cars pullin’ in.”

Billy sighed and touched the screen, putting his phone to sleep. “All right.”

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