They can make out the figures of men in the darkened alleyway, barely. It’s impossible to tell whether they are just passers-by or from the casino, but the hitchhiker and the driver descend with measured, delicate steps down the steel grating. It is slick though it has not been raining. They both wear a form of work boots and therefore can’t help but make a minimal sort of clanking as each heel hits a stair. It’s really not that loud, but echoing against the brick wall not fifteen feet away, it sounds like an all-too-good reason for the men below to look up; regardless of whether they are hostile or just passing through.

The two have to stop about three-quarters of the way down. As they got closer they could see a cluster of men huddled together in talk or speculation. A lamp overhead barely traces their outlines. From out of the shadow, a three-headed silhouette takes shape. Each face searches the other as they ponder their course of action. The trio finally splits up; two venturing further down the alley while the other, noticeably bulkier and more squat than his companions, heads towards the street. The driver and the hitchhiker take this as their cue to continue their descent. All that’s left is to grab the raised ladder and swing it down. It lets out a rusty groan that makes the driver think it’s going to snap off completely. The hitchhiker seems to enjoy the ride, kicking his legs out as he hangs on with one arm and pumps the air with the other. Despite the peril of the situation, he looks about ready to let out a celebratory “yeeeeeeehaaaaaw.”

Looking over the ledge of the building, the two men witness a sea of motley colored suits spill into an incandescent Freemont Street. The men are holding up traffic and searching everywhere, including neighboring casinos, for the pair. They question pedestrians in the urgent manner of pulling at their lapels, while shoving others aside as they stride down the sidewalk in measured leaps.

The driver struggles for his breath. “Shit man! Wad’ju pull?!”

The hitchhiker smirks like a mischievous child and holds the bushel of money out in front of him.

“Ya tryin ta get us killed?!” The driver is not impressed by the hastily gathered sum. “Shit, we gotta get outta here.” He said “we” though he would gladly offer up his passenger if it would mean his safe escape. The driver can’t follow this train of thought any further. He busies himself with trying to gain his bearings. He peers over each adjacent side, then the rear.

From this height, the rest of Las Vegas spreads out before them. It’s a sight that would otherwise be worth stopping for and drinking in, if they had the luxury of doing so.

Behind the casino, there is not so much an official parking lot as a barren, unsecured site on which the next grand casino is to be built. It sits a little bit off the main strip and is most easily accessible by a one-car wide alley that backs the casinos running north along Freemont. The driver, through a fog of labored breathing and alcohol fumes, remembers the silent walk from the car back to the main strip, and then down to the casino’s front doors. He tries to trace it in reverse, all the while estimating if it was a long, or not so long, walk. All he can remember is being so eager to lose the hitchhiker once inside, or at least once settled at a table, that the time between each step seemed like an interminable instant.

When looking back at the what-ifs and if-onlys, we unfairly glimpse a life that has no right to be reexamined. The driver recalls the procession through the back alley, with its many divergences, and onto the main street, with its numerous casinos and shops into which he could have escaped. He thinks of how he was free the entire time to go anywhere, duck into a doorway, or even batter the hitchhiker over the head with the handle of his gun; or worse, if it came to it. Yet these choices never presented themselves as clearly as the path from his car to El Dorado’s door.

Call it the path of least resistance: the impossibility of foreknowledge combined with the very human prejudice of continually assuming a favorable, or at least non-disastrous, outcome. The driver’s situation on the roof of a hotel, one hundred and thirty feet in the air and searching for a way to get down to his car, starts to not only make sense, but seems like the logical outcome of everything to have come before.

But the driver cannot see it this way. He is wrapped up in an immediate future of spur-of-the-moment risk calculations and the types of trade-offs that people can never ultimately live with. The past, however much it got him to this point, will not get him off this roof; nor will brooding over what he could have done. What matters is what he will do next, if only he could calm down for a minute to think.

The driver comes to lean against the edge as if he’s going to vomit. Nothing comes but the hot fumes of cigar smoke and a sickly alcoholic sting in his throat. Meanwhile, the hitchhiker has found a fire escape and is hoisting one leg over at a time.

The driver knows better than to turn around and is less concerned with the actual mechanics of the confusion than with finding the quickest way out. The driver scans the casino for possible escape routes. There’s the obvious but dangerous choice of the main stairway, and long rows of slots to either side of him, leading who-knows-where.

The voices are still fumbling over mislaid hands and flying fists, and a whole bunch of missing money, when a hand grips the driver’s elbow. Now he has to turn, and most likely take on whichever stocky henchman has latched onto him, but the figure jumps ahead and pulls him forward, not back.

It’s the hitchhiker. One hand is leading the driver by his sleeve. In the other: a bird’s nest of bills, scattering as he traces a getaway along the back wall.

Of course, the driver never wanted anything to do with him. More than ever, the driver’s resentment towards this imposing lowlife exceeds levels he thought possible; but his main concern is now with escaping and surviving. Besides, it’s not like he can go back and politely explain to the now-enraged mobsters that he was only giving this man a ride and has no stake in this ill-advised heist.

They come to an emergency exit and behind it is a stairwell. A loud grumble, like a furious, begrudged train, gets louder with every footfall. The driver lurches for the handrail leading downstairs, but the hitchhiker still has him by the jacket and pulls him the opposite way, up the stairs. There is no time to argue about tactics, but it is clear enough that the pink-suited man and his goons will automatically assume that the two escaped down the stairway, not up to the floors above.

The stairs assuredly lead to a rooftop, twelve stories up. The driver and his brigand companion can only hope that there is a way out from there.

“Ah prom’st Paula, ah owe it ta her.” The driver can barely hear his inner voice crying out, pleading to himself, when the thug’s baritone returns to briefly cut through the fog.

“The house cut. You played, you pay.” The miscreant is obviously amused by his little rhyme scheme. A menacing smile glosses over his lips.

Before the driver can answer, if he can dredge up anything to say at all, the pink-suited man is barreling over. It is unclear whether he comes as a peacemaker or reinforcement.

“Sal, Sal, back off de guy. I’m sure he din know.” It’s the short, dark-skinned man’s turn to beam at the driver. “Did ya?”

A shrug seems appropriate enough, so the driver barely lifts his shoulders in a show of restrained compliance, without ill will. His hands had been in his pockets. When he lifts them out, one is grasping a five dollar bill. The driver waves it over towards the pink-suited man. A fee of five dollars would mean that the driver won upwards of fifty bucks. That is a little over-generous, but the wad in his pocket probably amounts to thirty five or forty dollars. Five dollars off the top is erring on the side of caution and is more likely to leave this ridiculously pink-suited, bald-headed man, the sixth or seventh in line to the throne of Las Vegas, and his crones, happy.

The pink-suited man grabs it, almost as a caress, with a beefy hand and a cigar-stained smile. The driver turns once again and heads for the door. He is just stepping through when there is a crinkly-crack, like frail glass being crushed underfoot. With it, the dim light of the room cuts out. The back room is sunk in darkness.

Gruff voices ride over one another. The most recognizable one –accented, but coming out mostly as a squeal for all of its excitement- yells out, “What de hell?” and “Shit man, de money!” They are soon followed by a commotion of an overturned table and chairs and the bark of six gravelly voices, immediately behind the driver. Each one is exhorting the others to “grab the sonnofabitch”, “where da fuck is he?”, “grab ‘im!”, “at’s me, you idiot!”

“Pay up, pal.” It is another miscreant: a little taller, with a clearer complexion, and only the trace of a Spanish accent.

“What’re you talkin bout?” To the driver’s surprise, his retort doesn’t come out half as threateningly as he thought it might. Instead, it sounds genuinely shocked, as if he truly requires clarification as to the nature of this shakedown.

“Ya heard me, ten percent of your earn.”

While it seems understandable to the driver that he might be cleaned out of some of his winnings when they are earned in a card game comprised of criminals, in a grimy casino, surrounded by these tic-on-a-shit looking fellas, it strikes him as odd that the amount demanded is so low.

“What for?” That was a shot across the bow, even though it seems superfluous to ask a thug why he wants your money. The haze from the alcohol, distinct from the hanging, blue cigar smoke, is so thick in front of his eyes, he believes for an instant that he may be dreaming this entire exchange. Then he remembers that he hasn’t has an opportunity to dream, or sleep, going on forty hours. The thought suddenly make him nauseous.

“I’ve had too much ta drink. No I haven, they made them drinks too strong. Or else put sumpin in’em.” This thought is enough to elicit the panicked paranoia of the drugged and non-drugged alike; and like all of those who find themselves in such a too-bizarre-to-be-anodyne situation, the driver attempts to reason his way out. If only those cola-concoctions hadn’t been so thick and vile –though not enough to stop him from steadily sucking down four or five in a row.

The driver slurs to himself: “Why go through th’trouble of lettin’ me in th’game, juss ta rob me? An at ten percent?! Why not take it all?” Only one part of this refrain is able to cut through the noxious stew of cigar smoke, alcohol, and exhaustion. The low, but very business-sounding, ten percent keeps ringing around the driver’s mind. Simple tasks of multiplication and subtraction stumble over themselves, and the numbers pile up into a mess of dollar bills: ones, fives, and those few precious tens; all into a precarious pot.

“Dis true?”

“No. He’s only got two of ‘em, an he just flashed his Queen to pick up an Ace.”

It is true. Cheating is hard to pull off in Taipei Twostep, thus the game’s preference among a group where no one trusts the other. Therefore, an accusation of cheating, a convincing one at that, is even more difficult to pull off.

The pink-suited man laughs at this realization, but this does nothing to calm down the foreigner, menacingly darting his eyes between the driver and the pink-suited man. He thinks the latter is laughing at him. He grips his fingers at the felt, clawing at nothing in particular, and half-rises in his seat. The chairs are so heavy that they take some effort if someone wishes to jump out of one. The driver figures they would make lethal, if unwieldy, weapons; if that’s what the situation comes down to. The man in the pink suit is now standing, though one could be forgiven for thinking he was still seated.

“O-kay. Why don’t ever-ee-one count up what dey got.”

The driver feels on an instinctual level that this is a bad idea, at least in front of all these men. He gathers the bills before him on the table, but doesn’t bother to count as he folds them into a single roll. He starts peeling back some ‘ones’ but is surprised by the number of ‘fives’ and even a ‘ten’ or two gathered in the mix. As confirmation of this unexpected windfall, the driver’s pocket feels heavier than it did before, once he has slipped the bulk of cash into it.

No one is leaving, or even making their way for the doors, though they have been cracked open slightly. The smoke is thick enough at this point so that the driver cannot see to the other side of the room, save for the slight beam of casino light coming through the doors. The smell is still bad, but has taken on the kind of staleness that allows one to pass it off as a remnant odor, even if it is as strong as ever.

The driver decides to lead the way, disregarding whether the hitchhiker follows or not. The fidgety passenger had become so lost in the game -not just in the rapid-fire trumps and losses but in every gesture and groan from every player, especially his bald-headed friend- that the driver figures he is no longer his consignment. Stealing off towards the door, the driver could safely leave him behind, absorbed as he is, here in his element. Then he feels the claw cupped over his entire shoulder.