‘You know you have my full support, now more than ever. We could sure use your brain down here.’

Sam makes an obscene gesture with his tongue.

‘Good luck on Monday. Gabeheart out.’

22

NOVEMBER 19, 2033: MABUS PLAZA HOTEL AND
CASINO, SOUTH BEACH, FLORIDA

Saturday Night

The Mabus Plaza Hotel and Casino is an L-shaped monstrosity of tinted black glass and bloodred neon lighting, occupying five full beach blocks along scenic Ocean Drive. The top six floors of the thirty-three-floor dwelling are all lavish apartment suites leased year-round to film stars, politicians, bankers, and foreign dignitaries. For those who can afford the five million-dollar price tag, there is a seven-year waiting list for availability. For those who can’t, reservations for hotel rooms on levels seven through twenty-seven must be made eighteen months in advance and require a nonrefundable five-thousand-dollar deposit. Still out of your league? You can always rent a room by the hour. Two hundred one-bedroom studios are located on floors four through six and are available twenty-four hours a day for clients of the Mabus Bordello, a state-licensed brothel that occupies most of level five. Businessmen specials run 11:00 A.M. to 6:00 P.M. daily. ‘Blue-ball Mondays are 10 percent off, Two is for Tuesdays (menage à trois), Wednesday’s are ‘hump-days,’ with ‘Fantasy Thursdays’ rounding out the weekdays (Friday through Sunday reserved for platinum-condom members only).

The first three floors of the Mabus Complex are dedicated strictly to gambling. Levels One and Two are where the general public goes to lose its money. Level Three is more private, strictly reserved for the high rollers and VIPs—by invitation only.

None of the bright lights and sparkles of the old Las Vegas-style casino can be found in this ‘Hideaway of the Rich and Decadent.’ Light is out, darkness in. The walls and floors of Level Three are decorated in crimson silks and ebony velvets, the ceiling in smoky mirrors. Half of the two hundred craps and blackjack tables are set up as islands inside giant hot tubs. High-priced ‘pink ladies of the evening’ wearing high-heeled pumps (and little else) sell drinks, drugs, and ultimately themselves, for each of these carnation-dyed beauties can be ‘rented’ by the hour or trick (whatever ‘cums’ first). Baccarat players at hundred-thousand-dollar-minimum tables often receive sexual favors while they gamble, their naked genitals pleasured beneath the tables’ overhanging satin aprons.

Welcome to the Mabus Plaza Hotel and Casino—a den of iniquity raking in an estimated million dollars every hour—the favorite jewel of Lucien Mabus’s thriving financial empire.

For newlyweds Danny Diaz and his bride, Sia, it has become their own private hell.