Obviously, that assumption bore true again, because the two suits were now heading in a straight line for Hailey’s table. She jammed the last few chips into the purse and clicked the wonky clasp shut.

“You don’t want me to color you up?” the dealer asked.

“I like the sound they make rattling around in my purse,” Hailey responded.

And then she was away from the table and moving fast toward the hallway leading out of the gaming area, toward the interior of the resort. She would rather have gone straight for the front entrance, but the two suits were closing quickly and she wasn’t sure she could make it in time.

Card counting wasn’t illegal, and the fake ID was a minor crime, not the sort of thing you’d find yourself in handcuffs over. But like every practiced card counter who played the sort of stakes she was playing, she’d had run-ins with casino security before, and she knew they’d try to “back room” her if they caught her. Which meant a trip to somewhere deep in the bowels of the hotel, where they’d threaten to call the police, threaten to take her chips, and then make her sign some sort of “trespass” act—basically saying if she returned to the Encore, she’d be trespassing. And then, most likely, they’d fingerprint her before they’d let her leave with the chips.

And that was what she had to avoid. Because the fingerprints wouldn’t match the fake ID; nor would they match the real ID she had sewn into a pocket in her skirt, where she kept her apartment keys and her credit cards. And it certainly wouldn’t match the name on those credit cards, or the rental agreement she’d cosigned with her roommates, or the identification materials at the registrar’s office at MIT. Being good at math wasn’t going to earn her a PhD if she was facing multiple charges of fraud, no matter how innocent her motive.

Bottom line was, she had a lot more at risk than twenty-two grand in chips.