She skirted between two more blackjack tables, dodged a waitress carrying a tray loaded with vodka Red Bulls, then nearly upended a planter bristling with something that looked like a botanical experiment gone horribly wrong involving bamboo, a rosebush, and a miniature weeping willow. Then she was out of the gaming room and pushing her way through a more crowded hallway. Weaving past a group of bachelorette partiers with matching T-shirts and blinking bunny ears, cutting between two Instagram-worthy women in the midst of a selfie by a spitting fountain shaped like a clamshell, then nearly slamming headfirst into a pair of young men in shirts that were a little too tight and much too shiny. She finally dared cast a look back down the hall, hoping against hope—and her heart froze, because the two suits were still coming fast, the one with the crew cut pointing right at her as his thick thighs propelled him forward.

Damn. She sliced hard to the right, moving faster down another hallway until she reached a wide-open juncture with a marble floor adorned with brightly colored gigantic butterflies, beneath a high, recessed ceiling—dripping more of the gargantuan insects, poised midflight in a way that was probably supposed to elicit whimsy, though to Hailey seemed a bit more predatory. In the center of the juncture, beneath and between the huge bugs—that glistening, stainless steel statue—the cartoon sailor Popeye—proportions in tune with the swarm. Hailey had seen photos of the Koons sculpture in magazines months before the casino had opened—she knew Steve Wynn had paid $28 million for the garish, if amusing, monstrosity, and had bought it specifically for the Boston Harbor outpost of his casino empire because to him, at least, it evoked something playful and nostalgic. But in person, the six-foot-five, two-thousand-pound sculpture—polished to such a reflective sheen it made Hailey’s eyes water to look at it—seemed more intimidating than inviting. To her, it didn’t shout nostalgia; it screamed testosterone, which, in a casino—no matter how floral—was pointedly redundant.

But the sort of people milling about the Encore at 2:00 a.m. on a Wednesday didn’t seem to care. Hailey quickly slid into the glut of tourists gathered around the sculpture, ducking and weaving between extended cell phones and the odd, actual camera. For a moment she thought she might have lost the suits as she reached the opposite side of the juncture—but then a flash of reflected motion in one of Popeye’s bulbous, shiny shoes caught her eye. The two men were moving along the outskirts of the crowd, searching—any minute they were going to see her, and then they’d be right on top of her.