About twenty years ago, I was in a hotel lobby in Las Vegas waiting to meet some friends for dinner. As one is want to do while waiting anywhere in Vegas, I was feeding dollars into a slot machine. I’d allotted myself twenty dollars to blow on slots that day (it’s amazing how casually you toss money around in that town.)
I was looking around for my party, not really paying any attention as the machine ate three bucks for every two it returned. I looked up from checking my watch and noticed that there were jackpot symbols in the first three rows, the last row just a cherry. So close. But wait. This was a special machine, one that hesitated after the wheels stopped before moving the last wheel one space randomly up or down. Just above this last wheel was another jackpot.
For a moment, my heart was in my throat. A fortune hung on the flip of a coin. The last wheel quivered; I held my breath. Then my heart sank as the wheel rose to replace the cherry with a bell. It was a progressive machine, with a jackpot payout of close to three-hundred-sixty-thousand dollars.
What if the coin had flipped heads instead of tails? What would have happened then?
I thought about this through the years. The magic “if” of writing. What if, an ex-con was waiting to rob a casino, one of those smaller joints in Laughlin or Bullhead City. Or maybe one on an Indian reservation. What if that thief was waiting for his partners to show, anxiously passing the time with another bandit--the one-armed variety? What if he hit the big jackpot?
That’s the plot of my next short story, entitled Wheel of Fortune. Hopefully we’ll see if published somewhere in the not-too-distant future.
Stay tuned!