Part 3

"Square Pair!"

Chase smiled as his fellow craps players and the surrounding spectators erupted into applause. Obviously, the two "fours" looking up at him from the table were pretty good. He might have been more excited had he actually understood more of what was going on, but the finer points of craps were still eluding him. The cheering throngs kept telling him he was on monster roll, whatever that meant. He wasn't even entirely certain how he'd ended up at the table, much less how he'd ended up the shooter.

That he was even in Atlantic City was something of a miracle. Once he'd recovered from his concussion and gone back to work, the next 6 weeks had been brutal. Politicians were left busy finger pointing in the aftermath of 5/22, but it was the hospitals that were left to clean up the mess, and there were still plenty of patients recovering from injuries suffered on that fateful day. But after what Chase could only assume was either blackmail or some serious Cuddy ass-kissing, House was currently off in Las Vegas for an Infectious Diseases conference (or that was why his boss was supposed to be there). And Cuddy, positively glowing after Princeton-Plainsboro had been named one of the top 100 hospitals in America by Time the previous week, had given the Department of Diagnostics a full weekend's break from both boss and hospital. His first full weekend off in he couldn't remember how long, and he'd been mulling how to spend it when two mates had invited him to tag along with them to A.C. Kevin Reynolds—an investment banker with a serious passion for risk—told him he needed to live a little; Matthew Jackson, a mostly risk-averse tax lawyer with a passion for numbers, begged him for assistance in keeping Kevin from losing his shirt.

Neither the betting nor the booze facets of the Jersey Shore had been enough to tempt him. He wasn't much for gambling in smoky and noisy casinos; and getting pissed for the hell of it wasn't his preferred brand of entertainment. But the prospect of spending time at the ocean—even the wrong one—had been too hard to pass up. And so he went—and probably couldn't have written a better prescription for himself. Two days of fun, sun, and waves, and Chase had even consented to flirt with Lady Luck on their final night. He'd been happily up $100 at one of the Taj's blackjack tables when Kevin and Matt had dragged him off to the craps pit. And before Chase knew it, they were all flying high. He'd been up over two grand before they'd handed him the dice, and he hadn't stopped rolling for nearly 30 minutes.

Chase watched as the dealer finally stopped paying out the hordes and the players began throwing more chips onto the table.

"Keep this streak going and I won't have to worry about my bonus for the next couple of years," Matt told him as he started dispersing chips—Chase had long ago ceded control of his own stack to his friend.

"I still don't have a bloody clue about what I'm doing," Chase admitted, wondering how much Wall Street lawyers made in bonuses. They had to be making better money than a fellow's pay.

"Who gives a shit," Kevin declared. "The casino's sweating money by the buckets."

Chase actually managed to translate that one in his head. Craps players used more jargon than doctors did, and he knew patients constantly bitched—often, with good reason—about physicians talking over their heads.

"Right. What do I need?" he asked after a moment. His tutors had long ago abandoned all hope of teaching him the finer points of the game and its lingo. Now they just told him what everyone wanted, and more often than not he delivered—much to his surprise and the joy of everyone else involved, save the casino (which had already checked the dice, twice). Chase could've been offended by his friends' lack of patience, but took solace in the knowledge that they didn't have a clue how to do a tracheotomy or calculate ventilation pressures. You couldn't wager money if you couldn't breathe.

"You'd think he'd have figured it out by now," said Kevin, who was half smashed on the free booze the cocktail waitresses were dispensing at a rapid clip.

"Ignore him," Matt ordered, studying the table. "You get two '5's and you won't need a paycheck for a while, even after the IRS gets through with you."

That got Chase's attention and he looked hard at the large rack of chips in front of him. He hadn't really been paying much attention to his winnings amidst the hullabaloo, allowing Matt to wager for him. After knowing him for two years, Chase had learned that Matt was both scrupulously honest—which amused him—and a shrewd numbers man. After a few beers, it took Chase a minute or two to mentally tally his winnings, but when he did, his eyes widened.

"I won all of that?"

"Hey, hey. No satisfaction or you'll screw with the streak," Kevin protested as the boxman…or was that the stickman?…called for him to roll. "I believe the shyster asked for a ten the hard way."

A ten. Right. Chase concentrated hard on a ten—stupid, he knew; but superstition had taken hold and he refused to deviate from the pattern that had brought him success. He threw the dice and the table held its collective breath as they sailed across the table before hitting the back wall and settling on a pair of fives.

The resulting frenzy forced the pit boss to shut things down for a bit while winnings got calculated, the dice got checked yet again ("As if you'd even know how to cheat," Kevin scoffed), and chips were distributed.

So good had he been to the table that nobody seemed to care a whit when, distracted by the winnings in front of him, Chase crapped out on his next roll. Hell, the pit boss was so thrilled his run had ended, he offered the trio a free dinner at the hotel's best restaurant if they wanted to take a break from the action for a bit. They did.

To be continued