His name, she learned, was Hank Walker. Short for Henry, but he’d been Hank since childhood. Seemed to suit him better, he told her, but it still said Henry on his driver’s license. And he’d been born in New Jersey, the southern part of the state, near Philadelphia, but he’d moved west as soon as he could, because that seemed to suit him better, too. He indicated the Western shirt, the string tie. “Sort of a uniform,” he said, and grinned.

“It suits you,” she agreed.

He lived in Nevada now, outside of Carson City. And right now he was driving across the country, seeking out casinos wherever he went.

“I guess you like to play.”

“When I’m on a roll,” he said. “But these out-of-the-way places, I come here for the chips as much as the action.”

“The chips?”

“Casino chips. People collect them.”

“You sure collected a batch at the crap table.”

What people collected, he explained, just as others collected coins and stamps, were the small-denomination chips the casinos issued, especially the one-dollar chips. At each casino he visited he’d buy twenty or thirty or fifty of the dollar chips, and they’d be added to his stock when he got back home. He had a collection of his own, of course, but he also had a business, selling chips to collectors at chip shows — who knew there were chip shows? — and on his website.

“Ever since the government decided the tribes have the right to run casinos,” he told her, “they’ve been popping up like mushrooms. And they come and they go, because not all of the tribes know a whole lot about running a gaming operation. You belong to the tribe that’s operating this place?”

She didn’t.

“Well, nothing against them, and I hope they make a go of it, but there are a few things they’re doing wrong.” She half-listened while he took the casino’s inventory, took another sip of her Dirty Martini (which, all things considered, sounded better than it tasted), and breathed in his aftershave and an undertone of perspiration.