Amortals

by Matt Forbeck

  "Think what you like, Jackson," he said. "You could take enough money from these people to pay for your entire education, and they wouldn't notice it."

  I knew he was right, but I shook my head anyway. "That ain't the point. I can't do it anyhow. It — it just don't want to work."

  "You can do it," Bill said. "You've done it before. You're just psyching yourself out."

  He pulled a pistol out of his duffel bag.

  "What the hell are you doing with that?" I took a step back and bumped into the tempered glass behind me. We were thirty-three stories up in a rotating building, and the windows here were all sealed up good.

  "It's insurance." Bill flipped out the pistol's empty cylinder with practiced ease, like a gunslinger from the early days of this lawless town. He slipped a single bullet into it, slapped it back home and gave it a spin.

  "Against what? The bellboy?"

  "All sorts of things." He pointed the gun at me. "Right now, it's against friends cutting their own throats."

  "Put the gun down, Bill," I said. "It ain't funny."

  "I'm not joking." He cocked the pistol. "Change the cards."

  "How the hell did you get that through the airport?" I glanced around for some way to escape. Only one door led out of the room, and Bill stood between me and it.

  "I'm a magician, Jackson." Bill snorted. "How do you think I did it?"

  He pulled the trigger, and my heart nearly stopped. The hammer clicked on an empty chamber.

  "Put it away, brother." I held my hands over my chest. "Someone's going to get hurt."

  He cocked the pistol again. "Just change the cards. Then I put it away."

  I walked back to the table. "How did you get your hands on a gun?" I asked. "Tell me you haven't had that stashed in our dorm room all year."

  "I'm from Detroit," he said, like that explained everything.

  "I ate in your family's mansion for Thanksgiving, Bill. Grosse Pointe Woods ain't hardly the hood."

  "Just change the card."

  I looked down at the table. The cards were still there, mocking me: the three, six, and jack of clubs, the queen of diamonds, and the ace of spades.

  I put a hand on the top of my two pocket cards, and I stared at their backs so hard I thought I might burn a hole straight through them.

  "Feel anything?" asked Bill.

  "I don't always. Sometimes it just happens."

  He grinned as he shook his head. "Too funny. For me, it's like a synapse bursts in my brain, like a little orgasm."

  "That what I hear you doing in the bathroom at night? Playing with your wand and doing magic?"

  He pulled the trigger.

  The click made me jump about a foot. "Knock that the hell off!" I said.

  "Just shut up and change the damned cards!"

  I reached down and turned them over, exposing the two of hearts and the two of diamonds.

  Bill clucked his tongue at me. "A pair of deuces? That's the best hand you can come up with?"

  "That's not what I was trying for."

  "I know," he said. He pulled the trigger again.

  I tried not to flinch — I didn't want to give him the satisfaction — but I just couldn't help it.

  "That's half the chambers," Bill said. "And you say you're not lucky." He pulled back the hammer. "Three more tries."

  I wondered if I could catch the bullet. The great stage magicians had done it for decades, ever since there had been bullets to catch, and they'd just been using tricks. I knew real magic.

  If I couldn't change a couple of cards, though, I couldn't see how I might manage to catch a speeding bullet in my bare hands.

  "Clock's ticking," Bill said.

  "You told me there weren't any clocks in the casinos."

  "We're not on the — just change the cards!"

  I turned the hole cards facedown again. I pictured the faces of the cards in my mind, and I imagined them turning into something else. I turned them back over.

  They were the two of diamonds and the two of hearts.

  "Dammit," I said. "I could have sworn something happened there."

  I was so frustrated, I didn't even move when Bill's pistol clicked on an empty chamber again.

  "They did change, you idiot," he said. "You flipped them."

  "What?"

  I did a double-take at the cards. He was right. The heart and the diamond had switched positions.

  "What'd you pull the trigger for then?" I asked.

  "Rearranging the cards may be good for Three Card Monte," he said, "but this is poker. The big leagues. No-limit Texas Hold 'Em."

  I nodded. I hated him at that moment, but not just for the gun. I hated him for being right.

  "Two more chambers," he said. "One of them has to be full.

  That gave me a fifty percent chance of taking a bullet if I missed the next try and no damned chance of lucking out at all if I missed the one after that. I'd been fortunate so far, but eventually my luck would run out. I had to make this work.

  I flipped the cards over and stared at their backs again. We'd picked up a few used table decks in the hotel store after we'd checked in. They bore the red, white, and blue roulette-wheel logo of the Revolution Casino and Hotel laid over a background of the original US flag with the circle of 13 stars. Two of the corners had been rounded off to make sure no one could try to use them to cheat in a game.

  I pictured the card faces in my mind, and I saw the two of diamonds change to the five of diamonds. I left the other deuce alone.

  I flipped the cards over, and they'd done just what I'd seen. I turned to smile at Bill and instead found he'd pointed the gun right in my face.

  "What?" I said, more disturbed by his angry grimace than the pistol. "It worked! I got me a straight."

  I pointed at the cards in order: ace, deuce, trey, four, five. It was the lowest possible straight, sure, but still a straight.

  "You dumb ass," Bill said. "Is that really the best you can do?"

  "Come on," I said, my voice cracking just a little. "That'll beat anything that anyone else could come up with. Even a tiny straight like that beats a pair, two pair, or trips."

  "What about a flush?"

  I froze, then looked at the cards again. There were three clubs there. "A straight doesn't beat a flush?" I asked. "I always get that mixed up."

  Bill stabbed the gun at me and pulled the trigger. I had just enough time to say, "Don't!" before the hammer fell on the last empty chamber.

  "That's it," Bill said, cocking the pistol again. "Your luck's run out. You get one last chance. Do it right, or die."

  "You suck," I said. "You know that."

  He leveled the gun at my chest. "You don't think I'd do it."

  "No." I shook my head. "I know you would. That's why you suck."

  I flipped the cards back over and tried to ignore him, to concentrate on changing the cards. I could have chosen any two clubs, of course, but I wanted to get the best possible hand. In my mind, I changed the cards into the ace and king of clubs.

  I found it hard to focus on those two cards, though, knowing that Bill was pointing a pistol at me. I figured he was just bluffing. He wouldn't really shoot me. He knew what he was doing, and I trusted him. He was just trying to motivate me, to get me paying my full attention to the cards, but I couldn't stop thinking about that bullet sitting in that final chamber.

  I thought I'd done it right, but I wasn't sure. I just had to trust, to hope, that I'd managed to make the cards switch. I reached down and flipped them over.

  Bill poked the gun at me as he leaned over to look at the cards on the table: the ace and king of clubs.

  I'd never been so happy to see two cards in my life.

  "Woo-hoo!" Bill threw his hands in the air. "You did it! I knew you could!" He offered me a high-five, and I slapped his hand hard enough to make it sting.

  He shook his hand out, cursing. "What was that for?"

  "That damned gun. Were you really going to shoot me?"


  Bill gave me a sheepish grin. "Of course not," he said. He reached into his pocket and produced a bullet. "I palmed the bullet. It was never even in the gun."

  We both laughed at that, me mostly out of relief. Then he tossed the gun onto the table, and it went off.

  The bullet smashed into the wall next to Bill's bed, and the recoil sent the gun spinning back off of the table to land with a dead thud on the carpeted floor.

  "Shit!" Bill said, his hands trembling. "I'm — I'm sorry, Jackson. I don't know how — that's impossible."

  I looked down at the ace and king of clubs, which the gun's misfire had knocked to the floor as it skidded off the table.

  "That's the thing about magic," I said. "Nothing's impossible."

  CHAPTER TWO

  "Card, sir?"

  I looked up at the dealer, a dark-haired man in a pinstriped suit and fedora, the men's uniform here at Bootleggers, one of the hottest new casinos on the strip — or so Bill had said. The dealer's name tag read: "Justin: Atlanta." He peered at me over his wire-rim glasses and his dark soul patch.

  Justin had been peeling cards out of a six-deck shoe with the detached resignation of an assembly line worker at the end of his shift. Everyone else at the Blackjack table hung on the turn of every card, but Justin didn't seem like he could care less.

  It wasn't his money.

  Bill and I had each brought five hundred dollars to the table. For Bill, that was just pocket money, but for me it represented all my textbook money for the term. I'd borrowed some of the books I needed for the seven weeks from the start of the Winter semester to the beginning of Michigan's spring break, but I hadn't bothered showing up to most of the classes anyhow. Bill and I had been cramming on our magic studies instead, getting prepped up for the biggest test of them all: nine days in Las Vegas.

  On the walk over from Revolutions, Bill had insisted we go over the plan again. I didn't want to — I was sick of thinking about it — but he told me he could see how nervous I was. I wondered if he was trying to calm his nerves or mine.

  "Just repeat the Blackjack plan back to me," he said as we walked out the front door and down the steps carved to resemble those of the Capitol Building in DC. "I want to hear you say it.

  I groaned but went along with it. I liked playing Blackjack, but studying it so hard had stripped all the joy out of it for me.

  It's a simple game. The dealer gives everyone two cards face up, then gives himself one face down and one face up. You're not playing against the other players, though, just the dealer.

  Whichever one of you who gets closest to twenty-one without going over wins whatever you bet. Face cards count as tens. Aces can be used as either one or eleven. If you get 21 on the deal, that's Blackjack, and it pays 3:2 odds, or a hundred and fifty percent of your bet.

  When it's your turn, you can either ask the dealer for another card ("Hit me") or stay pat ("Stand"). If you take a hit and go over 21, you bust out and lose your bet.

  After you go, the dealer flips over his hole card. If his total is seventeen or more, he stands. Otherwise, he has to take hits until his hand is seventeen or over, or he goes bust.

  There are a few other wrinkles. You can split pairs to make two hands and bet on each of them. You can double down on lower hands, which means you double your bet and take one card, but after that you have to stand.

  Blackjack offers some of the best odds of any casino game, especially if you pay attention to the cards that have already been played. If you're clever, you can then figure out what's left in the dealer's six-deck shoe and use that to push the odds even farther in your favor.

  This is called card counting. It's what Dustin Hoffman's autistic character did in Rain Man. Regular folks use things like plus-minus systems to help them keep track of whether or not a deck's running high on face cards — which favors the player — or low.

  There's nothing technically illegal about any of this, but the casinos hate it. If they catch you counting cards, they ask you to leave, then send your photo to every other casino in town to make sure you can't play there either.

  We didn't want that.

  "We play the same table," I said as we strolled north on Las Vegas Boulevard. "We keep our bets the same. We never vary, and if one of us leaves the table, the other one does too."

  "Right," said Bill. "We don't want them picking us out as the latest version of one of the MIT card-counting teams."

  The clown sirens of Circus Circus beckoned us on our left, while the flashing lights of the Riviera and the new Thunderbird called to us from across the street. The art-deco tower of Bootleggers shone like a beacon at the end of the block.

  "We don't try to change the first cards dealt to us," I said, "just the ones we take as hits. We stand pat on seventeen or higher."

  During our practice sessions back in Ann Arbor, we'd tried messing with the cards during the initial deal, but it was too hard to keep track of each set long enough to concentrate on them. At least it was for me.

  Bill raised an index finger to correct me. "Unless the dealer is showing a face card or an ace."

  "Right. Then we take a single hit."

  Bill checked his expensive watch. I never wore one, preferring to rely on my phone. One less thing to carry.

  "It's 9pm," he said. "Just before the shift change in the Blackjack pit at Bootleggers. We play for an hour, and the next time they change dealers after that, we leave."

  "How do you know all that?" I asked. "You talk like you grew up in a casino instead of some rich suburb."

  Bill grinned. "That's what the Internet is for. It explains the rules to you."

  "And you gotta know the rules to play the game."

  Bill shook his head. "To win the game."

  Bootleggers looked like something Donald Trump would have come up with if he'd finally realized he was the reincarnation of Al Capone. The main entrance looked like the red-carpeted front of the glitziest theatre in 1920s Hollywood. The hotel tower behind it stabbed into the night, hundreds of spotlights illuminating its limestone-clad sides and neon-traced corners that curved toward setback after setback in layers like the crags of a mountain spire. It all culminated in a monster of a circular sign that read "BOOTLEGGERS" in a tall, thin, curved font with neon letters that had to stand thirty feet high.

  At the entrance, a doorman dressed in a pinstriped zoot suit over black tuxedo shoes with white spats held open the speakeasy-style door for us. Bill had the place mapped out in his head, and he took us straight to the Blackjack pit — a collection of green-felted tables under brassy lights with green-glass shades — and we got to work.

  At least Bill did.

  We sat down at a half-crowded table and put our money on the felt. Bill tossed down his cash with authority: five crisp, new hundred-dollar bills. I pushed my stack of crumpled twenties to the dealer who took pains to smooth and count them carefully and in full sight of the hidden security cameras that watched every table. Then he counted out two stacks of twenty green twenty-five dollar chips and pushed one of them to each of us.

  A small red sign near the dealer noted that this table had a twenty-five dollar minimum bet. With a confident smile, Bill pushed four of his chips forward as his bet. Trying not to gulp loud enough to be heard, I did the same.

  I'd wanted to start out easier, with minimum bets, and work our way up. Bill had argued against it. "We can't ramp up too fast, or we'll draw attention," he said. "If we start big, it's not so steep a climb."

  The fact that this only gave me five chances to blow it before I was tapped out didn't budge Bill a bit.

  "That's only a worry if you're going to lose," he said. "That's not in the cards. Not for us."

  I'd expressed my doubts about this, which ended up with Bill pulling a gun on me in our hotel room. I knew he was just trying to motivate me, but that bullet sneaking its way into the pistol still scared me. I believed he'd palmed the bullet, but that doesn't mean he couldn't have accidentally killed me.

  How did
the bullet get in there then? Had one of us subconsciously used our magic to load it into the chamber? If so, one of us wanted me to die. I wasn't sure which one of us would make the worse answer for that question.

  Then I came up with one: it might have been us both.

  With thoughts like that troubling me, it's maybe not surprising I lost the first four hands. Try as I might I couldn't get the right cards to fall for me. Not once.

  On the fourth hand, the dealer pulled a blackjack, which took everyone's bet. That wasn't my fault. Even Bill lost his money on that one, although he was still up three hundred dollars already. But it put me down to my last fourchip stack.