Gambling Hell
A Poker Boy Story
Dean Wesley Smith
Gambling Hell
Copyright © 2013 by Dean Wesley Smith
Published by WMG Publishing
Cover Design copyright © 2012 WMG Publishing
Cover art copyright © Cornelius20/Dreamstime
First published as “Poker Boy vs. A Denizen of Gambling Hell”
in All Hell Breaking Loose edited by Martin H. Greenberg from Daw Books
Smashwords Edition
This book is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. All rights reserved.
This is a work of fiction. All characters and events portrayed in this book are fictional, and any resemblance to real people or incidents is purely coincidental.
This book, or parts thereof, may not be reproduced in any form without permission.
One
The ten-twenty hold’em game at the Mirage was going just fine until Heidi sat down in the empty seat.
I was up about three hundred and enjoying the game, staying out of the way of another pro at the other end of the table. We were basically taking turns slowly relieving the tourists of their money, while making sure they had a good time giving it to us.
Heidi, with her long blonde hair, plunging v-neck sweater, and front-loaded assets shifted the feeling of the table. I sensed it at once, even without using my Ultra-Intuitive Super Power.
She gave everyone a bright, white smile, fumbled with her chips like she was a beginner, and then laughed at something the tourist beside her said that more than likely wasn’t funny.
At once my Poker Boy Gut-Sense Power shouted at me like a voice coming up from the depths of the Grand Canyon. Normally the power never shouted at me unless I asked it to. Now the Gut-Sense Grand Canyon voice was echoing in my head.
She’s a good player!
The breasts are fake!
She’s evil!
As the superhero Poker Boy, I’ve fought my share of evil and played with more than my share of both good and bad poker players. The first because fighting evil is what superheroes do. It is the job description. The second because I make my living, pay the expenses to the next fight against evil, by playing professional poker.
Trust me, superheroes have to get money somewhere, and it might as well be from people who are enjoying themselves over a card game while they gave me money to cover the costs of fighting those that needed to be fought.
Since the first day I put on my leather coat and Fedora-like hat that became my superhero costume, I knew that the Gambling Gods ran anything to do with gambling. Laverne, Lady Luck herself, was head of all things corporate, with Burt the General Manager running all casino operations in the god realm.
Stan was the main God of Poker and my direct boss. I liked Stan, and over the years I had actually met both Laverne and Burt during adventures. I knew them to be powerful and damned scary. No poker player I know of screws around with Lady Luck and lives to win another pot. I always treated Laverne with the respect she deserved and so far my luck had just been fine.
Of course, over the years there had always been evil to fight. Otherwise there would have been no need for my services as Poker Boy. But until Heidi sat down at my table, I had never faced evil over a game. And I had no real understanding that there was also a gambling hell where the evil I was fighting came from.
To be honest, I’m not sure why I hadn’t put two and two together and come up with a gambling hell. The evil had to come from somewhere, didn’t it? Besides, if there were Gambling Gods, I knew there had to be a gambling hell to keep the universe balanced. I just hadn’t thought of it before I met the denizen of Gambling Hell named Heidi.
She had finished stacking her chips in a beginner-like manner, a neat triangle coming out from the rail, all chips stacked neatly in piles of five. Then she looked up at me and smiled.
Only there was nothing about that smile that reached her dark eyes.
I didn’t move, didn’t smile back, but it was clear from her look that she knew who I was.
And she was challenging me.
My Grand Canyon warning voice echoed in my head again.
EVIL!
Evil!
evil!
After the echo in my head died off, my next thought was to rack up my chips and just find another table, or maybe even call it a night. But I was a superhero, and superheroes didn’t run from evil, they fought it, head on. Normally I had to go track it down, dig it out, and then vanquish it in some fashion or another. Evil had very seldom come to me and asked to be beaten like Heidi was doing.
But now Evil itself was sitting three chairs down the table from me in a ten-twenty game, directly across from the dealer, and I had no idea why. But I had a hunch I was about to find out.
The pro at the other end of the table, a man I respected for his great skill at poker and his ability to read just about any player, gave Heidi a quick once-over, shook his head, and racked up his chips. He knew, just as I did, that what had been a very good game had just gone sour.
“Good luck,” he said to me before turning to leave.
I nodded at him and then glanced down at the two cards the dealer had just given me. Pocket kings.
I was two in front of the blinds so I raised the bet to twenty. Everyone at the table folded except Heidi, who pretended to fumble with her chips and had to have the dealer help her get her bet right.
She was good. Every man at the table was watching her, either her smooth-skinned hands or her plunging neck-line.
The flop gave me another king, with two smaller cards that didn’t match in suit or reach for a straight. Since I figured she was going to play the dumb blonde to the hilt and if I checked, she would check, I decided instead to bet ten more.
She again made a production out of calling. She was either giving me the first hand as part of the act, or she had aces and was playing me, pretending she didn’t know what she was doing.
Then I realized there was something else going on. The calm, fun nature of the table was gone, replaced with tension and a focus that was distracted from the cards. It was almost as if the entire table had been shifted slightly out of the big Mirage Casino card room and into another dimension.
I glanced around. The rest of the room seemed distant and a little fuzzy.
So she wasn’t just after the money, she was taking the table for another reason. As Poker Boy, I had seen a lot stranger things and for the moment I was willing to ride along to see exactly where we were going.
And why.
Two
The turn came another garbage card, with a rainbow, all four suits, on the board. I still had my three kings, but this time I just checked to her, wanting to see how she played her hand next. To a pro, in certain circumstances, a check means a weak hand. At other times it’s a trap, meaning the hand is strong and the pro wants someone to bet so the pro can raise.
She looked at me with a puzzled smile on her face, pretending she didn’t know what a check meant.
“Up to you,” the young dealer said, resting his hand in front of the woman to indicate it was her turn to bet.
“Oh, it’s my turn?” Heidi said, looking down at her cards again, then pretending to study the cards on the table. Then she looked up at the dealer, “What can I bet?”
A few men around the table who were taken in by her act chuckled. When a beginning player asked how much they could bet, it always meant they had a strong hand, or thought they had a strong hand. With Heidi I knew it was all an act.
But with that question, the room around us seemed to grow even more distant and blurry. The noise from the other tables faded farther into the background.
I had a sense of downward movement. No one else at the table noticed, including the dealer, as all their attention remained focused on Heidi, her blonde hair, and her v-neck sweater.
“The bet is twenty,” the dealer said.
She fumbled with her chips and then slid twenty forward.
She smiled at the dealer and then looked my way.
I knew I was going to have to make my move pretty soon to stop what she was doing with this table, but I wanted to see that last card before I did. If she had two aces in her hand, there were still two aces left out, and I wanted to be sure that third ace didn’t hit the board before I moved. So I simply flat-called her twenty.
The dealer patted the table to indicate the bets were all square, burnt a card and turned over the river card. A four of hearts that matched the four of clubs already on the board.
I had kings full of fours, the highest full house possible with the cards on the board. But not the highest hand possible. And that worried me a lot.
Around the table the rest of the Mirage poker room had become nothing more than a distant blur, the only sounds a faint rumbling. And the air was getting warmer and warmer by the moment. Heidi was moving the entire game into gambling hell, and no one but me seemed to be noticing.
I took a deep breath and focused on a spot between two upcoming seconds. I wanted to use what I had called my Unstuck-in-Time power. Stan the God of Poker had told me I had the power, and since then it had come in handy more than once.
My power froze everyone’s movements except Heidi. Clearly my power hadn’t worked on her. She truly was evil and very powerful.
Seven of the men were frozen staring at her chest, the dealer and one of the other players were staring at her hands.
“Nice trick,” she said, laughing in a way that made me shiver, even though I had on a leather jacket and the temperature around the table had gone up by twenty degrees.
By slipping myself between moments in time, I could see a little better where we were.
Granted, the Mirage Poker room was a faint overlay, sort of blurred and fuzzy, but through that vision I could clearly see a huge cave with dark walls and bright lights hanging from the roof. The table I was at seemed to be up near the roof of the cavern, still sitting in the Mirage, but yet at the same time floating in space, not yet all the way down to the surface.
A river of molten lava ran through one side of the cavern, accounting for the extra heat. There had to be at least a hundred different poker games going on around the room, all frozen because I was looking at them from a moment between seconds.
A poker room in gambling hell. This was the last place I wanted to be.
“So, Poker Boy,” she said, smiling at me, “you hoping to freeze time and come and take a quick glance at what I have in my hand?”
I laughed at her. “Not my style. That’s something you’d do I’m sure. I just wanted to stop this little elevator act you have going on.”
“And you think this trick is going to stop it for long?” she asked, flaunting her chest assets by learning forward and making sure her v-neck sweater bagged out just enough.
Granted, I was a man. But I had turned down sexual advances from a goddess far more interesting than her, so her attempts to distract me dropped short.
“Long enough to get this settled,” I said.
“And just how do you plan to settle this?” she asked, smiling at me. “Knock me off my chair?”
I stared at her, looking deep into her eyes. In my years of doing superhero deeds, I had found many ways of solving problems, and none of them, not once, had I needed to use any physical-type action. Anyone who actually looked at me would know I wouldn’t be any good at that stuff anyway. I kept my poker face on and just kept staring at her, trying to get any kind of read on what exactly what would work. Frighteningly enough, at the moment I didn’t know. I was just playing a bluff.
Three
She waved her arm around at the cavern. “You’re in my world now.”
I said nothing.
She shifted slightly, still smiling at me, still learning forward trying to get me to look at her fake assets.
I just stared at her face, into her eyes, like I stared at any poker player who tried to make a move on me. And I made sure I kept us firmly planted between seconds of time.
After a long moment of me staring at her she shifted slightly again, then turned to stare back, her fake smile frozen on her face.
I could tell I was getting to her. But I still had no idea what to do to get this table and all the men around it back into the Mirage poker room. I needed some answers.
“So what do you want me for?” I asked. “Why these guys?”
“Customers,” she said. “Got to keep the operation running.”
“No winning allowed down there,” I said, indicating the tables frozen below us in the cavern.
She smiled again, and for the first time the smile reached her dark eyes. “Never.”
Right at that moment I knew I had her. Just like I did in any tournament before making an all-in bet, I went quickly back over what had gone on before.
She’d been pulling a scam on the first hand after sitting down, and had gotten impatient to take the table down into her own world. And I’m sure there was a reason she was impatient.
Then I realized why. If we had reached the floor of the cavern in hell, I’m sure I would have lost the hand we were playing. She would have been able to change her cards into pocket fours, giving her quad fours, the only cards that would beat my kings-full in this hand. That’s why she was in a hurry to get the table down. She wasn’t used to losing and she was going to lose the first hand.
But we hadn’t reached the floor of the cavern yet. And I could still see the Mirage poker room outlined around us. That meant, I was sure, that real world rules played. That Laverne and Stan were still with me in spirit.
I leaned forward. “Any of these men actually due to arrive in your world today?”
She glanced around at the frozen faces staring at her chest. “No.”
“So then you’re basically after me. Right?”
She said nothing, but I could tell from her eyes that I was right. I also knew without a doubt I wasn’t ever destined to go in this direction after I died. Besides, from what I understood, superheroes lived a long time, so I had no idea how long in the future any question about this issue was going to be.
“Why go after a superhero?” I asked.
She smiled. “Challenge.”
“It must be getting dull in Gambling Hell.”
She only shrugged and smiled.
I had played her right into my hand and there was no point in rubbing salt into a wound any more, even if the person was from Gambling Hell and didn’t know they were even wounded yet. So instead I smiled at her for a few moments longer, just to get her squirming.
Then I said, “Well, if you like a challenge, how about we finish this hand to see which direction this table is going? I win the hand we go up, back to the Mirage and you go somewhere else to play. You win, we go down, and I’ll go with you for a while. Play your game.”
The moment I put it back on the cards I caught a slight, very slight hint of panic cross her face. She hid it well, but I still saw it. I knew I had her. She had a good hand, but she didn’t have the nut hand.
“Well, let us go so the dealer can call the hand,” she said.
“No,” I said, not wanting this table to get any closer to that cavern floor. “Right here, right now. No more bets. We roll the cards and see who wins. Otherwise I call in Stan and he puts this table back where it belongs and you lose the chance of getting these players and me as your toys.”
Heidi stared at me, taking her turn trying to read me. She was good, of that I had no doubt. But the best players in the world had tried to put reads on me for years without luck. No chance a simple Denizen from Gambling Hell could do it.
Finally she nodded. “You have a bet.”
; “I win,” I said, making the bet clear, “the table goes back to the Mirage and you leave. You win, I release the table and we play in your world for a while.”
“Those are the stakes,” she said.
With that she flipped over pocket aces.
“Nice hand,” I said.
And then I did something I never do in real life because it just annoys me and every other player. I hesitated in turning over my cards. It’s called slow-rolling and it is the worst thing any player can do. But I did it anyway, just to get under Heidi’s skin, just to give her a brief moment when she thought she had won. Sort of a little taste of her own hell is the way I figured it.
“Pocket kings,” I said, flipping my cards onto the table face up in front of me. “Kings-full.”
For a moment I thought I caught a glimpse of what Heidi really looked like under all that fake skin and large breasts. And let me tell you, she was one ugly human being. Nightmare ugly.
She stood, pushing her chair back and I let us go back to normal time at the same moment.
Suddenly the noise from the Mirage poker room pounded in around us. The men at the table were suddenly very surprised that Heidi was standing, and that our cards were showing without a final round of betting.
“Nice playing with you,” she said, staring at me. Then without her false smile, she bent over and picked up her chips, giving a number of the men at the table a real show before turning and stamping off.
“What just happened there?” the dealer asked as he slid the pile of chips in the middle of the table toward me.
I shrugged. “Sore loser.”
One of the men who had gotten the best show from her picking up her chips laughed. “She bends over like that a few more times and she can take all my money.”
“Always be careful what you ask for,” I said. “You never know where you might end up.”
Everyone around the table laughed and the mood shifted back to fun game of serious poker, playing for money instead of souls.
Gambling Hell: A Poker Boy story Page 1
