Seven-Card Stud

by Ava Drake

  Collin started. “What?”

  “Where did you go just then?”

  “I was trying to figure out how to force you to quit this tournament if you won’t do it voluntarily.”

  “Not happening, buddy. That ship has sailed, so you can just get over it.”

  Collin opened his mouth to argue, but Oliver cut him off. “How about instead you stick around the tournament till the end so you can protect me?”

  “I’m no world-class poker player!” Collin protested.

  “You could be. You have all the brains and observation skills it takes.” Oliver climbed out of bed naked and went to the desk to rummage in his duffel bag, which already was vomiting its contents all over the far corner of the room. How one man could make that big a mess so fast, Collin had no idea.

  Oliver plopped down on the bed, shuffling a deck of cards.

  “We can’t play strip poker because we’re already naked,” Collin remarked.

  “Winner tops, loser bottoms.”

  Collin grinned. “What’s the incentive for me to win, then?”

  Oliver laughed as he shuffled. “Fine. Other way around.”

  Collin listened closely as Oliver talked his way through a dozen hands and how he would analyze each player’s cards based on various bets his opponents might make. The math was relatively straightforward, particularly after he’d been playing so much poker for the past week.

  “With me so far?” Oliver asked.

  “Yup.”

  “Okay. Now let’s talk about bluffing and what it does to the probability calculations….”

  Some of the math he just had to take at face value because they didn’t have blackboards and weeks for Oliver to go through the lengthy derivations and proofs to make Collin understand how Oliver had arrived at his various formulas.

  Oliver dealt another hand, and this time had Collin talk his way through the math.

  “You’re going to end up on the bottom yet,” Oliver declared. He shifted the tutorial to betting strategy, and Collin and he entered into a spirited discussion of caution versus bold risk-taking. No surprise, Collin was of the school that card players should play the numbers. Trust the odds and work the statistical calculations slow and steady.

  “But it’s called gambling for a reason,” Oliver argued. “Every now and then you have to trust your gut and take a chance on a hand.”

  “But why?”

  “Because luck is the one variable that cannot be accounted for. The very best players get intuitions from time to time, and they know when to listen to those and act on them.”

  Collin knew the feeling well. Intelligence analysts had to do the same, particularly with threat assessments. Sometimes the facts didn’t bear out a risk, but his gut feeling was strong enough that he would make a call anyway. Sort of like going to bed with Oliver. There was no logical reason whatsoever for him to have taken a chance on this guy, but there’d just been something about him….

  “Okay. I’m going to deal a hand. Play it without doing any math. Fast,” Oliver instructed.

  “But—”

  “Just play. Don’t think.”

  “But I think about everything,” he protested as the cards went face down across the sheets.

  “I noticed,” Oliver retorted.

  In spite of the order not to, Collin did some fast, basic calculations in his head as he bet the next few hands. They went disastrously. Had there been real money on the bedspread, he’d have lost it all.

  “Stop thinking,” Oliver ordered more sternly. “Just play.”

  Frowning, Collin tried again. And again, the hands went disastrously. He consistently zigged when he should have zagged.

  “Oh, for crying out loud,” Oliver complained after yet another awful hand for Collin. “Am I going to have to take you out cliff diving or bungee jumping to loosen you up?”

  Alarm blossomed in Collin’s gut at the thought of doing either. The zip-lining he’d had to do in his field operations training had been bad enough.

  “Christ. You look like you’re having a stroke. Breathe, buddy.”

  “I would rather engage in activities that are slightly less death-defying,” Collin managed to squeeze out past the panic in his belly.

  “How about something like surfing? Have you ever tried that?” Oliver asked.

  “Not much surfing in rural England, sorry.”

  “Next day off from the tournament I’m taking you surfing.”

  “So you are trying to kill me after all,” Collin exclaimed. “I knew you were the murderer!”

  “That’s me. Mr. Plum with the candlestick in the library.”

  “What is it about the candlestick that so fascinates people?” Collin asked. “Why don’t people ever use the rope or the gun or the knife when they make Clue references?”

  Oliver tilted his head. “Because the candlestick is something you’d pick up in the heat of the moment. It connotes passion. Spur-of-the-moment rage. It’s more exciting than a dry, premeditated murder with a recognized weapon.”

  “Do you suppose that’s why our killer or killers are using working girls as bait?”

  “Has anyone ever told you that you overthink everything?”

  Collin smiled crookedly. “Maybe once or twice.”

  “I know how to loosen you up.” Cards and covers went flying, and Oliver tackled him again. And oh, how Collin let him. Oliver was like an oversized puppy this morning, eager and playful. And Collin could not help absorbing some of his infectious joy.

  They’d made silly, inelegant love and were breathing hard, lying side-by-side staring at the ceiling, when Collin’s cell phone rang, jarring him out of the moment. That was the Wild Cards ring.

  He flung his arm out to the nightstand, groping blindly for his phone. “Yes. Hello. Callahan here.”

  “It’s Pere. We’ve been looking at the e-mails and camera feeds you sent us. We’ve got an image of a man on the deck of the Erebus. We’ve spotted him several times aboard the yacht, leading us to believe he’s staying aboard and may be the owner, but we’ve only got one image that can be enhanced.”

  Wild Cards HQ had some of the best image enhancement technology in the business. He knew; he’d been part of the team that developed it. Collin rolled out of bed and moved over to the window, staring down at the massive ship berthed down the beach.

  His boss continued, “We were able to make a positive identification. The man is named George Elliot.”

  Collin’s entire body went stiff. No way. But the Wild Cards staff couldn’t be mistaken. Pere had been specific: a positive identification. Fuck. He bit back a sound of surprise and denial. George Elliot was Oliver’s father.

  Pere was speaking. “—West Coast mogul. Made his fortune investing in films and then in real estate. Finances went offshore about twenty years ago. No one knows what he does with his money now. Rumors of involvement in several international consortiums have surfaced from time to time but have never been confirmed. His son is playing in the tournament.”

  Hell, his son was playing in Collin’s bed.

  Pere continued, “You asked about him two days ago, if you’ll recall. The team’s worked up a profile on the son.”

  Collin chose his next words carefully. “Have you got any more on that?”

  “Interesting character, young Oliver. Left home young to go to Stanford. Math whiz. Dropped out of sight about five years ago after a reported mental breakdown. Our psychologist thinks it was more likely just a youthful rebellion with a solid dose of screw-over-mommy-and-daddy. Recent rumors have him going to work for his father, perhaps as a financial analyst—which is an elliptical way of saying the son may be in cahoots with the father in whatever shady enterprises Elliot’s got himself embroiled in. God knows, the son would be dangerous as hell as a criminal mastermind. We tracked down two of his old professors at Stanford. They both said he’s the smartest math student they’ve ever seen.”

  Smart enough to be hoodwinking him? Smart enough to
be working on the sly for the directors of this tournament? Spying on the spy? Fuck.

  OLIVER spent the afternoon watching the secret tapes of other players and their hold cards. It was cheating, which made him feel surprisingly guilty. At least he knew he hadn’t inherited his sire’s completely amoral business instincts. That was a relief. George Elliot was widely known to be a barracuda who would not hesitate to destroy anyone or anything in the name of making a few more bucks.

  Given that his opponents were killing each other, Oliver supposed he shouldn’t feel too guilty about studying the tapes. Still. This whole tournament was an ugly business. The name of the game here was to win at all costs. All costs. It left a nasty taste in his mouth. Nasty enough that he didn’t care anymore if he was the best poker player on earth or not. Nasty enough that it reminded him of his father.

  He’d been pretending ever since he’d gotten that all-expense-paid e-mail invite to this event that it didn’t smack of George Elliot. His father had always worshiped minds that were quicker than his, particularly in mathematical and computer fields. George took huge pleasure in having power over brilliant people. Made him feel intellectually superior, Oliver supposed. Whatever. He wanted nothing to do with his old man, regardless of what made the bastard tick.

  Were it not for Collin being elbow-deep in this mess, he would walk away from this damned tournament right now, George or no George hiding behind the scenes pulling the strings. But he had no intention of abandoning Collin to these thugs and hustlers. He would get eaten alive.

  Whenever Oliver ran across something interesting or revealing about one of the remaining players in the play tapes, he shared it with Collin. After all, the object was for one or both of them to stay in the game long enough to find out who was running it and why. And sharing the stolen information about how the other players really bet made him feel a tiny bit less guilty about having it.

  Collin had been uncharacteristically quiet since that phone call had come in. Like he was preoccupied with something at work. Should Oliver push to know what it was, or leave it alone? Hard to tell with Collin. Sometimes, he was an open book, and at others, he held his metaphorical cards very close to the chest. The guy might be uptight, but Oliver guessed that was not his natural temperament. The trick was to get him out of his head enough to let down his hair and relax more. Easier said than done, though.

  Collin had taken a break from staring at e-mails on the El Rocca server and was in the shower—and Oliver was seriously considering joining him—when Collin’s laptop beeped to indicate an incoming e-mail. He should leave it alone. It was private, right? But hell, he was cheating at cards; why not cheat a little at love? He’d already jumped off the ethical cliff, after all. Collin’s laptop was open. All he had to do was lean over and touch the mouse pad to wake up the screen. He’d seen Collin type in his password enough times to know it by heart.

  He leaned. He touched. He typed.

  The sender was Pere at WCI. Wild Cards, Inc. A work e-mail, then. He justified reading it by reasoning that if there were an emergency, he could tell Collin about it right away. And besides, they were working together. Right? Admitting to himself that this was not his finest hour, he nonetheless glanced at the body of the e-mail.

  The name Elliot jumped out at him, and that was when he seriously started reading. Holy shit. This was a complete dossier on him. What the hell? Collin had people digging into the most intimate details of his past? Why? Fury at the invasion of his privacy ripped through him. Suddenly he was feeling a lot less guilty about snooping on Collin’s fucking laptop.

  When the report devolved into a lengthy psychological analysis of his daddy issues, his fury boiled over. He surged up out of his seat, grabbed his wet suit, and barged out of the room. He was going surfing. And he fucking well wasn’t taking Collin along like he’d promised.

  He stormed down to the hotel’s porters and waited impatiently while they retrieved his surfboard out of the luggage storage room. Fortunately, most of the cabs in Gibraltar were minivans, and he was able to stuff his board in one. It was a pain in the ass walking across the windswept runway at the airport/Gibraltar border carrying his surfboard, but he was so mad he barely noticed. Once on the Spanish side of the border, he grabbed another cab, strapped his surfboard to the top of it, and sat back, brooding, while the cabbie drove down the coast to Tarifa.

  The surf was made up mostly of bunny waves, but they were enough to work off the worst of his anger. He zipped up his wet suit, picked up his board, and jogged out into the Atlantic Ocean. He took his cue from the dozen other surfers working one particular section of the beach. The locals would know where the best waves were generated.

  He caught a few swells and got the feel of the curls, and then it was on. He attacked the waves like they were enemies in need of conquering. It took a while, but the rhythm of the sea, the paddling, and the exhilarating sensation of being flung along by Mother Nature gradually soothed the worst of his fury.

  Why should he be pissed off at Collin for doing to him exactly what he was doing to the other players in the tournament? It wasn’t as if anything in that profile of him and his father was a big secret. Anyone was free to draw whatever half-assed psychological conclusions they cared to from the public details of his life. Still, it stung to have his lover poking around behind his back. If he wanted to know the details, why hadn’t Collin just asked him outright about his old man?

  Maybe he’d been too angry to notice before, but he’d paddled out to the farthest point where swells were forming and had just stood up on his board when he felt a strange vibration pass through his feet. It felt almost electronic in nature. What was up with that?

  Shrugging it off, he surfed in to shore and paddled out again. This time he noticed the pulsing vibration clearly as he lay on the board. What the fuck? He rolled off the board and ran his hand along the smooth finish of the board’s underside. Nada. He did feel a small ridge in the epoxy resin coating that would need sanding out and refinishing soon, but nothing to explain the odd vibration.

  Next time in to shore, he called over to another surfer to ask in his unreliable Spanish if there were ever earthquakes in this area. The guy looked at him like he’d lost his mind, so he’d take that as a no.

  His third time paddling out to pick up a swell, something bumped the bottom of his board. He frowned. He’d felt a bump like that once before. It had been a mako shark off the coast of Hawaii investigating his board’s edibility.

  Another bump. Harder this time.

  He yanked all his limbs out of the water and, sitting on his heels, stared down into the murky water all around him. He couldn’t see a damned thing. But that had definitely been a shark testing his board.

  Best bet with a shark was to get the hell away from it. A small swell was rolling his way, not one he’d usually surf, but it was big enough to push him in toward shore. He would take it. He jumped to his feet, picked up the wave, and carefully rode it, milking all the forward speed he could coax out of it.

  All of a sudden, his board lurched violently, yanked right out from under his feet. He registered his ankle tether going slack just as his face hit the water. He popped up immediately and flattened out his body into a rigid length, body surfing for his life. Whatever had hit his board had cleanly severed his steel-fiber-reinforced ankle tether. And only one thing in the water approaching from below was capable of that.

  A shark.

  Thankfully the swell he’d been riding grew as it hit the shallower water and pushed him forward with even more speed.

  “Hey man! You lost your board!” one of the other surfers shouted.

  “Shark!” he shouted back.

  The word sent all the surfers to their feet on their boards, frantically riding whatever wave they could catch to shore. Surfers ran ashore all along the beach. Several came over to him, and one picked up the end of the ankle tether that should have been attached to his surfboard.

  “Clean cut, dude. Shark bite.”r />
  Oliver nodded, winded. “Any sign of my board?”

  The surfers around him scanned the beach. One said, “Red-and-white board with yellow racing stripes?”

  “That’s it.”

  “Just washing ashore now. Stay here, brah. I’ll fetch it for you.”

  He caught his breath after the frantic swim for shore as the guy jogged down the beach to his abandoned board. But his breath accelerated again as the guy laid Oliver’s board down beside him in the sand. A huge semicircular bite had been taken out of the side of the board right where Oliver normally stood on it.

  The white polystyrene core of the board was plainly visible, along with several wires sticking out of the foam. Frowning, he leaned over to examine them more closely. What on God’s green earth were wires doing embedded in the foam of his board? Except, as he examined them, he concluded that they weren’t embedded as much as they’d been poked into the board’s core after its manufacture. He pulled out his ankle knife and dug farther into the foam core, but whatever the wires had been attached to had apparently been in the part of the board the shark had eaten.

  “Are shark bites common in this area?” he asked no one in particular.

  “Not at all,” one of the English-speaking surfers, an American by accent, replied.

  Quickly, Oliver described the strange vibrations he’d felt just before the shark attacked him, but the surfers all looked at him like he’d lost his mind. He knew he’d felt those vibrations!

  As the other surfers drifted off, losing interest in the crazy guy, one stuck around. Oliver looked up at him ruefully. “Do you think I’m crazy too?”

  “Nope. I happen to be a marine biologist in my real life, and I’ve been working on a team doing research into using radio signals to attract and repel sharks. If you had to describe the vibrations you felt, would you say it felt like low rumbling or something at a high, fast frequency, like, say, a dentist’s drill?”

  He frowned, thinking back to earlier. “Nope. Definite low rumbling. Almost a pulsing, like a heavy metal song playing in the next car over. Why?”