by Jana DeLeon
"Damn it, this is not funny," Jake said, trying to pull her back to the seriousness of the situation. "The car is on fire, there's a flood coming from the sky, and you're laughing."
She raised her head slightly to look at him and he couldn't be sure whether she was laughing so hard she was crying or whether it was merely the rain streaming down her face. Pointing at the car, she finally managed to speak, "I'm not laughing about the car. I'm laughing about your clothes. They're still inside."
Jake stared at the car in dismay, wondering for a moment if he could retrieve them before it was too late.
The explosion that followed settled that question for him.
Pieces of the car burst up from the center and they both crouched down, covering their heads from the shards of flying metal. When only rain continued to pour down upon them, they rose up and looked at each other in amazement.
"I didn't really think it would blow up," Mallory said, "I figured the rain would put it out first."
Jake shook his head. "It must have gotten to the gas tank first. Hertz is not going to be happy about this. Or State Farm."
Mallory started to giggle again, then looked at him and put one hand over her mouth. "I'm sorry," she managed to get out, "but you have to admit, it was a pretty spectacular finish."
Jake wiped the water from his eyes and looked once more at the smoldering car. It was kind of funny, when you thought about it in abstract. He let out a single laugh, then another, and pretty soon was laughing as hard as Mallory when the high beam of a floodlight hit them.
"Good God Almighty!" Scooter stared at them for a moment, then brought one arm up to cover his eyes. "We had a deal, Mallory, remember, since that one time with me and the two strippers? No naked people on the front lawn. And this is a guy - I just saw another naked guy."
He stalked back to his cabin, arm still over his eyes, and ran right into a post as he stepped onto his porch. He wrestled with the screen door for a moment, then slipped inside, the door banging behind him.
Mallory grabbed Jake's hand and pulled him toward her cabin, a huge grin on her face. "C'mon, let's get you inside before you hurt anyone else. I've got some sweats you can borrow and this whole car fire thing has given me an idea about winning this tournament. It's a long shot - I mean miles long - but what the hell, it's better than what we've got now."
Jake hurried along beside her, trying to remain horrified at Scooter seeing him in the buff but too curious about Mallory's comment to stay fixated with one emotion. "Why would the car fire give you an idea about poker?"
They stepped inside the cabin and Mallory hurried to the bathroom and returned with towels. She tossed one to Jake and began to pull off her wet clothes. "The same thing happened before to Amy and me when she let me drive her car," she said as she began to ring the water from her hair.
Jake stopped drying off for a moment and stared at her. "You and Amy were having sex in her car, and it was hit by lightning?"
Mallory rolled her eyes. "Don't you wish. No, Amy was sick with the flu and I had driven her to the doctor. We'd just pulled up into my driveway when her engine started smoking-turns out something was wrong with the fuel line and the whole thing went up in flames. Car was totaled, but I managed to get her thesis research out of the trunk before it was too late."
Jake stared at her, trying to make sense of her line of logic. "And this has what exactly to do with the tournament?"
Mallory grinned. "Amy. Amy has everything to do with the tournament. She's playing the tournament as proof of her thesis. She's developed a method for counting cards that she claims will improve the player's odds by five hundred percent."
"Amy is writing a thesis on poker? I thought she was a computer hacker." Could this get any more bizarre? "What the hell is she majoring in - criminology?"
Mallory laughed. "Well, her minor is political science, which is close enough, but her major is math, and she's a complete prodigy. If she says her method works, I'm sure it does."
"Why didn't you mention this before?"
Mallory shrugged. "I guess it just didn't occur to me until now. In the beginning, it wasn't necessary because I had everything covered. Then we got busy breaking into hotels, finding voodoo dolls and searching apartments ... I guess I kept thinking we'd figure it out and go on as originally planned. Plus, it took Amy years to develop this. It can't possibly be easy."
She grabbed the phone off the kitchen counter and pressed in some numbers. "We'll just have to hope she can teach you something that will help before tomorrow morning. How are you with numbers?"
What the hell. "Better than with cars."
It only took a couple of minutes for Mallory to arrange things with Amy, who was instructed to hang tight until Mallory had everything in place. Then Mallory hung up the phone and went in search of clothes for Jake. She took another couple of minutes to dig some sweatpants and an oversized T-shirt out of her closet before picking up the phone again.
Jake grabbed the clothes off the couch and pulled on the pants. They were a couple of inches too short but would have to do. The T-shirt, however, was a whole other matter. It was pink, for starters, with the word "Sexy" across the front in glittery silver lettering. "No way," he said, and tossed the shirt back at her. "Give me anything else - Kill Something Season, Fish and Wildlife, Beer Drinking Contest - anything but pink Sexy."
Mallory lowered the phone from her ear and gave him a smile. "That's the biggest shirt I have - I sleep in it." She lifted the phone back up to her ear. "You'll live. And before you even suggest it, you are not going bare-chested in front of Amy. She's very innocent and your bare chest is very distracting." She grinned at him and turned her attention back to the phone.
"Scooter," she said, "can you come over as soon as possible? I need your expertise on an electronics matter."
Jake could hear the other man protesting all the way across the room. Mallory rolled her eyes and waited for Scooter's tirade to end. "He's dressed now, I promise," she said. She paused for a moment then shook her head. "Seeing another grown man naked definitely does not make you gay."
A minute or so later there was a knock at the door, and Mallory opened it to an apprehensive Scooter. He took a single step into the cabin but as soon as his eyes locked on Jake's T-shirt, he stepped back outside. "Mallory, you said he was dressed," he protested. "That ain't no way for a real man to dress."
Mallory grabbed Scooter's arm and tugged him inside. "His clothes burned up in the car and that's the biggest shirt I own. And you're smaller than me so don't even suggest it." She walked toward the kitchen, pulling Scooter behind her. "With the way the casino cameras are set up, do you think you can fix something to get a shot of Silas's hands?"
She grabbed a pad of paper and began to draw. His curiosity overriding the insult of his clothes, Jake stepped closer to see a rough rendition of the casino layout on the paper.
"So what do you think?" Mallory looked at Scooter. "Is there any way to install the cameras where Silas won't notice? I figure the table is out because there's no way he isn't looking for that, especially with Reginald hosting."
Scooter flipped the pad around and stared at it a minute, his brow scrunched in concentration. Finally, he shook his head. "I could put three or four cameras in the ceiling with an angle down, but getting a clear look at his hand would still be a long shot. One of them may pick something up ... say ... three out of ten times."
Mallory looked over at Jake. "That's a thirty percent better chance than we have right now."
"Yeah, at this point anything is better," he agreed. "Do you think Reginald will let you install the cameras?"
"I think, given the situation, Reginald will be thrilled to let us install some cameras, and we're on our way to talk with him right now." She grabbed her rain jacket from a peg in the kitchen and motioned to Jake. "C'mon, Sexy, let's go find Reginald and get Scooter to work. We'll grab some clothes for you from your hotel room since you wearing my T-shirt appears to be an affront to masc
ulinity. I'll call Amy on the way and tell her to meet us at the casino." She looked at the two men and smiled. "Sound like a plan?"
Jake nodded and followed her out into the rain, wondering exactly how bad things had gotten when he felt better about this tournament right this moment, pink Sexy T-shirt and all, than he had in days.
Mallory stepped inside her uncle's office and closed the door behind her. Amy and Jake were hovering over reams of paper with numbers and photos of cards on them and Scooter was busy having fun with his new drill again.
With the number of curveballs thrown at him lately, Reginald was probably hunkered down in his office with a bottle of scotch. To his credit, her uncle hadn't shown a single iota of surprise when Mallory had insisted he meet her at the casino, then burst in with Amy, Jake and Scooter and informed him that Silas was a money launderer, Jake an FBI agent and that they knew all about the ATF and their blackmailing scheme. But then she figured with everything the man had endured for the last couple of weeks, he would have bought a story about aliens in the casino.
What she was about to do could have waited - probably needed to wait - but there were too many unresolved items wedged between her and Reginald and she somehow felt that getting it all out now would make things go better tomorrow.
"Uncle Reginald?" she said, and he raised his head from the paperwork on his desk. "You got a minute?"
Reginald motioned to the chair across from him. "At the moment, I got nothing but time, and it's dragging, every single second of it."
Mallory nodded. "I can imagine. It's fairly crawling for me too. We need a lot more of it for our plan to work the best, but at the same time, I just want it to all be over."
"Yeah. It's the ‘over' part that I'm most worried about."
Mallory shifted in her chair, not exactly knowing where to start, then finally decided she'd start at the beginning. "I've already told you Jake and I broke into Silas's room, that night I saw you at the hotel."
A fleeting glimpse of embarrassment passed over Reginald's face and he nodded. "I remember."
"Well, I took something from Silas's room - a voodoo doll." She looked her uncle directly in the eyes. "It looked just like me, Uncle Reginald. The hair, the facial expression, the clothes I wore the first day of the tournament. That doll was me."
Reginald stared at her for a moment, then finally blinked, his expression never shifting.
"You knew," she said. "The voodoo woman was telling the truth."
Reginald dropped his gaze to the desktop. "I knew."
"Damn it! Why didn't you tell me? Why did you let me go around my entire life wondering? Why didn't you bring me to the voodoo woman sooner, when something might have been done?"
Reginald looked up at her with sad eyes. "I begged my sister to have the voodoo woman at the birth but she wouldn't hear of it. She said that you were the reason Silas put the curse upon her and you might as well live with it. She said it was karma, or some bullshit, that someone had to pay and it wasn't going to be her."
"But you could have taken me yourself ... if you knew what was done."
Reginald nodded. "I planned to. As soon as your mother left the hospital I figured I'd get my chance. But she knew. She knew I'd try, and she had some fool idea in her head that if the curse came off you, it would go back on her. So she left the hospital and disappeared."
Mallory stared at her uncle. "What do you mean, she disappeared?"
Reginald held both hands up in the air in frustration. "She walked out of the hospital with you and drove away. I still don't have any idea where she went."
"And my father?" Mallory asked, trying to absorb what Reginald said.
"Was in prison for one of his many visits. Your mother blamed it on the curse, but the truth is Silas Hebert set him up to take the fall in a money-laundering scheme for stealing your mother away. There wasn't anything out of this world about it."
"So my father was telling the truth about the money."
Reginald shrugged. "Maybe he was telling the truth that he didn't know. Or maybe he was in it up to his neck, and he's the one who took the fall. Doesn't matter. He would have involved himself anyway. He wasn't a good man, Mallory. And he was never gonna be."
Mallory thought about Reginald's words for a moment, then nodded. "But why the curse? If Silas loved my mother, why would he curse her?"
Reginald blew out a breath and shook his head. "The line between love and hate is a fine one, but Silas's feelings for your mother were more obsession than love and ultimately, that's what scared her away."
"Then why does Silas hate you so much? I mean, it was her decision to leave him, right?"
Reginald tapped his fingers on his desk. "Not exactly. You see, I knew your mother would never have left Silas on her own."
"So you helped."
"Yeah, I helped. I found out Silas was working for a small-time mob boss out of New Orleans, racketeering, drug running ... I put the cops onto him and the charges stuck. Silas never had proof, but he knew I had turned him in. No one else but your mother and I knew what he was into."
"So Silas went to jail and my mother got away," Mallory said.
"I convinced her to go off to college, even footed the bill by working two jobs, but in the end it didn't do much good."
"She traded Silas for my father."
Reginald nodded. "And I had to admit that the real problem was my sister, not the men she was with. When she came up pregnant with you, Silas had just been released and was under the impression that she'd waited for him. When she told Silas that she was going to marry your father, he lost it. Blamed the pregnancy for forcing her into marriage. Blamed me for her turning to another man."
Mallory shook her head, incredulous. "So he cursed my mother and me, and set up my father to go to prison. It's too much to believe."
"It's incredibly messed up is what it is," Reginald said, his voice beginning to rise. "In the end, I didn't give a damn about the two of them. They made their beds." He looked her straight in the eye. "I looked for you, Mallory, I swear it. Spent two years and God knows how much money trying to find you before it was too late, but I never turned up a thing. To this day, I still don't know where she went or what she did for money. By the time she came back. .."
"It was too late to reverse the curse," Mallory finished.
"I'm sorry, Mallory. Sorry for everything."
"My own mother," Mallory said, too numb to feel anything at all. "How could she?"
"My sister was always a selfish person. Even as a little girl I knew she'd never be a good wife or mother. Everything was for her. Your father was the same way, so I guess that's why their relationship worked." He looked her straight in the eyes. "What I do know is that none of this is of your making. You never deserved them as parents, and they sure as hell didn't deserve you as a child. You were better than them, Mallory, and it was apparent from the beginning."
"Why didn't you tell me?"
Reginald dropped his gaze down to the desk. "Why? So you'd know your own mother despised you and blamed you for her ruined life even though it was all of her own making? So you'd be constantly aware that your life was overshadowed by something you didn't ask for and couldn't control?"
He looked back up at her and shook his head. "I'm sorry, Mallory, but I couldn't do it. Harry and Thelma did a fine job raising you. You're my pride and joy even though we've had to maintain distance all these years because of the way I do business."
"Like the distance you maintain with Glenda?"
Reginald looked at her in surprise.
"Jake and I kinda came across her two nights ago when we were investigating a lead on his case," Mallory explained. "She told me about the two of you."
"Yeah, well," Reginald looked down at his desk and thumped his knuckles on the surface. "Glenda's the whole reason behind me going legit. I was almost there before this bullshit with the ATF came up. If I don't get the money to pay back the loan shark, I'll never be able to turn things around."
&
nbsp; Mallory shook her head. "That's not going to happen. This is all going to work out right, I feel it in my bones." She looked over at her uncle and smiled. "And thank you, for everything you've done for me. If I didn't think it would break your watch or sprain your wrist, I'd hug you right now."
Reginald rose from the desk and stepped around in front of her, his eyes misty. He reached down and pulled her up to him, circling her shoulders with his arms and hugging her tight. "It's worth the risk."
Mallory made it back to the casino just in time to get everyone to take a much-needed break. Amy's face was flushed with aggravation, Jake's with frustration. Scooter stood posed at the top of a ladder, drilling a tiny hole in the ceiling and apparently oblivious to the scene beneath him.
"It's not going to work," Amy said. "He's not going to be able to learn all this in"-she looked down at her watch-"seven hours."
"Well?" Mallory looked over at Jake.
He ran one hand through his hair and paced a couple of steps, then turned and paced back to face her. "It's too much information. I'm not doubting her work - she's proven it will fly, but I don't think I can commit it all to memory before the tournament starts again."
Mallory blew out a breath and looked at Amy. "Are there any shortcuts? Anything smaller you can teach him to help, not necessarily the entire package?"
Amy shook her head. "It just doesn't work that way. I narrowed this down to the simplest method possible. But even the simplest method is going to be complicated. We just have to keep working and hope for the best. Maybe enough of it will sink in so that it will give him an edge."
Mallory nodded. "I'll get you both some coffee. Okay?"
"That would be great," Jake said, and gave her a grateful smile as he took his seat at the table again. "Let's give it another try." He shuffled the cards and began to deal.
By the time Mallory got back with two huge mugs of coffee, Reginald had emerged from his office to supervise Scooter's camera work. Mallory set the two mugs on the card table and went to see Scooter's handiwork firsthand.
