by Robin Spano
Why had she opened her mouth? Clare mucked her trips and accepted the small pot when it was pushed her way.
“Not gonna show me what you won with?”
“Not a chance.” Clare was disgusted with herself for giving her hand away.
“You played well last night,” Joe said. “A couple times at MacCauley’s, you made plays that I wasn’t sure were genius or dumb luck.”
“Please. You guys ate me for breakfast.” Clare wanted to believe she was making good plays — she’d been studying the game intensely — but she knew when she was outclassed by a million.
Joe tossed some chips into the center and covered his hole cards with a protector chip. “Did someone say breakfast?” He pulled a banana from his hat and tossed it to Clare. “You should play in our Vancouver side game, too.”
“Are you suffering so badly for weak competition?” Clare opened the banana and took a bite. It tasted good, considering it had been in someone’s hat. She looked at her cards and saw aces. Her heart started thumping. She hoped Joe couldn’t hear it across the table.
“Partly,” Joe said. “But if you want to make a living at poker, you’re going to have to get good at cash games. Tournaments have too much luck involved. That banana looks great in your mouth, by the way.”
“Glad you like it.” Clare toyed with her stack, wondering if sex was Joe’s weakness. More likely not — he was probably trying to throw her off her game. Joe had raised, so Clare decided to play cautiously and re-raise with her aces.
Joe pulled a plum from his hat and started chomping. “All business, huh? That’s cool. I figured you must be smarter than you look. Though what I can’t seem to make sense of is why you’re here, and not off touring the art galleries of Europe while you sort out who you want to be when you grow up.”
“I don’t like art. And people who study it are pretentious.”
“Ah,” Joe said, calling Clare’s raise and closing the pre-flop betting. “A truly smart rich kid. I can see why T-Bone’s pissed at you.”
Clare rolled her eyes. “Has the almighty cowboy never lost a hand before? Or am I supposed to cower in his presence?”
The flop came king-ten-three. Two hearts were on the board. It wasn’t great for her aces — the drawing possibilities to straights and flushes were dangerous. She probably still had the best hand at the moment, though.
“Not cower, exactly . . .” Joe looked at the flop, frowned, and checked. “Maybe stand back in worship.”
“I read T-Bone’s book. It wasn’t exactly worthy of worship.”
“Yeah?” Joe said. “Good book?”
“It sucked. I didn’t learn a thing about how to play poker.” Clare was pretty sure she was supposed to bet here; she just wasn’t sure how much. She went with half the pot.
“You should tell T-Bone that,” Joe said, calling quickly. “Maybe it will make him like you more.”
“I don’t care if T-Bone likes me.”
“No kidding.” Joe took a sip of Coke as they watched the turn come down: the ace of hearts. It gave Clare trips, which was nice, but it also put a flush and a straight possibility on the board — both of which would beat Clare’s hand. “Have you read my book?” Joe asked.
Clare shook her head. “Is it any good?”
“Probably not. It was ghost-written and I haven’t even read the final published version. So you mean it about that coffee? Or would you rather go for a beer? I think beer’s more personable.” Joe stared at the community cards, wrinkling his mouth. “I’m thinking I should go all in.”
Clare said nothing. She hoped he didn’t go all in. This close to the bubble, with her career riding in the balance, she’d have to believe him and fold.
“Nah,” Joe said. “Check. So — beer?”
“I’ll take a rain check,” Clare said, checking quickly.
“Perfect,” Joe said. “It rains a lot in Vancouver, so I’ll consider that a date.”
“Consider it what you like.” Clare grinned, though she’d been trying not to. The real Clare would love to have Joe as a one-nighter — he was a sleazeball, but he was seriously fun to flirt with — but with his girlfriend treating her with that suspicious mix of warmth and derision, there was no way screwing Joe could be a smart move. “And hey, maybe bring Elizabeth, so she doesn’t get the wrong idea.”
“Why? Do you have a wrong idea?”
The river card came. The ten of spades, giving Clare the full house she’d been hoping for. In a perfect world, Joe had the flush or the straight that had scared her on the turn, because now Clare could beat it, and he’d still be willing to commit a good portion of his stack.
“You’re inviting me in front of all these people.” Clare cast her glance around the poker table. A skinny kid in a backwards baseball cap smirked when she caught his glance, and a disheveled academic type at the end of the table nodded at Clare with a glint in his eye. The table was clearly interested in their conversation.
“Hmm.” Joe tilted his head to one side. He glanced at Clare’s remaining chips and bet about half the pot. “I don’t think these people will talk. I think we should go out one-on-one.”
“I’ll think about it.” Clare pushed her chips all in. She bit her lip, clasped her hands, trying to look nervous so he’d call. “As in, I’ll contemplate how socially suicidal I’m feeling.”
“How is going out with me social suicide?” Joe leaned back in his chair and folded his arms across his chest, studying Clare, eyeing the cards on the table. “Most people would think a date with me was the opposite.”
“I like Elizabeth,” Clare said.
“Why? Lizzie hates you.”
“But she pretends she doesn’t, and that fascinates me.”
“Ah, come on. One date. You might even want to have sex with me at the end.”
Clare smiled, this time on purpose. “I’d rather fuck your girlfriend.”
“Cool,” Joe said. “I’ll try to arrange that. By the way, I call. I’m sorry to knock you out of the game like this. I hope we can still be friends.”
“What do you mean?” Clare flipped her cards and showed Joe her full house. She felt her heart sink when Joe’s confidence didn’t waver. “Don’t tell me you have a royal flush.”
“I don’t have a royal flush.” Joe flipped over two tens. “But my quads still beat you.”
FOURTEEN
NOAH
Noah lifted a few of his chips and let them slide through his fingers back to their place in the stack. He was relieved to see Tiffany walk away from her table, defeated. Not that he wanted her to lose. But if she busted out before the bubble, she probably wasn’t cheating.
So who was?
Noah looked at the players at his table. Most had their ears free. One woman was listening to an iPod Shuffle, but unless it was a cleverly disguised receiver, Noah was pretty sure she wouldn’t be able to pick up the cheating info stream on it. A middle-aged accountant type was wearing a hands-free earpiece for a cell phone — which was dumb, because if your phone rang when you were playing, it was a ten-minute penalty. But an earpiece was too obvious for a high-level cheater — the guy probably just thought it looked cool. What aroused Noah’s suspicion most were the thick red glasses on George Bigelow. Any earring or eyeglass arm could be set up to receive a Bluetooth signal.
Noah said to George, who was sitting to his right, “You’re that guy who wrote Suicide Kings.”
George nodded, his gaze still on the cards. “Crap title, right? My publisher thought it was catchier than my working title, Ace Magnets.”
“I agree with your publisher.” Noah grinned in what he hoped was a gushing fan way. “The book was great. It helped my game a lot.”
“I wouldn’t call it a masterpiece.”
Noah liked George on first impression. He was quirky, kind of hip in a retro-geek way, and he could self-deprecate l
ike the best of them.
“I disagree,” Noah said. “Your writing’s cool and clever. You ever think of writing something else? You know, not about poker.”
George smiled broadly. “I’m working on a novel now.”
“What’s it about?”
“Oh,” George said. “A writer never talks about his current work.”
Totally not true. Noah’s mother had a million writer friends, most of whom had verbal diarrhea when it came to their current work. But Noah respected George’s right to silence. And he was just as happy not to hear a long-winded saga.
Noah switched topics. “You’re dating Fiona Gallagher, right?”
George shook his head. “We broke up a few months ago.”
Shit. The guy looked really sad about it. “Sorry, man. Is it hard to be on the same scene? You must see her every day.”
George shrugged. “We’re adults.”
Noah went in for the kill. “So where’s Fiona while the tournament is playing? Does she sit in her booth and watch the hidden cameras?”
“Her techie does that. A kid called Oliver. She hates his guts, actually. Don’t know why she doesn’t fire the guy. Fiona stays out front and does exit interviews as people bust out of the game.”
Noah nodded. His questioning line may have sounded clumsy, but he had the answer he’d been after: Oliver the techie had the hole card signal live. Was he the only person who did?
Noah folded his queen-ten. In late position, the hand was playable, but he wanted to play safe. Even if a timid game was unlikely to net him first place, it would keep him in the game longer. And until he found this signal, he was going to learn more at the table than away from it.
FIFTEEN
CLARE
Clare scowled at her reflection in the casino bathroom mirror. She’d busted out in thirty-eighth place: two off the bubble. If she’d been smart and played conservatively — if she hadn’t been suckered into going all in with her aces — she would have finished in the money. And followed the tour to Vancouver. Now she was going home to boredom.
She hadn’t even played the hand badly and that’s what was so fucking unfair. Poker was luck at least half the time. So because of rotten luck, Clare’s career was basically over. Fucking Cloutier. Clare could do this job if he wasn’t always standing in her way telling her she couldn’t.
She had one night left in the hotel. Cloutier the giant asshole had said she could check out the next morning — probably because it was too late to cancel the room without a penalty. So Clare had one night to find a critical piece of information from someone on this scene — something, anything, that would render Clare invaluable to the case, so that pulling her would be to the case’s detriment.
She tugged her cosmetic bag from her fuschia leather purse. As she unscrewed the cap on her mineral foundation, a tall redhead strode into the washroom and set her purse on the sink two over from Clare’s.
“Fiona, right?” Clare said.
The woman turned, gave a small smile, and nodded.
“I love your exit interviews,” Clare said. “How do you come up with those hilarious questions on the spot like that?”
Fiona squirted soap onto her hands and lathered them intensely. “I pretend we’re at a party that the audience is getting an exclusive glimpse of. Everyone likes to feel like they’re in on the action. Are you playing in the tournament?”
“I was,” Clare said. “Until Joe Mangan took all my chips an hour ago.”
“Yeah, Joe can be a bitch.” Fiona dried her hands on a paper towel and pulled a small round brush from her purse.
“It’s cool,” Clare said. “It’s my first tournament. I can’t expect to win right away.”
“Right on.” Fiona nodded. “The Zen approach.”
Clare wasn’t sure what was Zen about being realistic. Maybe Fiona had just smoked a joint and thought everything was Zen. She didn’t smell like she had, though — she smelled like expensive perfume.
“How did you get into poker broadcasting?” Clare dabbed liquid blush along her cheekbones with the sponge, like her new handler Amanda had shown her. “Did you go to journalism school?”
“Ha ha. No. I started podcasting one summer with my friend at home in Denver. It was the summer between undergrad and law school — or what would have been the summer between them, if I’d ended up going to law school. The podcast was supposed to be this big joke. We nicknamed the players on TV — not their serious poker names, like Devil Fish or Kid Poker — we called them stuff like Fat MoFo and Skinny Crack Ho. T-Bone Jones was the Creaking Cowboy.”
“Creaking?”
“Because he’s so old he has to oil his bones.”
Clare grinned, smudging her blush a bit. She wiped the excess away with her index finger — hopefully that’s what you were supposed to do. “Why did you lose those names?”
“Sold out to go corporate. I kind of hate myself for it, but the money’s way better, so what else would I do? The only name that stuck was Joe’s. We called him Pretty Boy, ’cause he’s, you know, kind of homosexual-looking, and now the industry’s adopted it, so I’m allowed to use that on my broadcast.”
“Awesome.”
“Yeah, the whole thing’s kind of awesome. I still can’t believe I basically get to party for a living. How about you? Why are you here?”
Clare drew in her breath. “I’m testing a theory. I’ve been reading up on poker, and I think if I play in ten tournaments in one year, I can net a higher profit than if I’d invested a hundred thousand in the stock market.”
“You have a hundred grand to toss into a theory?” Fiona lifted her eyebrows.
“And then some.” Clare nodded. “But a hundred grand is what I convinced my dad was a reasonable amount to invest. It’s my money, technically, but since he’s spent his life earning the money to give me the trust fund in the first place, I wouldn’t have taken the risk if he didn’t green-light it. It wouldn’t seem fair.”
Fiona dropped her brush back into her purse and fished out a colored lip gloss. “How the hell did you get him to green-light a poker tour?”
Clare gave Fiona a lopsided grin. “My brother has lost nearly half a million of his fund in the dumbest investments you could imagine. He thinks he’s god’s gift to the club district — well, he basically is, but as a financial donor, not as an ingenious entrepreneur. I guess my dad figured he could allow me the same room to explore. And he liked that I made him a presentation with graphs and flow charts. Shows him I’m taking it seriously, looking at this as a business plan.”
“That’s, like, seriously cool,” Fiona said. “To convince a cold hard businessman that his sweet little daughter should go make her way on the poker scene. Kudos, man.”
“I’ll take the kudos when I win. So far I’m down ten grand with nothing to show for it.”
“We should party,” Fiona said. “What are you doing tonight?”
Clare put away her makeup. “Taking poker lessons from Mickey Mills.”
“Mickey’s old. He’ll be in bed by eleven. We should hook up after that for drinks.”
“Yeah, sounds fun.” As Clare gave Fiona her false name and the text details for Tiffany’s phone, it occurred to her that this exchange had been far too easy. Clare knew her own motive — to embed herself in the poker culture deeply enough that she’d be a clear asset to the case. But Fiona had been the one who’d suggested drinks. Why?
SIXTEEN
GEORGE
George was thrilled with his twenty-sixth place finish. He’d played his cards more boldly than usual, and the aggression had paid off. He was pumped to dive into his so-called fiction.
He had almost reached the elevator when Mickey approached him. “Have you reconsidered my offer?”
“Was I supposed to?” George pressed the Up button.
“’Course you were. You
gotta come to your senses. We can make millions together.”
George smirked. “Biographies of poker players don’t even make hundreds.”
“Because the ones on the market are crap. Have you ever stopped to think that maybe the first top-notch poker biography has yet to be written? By you and about me?”
“No,” George said. “That’s not something I stopped my life to think about.”
“Well maybe you should, instead of prancing around telling everyone you want to write fiction.”
“I don’t prance.” Where was the elevator?
“You don’t make anyone feel like you want to be here. Nobody likes a snob, George.”
“Do you get most things you want by insulting the person you want them from?” George asked, and realized that yes, Mickey probably did.
“It’s how I got Loni.” Mickey smiled almost fondly. “Found her in a bar one night, asked her if she was as easy as she looked.”
George groaned. “You probably lost her by insulting her, too.” But what did George know? The longest he’d kept a girlfriend had been Fiona Gallagher for two years, and he still wasn’t over her.
“Au contraire,” said Mickey, in an accent that was anything but French. “I lost Loni by being too permissive.”
“She was your wife, not your dog. They get to do what they like nowadays.”
The elevator arrived. George got on.
“Yeah, well. They shouldn’t.” Mickey followed George into the elevator. “You know what my favorite T-shirt says? ‘If I wanted your opinion, I’d take my dick out of your mouth.’”
George snorted. “How are you still alive?”
“You mean, how am I not the Poker Choker’s latest victim?”
“What I meant was why has no one beaten you to death for your mouth? But in light of recent events, I guess my remark was off-color.”
“Where’d you learn to talk so formal?” Mickey adopted a mock-nasal accent that George hoped he didn’t have: “‘In light of recent events,’ blah blah blah.”
