Aces and Eights

by Ted Thackrey, Jr.

  All right. Worth a thought, but not immediately useful. The rage, however, was a different matter. Not the best. Not perfect. Not what I might have picked off the shelf and not the kind of thing you want to face every wee-hour morning of your life. But serviceable. Utilitarian.

  Hatred can be turned to account.

  A worthy workman employs the tools at hand...

  “Long as we’ve got nothing else to do right now,” I said, showing him a bland and friendly smile that I hoped might expand rage to the exclusion of thought, “let’s have a chat.”

  The fire points of his eyes blazed up, yearning toward me in a lava flow of virulence.

  “I know you didn’t mean to be impolite,” I went on, coaxing and encouraging the Furies, “but you interrupted our game. You and your partner. I’m sure it wasn’t intentional, and to show you I’m a sport, I’m going to let you have a chance to make it up to me. You’d like that, wouldn’t you?”

  I felt a hesitation.

  The waves of energy radiating from below stuttered for a moment, and when they returned they were changed. Fury and hatred were alloyed, now, with speculation. With doubt.

  The man below was wondering if I might be crazy.

  “What we’ll do,” I said, helping him to go with that thought, “we’ll play us a different kind of game here. Just you and me.”

  His immediate reaction, not surprisingly, was an overwhelming negative. But I had expected that. Concentrating again on my hand I relaxed its grip for a bare nanosecond, allowing its burden to slip a terrifying half-inch earthward before clamping firm again, and was instantly rewarded by a single breath of cold air...a momentary ice-touch, damping the heat of the wa before the hellfire flared up again.

  “All comfy?”

  No answer. So I let the arm swing a little.

  “Rock-a-bye baby...”

  “Jesus!”

  I widened the idiot smile and clucked reprovingly, shaking my head in time with the metronome of his body. “He hears you, son,” I said. “Yea, verily! And marks the books of those who take his name in vain! But about our little game: I like the kind where you ask questions and people have to tell the answers or pay a forfeit. Do you like that kind, too?”

  Another ration of silence. So I repeated the earlier lesson, allowing him to slip one more millimeter toward death, and this time the reaction was more than could be accepted. Full appreciation of his situation was finally beginning to seep around the adrenalin-laced edges of perception.

  One more jolt, I decided, ought to be enough. But I never got to put it to the test.

  Suddenly we were out of time.

  The noise from the helicopter had gotten louder as it took off from the roof, but I had dismissed it from thought—and that was a mistake. The pilot had something more than escape on his mind, and I realized what it was as he edged the ship crabwise, away from the tower but not in the expected line of quick retreat.

  It was a Huey, and in an instant I found myself back on a hillside in Vietnam...not as the rifle-bearing grunt I had been, but as the enemy we had stalked even as he stalked us. I was Charlie, black pajamas and all, and the bird hovering near was the heart of darkness, the symbol-made-real of hatred and death. There was a door gunner, and he was lining up the shot.

  I understood at once.

  Guerrilla disengagement maneuvers—like machine guns and closed rooms—have their own logic. You take with you those who can come. But you do not leave the rest.

  “No!”

  The single word-sound, expelled from me in a frantic blast of breath and lung power, was enough to alert the dangling man to his danger. But not enough to allow us to do anything about it.

  A decade had passed since the last time I heard the peculiar sound of .50-caliber ammunition at close range, but it is not a sound you forget.

  The gunner’s aim was excellent.

  And the shot was easy.

  The man below me was dead—and I knew when it happened; the heat became ice and then was nothing at all—before the second burst tore his body free of my grip to fall, limp and tenantless, to the parking lot three hundred feet below.

  I scrambled backward, moving by instinct rather than intention, quickly enough to be out of the way when the gunner put another burst into the penthouse to keep everyone’s head down. It was an effective argument and might have done the work as intended but for the decorative genius of the Scheherazade’s lighting engineers who had ringed the entire top floor with spotlights whose beams converged in the sky at the far end of the building, illuminating the sky above the hotel...and capturing the Huey for a single instant as it clattered away.

  The image was compelling. And indelible: NANG

  Clear, prosaic markings on the side and bottom of the gunship informed the world that one killer had just escaped and another had been summarily executed under the All-American red-and-white-and-blue auspices of the Nevada Air National Guard.

  A SERMON

  (CONTINUED)

  We live, indeed, in a world of wonders where deadly fumes fill the sky and poisons spew into the oceans and murder has become the casual sport of children. A world where inconstancy is the only constant, where chance is the only certainty...

  THREE

  The first few moments after the helicopter was finally out of sight were only an extension of what had gone before—a waiting, to see who would start shooting next.

  And then reaction set in.

  My hands were bleeding from contact with broken glass and other unfriendly objects, and when I tried to haul myself erect I discovered that it wasn’t as easy as I remembered. Ask anyone who has ever survived a firefight. The shakes begin when the shooting ends. And then come the sweats.

  Leaning on the track-sprung jamb of what had recently been a heavy glass door, I found myself fighting a sudden lunatic impulse to laugh.

  Tables, chairs, cards, chips, broken glass, weapons, bullet holes, assorted wreckage—and money in every denomination except small—were strewn about what had lately been an elegant penthouse suite with a kind of lunatic precision keyed to the presence of three supine bodies and a few wild-eyed survivors now emerging hesitantly from inadequate cover.

  Raw material, perhaps, for the brush of a latter-day Bruegel.

  Or Gahan Wilson.

  But I had come to Las Vegas in aid of financial enhancement—to play a game of high-stakes poker against people who could afford to win or lose with equal grace. A quiet professional exercise, arranged by an old friend and undertaken in the reasonable hope of profit.

  Surveying the result, I had to think it was one hell of a way to run a business...

  Summer is an easy time in the little Sierra town of Best Licks where I live, and until four days ago I had been enjoying it to the limit. But then the letters came.

  Three were from banks, informing me that I was broke.

  A fourth was from the Department of the Treasury, explaining why.

  Income tax is always a problem for anyone who makes all or part of his living from any activity even loosely definable as gambling. He does not dare tell the truth. List your profession as “gambler” or “betting agent” or even “casino operator” and your tax return gets a bright red “RACKETEER” stamp across its front—open invitation to the unwelcome attentions of every government agency from the Secret Service to the FBI, with carbon copies to the State Department just in case you ever need a passport.

  So the gamblers have to lie.

  I know one former world poker champion who lists his occupation as professional golfer (God knows he is that; never play that man a round at $100 Nassau!) and another who claims to be a billiards instructor; a world-renowned casino boss who had set up and operated gaming operations throughout the Caribbean and Central America went to his grave insisting that he was an educator (he ran a school for blackjack dealers during the last few years of his life), and the number of Las Vegas hustlers who represent themselves as traveling salesmen (you buy and sell the cards
, right?) is almost beyond counting.

  I call myself a minister of the gospel, and I can prove claim to the title.

  Sort of.

  The room in my house that serves me as office and citadel has a number of items displayed on the wall, including devil masks from Sri Lanka and Madagascar, a handsome and carefully counterfeited treasure map that I keep to remind me that I am not a genius, and a Malay dagger that had to be pried out of an inconvenient spot in my back in the days before I started learning to pay close attention to my surroundings.

  There is also a framed certificate declaring to all and sundry that I am ordained a minister of the Universal Life Church, Inc. (Kirby J. Hensley, DD, president and presiding bishop), and entitled to all privileges and considerations pertaining thereunto.

  It is quite legal.

  It costs nothing.

  You can get one like it by mailing a simple request to church headquarters in Modesto, California.

  And it is prominently displayed in the interest of heading off any inquiry that might arise concerning other certificates, dated a few years earlier and hidden elsewhere in the house, attesting to my ordering as deacon and priest of the Protestant Episcopal church in the United States of America.

  Not many people remember that such documents exist, and only two of them live in Best Licks. All the others up there accept me as a hypocritical Bible-thumping humbug, and attend my Sunday services at the town’s beat-up little church because they believe it’s all a part of an elaborate scam invented by their pastor to pry money out of the bureaucrats at various welfare foundations and government agencies.

  Actually, the occasional infusions of money that support the annual deficit of the town of Best Licks—and its oddly assorted population—come not from the long-suffering taxpayers or from charitable groups, but from the pastor’s poker fortunes.

  A satisfactory arrangement, and a long-standing one.

  But now the Internal Revenue Service was having an acute attack of curiosity. Someone in the Fresno office had decided there was something decidedly peculiar about the Church of Best Licks, its pastor, and the whilom ghost town in the Sierra. It wanted to ask some questions and to make sure it got some answers; all bank accounts and other assets of church, town, and pastor had been impounded.

  Margery, the electronic genius and majordomo without whom the whole shooting match would have turned back into a pumpkin long ago, gave me the bad news when I returned from a pebble-catching session with our resident mahayana master, who had been showing me a brand-new exercise: Hold a pebble on the back of each hand, raise your hands to shoulder level and as far behind you as possible—then move your hands quickly and accurately enough to catch both pebbles in your palms... before they have fallen more than three inches.

  Great for the reflexes.

  But the glow of accomplishment that comes with even the most meager and halting progress evaporated the moment I got back to the office. Margery is aware of where the money really comes from and has too much sense to be impressed—she knows how easily a poker player can get broke and how often it happens to me. I’m only a winner over the distance; short term is in the laps of the gods and the laws of probability.

  “They get it all?” I asked.

  Margery shrugged.

  “Most of it,” she said. “Weren’t any letters from the banks in Modesto or San Rafael; I checked by phone and the balances there are still where they should be.”

  “Not a hell of a lot.”

  “Better than nothing.”

  “If you say so...”

  Neither of us talked again for a while, and I used the silence to consider various ways and means, but we both knew the bottom line without any real need for discussion. I was going to have to find a game.

  And soon.

  Poker is a phenomenon that flourishes from one end of the nation to the other; no city and no town is complete without a regularly attended and socially (if not always legally) accepted game or two. The developing professional can support himself well enough by working a kind of circuit among them, never staying long enough in one location to wear out his welcome and never neglecting a stop for so long as to become a stranger.

  While moderately profitable, however, these locally established games usually have built-in betting and raising limits that keep them within the range of acceptable pain for middle-income losers. An indispensable training ground. But the professional who pays his dues and learns his trade must graduate to the arena of table stakes, no-limit play where it is possible to win or lose a young fortune in an evening or two of friendly action.

  Such contests are not rare. But they are harder to find than the middle-level kind and require a certain amount of discreet probing among friendly contacts in the trade—an inquiry here and a word there—to find out who is holding and who is hurting and who is looking for a chance to play some poker.

  It can take time, and I was about to make the first of what I knew would have to be several long-distance calls when my own phone rang.

  Margery picked it up, said a word or two, and handed it to me. I clamped my palm across the mouthpiece.

  “Who?”

  She shook her head. “Male,” she said, “maybe midforties by the voice—said ask you if you’d tried to kill any hospital orderlies lately...?”

  I thought it over, and the first name that came to mind, in view of the inquiry, was that of Mistah Dee Tee Price, the sometime demolitions sergeant turned boardroom takeover pirate who had aided and abetted me in various enterprises over the years since our failed attempt on the life of that obnoxious medical corpsman.

  But Margery was well acquainted with Dee Tee’s East Texas rumble and would have told him to cut the crap.

  Which left only one possibility.

  “To hell with you, Goines,” I said, lifting the receiver to my ear. “We should have set that trap for you instead of the pill-roller.”

  Sam Goines laughed, and we spent another minute or two exchanging insults in lieu of small talk to bridge the more than ten years since our last conversation. And then he came to the point.

  He was putting together a friendly little game—say $100,000 buy-in—and would I care to take a hand?

  Well, sir, then, there now...

  I make it a point never to question the ways and works of the Omnipotent and All-Seeing. Ask and ye shall receive. Knock and it shall be opened unto you. Your Father knoweth ye have need... and all these things shall be added. Them as has, gits. Never look a gift game in the mouth, and behold, O ye of little faith.

  Amen, bro.

  Packing took five minutes and transportation to the nearest major airport took a little longer. But not much, and floating down on the desert metropolis of Las Vegas the following night I had moments of leisure in which to be struck, as always, by the sheer unlikelihood of the place. A town of its size simply does not belong where it is, and no explanation for its existence—its continued prosperity—has ever seemed entirely adequate.

  Everyone has his own theory.

  One of the more logical was put forward in a television interview a few years ago by a man of thoughtful years and respected credentials (three times poker champion of the world in the days when that title was anchored in reality and a legendary hand at the game before he was old enough to vote) who had been a fixture in Las Vegas for longer than most people can remember and had better reason than most for appreciation and understanding of the local scene.

  But his view was not the sort to make him a local hero. “Look at the faces out there on the street,” he said. “Not the ones over on the straight side of town, where they join the PTA and work for a living. I’m talking about the faces out there on the sidewalk in front of the casinos.

  “Just look!

  “Those faces are hurt. They are damaged and the people that own them are the ruins. The dregs. Every loser and hustler and thief and (bleeping) son of a (bleep) from every part of the country and every part of the world winds up out there.
In Las Vegas. All crowded together in the middle of the desert where they can tear each other up and tear themselves up and throw themselves away any fool way they please and nobody will give a good goddamn.

  “That’s why this town is out here where it is.

  “And a damn good thing, too. The only other business that this kind of country is good for is maybe testing atom bombs, and by God if they don’t do that now, just a few miles away from here, over at the Flats.

  “Think for a minute: If you wanted to build something really dangerous like a germ warfare factory, say, where would you put it? In the middle of New York City? Chicago? Los Angeles, maybe? Hell, no! You’d put the filthy thing out here in the desert where it couldn’t hurt anything or anyone who matters a damn...”

  The interview aired on ABC’s Wide World of Sports, and the Chamber of Commerce people didn’t speak to him for a month.

  Not that he noticed.

  All the same, the town has continued to thrive amid constant predictions of gloom and doom, and a big part of what has happened and is still happening there is visible to the eye. Especially from the air. Especially at night.

  To passengers approaching McCarran International, an airport capable of serving a city six times the size of Las Vegas, the massed lights of the town have a nervous and shimmering quality that gives peculiar emphasis to those dark patches near its center. They suggest unfinished business, and this is accurate because Las Vegas is still busily inventing and reinventing itself and its myth as it stumbles into the final decade of the twentieth century.

  Just a year or two ago the place was generally believed to have suffered mortal injury when gambling was made legal in the decayed New Jersey seaside resort of Atlantic City. Existence of the new East Coast competitor was expected to cut deeply into the annual “handle” of the casinos, which is the only true and reliable measure of prosperity in the desert of southern Nevada.

  And for a time, that is what happened.

  Development came to a screeching halt, some of the older and weaker hotels were driven nearly to the wall. The casino at the Aladdin Hotel actually closed for a time, and many of the more prosperous casinos joined a general rush to throw up clones of their Las Vegas entities on or near the Boardwalk.