The Last Act: A Novel

by Brad Parks

  “This is Pete Goodrich,” Doc said. “He’s Bobby for the night. Pete, this is Mitch Dupree.”

  So he was Mitch. Not Mitchell.

  We exchanged nods. He was staring at me, hard, just like he had that first night in the dining hall and a few times since then. I strained to remain nonchalant.

  “Everything okay, Mitch?” Doc asked. “You look bothered.”

  Mitch sat down heavily next to me and said, “I’m fine. Let’s just play cards.”

  He had been carrying a cardboard box with him. He reached into it and pulled out a handful of construction paper that had been cut into stamp-size bits. He began organizing them by color.

  “Mitch was a banker,” Doc said. “So he brings the chips and handles the money. He also keeps stats on winners and losers if you’re ever curious about that.”

  “It passes the time,” Mitch explained.

  “Sort of anal, if you ask me,” Jerry said.

  “It’s in a banker’s nature to document things,” Mitch shot back.

  Just hearing him say the word “document” was thrilling.

  Doc was already moving on: “The chips are the usual denominations. Blue is ten, red is five, white is one. Buy-in is one can.”

  “One,” I blurted. “Bobby told me five.”

  Doc and Jerry busted up laughing. Even Dupree cracked a little smile.

  I hadn’t meant it to be funny. Bobby lied so he could extort more money out of me. Somehow, I was genuinely surprised that I had been conned by a con.

  “No, no, just one,” Doc said, still smiling. “You can re–buy in once for another can if you want, but that’s it. This is paupers’ poker. The maximum pot is eight cans.”

  “All right, well, I’m in,” I said. I extracted a can from my pocket and slid it over to Dupree, who was still organizing slips of paper. The other guys handed over their cans as well. Dupree placed all of them in the cardboard box, which was now beneath his chair.

  “The blinds start at two and one,” Doc continued. “The big blind goes up by two every time we get around to the same dealer again. We do it that way instead of doubling it because it makes the game last a little longer. Other than that, it’s just regular hold ’em.”

  “Nothing wild except the players,” Jerry hooted.

  “Sounds like my kind of game,” I said.

  And, at least at first, it was. I managed to win enough to stay in the game as the large blind increased to four, then six, then eight. The whole time, I felt like Mitch was trying to steal glances at me out of the corner of his eye. I pretended to ignore it, but it was still distinctly unsettling. Why did he keep looking at me like that? I might have told myself he was just trying to read me, learn my tells. Except he had been doing the same thing before we began playing.

  At one point, when the blinds were at ten, I was dealer and was just about to look at my hold cards when Mitch flipped up his cards and said, “Re-deal, re-deal.”

  I had mistakenly given him three hold cards. Two cards must have gotten stuck together. I hadn’t noticed. I don’t think anyone else did, either. Mitch could have easily gotten away with taking the better of the two cards and sliding the third back into the deck when no one would notice.

  But he wasn’t that kind of guy.

  Apparently, he cheated only when the stakes were in the millions.

  After that, we settled back into the game. Doc eventually busted out. Then Jerry did, too, leaving only Mitch and me. With Doc acting as full-time dealer and Jerry shuffling for us, the blinds increased quickly until they reached what they had decided was the limit—a dollar. My first time as the large blind at that amount, I was dealt a pair of kings. If Mitch stayed in for fifty more cents, in addition to the fifty he had already put in as the small blind, I’d raise pre-flop and buy him out.

  Except Mitch beat me to it, raising a dollar pre-flop. A bold move. And it set up a showdown, because I wasn’t folding with pocket kings. I saw him. Doc and Jerry—who were serving as our peanut gallery at that point—made appropriate noises of appreciation and anticipation. This was looking like it would be the culminating hand of the night.

  Out came the flop: a queen, an ace, and a king. Lots of pretty faces smiling back at us. Doc and Jerry ahhed some more.

  Without hesitation, Mitch bet a dollar. Which told me he probably had an ace in the hole. But I had those kings, giving me three of a kind. I saw him again.

  The turn: a three. Which probably didn’t change anything for either of us. Mitch announced he was all in. My remaining chips just covered his bet, so I pushed them in the middle and said, “Okay, looks like we’re both all in.”

  “All right, all right,” Jerry said. “It’s about to get real up in here!”

  “Okay, fellas,” Doc said. “Pot’s right, so here goes.”

  Doc paused dramatically, then revealed the final card.

  Another queen. Giving me a full house, kings over queens. Unless Mitch had pocket queens, I was unbeatable.

  Mitch immediately hooted out a boisterous, “Ha!”

  He flipped up his cards, an ace and a queen, and cooed, “Full boat. Queens over aces. Thing of beauty.”

  It sure was. It just didn’t beat a full house with kings over queens.

  I could have broken Mitch’s heart simply by turning over my cards. But I hadn’t come here to win. So I slid my cards under what remained of the deck next to Doc and said, “Nicely played, Mitch. You got me.”

  “Fine game, young man, fine game,” Mitch said, beaming.

  I acted properly dejected. But when he stuck out his right hand, I shook it like the good sport I was.

  “Dang,” Jerry said. “Felt like I was watching World Series of Poker just now.”

  Mitch raked the pot toward him with both hands—a grand show, even if it was just slips of construction paper. Then he brought up the cardboard box and dumped them inside, along with the mackerel packets he now got to take home with him.

  “It was your night, Mitch,” Doc said.

  “Sure was,” he agreed, though he was now looking at me again. “Plus, I finally figured out why you looked so familiar.”

  And then he said the last words I wanted to hear: “I saw you in a play once. It was about tomatoes, if you can believe that.”

  * * *

  • • •

  Over the next few seconds, I might have aged a few millennia. Acting is about mastering character and then not breaking it, no matter what. And it took every bit of my experience to maintain my Pete Goodrich as a sudden rush of stress hormones cranked up my inner furnace.

  The other two men were now staring at me curiously. A fine layer of perspiration had popped on my forehead—what I would have called a flop sweat, except we had already had the final flop of the evening.

  Cherokee Purples had folded after ten weeks—seventy-six shows, to be exact. It ran in a theater that sat seventeen hundred—but was often no more than three-quarters full—which meant less than a hundred thousand people in America could claim to have seen it. Out of 320-odd million residents. The chances Mitch Dupree would be one of them were too small for me to calculate without the aid of electronics.

  He was looking at me pleasantly enough, with no suspicion or malice. But I had already been introduced to him as Pete Goodrich. How could I finesse a double life as Tommy Jump? Could I tell him that identity fraud was part of my crime? Claim I had a twin?

  “Oh yeah?” was all I said, willing my body to cool down.

  “Yeah. For our anniversary, my wife and I used to go up to New York and see a show. She loved the theater. She followed reviews and everything. We ended up going to this one that she was really high on because the Times raved about it. You’re a lot more muscly, but otherwise you look just like the guy who played the kid.”

  I was suddenly thankful for every weight I had lifted since
I was a spindly teenager. You look just like the guy who was subtly but importantly different from You’re the guy who. I had to hope that remained a distinction for him.

  “Huh,” I said. “How ’bout that.”

  “Yeah, it’s uncanny,” he said. “I’m good with faces, and I swore the moment I saw you when you first got here that I had seen yours before. I just couldn’t remember how.”

  “Well,” I drawled a little extra. “Guess I got a long-lost cousin out there.”

  “He had a big voice,” Mitch said enthusiastically. “He was a little guy, but when he opened his mouth, man, he could belt it out. I wish I could remember the name of the show. . . .”

  As his voice trailed off, Jerry filled the silence.

  “What do you say, Pete, you want to do a little West Side Story for us?” he asked. And then he broke into an off-key “Mah-reeeeeee-ah! I just met a girl named Mah-reeee-ah!”

  “I only sing in the car,” I said quickly. “And, believe me, no one wants to hear it.”

  Mitch continued: “Damn, it’s on the tip of my tongue. It was an unusual name . . . Doc, you’ll have to look it up for me.”

  My attention went to Doc, who immediately shot Mitch a scornful look and mumbled something under his breath. Then suddenly Doc was collecting his cards and standing up, like he couldn’t wait to get away from the table and distance himself from what Mitch had just said. Which only made me want to examine it.

  Look it up . . . how, exactly? I couldn’t imagine the FCI Morgantown library kept Playbills from long-extinct Broadway musicals. And we were strictly kept away from the Internet.

  Unless . . .

  And then I understood:

  Doc had a smartphone hidden somewhere. That’s why he was hurrying away. He didn’t want to bring any more attention to the secret that Mitch, in his excitement, had inadvertently spilled around the new guy.

  I stood too. And, wanting to pretend I hadn’t heard or understood the implications of Mitch’s final sentence, I blathered out, “If you read German folklore, they say we all have a doppelgänger out there somewhere. Nice to know mine does Broadway.”

  “Yeah,” Mitch said uneasily, having realized his mistake. “I just got this mental block about the name of the show. Eh, it’ll come to me.”

  “Anyway,” I said, pivoting away from this line of conversation, “it was great playing with you guys. It sounds like Bobby wanted to take a little time off from the game, so I think you might be seeing more of me.”

  “Fine with me,” Mitch said, also anxious to move on from his gaffe.

  “Yeah, long as I get to take your money home tomorrow night,” Jerry said.

  “Nice playing with you, Pete,” Doc said.

  “You too,” I said, stretching perhaps a bit too extravagantly. “Just about time for the count, I guess.”

  They agreed it was, in fact, about that time. We scurried toward our respective rooms.

  All the while, I was thinking back to our orientation, where smartphones had been fingered as the ultimate evil. I had more or less ignored it as more droning from paranoid administrators. If a guy wanted a burner so he could have phone sex with his wife somewhere that wasn’t the Randolph common area, it truly wasn’t my concern.

  Now? Doc’s phone suddenly was my concern. If Mitch could remember the name Cherokee Purples and told Doc to google it; or even if they googled “broadway musical involving tomatoes” and it led them to it?

  They would soon find pictures of a younger Tommy Jump, who would bear a more-than-coincidental resemblance to Pete Goodrich.

  CHAPTER 26

  With each passing mile, Natalie Dupree gripped the steering wheel fractionally harder. Why was this making her so nervous? She wasn’t doing anything illegal.

  It just felt that way.

  Her destination was in Gwinnett County, Georgia. When she was a girl, this was considered country. It had since been consumed by Atlanta sprawl.

  The address she had plugged into her GPS led to a warehouse set aside from a two-lane divided highway. A small white billboard had been wheeled next to the turn-in. Its plastic lettering told her she had found the right place.

  The parking lot was filled with vehicles that belonged at a political rally. DON’T TREAD ON ME decals fought for attention with FREEDOM ISN’T FREE bumper stickers. Enthusiasm for hunting, the military, and Duck Dynasty were manifest. Proclamations of devotion to the US Constitution shared window space with Confederate flags, a pairing that surely would have bewildered the combatants of the Civil War.

  She pulled next to a truck that had been covered in a camouflage wrap—wasn’t it safer if the other drivers could see you?—and got out, shouldering the Fendi bag that Mitch had bought for her during happier times. Just inside the entrance to the warehouse, a man sat at a table with a cashbox in front of him, selling tickets. Admission was twelve dollars for adults and four dollars for kids, or fifteen dollars and six dollars for what was called VIP access.

  “What does VIP get me?” Natalie asked.

  “No wait,” he said, tilting his head toward a line of roughly a dozen people whose discontent with their diminished status was plain. “I can only let in so many at a time.”

  Charlie and Claire were at school. She wasn’t scheduled to work at Fancy Pants until the afternoon. She still wanted to get this over with as quickly as possible.

  “I’ll do VIP,” she said, handing over a ten and a five.

  “All right,” he said, inking her hand with a stamp that read VIP and waving her through.

  The interior of the building had no windows. The only light came from fluorescent bulbs attached to the ceiling that cast a yellow pall on the scene below. Folding tables ringed the outside of the space, with more tables arranged in rows in the middle of the floor.

  And every table was covered with guns.

  Handguns. Shotguns. Long guns. Semiautomatics with scopes. AR-15s with pistol grips. AK-47s with banana clips.

  Guns for sport. Guns from the old west. Guns used in World War II. Even a few muzzleloaders for the nostalgic collector.

  It was almost too much for Natalie to take in at once. She made one clockwise pass around the room, pointedly not making eye contact with any of the sellers. There were enough other patrons that she could pass through without anyone trying to talk to her. She was just trying to get her heart to start beating normally.

  Was her anxiety because this made her think of waking up with that Mexican man’s gloved hand clamped across her mouth? And how different that confrontation might be next time if she had a weapon within arm’s reach?

  Or was it because she knew the other thing she ached to do with one of those guns?

  Because, sure, Natalie could have spared the long drive to the exurbs and patronized a local sporting goods store instead. It wasn’t difficult to buy a firearm in the state of Georgia. There was no need for a permit, no waiting period.

  But they’d still ask for ID. They’d still run a background check to make sure she wasn’t a felon. There would be a paper trail.

  Not so with gun shows. They were considered private sales. No different from your neighbor selling you a gun. There would be no legal scrutiny. No paperwork.

  Which is how Natalie wanted it.

  Midway through her second pass around the room, she stopped at a table that seemed to be a little more neatly arranged than the others. Her gaze fell on a pistol that was black on the bottom, gray on top. A price tag was attached to the barrel with a piece of string. It informed her that the quality of her life could be improved for a mere 425 dollars.

  “That’s a Colt Mustang,” said an eager-looking older man with a gray beard and an ice-cream-scoop belly. “You looking for something for yourself? Your husband?”

  “I’m divorced,” she said curtly, aware she was wearing her engagement ring and her wedding ring. />
  Whatever. Let him wonder.

  “Well, that Colt’s a good choice for a lady living alone,” the man said as his eyes traveled up and down her body. “It’s perfect for personal protection. Plus you can slip it in your purse if you want to carry concealed. Looks like it fits you real nice. You can pick it up if you want.”

  Tentatively, Natalie wrapped her fingers around the handle and lifted it for the briefest moment before setting it back down.

  “Bought it from a police officer last week,” the man said proudly. “His wife wanted something a little bigger. It’s been well cared for.”

  Natalie had read online that one was expected to barter at a gun show. So she said, “I’ll give you four hundred for it.”

  “I can do that,” he said. Then, as an afterthought, he asked, “You from Georgia?”

  “Yes,” she said.

  If he requested ID, she was going to bolt.

  But he just said, “All right. I gotta ask. I can’t sell it to you if you’re out of state.”

  “I live in Atlanta.”

  “Okay, then.”

  And that was it. He started removing the price tag. She reached into her purse and pulled out four crisp hundred-dollar bills, the proceeds from a few stray savings bonds she had found tucked away in a filing cabinet. She slid the money across the table. The man handed her the gun, now wrapped in a paper bag.

  “You got a carry permit?” he asked.

  “Yes,” she lied.

  “All right. That’s a good gun right there. Hope it works out well for you.”

  Natalie smiled weakly and thanked him. The entire transaction took about sixty seconds. Another minute later, she was out the door and back in her car.

  With her new gun, legally purchased—and completely untraceable—at her side.

  CHAPTER 27

  Sleep had been slow to arrive that night as I pondered my options.