Thou Art With Me (21 page)

“What should I wear?” she asked Jeremiah after she’d stood in front of the closet unable to make a decision for five minutes.

“Definitely the red one, it will keep the other gamblers distracted,” he said.

“Really?”

He walked up behind her and wrapped his arms around her waist. “Really,” he whispered into her ear before kissing it.

She turned in his arms and then he was kissing her lips. Her heart began to race as the kisses continued, deeper, more passionate. His breathing was ragged as he tightened his arms around her.

“Don’t go,” he whispered.

“What?”

“Don’t go. Stay here with me,” he said, his voice pleading.

“I have to go. This is our chance to catch the bad guys. It’s why we’re here,” she said.

He put his hand under her chin and tilted her head upward so he could stare into her eyes. “Please, I’m begging you. Don’t go. It’s not safe. I...I can’t protect you.”

She stared back at him. “I know.”

She stepped back, forcing him to release his hold on her.

After dinner Cindy was out in front of the building where both Jack and Levi seemed surprised to see her. Inside she was in complete turmoil. She and Jeremiah hadn’t spoken six words since she had told him she was going through with the plan. She owed it to Mark to do this. More than that, she owed it to herself.

A limo pulled up in front of them.

“Well, boys,” Cindy said. “Let the games begin.”

Mark, his captain, and Zeb were all on the casino floor, slowly running through their nickels as they kept watch. At last two men and a woman in a red dress were escorted through on their way to one of the private rooms.

It took all Mark’s self-control not to stare. The woman was Cindy. She looked different than he’d ever seen her. She was cool, collected, and she was working her curves for all they were worth. It was like watching her doppelganger walk by; it was so hard to believe that it was the same woman he knew.

They hadn’t been able to risk going near the resort to wire her up with a mic or anything. Fortunately Jeremiah had brought a whole bag of tricks with him unbeknownst to Mark and Cindy. The gold wristwatch Cindy was wearing was just a fancy casing for a panic button. As soon as she pushed it, Jeremiah would be alerted and he, in turn, would alert them. It wasn’t ideal, but it was what it was.

Until she pushed that button all they could do was wait and wonder what was going on inside the room she had just disappeared into.

Cindy walked into the game room followed by Jack and Levi. Two other men were already present and seated at the table. A third man was standing in the corner and Cindy wasn’t sure if he was running the room or providing security. Either way he did not look like someone to tangle with. Their driver made sure they were all inside the room before he left.

Cindy chose her seat, facing the door. From that seat she could also keep an eye on the man in the corner. She settled in as though she owned the place, and it must have had an affect because all eyes were on her. Dimitri would have been proud.

In front of each player were stacks of chips. “I don’t believe I’ve ever encountered one of these before,” she said, lifting up one of the white chips.

“White is one thousand. Red is five thousand. Blue is ten thousand. Green is twenty-five thousand,” the man in the corner said.

“Oh gentlemen there must be some mistake. I didn’t ask to sit at the kiddy table,” she said.

And in her mind a phrase her grandfather had always used when playing cards with her was running over and over.
Go big or go home
.

One of the strangers at the table glanced at the man in the corner.

So, he works for the casino and he’s not just another player
, she thought to herself.

“Would any players object if we bring out the black chips?” the man in the corner asked.

Levi and Jack exchanged quick glances. “Black. One hundred thousand?” Levi asked, sounding strained.

The man nodded.

Levi and Jack exchanged another quick glance.

“I’m not making you uncomfortable, am I?” Cindy asked roguishly.

“No. Bring out the black chips,” Jack said.

The man disappeared and returned a couple of minutes later. He set five black chips in front of each player, bringing the total of chips in front of each person to one million by her estimation.

Look at me now, granddad.

“House rules. There will be ante before each hand played. Dealer’s choice for the game.”

There was a brand new deck of cards still sealed in plastic in the middle of the table.

“Who goes first?” Levi asked, sounding nervous.

Cindy made a tsk-ing sound. “Oh you poor boy. Did no one ever explain things to you? Ladies always go first.”

She leaned forward, picked up the deck of cards, and peeled the plastic off it. The man in the corner quickly took it off the table where she dropped it. She sorted through the deck, tossed the two jokers to the side along with the box, and then began to shuffle.

On the third time through she was able to make the cards form a bridge despite how stiff they were. She let Jack cut the deck and then she picked it back up.

“Ante up, gentlemen,” she said, tossing in a red chip.

All the men did the same.

“You know what I love?” she asked, letting her voice purr over the words. “A good game of stud.”

21

Jeremiah was nearly out of his mind by the time he sat down on the couch in Dr. Carpenter’s office. Cindy was beyond his help. All he could do was wait for the signal from her wristwatch that it was time for the police to close the net and pray that she would be safe.

“This is unexpected,” Dr. Carpenter said as he looked up from the papers on his desk.

“Is it?” Jeremiah asked, in no mood to play games with the man.

“Not really, no.” Dr. Carpenter took off his reading glasses and tossed them on the desk. “They took her, didn’t they?”

“Yes.”

“Then they are even bigger fools than I took them for.”

Jeremiah just continued to stare at him.

“What I told both of you was the truth. You have the potential to have a great relationship, but you both need to overcome a few things first. Honestly, you’re at a crossroad. The time has come to choose. Choose even a moment too late, though, and you will have lost her forever.”

“Thanks for the advice.”

“So, what now?”

“Now you’re going to tell me everything.”

“I don’t know everything. I am paid to give them names. The names of the resort clientele that are most likely to have risk taking or addictive personalities. At first I thought they were trying to identify candidates for their gambling addiction retreats, a way to market more aggressively to those who might need it.”

“But it didn’t take you very long to figure out that wasn’t what they were doing with the names you gave them?”

“Yes. They paid too well. Ten dollars a name is nothing. I agree, look the other way. Maybe even a hundred same thing. But a thousand dollars a name? That’s too much to pay for a marketing lead for this particular business. For a moment I thought maybe they were selling the name to competitors, but I soon realized that is not it either.”

“What happened?”

“They started giving me lists of people to focus on. Lists with only the wealthiest clients on them.”

“Why’d you do it? You’re a smart guy, very perceptive. You could do quite well somewhere else.”

The man shook his head. “Ah, yes, but somewhere else they’d look a little more closely at my papers, make a few more inquiries, maybe even a phone call.”

“And they’d figure out you lost your license some time ago,” Jeremiah guessed.

“It is as you say.”

“For what?”

“It doesn’t matter. What matters is that I am good at what I do. Here I could help people. And I have. But I also know nothing lasts forever. So, I take the extra money, save it for when I have to leave.”

“Tell me about Malcolm Griffith.”

Dr. Carpenter frowned. “Malcolm Griffith. I saw him when he was here a week or two ago. I never put his name on the list.”

Jeremiah leaned forward. “Now would not be the time to lie to me,” he said, and he went ahead and let the mask slip a little, let the doctor see just how far the darkness ran through him.

The other man sucked in his breath. “I knew you weren’t a nice guy.”

“No, I’m not, but I am the good guy. Tell me about Malcolm.”

“Malcolm was rich, yes, and he was a bit of a risk taker, as most rich men are. That’s how many of them achieve the level of success they do. But he is no gambler. He has no addiction complex. And he has a very strong sense of right and wrong.”

“Had,” Jeremiah corrected him.

The psychologist frowned. “What do you mean?”

“I mean your friends pulled him into their little poker game. He realized it was fixed, he confronted them, and they killed him.”

Dr. Carpenter’s eyes widened in genuine surprise. “This isn’t true.”

“It is true.”

“Why would they pick him? I never put him on the list.”

“Greed? Just a guess. After all, you didn’t put Cindy on the list either and yet she’s at the game right now.”

“I never thought anyone would get hurt,” he said, looking genuinely contrite. “I’ll help all I can, tell you all I know.”

“Is Arnold one of them?” Jeremiah asked.

“No.”

“How do you know, you said you didn’t know everyone in their little group.”

“I know he is not. He does not have the personality for it. He is a good man. And I know that they worked hard to avoid being detected by him. I figured detection one day was inevitable.”

“Hence, saving up your little bribes for the day you got fired.”

He nodded.

“Okay, show me everything you have.”

They were nearly an hour into the game and Jack was nearly out of chips. Levi was doing only slightly better while Cindy was holding her own against the other two men. Then again, she had an advantage. She knew they were cheating and she was playing accordingly. Both Levi and Jack were still under the delusion that this was a game of skill and luck.

She just wished she knew when her moment would come. She could tell they were cheating. They were signaling to each other. It was subtle, but it was happening. So if either of them were dealing she knew to keep her bets light. She was also working to lay down a set of false tells so that she controlled what kind of hand they thought she had. It was a trick she had learned playing with her father and grandfather.

Her seven-year-old self had learned to frown at bad hands all throughout a game and to try to bluff her way through them until she got a really spectacular hand and then she would frown just as hard and raise aggressively. And they would think that once again she had nothing and she would keep raising until they called and she’d clean them out. It was a lot more sophisticated than what her seven-year-old self was capable of, but she was working the same principles here.

Jack slammed his cards down as he got taken for the rest of what he had. He was red in the face, angry. He wanted a chance to win it back. “Get me some more chips,” he said.

“I’m sorry, but you’ve maxed your credit limit,” the man in the corner said.

Jack sat there for a moment, fuming.

“Don’t be a sore loser, Jack,” she said, not trying to mock him, but rather trying to calm him down so he’d get out of there before he did something truly stupid.

“I am no loser,” he said. He turned toward the man in the corner. “This should buy me more chips,” he said. He pulled Dorothea’s pearl necklace out of his jacket pocket and tossed it at the man.

Cindy barely restrained herself at the sight of it.

The man glanced at the one player at the table who nodded almost imperceptibly.

“Let me see what I can do,” the man said, exiting with the necklace. He returned shortly with more chips.

It didn’t matter. Within three more hands both Levi and Jack were out. They stood up and the man moved to block the door. “No one leaves until the game is done.”

“This is a load of crap,” Levi fumed.

And suddenly it was as though she could see what was about to play out. She could feel the anger of the two men. Jack was angry, but at this point knew to keep his mouth shut. He had, after all, used a stolen necklace as a buy-in. Levi, though, was starting to get noisy. He was on the verge of saying that there had been cheating going on, and if he didn’t back down from that statement fast he was going to get himself killed.

Maybe get all of them killed. She thought about pushing the panic button. The truth was, though, as far as the cheating went it was her word against the others in the room.

She took a deep breath, picked up a couple of her black chips and threw them at Jack and Levi.

“Why don’t you boys shut up and let a lady play,” she said. “Or you could cause a fuss and end up with
nothing
,” she said, giving her voice a slight edge to it as she’d heard Jeremiah do before when trying to intimidate someone.

And, for a miracle, it actually seemed to work.

“Alright. Now let’s stop fussin’ and start playing,” she said.

They went four more hands and then she was dealing. She’d called five card draw this time. She ended up with the Ace, King, and Jack of hearts along with the eight of hearts and a six of spades. She stared for a moment. Her natural instinct was to get rid of the six and hope for another heart to give her a flush. She had three to the big one, though. The royal flush. Her father would tell her to play it safe, but her grandfather’s words kept echoing in her head.

She tossed the six and the eight. She pulled two cards and when she saw the Queen and Ten of hearts show up as if by magic it took everything she had not to give away her excitement. She played her fake tell, letting off that she was disappointed but determined to try and recoup her losses by bluffing.

She sized up the stacks of chips in front of the other two players. When the betting came around to her she raised by one million dollars. It was not the first time she’d made that large a bet, but three of the four times she’d bet that large before she’d been bluffing and had made sure she was caught in the bluff.

Now the other two guys were sizing up her stack of chips. It was the end, it was as though they all sensed it. The guy to her left stared her dead in the eyes and then raised again. As did the guy next to him.

She licked her lips and then slid her entire pile into the center. “I’m all in, gentlemen,” she said.

And after only a moment’s hesitation they both did the same. “We call, little lady,” the one said.

She brushed her watch with her pinky finger, pushing the button, as she flipped her cards up and over to drop them on top of the pile of chips.

“Royal flush.”

Jack and Levi jumped out of their seats. Cindy braced herself for the fallout.

“That’s more than five million,” the man directly across from her said.

“So it is,” she answered.

He glanced at the man in the corner. Her heart hammered in fear because she felt what was coming next. And when he pulled a gun out of his coat she saw it long before Jack or Levi did.

“Okay, now here’s the deal-” he began.

The door flew open and he turned in surprise. Mark leaped forward, knocking the gun out of his hand and then hit him in the jaw. Two other men surged into the room behind Mark and descended on the two gamblers.

“Make sure you arrest Jack for the theft of Dorothea’s pearl necklace,” Cindy said as she stood up.

She was amazed that her legs would even support her weight given how shaky she felt.

“Mark, a million of this belongs to Joseph,” she said.

He nodded even as he was putting the handcuffs on the gunman. Jack made a break for the door. Cindy yanked off one of her high heeled shoes and threw it at the back of his head. The heel hit him right in the back of the neck and he dropped like a stone.

“Whoa!” Levi shouted in shock.

“You think that’s something, you should see what she can do with a dart,” Mark said.

Seven hours later Cindy and Jeremiah were in the back of Mark’s car and finally heading home. The two women, the masseuse, a janitor, and Dr. Carpenter had all been arrested along with the three men from the casino.

It turned out that the masseuse, Lancaster, had been the brains of the group. He had successfully run similar schemes at two other resorts around the country. Once on the inside he had manipulated the old yoga teacher into leaving so Summer could take her place.

Malcolm had been killed at the poker game when he surmised the game was rigged. He had been killed by the same man who would have shot Jack, Levi, and Cindy. Lancaster and the janitor had buried the body.

As soon as the handcuffs had gone on the front desk woman had rolled over on the others, telling the police everything she knew, including the location of the grave.

When Cindy and Jeremiah had finally left, Arnold had extended an open invitation to return any time for free.

Cindy was exhausted as she finished telling Mark and Jeremiah just how the poker game had gone.

“You should have seen her throw her shoe, though. That was the best part,” Mark said.

“Dorothea got her necklace back, I’m glad,” Cindy said.

“Yeah. Apparently Jack has a history of stealing baubles for his wife. She’s going down for it, too, as an accessory.”

“What about Kim and Levi?” Cindy asked.

“Idiots, greedy idiots, but they were clean.”

“I can’t believe it’s already Friday,” Jeremiah said.

“I haven’t gone to bed yet, it’s still Thursday, I don’t care what the clock says,” Mark protested.

“I’m going to sleep all day tomorrow, or today, or whatever,” Cindy vowed.

“I think we all will,” Mark said grimly.

They made it to Cindy’s house first just as dawn was touching the sky. Jeremiah carried her bag up to the door for her. “Meet you Saturday morning for Valentine’s breakfast?” he asked.

“That sounds good.”

He leaned in, gave her a quick kiss, and then was headed back to the car.