Tim Powers - Last Call (8 page)

Scott couldn't tell if Newt sighed or if the whisper was just the tires on the Boulder Highway pavement. "I don't know, man, but Leroy is a sucker for that bet."

There were a lot of cars parked in the Boulder Basin marina lot, and the white houseboat at the dock was big and wide, and lit brightly enough to dim the emerging stars. The moon was dark—a day short of the newest sliver.

Gravel crunched underfoot as they walked from the car toward the lake and the boat, and the wind from up the distant twistings of the Colorado River fluttered Scott's sweat-spiky hair.

A figure who could only be their host stood on the lighted deck. He was a big, tanned man in a white silk suit; by his lined face Scott guessed him to be around forty, but his hair was brown and full with not a thread of gray, and at least in this light it didn't look like a toupee. A big gold sun disk hung on a chain around his neck.

"Here's a young man wanting to play, Mr. Leroy," said Newt as he led Scott up the ramp to the teakwood deck. "Scarecrow Smith, this is Ricky Leroy."

When Leroy smiled at Scott, it was absently, with the politeness of a distracted host, but Scott opened his mouth to ask the man
How've-you-been?
, for he was unthinkingly sure that he had once known him well. Leroy caught Scott's look of recognition and raised one eyebrow curiously. Scott realized that he couldn't remember where he knew Leroy from, and at the same moment he became aware of the open port beyond the tall white figure.
Never talk about anything important in front of the cards,
he thought. "Uh, beautiful boat you've got," he said lamely.

"Thank you, Mr.—I'm sorry?"

"Smith."

"Mr. Smith. I hope you get a few beautiful boats yourself!" Newt led Scott across a couple of yards of deck and through the broad double doors. Their steps were suddenly muffled in thick red carpet. "You know him already?"

"I don't know," Scott mumbled, looking around, ignoring for the moment the crowd of people standing by the bar in the corner or sitting around the long green felt table.

He guessed that a wall or two had been knocked out to make the central lounge so big; the room was at least twenty feet by forty feet, and the dark rosewood paneling gleamed in the yellow light of the many electric lamps hanging on the walls.

Newt was whispering to himself and bouncing a finger this way and that. "Just made it," he said quietly. "We're now thirteen. Grab a seat."

The engines started, and the boat shook.

"I want another beer first."

The boat surged forward as he was walking toward the bar, and he almost sat down on the carpet. The person who caught his arm and steadied him was Ricky Leroy. "Can't have you down yet!" said the big man jovially. "Smith, you said your name was? No relation to Ozzie, I suppose?"

"Actually," Scott said, taking another step forward and leaning on the bar, "yes. He's my dad. A Miller, please," he added to the obese bartender.

"He couldn't make it tonight?"

"Thanks," Scott said, accepting a tall glass from the fat man. "Hmm? Oh, no—he doesn't like to gamble on water."

Leroy chuckled indulgently. "I guess he's old enough to have picked up a lot of superstitions."

When Leroy fanned the deck out face up across the green felt, Scott stopped breathing.

The vivid gold and red and blue images on the oversize cards seemed to intrude forcefully into his brain through the retina of his one eye, and to blow away all the memories and opinions and convictions that were the scaffolding of his adulthood, so that the cards' images could settle into perfect-fit indentations laid down long before.

The smells of hot metal and perfume clogged his nose, and it seemed to him suddenly that it was raining outside, and that someone had just been singing "Sonny Boy." And he remembered for a moment the grinning face of the Joker staring at him, somehow, from out of a plate of lobster stew.

Something in him was now unlocked—not opened yet, but unlocked—and he thought fleetingly of a night nine years earlier, and the infant girl he had held in his arms for eight hours as Ozzie drove them homeward across the Mojave Desert.

He took several deep breaths, then with trembling fingers lit a cigarette and took a sip of beer.

He looked at the other players around the table. They all seemed shaken, and one man was holding a handkerchief across his eyes.

Leroy gathered the cards together, flipped them facedown, and began shuffling them. "The ante is a hundred dollars, gentlemen," he said.

Scott drove the old thoughts out of his head and dug into his pocket.

Assumption was a game that promoted action. Nobody seemed to want to fold before the mating and thus lose the chance to sell his four cards or buy another advantageous four.

By the time the first hand's mating came up there were ninety-one hundred dollars in the pot. That was a fifth again as much as Scott had walked in with, and he was in for only seven hundred.

He had a Knight of Cups and a Six of Swords down, and was showing a Knight of Swords and a Six of Sticks. When his four-card hand came up for auction, the bidding went up to eight hundred, but another hand out there was showing a Knight, and he decided to wait and bid on it. Sail out of this hand aboard a Full Boat, he thought.

But the man holding the Knight bought a hand before the bidding came around to him. The man's hand was now "conceived" and no longer for sale.

There were five hands left to be auctioned, but none of them held any obvious help for Scott, and he wondered if he should have taken the eight hundred when he'd had the chance.

And then he waited too long, until his was one of only three unconceived hands.

"I'm willing to sell now," he told the other two players.

They both looked at him and at his two showing cards. "I'll give you two hundred," said one, a thin man in a cowboy hat.

The other player smiled at the one who'd bid. "I'll give you
three
for
yours
."

The man in the cowboy hat seemed to be considering the offer, and

Scott said quickly, "I'll take one."

The old cowboy gave him a hundred-dollar bill in exchange for his hand, and Scott picked up his empty glass and made his way to the bar.

Scott was leaning on the bar and sipping his new beer when Leroy walked up and tossed a stack of bills onto the wet wood next to the beer glass.

"Congratulations!" Leroy said heartily. "You're a parent."

Scott reached forward and fanned the bills. There were ten hundreds and three twenties.

"The pot went up to ten thousand six hundred," said Leroy, "and the old cowboy had a Straight Flush. Not all that uncommon in this game. Do you want to match that and cut the deck for Assumption?"

"Uh, no," Scott said, picking up his beer. "No, thanks, I'll keep this. The next hand's about to start then?"

Leroy waved him forward. "Your throne awaits."

At the mating in the next hand Scott had a Two and a Six down and two Kings showing, and when his hand went up for bid, two players, each of whom showed a King, bid the price of it up to $2,000 before one of them finally dropped out.

Scott pocketed his $2,000 and went back to the bar. He was already ahead by $1,860—his roll was now $9,360—and this had only been the second hand. And he hadn't even won yet!

But it was on the third hand that he really tied on to it.

As Ozzie had taught him, he quickly scanned every one of the other twelve players' up cards and then tried to watch as each of them peeked at his down cards. One man blushed slightly and began breathing a little faster, and another quickly looked away and began riffling his chips.

They both scored, Scott thought.

The first had a Queen showing; he almost certainly had a Queen and an Ace down, since two other Queens and three Kings were exposed on the board. The other man was showing an Ace; he probably had one of the other two Aces down.

Finally Scott looked at his own cards. He had a Six and a Five down and a Seven showing. Unsuited. Hope for a Straight.

He stayed, along with everyone else, through a bet and two raises. There was now ninety-one hundred in the pot.

The room was layered with cigarette smoke, but it seemed to be thicker over the pot.

The second up cards were dealt, but though he watched the players' faces, he wasn't able to glean any readable tells. He looked down at his own—a Six.

The man to his left was white-suited Ricky Leroy, who showed a Six and a Five, and Scott decided to buy Leroy's hand and hope for a Full Boat and not just a low Two Pair.

The round of betting showered another twenty-six hundred-dollar bills into the pot.

Leroy proved willing to let the hand go to Scott for twelve hundred dollars—and when the four cards were flipped to him, all face up as the rules demanded, Scott made sure that he only blinked sluggishly, as if he were too tired and drunk to have focused on them yet.

The four cards were the Six and the Five that had been showing and a Deuce and a Six. Crane now had four Sixes.

With a steady hand he lifted his glass and took a sip. So Leroy's houseboat lists a little, he told himself when he noticed the tilted surface of the beer; so what?

The rest of the mating seemed to take hours, but at last there were six players still in the game with eight cards each, two down and six up. Leroy had walked away to the bar.

"Three Sixes bet," said the man who was dealing.

"Uh," said Scott, peeking again at his down cards, "check."

The man to his left bet two hundred, the next man folded, the next two called, and the last man raised it another two hundred. The stack of bills in the middle of the table looked like a pile of green leaves that some gardener would eventually bag up and haul away.

"That's four hundred to the three Sixes," said the dealer.

"See the four," said Scott, peeling six bills off his roll, "and raise it two."

"A check-raise from the Sixes," noted the dealer.

Everyone folded but the man who had raised. He stared at Scott for a long time. He was showing two Knights and two Tens and two worthless cards. "And two," he said finally.

He thinks that the three Sixes are all I've got, Scott thought, or that at best I've got a low Boat. He's got a high Boat, probably Knights over Tens, and he knows the Aces and Queens and Kings are effectively gone.

"
And
two," Scott said, throwing the bills out onto the table.

The other player didn't move, but a glow seemed to go out of him. "Call," he said, pushing two more hundreds across the felt.

Scott flipped over his two down cards, and the other player bowed his head and tossed his hand into the discards.

"The Four of a Kind beats the Boat," pronounced the dealer.

Scott started to reach out with both arms for the pile of money, but Leroy, who had left the table after selling his hand to Scott, had returned and now stepped forward.

"Maybe not the
houseboat
." He grinned, showing big, even white teeth. "There's thirteen thousand six fifty in there, I believe." He took a leather billfold from inside his jacket and carefully separated out of it thirteen one-thousand-dollar bills and six hundreds and a fifty. He leaned forward and pressed them down onto the heaped money.

Hot, dry desert air sighed in through the open portholes, and Scott's throat burned with the smell of hot stone.

"I'm claiming the Assumption," Leroy said.

Scott sat back, put his hands on the edge of the table and grinned curiously up at this new opponent. Somehow he had forgotten Newt's telling him that Leroy liked this bet.

Scott had sunk $3,050 into this pot, counting the $1,200 he had paid for Leroy's hand. If he lost the cut, it would take him down from the more than $25,000 he had thought he had before Leroy had spoken—about three times what he'd walked aboard with—to less than $12,000. But if he won it, he'd be sitting on nearly $38,000. And at least the odds were in Scott's favor.

The dealer shrugged, gathered in the cards and shuffled them several times, handed them to another player to cut, and then slid the deck, solid as a brick, to the patch of felt in front of Scott.

The cigarette smoke was a narrow, upright funnel in the middle of the table now, like a tiny slow-motion tornado.

Still grinning, Scott slid his fingers halfway down the card-edges and lifted off the top half and showed the exposed card to the company—getting in return some looks of sympathy—and then he looked at it himself.

It was the Three of Cups. There were only four cards in the deck lower than that, the Deuces, and only three that would tie it. Seven cards out of fifty-five. One chance in about eight and a half.

Still holding the card up, Scott finished his beer, proud that his hand didn't shake in this almost certain defeat. He didn't have to tip the glass back very far at all.

He laid the top half back down on the deck and pushed it across to the dealer, who reshuffled and passed it for the cut and then slid it to the place where Leroy had been sitting.

Leroy leaned forward and curled his brown hand down over the cards; for a moment he seemed to be kneading them gently, and Scott was dully sure that the man was cheating, feeling for a crimp or an unshaved edge. Ozzie had taught him long ago that cheaters were to be either used or avoided, but never challenged, especially in a game with strangers.

Then Leroy had raised a segment of the deck, and the exposed card was the Deuce of Sticks.

There were sighs and low whistles from the other players, but Scott's ears were buzzing with the realization that he had won after all.

He reached out and began raking in and stacking the bills, glad of the revolver pressing against his hip-bone under his sweater.

Leroy sat down in the chair beside him. Scott glanced at the man and said, "Thanks."

Leroy's pupils were wider than normal, and the pulse in his neck was fast. "Yeah," he said levelly, shaking his head, "I don't know when I'm going to learn that that's not a smart bet."