'Drink?' King said.
'I'll just take a beer,' Macklin said.
'Maybe a shrimp cocktail.'
'Fine. Tiffany will get it for you.'
Macklin sat down. He took the thousand out of his pants pocket and put it on the table beside him without making much attempt to smooth them out.
'The gentleman with the five-o'clock shadow is Tony, my dealer.'
Macklin nodded at him.
'The rest will introduce themselves,' King said.
'Bill,' the first player said, and they went around the table.
'Chuck.'
'Mel.'
'John.'
'Sully.'
Macklin smiled and nodded. Tiffany brought him beer and shrimp cocktail and managed to rub one of her breasts against him as she did so.
'Five-card draw,' Tony said.
'Jacks or better. Hundred-dollar minimum.'
Macklin nodded and put his hundred in the pot. Tony began to deal. He was thin with dense black hair that waved straight back.
The cards seemed to move about in his thin hands as if they were alive. Macklin got a pair of threes. Chuck opened. Macklin drew three cards. It didn't improve his threes. He dropped out. Chuck won with three queens. Tiffany made sure everyone had what they needed in food and drink. And she made sure that she rubbed her chest against all the players but Tony. Tony neither ate nor drank.
Sergeant Voss leaned on the wall in the foyer. Occasionally Tommy King sat in for Tony. Macklin was a competent card player, but it didn't interest him. Gambling was for losers. There were better ways to get money. And there were better ways to lose it... like women. Macklin played hard enough to make it seem he was trying and kept close track of the amount of money that was moving Iv across the table.
After an hour and a half, Macklin was down $200.
i 'Excuse me a minute,' he said.
'Damn beer, you don't drink it, : you just rent it.'
He stood and walked through a bedroom into the bath and closed the door and locked it. Then he unbuttoned his pants, pulled the tape off the gun butt and took the pistol out of his protector. He put the pistol down on the top of the toilet tank and took the occasion to urinate. Make it authentic. Then he zipped up.
Washed his hands, dried them on a towel, picked up the pistol, cocked it, and went back through the bedroom. He took a pillow |s off the bed and shook the pillowcase loose. Carrying it in his left hand, with the 9-mm in his right, he went into the poker room. The first thing he did as he stepped through the bedroom door was to shoot Sergeant Voss in the middle of the chest. Voss grunted and fell on his left side and twitched a couple of times and was still. It took the starch out of everyone else in the room. Macklin waved the gun gently toward the poker players. Tiffany began to cry softly.
Macklin ignored her.
'Any one of you can be next,' Macklin said.
'Unless I get all the money.'
Nobody spoke.
'Everybody clasp their hands behind their head.'
They did as they were told.
'No problem,' Tommy King said.
'You'll get your money.'
'This is true,' Macklin said.
'Now, one by one, starting with you, Tommy, get up, empty your pockets into the pillowcase. And then lie facedown on the floor,' he gestured with the gun barrel, 'right there.'
They did as they were told. After all the men had done as they were told, Macklin picked up the money on the table and handed it to Tiffany.
'Hold that,' he said.
Then he surveyed the room.
'In a minute I'm going to search you, one at a time. If I find you held out on me, I'm going to shoot you in the back of the head.'
He paused a moment.
'Anybody got anything to declare?'
