The only one not frozen was George. He began to shake. His gaze fell to the remaining papers in his fist. He tossed them in.
I pitied him. Pity, though, has no place in poker. Then again, neither do fools.
She called. He turned over his hole card. He didn't have a flush. Just a pair of kings, as she must have suspected. His right hand edged off the table to drop limply onto his lap.
All eyes stared at Ann's hole card, as if their combined hopes could lift it from the felt. It resisted. It lay there until Ann reached over to invert it.
An ace. A diamond for the heart already exposed.
The fat man laughed, looking at the loser. The tall old man gazed with sympathy at the pitiable figure. Ann motioned for a security man to retrieve her winnings. The shares she recovered personally, tucking them away in her purse.
The fat man's laughter faded like a good memory when he saw the pistol in George's hand. A maddened finger jerked against the trigger.
I tried to outrace the bullet. My arms rose up in a double fist to come smashing down on his right shoulder. Too late. The gun lunged backward in his hand. He dropped under my blow like a bag of wet garbage, the pistol falling onto his lap.
The chair Ann sat in had a hole in it. High up, at chest level.
Ann was gone.
While guards jumped on George's unconscious frame, I looked for Ann. I saw no sign until I noticed a mound of chips slide off the table. I had to concentrate in some odd fashion in order to see her. Staring more intently, I saw her shoveling the chips into a Mylar bag. Not even the guards seemed to notice her. Whenever someone stared directly at her, it was as if his gaze just kept moving.
I stepped over to her and knelt down.
'Congratulations,' she said, handing me the shares. 'You now own controlling interest in a failed spacecraft company.'
Across the field of green, George stirred as if waking from a deep sleep. One of the guards lifted him up while the other deftly retrieved the pistol.
'Let's go.' Ann shook her hair back and crammed the last few chips into the bag. She turned to go, only to bump up against the arm of a slender black man. He reacted as though nothing more than a breeze had wafted by.
A few men and women glanced at Ann as we waded through the crowds toward the casino exit. Their gaze would light on her, then wander, their expressions growing blank.
My last view of George was of him being escorted to the security office by three gentlemen in nicely tailored black tuxes. He looked as if he'd been deflated and hung on a coathook.
'You rolled him like a drunk,' I said.
She shrugged. 'Poker is a lot like assassination, Dell. Sometimes someone gets wiped out.'
'And assassination is a lot like poker-you've got to understand the minds of all the players.' I spoke quietly, waiting for her to convert her winnings at the cashier. 'What I've been trying to figure out all along is your part in this. A little roughing up by a priest wouldn't drive most people to such efforts.'
She said nothing. The cashier calmly wrote out a chit. He might have been playing with the money all by himself for all the notice he gave Ann. You'd think they had women shot at every night.
She deposited the chit in her handbag. When she looked at me, it was with a flush of excitement. The light in her eyes warmed, like fire seen dimly through ice.
'I've got a lot more than that to get even with, Dell. A lot more than a little pushing around.'
I stepped out of the casino with her at my side. 'Let me guess,' I said. 'Your parents were Bible-beating fundamentalists, right?'
She grimaced. 'Hardly.'
'Then you possess the ultimate Electra complex, which you try to sublimate by helping to murder your heavenly Father.'
