She had my heart beating faster, I’ll give her that.
“Come on,” she said. “There’s a lot of money involved, and I’d rather work with another woman.”
“What’s the buy-in?” I asked. Information gathering. Knowledge. That’s all it was.
“It’s steep,” she said, “but we’d go home with everything, guaranteed. It’s not a typical cash game. It’s no-limit Hold’em run as a freeze-out tournament.”
“Which means?”
“It means you can’t buy in again when you’re out of chips. One buy-in, and the winner takes all. We would take it all. Your share would be twenty percent.”
Twenty percent of what? she wanted me to ask. Not that it mattered. I could have used twenty percent of anything. But Webbs weren’t criminals, and Jack Clarion’s old student knew the difference between a magician and a cardsharp. Didn’t hurt, either, to have the World of Magic gig in front of me, reminding me who I was and who I wasn’t.
“I’m not a cheat,” I said.
“I thought we just established that you are.”
I shook my head. “No.”
“Then what you are is a cheat with no guts.”
“I’m a magician,” I said.
“Right. I just said that.”
I smiled and sipped my drink. “It was a center deal, though, wasn’t it? I’m almost sure. It had to be, if it wasn’t a second deal, and it wasn’t a bottom deal. You flashed the bottom card on purpose, and then you dealt from the center. Am I right? Just tell me I’m right.”
She stared at me, waited until I couldn’t bear it any longer. “Incorrect.”
“For real?”
She stood up. “I’m sorry you drove all this way for nothing.”
It was actually less than nothing, because now I knew about her. I knew she had the knowledge I wanted, but I was being denied access.
She glanced toward the back of the bar. “Would you at least like something for your trouble?”
“How’s that?”
“Those guys playing pool—would you like some of their money?”
My first thought was: you’re a pool hustler, too? Then I realized, no, that’s not where this was going, and any number of classic bar cons and proposition bets started cycling through my mind. Barbill scam? No, this place was too rinky-dink, the drinks too cheap. I knew she had the deck of cards in her bag. With the cards she could take their money any number of ways. But which way? How?
“Follow me,” she said. The guy in the baseball cap was lining up to take a shot when Ellen approached them. He stood up straight again and said, “Hey.”
Both men wore T-shirts and blue jeans. Closer up, I saw that they were older than I’d first thought, at least five or ten years older than me, with fleshy faces and expanding guts, the lankness and grace of youth having fully given way to reveal the men they were stuck being from here on out.
Ellen said, “My friend and I were hoping you could settle a bet for us.”
“What kind of bet?” he said.
“Do you guys have four twenty-dollar bills?”
The baseball cap guy frowned and got his wallet out. “I have two.”
“I have a twenty and a ten,” said his friend.
“No,” Ellen said, “the ten’s no good.”
The ten was perfectly good, I assumed. Saying it wasn’t? Misdirection.
“So three twenties?” Ellen said, and tilted her head, as if deliberating. “Okay,” she said. “Let me have them a second.”
The guys looked at each other.
“Just for a second. I want to show you … well, you’ll see.”
They handed her the twenties, and the baseball cap guy said to his friend, “You wouldn’t give me twenty bucks if I asked,” and the second guy said to the first guy, “That’s because you’re an ugly fuck and your tits are too big.”
When the twenties were in Ellen’s hand, she smoothed them out and said, “Nat, come with me a sec.”
I followed her over to the bar, still clueless as to what the con was.
“David, we’ll be back in two seconds,” Ellen said loudly enough for the two pool players to hear. She kept going toward the exit. I kept following her.
Suddenly, we were outside in the cold late-afternoon gloom, standing in front of Ellen’s car.
“Get in,” she said.
We drove away.
“What was that?” I said, trying to see behind us through the side-view mirror.
“Here.” Ellen handed me the bills. “Sixty dollars for your trouble.”
“Did we just rob those guys?”
“Don’t worry, they won’t do anything.”
“Why not?”
Ellen kept driving. “Because they’re men. Imagine them telling a cop, We gave sixty dollars to a couple of women because they asked us to, and then they walked out of the bar. Take a guess what any cop would tell them?” She shook her head. “People who say the best cons leave the victim ignorant of the con? That’s nonsense. People watch too many movies. The truth is, the real suckers almost always know they’ve been conned, only they can’t do anything about it because they’re born to be suckers. What?”
“Nothing,” I said, looking at the bills in my hand. “I was expecting something more … I don’t know. More.”
“Okay, then here’s another truth. Most cons aren’t elaborate. The shortest route from A to B. That’s your best route. How did we take their money?”
“By taking it?” I said.
“Bingo.”
“But now you can’t ever go back there. Why would you do something like that in your own local bar?”
She laughed. “What are you talking about, my bar? I’ve lived in this town for ten years and I never set foot in there before today.”
She made a few turns, and then we were approaching the road where my car was standing vigil over the empty school.
“Is that yours?” she said. “You gotta fix that. You’re gonna get a ticket.”
I couldn’t take my eyes off the bills. “We just robbed those two men,” I said.
“How does it feel?” she asked.
“I don’t know. Kind of weird.”
“Does it feel terrible? Do
