since he was younger than this boy and he knew how to size up a roll. The kid was holding close to five thousand. Tony said, “I’m serious, man. I want to play with you.”
“Where’d you get that?”
A shrug. “I got it.”
“Don’t give any
“It’s not stolen,” the kid said, lowering his voice. “I won it.”
“At cards,” Keller asked wryly, “or the lottery?”
“Draw and stud.”
Keller enjoyed a particularly good bite of hamburger and studied the boy again. “Why my game? You got dozens you could pick.”
The fading city of Ellridge, population 200,000 or so, squatted in steel-mill territory on the flat, gray Indiana River. What it lacked in class, though, the city more than made up for in sin. Hookers and lap dance bars, of course. But the town’s big business was underground gambling — for a very practical reason: Atlantic City and Nevada weren’t within a day’s drive and the few Indian casinos with licensed poker tables were filled with low-stakes amateurs.
“Why you?” Tony answered, “’Cause you’re the best player in town and I want to play against the best.”
“What’s this, some John Wayne gunfighter bullshit?”
“Who’s John Wayne?”
“Christ… you’re way outta our league, kid.”
“There’s more where this came from.” Hefting the wad. “A lot more.”
Keller gestured at the cash and looked around. “Put that away.”
The kid did.
Keller ate more burger, thinking of the times when, not much older than this boy, he’d blustered and lied his way into plenty of poker games. The only way to learn the game poker is to play — for money — against the best players you can find, day after day after day. Losing and winning.
“How long you played?”
“Since I was twelve.”
“Whatta your parents think about what you’re doing?”
“They’re dead,” he said unemotionally. “I live with my uncle. When he’s around. Which he isn’t much.”
“Sorry.”
Tony shrugged.
“Well, I don’t let anybody into the game without somebody vouches for them. So—”
“I played in a couple games with Jimmy Logan. You know him, don’t you?”
Logan lived up in Michigan and was a respected player. The stakes tended to be small but Keller’d played some damn good poker against the man.
Keller said, “Go get a soda or something. Come back in twenty minutes.”
“Come on, man, I don’t want—”
“Go get a soda,” he snapped. “And you call me ‘man’ again I’ll break your fingers.”
“But—”
“Go,” he muttered harshly.
So this’s what’d be like to have kids, thought Keller, whose life as a professional gambler over the past thirty years had left no room for a wife and children.
“I’ll be over there.” Tony nodded across the street at the green awning of a Starbucks.
Keller pulled out his cell phone and called Logan. He had to be cautious about who he let into games. A few months ago some crusading reporters’d gotten tired of writing about all of Ellridge’s local government corruption and CEO scandals so they’d done a series on gambling (THE CITY’S SHAME was the yawner of a headline). The police were under pressure from the mayor to close up the bigger games and Keller had to be careful. But Jimmy Logan confirmed that he’d checked the boy out carefully a month or so ago. He’d come into the game with serious money and had lost bad one day but’d had the balls to come back the next. He covered his loss and kept going; he walked away the big winner. Logan had also found out that Tony’s parents’d left him close to $300,000 in cash when they’d died. The money had been in a trust fund but had been released on his eighteenth birthday, last month.
With this news Keller’s interest perked up.
After the call he finished his lunch. Tony delayed a defiant half hour before returning. He and his attitude ambled back into the diner slowly.
Keller told him, “Okay. I’ll let you sit in tonight for a couple hours. But you leave before the high-stakes game starts.”
A scoff. “But—”
“That’s the deal. Take it or leave it.”
“I guess.”
“Bring at least ten thousand…. And try not to lose it all in the first five minutes, okay?”
The moments before a game begins are magic.
Sure, everyone’s looking forward to lighting up the sour-smooth Cuban cigars, arguing about the Steelers or the Pistons or the Knicks, telling the jokes that men can tell only among themselves.
But the anticipation of those small pleasures was nothing compared with the one overriding thought: Am I going to win?
Forget the talk about the loving of the game, the thrill of the chase… those were all true, yes. But the thing that set real gamblers apart from dilettantes was their consuming drive to walk away from the table with more money than they sat down with. Any gambler who says otherwise is a liar.
Keller felt this rush now, sitting in the pungent, dark back room of Sal’s Tavern, amid cartons of napkins, straws and coffee, an ancient Pabst Blue Ribbon beer sign, a ton of empties growing mold, broken bar stools. Tonight’s game would start small (Keller considered it penny ante, despite the ten-large admission price) but would move to high stakes later in the night, when two serious players from Chicago arrived. A lot more money would change hands then. But the electric anticipation he felt with big stakes wasn’t a bit different from what he felt now or if they’d only been playing for pocket change. Looking over the bare wood table, seeing the unopened decks of the red and blue Bicycle cards stacked up, one question sizzled in his mind: Am I going to win?
The other players arrived. Keller nodded a greeting to Frank Wendall, head of bookkeeping at Great Lakes Metal Works. Round and nervous and perpetually sweating, Wendall acted as if they were about to be raided at any minute. Wendall was the smart boy in Keller’s poker circle. He’d drop lines into the conversation like, “You know, there’re a total of 5,108 possible flushes in a fifty-two-card deck but only seventy-eight possible pairs. Odd but it makes sense when you look at the numbers.” And he’d then happily launch into a lecture on those numbers, which’d keep going until somebody told him to shut up.
Squat, loud, chain-smoking Quentin Lasky, the owner of a string of body shops, was the least educated but the richest man in the room. People in Ellridge must’ve been particularly bad drivers because his shops were always packed. Lasky played ruthlessly — and recklessly — and would win and lose big.
The last of the group was the opposite of Lasky. Somewhere in his late sixties, lean, gray Larry Stanton had grown up here, worked for another local manufacturer all his life and then retired. He was only in Ellridge part of the year; winters he spent in Florida. A widower, he was on a fixed income and was a conservative, cautious player, who never won or lost large sums. Keller looked at the old guy as a sort of mascot of the game.
Finally the youngster arrived. Trying to be cool but obviously excited to be in a serious game, Tony stepped into the room. He wore baggy slacks, a T-shirt and a stocking cap and he toted a Starbucks coffee. Such a goddamn teenager, Keller laughed to himself.
Introductions were made. Keller noticed that Stanton seemed troubled. “It’s okay. I checked him out.”
“Well, it’s just that, he’s a little young, don’t you think?”
“Maybe you’re a
Stanton was the banker and took cash from everybody and began handing out chips. Whites were one dollar,
