Crime week: What happens in Vegas does not always stay in Vegas
“When the world is in crisis people need some kind of escape. The best one is to lose yourself in a good story. There’s nothing like a good book to grasp your attention and to make you forget about the world around you for a few hours. I hope stories give people some kind of relief from the fear, the pain and the difficulties this virus brings to all of us.
“I write about a former con man who became a trial lawyer in New York. Eddie Flynn’s past is never far behind him, and I wanted to take an opportunity to tell a story from Eddie’s past - when he was playing cards and hustling high-rollers for a living instead of hustling juries.” - Steve Cavanagh.
Everyone’s got a plan until they get punched in the face.
That’s the first thing I learned in the ring. You spend hours working on your combinations, getting the breathing and stance just right, then – wham. Your plans follow your ass to the canvas. And it doesn’t matter how much you’ve prepared.
Maybe you’ve studied your opponent for weeks, figured out his weak spots. I always found it real easy to see an opening. A guy drops his shoulder half a second before his glove moves, his eyes lock on to a target, or maybe he tucks in his chin before he throws.
You do enough study, you can read people like a map. Sometimes, it doesn’t make any difference: there’s just no possible way to see that bunch of knuckles tearing over the horizon, coming straight for you.
Before I was a trial attorney, I had a different life. I’d learned to read people. It came in handy when I was reading witnesses and jurors. But those kind of lessons come with a price. A painful one.
On this particular night, 17 years ago, with this particular punch – well, nobody saw it coming.
Vegas.
Caesar’s Palace. Poker. Texas Hold-em. Three in the morning.
I’m five whiskey sours down and 45 grand up. Only one opponent left at my table.
He’s two stools away, on my right. This man is a professional poker player and an amateur asshole.
He’s north of 55 but he didn’t look a day over 70. Half a gallon of Jim Beam and four packs of Marlboro Red a day for 35 years had aged him like a lemon left in the hot dessert sun.
Deep, dark folds of bile-colored skin were rutted around his mouth and brown eyes. The whites of those eyes had a yellow tinge to them, to match his pallor.
The pale, button-down shirt only accentuated the sickness oozing out of his pores. When I met him for the first time that evening, I didn’t know whether to shake hands or call him a paramedic.
His name was Rubin Wachowski, a semi-retired second-hand car salesman from Poughkeepsie but he never used his real name when he was playing cards. In the desert, he called himself the Cat.
Stupid, I know. Las Vegas had that effect on people.
The entire town was a neon fiction. A shiny, inviting mirage of sex, gambling, drugs and very few rules. It still had the feel of a pioneer town, even though the corporations were running it.
Nothing seemed real in Vegas.
Not even time. There were no clocks on the walls of the casinos, no reminders of the hours and the dollars slipping through your fingers.
They liked it that way.
I did too.
The Cat threw in five grand.
“Call,” he said.
I turned and studied him. His lips were drawn tightly together, the edges curling upwards in a permanent feline grin.
He had big eyes too. Round. Liqour-Yellow. Cat’s eyes.
The cat-like effect would’ve been more pronounced if Rubin hadn’t weighed over three-hundred pounds. Both sides of his ass fell off the edge of the stool.
A big cat.
I checked my cards. Ace and a Jack.
A strong hand if the flop fell right. And it did.
Three cards were then dealt face up. Two Kings and a Jack.
I had two pair. Kings over Jacks. Ace high on top. Possible full house. Possible straight.
The Cat gave nothing away. Didn’t check his cards again, didn’t react. I watched his fingers. They were thick and bloated. He reached for his chips and started messing with them; rearranging his stack.
It was an impressive sight. Ten rows of black and red chips made up 50 grand. And behind them, two chip bars. The chip bars were around the same size as a playing card, a third of an inch thick and colored silver. Each bar was a hundred grand.
Each hand I’d played that night was a step closer to getting my hands on those bars. Now was the time. My stack was much smaller. Sixty grand in total.
There was already 17 grand in this pot alone. I threw down 10,000 in chips.
The Cat took a pull on his cigar, let the smoke escape from his mouth like his stomach was on fire. He hesitated, didn’t look my way, answered the 10 grand and raised 10.
My gut told me it was a bluff. In this game, you play your opponent as much as you play the cards. It’s a skill game.
A confidence game. Right then, the Cat was betting like he held the other King in his hand. If he did, I was screwed. Three Kings beats two pairs.
I called his 10 grand, said, “You’re bluffing.”
He didn’t react.
There was $57,000 on the table when she walked into my line of vision. A blonde. Tall, slim, with Saturday-night eyes and lazy Sunday-morning lips.
She wore a short, red dress that was tight enough to send a man to war. From the bucket of change in her hands, it looked like she’d been feeding the one-armed bandits all night.
“Sweet Jesus, would you look at that?” said the Cat, nodding toward the lady.
“I don’t think she’s a cat lover,” I said.
“Why not? All the ladies love the Cat,” he said.
I gave him a look. The kind that asked if he was serious.
Turns out, he was. She passed by our table.
“Hey, darlin’, can I buy you a drink?” He called out.
The blonde stopped dead, fixed those eyes on the Cat and then approached the table.
She stood next to me, close enough that I could smell her perfume, then she leaned over and stared hard at the Cat.
“You’re the Cat, right?” she said.
“The one and only,” he said.
“You’re the son-a-bitch, who cleaned my boyfriend out of our apartment deposit last week,” she said.
The Cat raised his hands and said, “My bad, but you should think about ditching him anyways: get yoursel’ a real man.”
The cigar bobbed up and down between his lips as he chuckled at that one. The lady didn’t take it kindly.
“I wouldn’t sleep with you for a million bucks,” she said.
I could tell where this was going. The dealer spotted it too.
“Ma’am, please calm down,” said the dealer, a dark-haired kid in a black waistcoat.
This was a distraction.
There was money to be made on this table. I’d about had enough.
“Look, lady, I’ve got a game going here,” I said.
She took a step back, smiled.
Maybe it was the perfume. Maybe it was the smile. Or the dress.
Didn’t matter. Whatever the distraction was, it worked.
She hit me in the chops so hard and so fast, Sugar Ray would’ve been proud. A straight right-hand. Deep out of nowhere.
Strong enough to send me flying sideways off my stool, straight into the Cat. I tried to grab onto the table as I fell and managed to send all the chips flying across the green baize.
The cat managed to stay upright but my head hit the carpet.
For a second, all I could see were luminous streams of colour – lines of glossy light whirling in front of my eyes.
I shook it off. Tried to focus on the dark, navy carpet. Something small and white lay in a pool of red on the floor. I knew what it was without even picking it up.
My tooth.
A pair of hands grabbed hold and hauled me to my feet. The man who’d picked me up wore a Hawaiian shirt, decorated in a pool ball and palm tree motif.
“You okay, buddy?” he said.
“I just need to sit,” I said.
Somehow, I made it back on to my stool. A security guard appeared beside me, started looking at my face and I heard him call for a medic. I closed my eyes, tried to stop the ringing in my head.
Then I heard the blonde: “Take your hands off of me! I’m going, alright?”
She tried to shrug off two members of security.
“Let her go,” I said, “no harm done.”
They released her arms but made sure to walk her off the premises.
Only when she’d disappeared behind a bank of machines did I hear the Cat’s laughter.
“She really laid you out,” he said.
“She did, too. I fold,” I said.
The cat stopped laughing. He wasn’t going to ask me to reconsider, or give me time to recover. Easiest hand of poker he’d won in a decade.
Three minutes later, I held an ice pack on my face, a bundle of cash sat on the passenger seat and I was steering my car, one-handed, along the strip.
Thankfully, even after I’d folded that hand, I still left the casino ahead.
Anytime you drive out of Vegas with more money than you came with is a job well done. I even had my tooth in a napkin beside the envelope of cash.
An hour later I pulled in by the side of the road. I’d left the interstate a half-hour ago and lit up the desert road with the headlights from my Chevy. I kept the lights on and for another 10 minutes, I watched the bugs dancing in the beams.
Two cars pulled up behind me. I tensed up, gripping the wheel. The engine purred, ready to take off if I didn’t like who got out of the cars.
A man with a patterned shirt appeared from the first car and a woman in a red dress from the second. They stood, baking in the red glow from brake lights.
I got out of the car.
The man in the Hawaiian shirt said: “I put half on black. We got lucky.”
I’d met Roosevelt two years before. He had light fingers. A smooth palm action and balls the size of watermelons. Well, you needed them if you wore Hawaiian shirts in Detroit in December.
When he’d picked me up off the casino floor, I slipped him the two 100-grand chip bars that I’d swiped off the Cat’s stack as I went down from the punch.
Roosevelt then turned and went straight to the roulette table. He was supposed to go to the cashiers.
He opened a hessian sack with the casino’s logo in the side.
Three hundred grand. Split three ways.
“I hate this hair colour and I hate this goddamn dress,” said Boo. Ex-hooker, professional con-artist and owner of a mean straight right-hand.
“At least you didn’t get punched in the face,” I said.
“Oh, honey, that’s my favourite part,” she said.
In the excitement and the shock of a beautiful woman laying me out, it took a while for the Cat to notice that he was down two big chips. By that time, I guess I’d already left.
“Next time just cash out, like we agreed,” I said.
Roosevelt put his hands on his hips and said, “We got lucky.”
I nodded.
Luck didn’t last. Not in this game.
I put the false cap back on to my tooth, took my cash, and got behind the wheel. We went our separate ways.
Until next time.
from Poker
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