Kitty and the Dead Man's Hand

Chapter 5

I’d been to enough concerts with enough backstage passes that I knew some tricks. First: act like you belong. If you walk with purpose and disguise the fact that you don’t know where the hell you’re going, most of the underlings won’t stop you. That would take a bouncer or stage manager. Second: most theaters had the same basic layout. The house, the stage, the rigging, the booth, and somewhere in back were dressing rooms and storage areas. Follow your instincts, poke your nose in enough rooms, eventually you’d find something interesting. The hard part was usually finding an unlocked, accessible door to the backstage area in the first place.

In the lobby area between the theater and the casino, an emergency exit toward the back looked promising. I checked for alarms, hoped for the best, and opened the door. On the other side was a concrete hallway, functional and unattractive. Wiring and vents were exposed. Directly opposite me was another door marked EMERGENCY. It probably led to the outside. To my right, however, the hallway led back to the direction of the theater. Bingo.="0„

The place was mostly dark, lit by a few unobtrusive work lights. Boxes, chairs, lighting and microphone stands, and other theatrical detritus lined the walls, shoved here to be out of the way. I followed my nose, strained my ears listening for human sounds: movement, voices. I didn’t hear anything. The place smelled musty and a little ripe—thirty years of performers working and sweating here had seeped into the walls. I found a door marked STAGE. It was locked. I continued down the hall looking for another way in, to get a closer look at Grant and his gear.

The Wolf side didn’t like this at all. The hallway seemed too narrow. It was crammed with stuff, scaffolds, wiring, larger vents trailing along the ceiling, an optical illusion making me claustrophobic.

I heard something then, like a box dropped on a hollow floor. Freezing, motionless, I waited for the next noise to tell me what was happening and heard movement, shifting, someone walking on the stage, maybe. When I turned, the direction the sound came from seemed to change. Carefully, I continued on, and the sound seemed less human. More like mice scritching behind the walls of an old house. The muscles in my shoulders started to bunch up, like hackles rising.

Maybe this place was haunted. Every old theater had a ghost, right? Nothing to be afraid of. Actually, I didn’t know enough about ghosts to know whether to be afraid of them or not. I tried to breathe slower. Had to keep it together.

Ahead, another doorway—double doors, with long metal push-in handles—stood open. It seemed to be lighter beyond. Maybe this was where the dressing rooms were. I continued, expecting to find another hallway lined with doorways. Maybe one would be helpfully labeled with a nameplate reading “Odysseus Grant.”

Instead, I found a workshop. Industrial power tools stood on islands, their electric cords attached to overhead sockets. Other industrial equipment, like a stage-sized cherry picker, lined the edges. Above, an extension cord was swinging from a socket, like someone had just been here. I definitely heard footsteps now. They sounded distant, as if someone had followed me through the first set of emergency doors. They walked steadily but unhurried, growing louder.

I clenched my hands, feeling the claws lurking inside me. Get the hell out of here, Wolf was whining. Growling. I couldn’t go back, though. Had to go forward. I raced through another set of double doors at the end of the workshop.

And ended up on an outdoor loading dock, behind the theater. The door clicked shut behind me, and I rattled the handle. Locked. A cool evening breeze blew in from the desert. The place smelled like asphalt and truck exhaust. Perfectly normal. The tension started to drain out of me, and I felt stupid. So much for that adventure.

As I walked back around to the front of the hotel, admiring the plain, grubby exterior of the building’s backside and the glimpse of stark, empty desert beyond the streets behind it, I did what a sane, normal person would have done right from the start: I called the theater box office and asked if it would be possible to pass a message to Odysseus Grant. In minutes I managed to contact the press office and request an interview.

Back at our room, Ben was sitting on the edge of the bed looking shell-shocked. He leaned forward on his knees, his hands dangling, staring at the wall with way too much concentration. He was thinking awfully hard about something. He acknowledged my arrival with a glance.

“What’s wrong?” I said.

He straightened, and the studious expression grew even more intent, like he was trying to figure out how to explain something. “That poker game I played? It turned out to be kind of... interesting.”

We weren’t even married yet and I could already recognize the tone of guilt. I sat next to him on the bed. “How much did you lose?”

“That’s just it,” he said. Now his brow furrowed, confused. He’d failed to figure out how to explain this. “I won.”

My eyes bugged. “You what? Oh my God. That’s great!” I had visions of him winning enough to pay for the wedding and then some. All those Vegas dreams come true. I sat down next to him. “So you can take me out to a really nice dinner, right?”

He held my hand. “That’s just the thing, it was a fifty-dollar buy-in satellite tournament. I haven’t won any money yet, but I did win a spot in Saturday’s tourney. First place is half a million.”

I was glad I was sitting down. “You’re a poker genius. I had no idea.”

“I’m not,” he said. “I can usually break even in a home game. I did this on a whim, because it was a way to play a lot of poker for not too much money. I’d lose the fifty bucks, then walk away. But I didn’t lose.”

“So you got lucky. That’s great.” But there was more to it than that, or he wouldn’t be sitting here looking like he’d been hit on the head with a hammer.

He shook his head. “No. There was... something. I could read people. Totally read them. I knew what they were going to do, I could tell when they were bluffing. Everything. And I was never wrong.”

“So you got suddenly, conveniently psychic?”

He looked at me, and this time he smiled, a sneaky, wry smile. “I could smell it. I could hear their heartbeats speed up. Sense their muscles twitch when they squeezed their cards just a little harder. It was... incredible. Amazing. That’s part of poker, you always look for tells, you try to hide your own. But these are things most people wouldn’t even be aware of, much less be able to hide. And I could sense them all.”

“It’s the wolf. The wolf sensed all that.”

“It was like hunting,” he said.

I knew exactly what he was talking about. As wolves, we hunted. Every full moon we went into the wild and searched for prey. Our senses—smell, hearing, taste—let us follow the smallest track, let us know when a rabbit flinched before it ran. Our human selves retained some of those senses.

Apparently, Ben had used those senses to win at poker.

“That’s really funny,” I said.

“I know, I almost gave the whole thing away by cracking up at the table. I think the other players wrote it off to my being a crazy tourist with an incredible winning streak.”

“Well, congratulations. Hey, wait a minute—you said the tournament’s Saturday? What time on Saturday?”

Now he really looked like he’d tasted something sour. “Two p.m.”

The same time as the wedding. That didn’t quite register. He was ditching our wedding for poker?

He talked fast. “I already called the chapel, they can move us to six p.m. It’s just a couple of hours. If it’s okay with you. Is it okay? I’m really sorry. Kitty—say something.”

If this was happening to someone else, it would be funny. Let that be a lesson. I leaned over and kissed him, muffling his next sentence. He blinked in surprise. Nice to see I could still keep him on his toes. Then he put his arms around me, like a good boyfriend.

“You’re not angry?” he said, when we came up for air.

I draped my arms over his shoulders. “I could get angry and look like a petty, spoiled girlfriend, or I can deal with it. I’ll deal with it. Because hey, if you have a chance to win half a million, who am I to argue a little thing like a wedding? But I might make you explain it to my mother.”

“I’m probably not even going to win. I’m sure I won’t even last that long. I’ll be out of the running in the first half hour. Then I’m all yours.”

“You’re already all mine. I’m just loaning you out for a little while.” I tightened my embrace around him, pulled myself close until I straddled him, and kissed him as I tipped him back on the bed.

We were a little late heading out for dinner.