Men from Boys

The Poker Lesson Jeffery Deaver

‘I want into one of your games,’ the boy said.

Sitting hunched over a hamburger in Angela’s Diner, Keller looked up at the blond kid, who stood with his hip cocked and arms crossed, trying to be cool but looking like an animal awkwardly trying to stand on its hind legs. Handsome enough even though he wore black-rimmed nerd glasses and was pale and skinny.

Keller decided not to ask the kid to sit down. ‘What games?’ He ate more of his burger and glanced at his watch.

The kid noticed the move and said, ‘Well, the one that’s starting at eight tonight, for instance.’

Keller grunted a laugh.

He heard the rumble of one of the freight trains that bisected this neighborhood on the north side of town. He had a fond memory of a diesel rattling bar glasses six months ago just as he laid down a flush to take a fifty-six thousand three hundred and twenty dollar pot away from three businessmen who were from the South of France. He’d won that pot twenty minutes after the first ante. The men had scowled French scowls but continued to lose another seventy thousand over the course of the rainy night.

‘What’s your name?’

‘Tony Stigler.’

‘How old’re you?’

‘Eighteen.’

‘Even if there was a game, which there isn’t, you couldn’t play. You’re a kid. You couldn’t get into a bar.’

‘It’s in Sal’s back room. It’s not in the bar.’

‘How do you know that?’ Keller muttered. In his late forties, the dark-complected man was as strong and solid as he’d been twenty years ago. When he asked questions in this tone you stopped being cute and answered straight.

‘My buddy works at Marconi Pizza. He hears things.’

‘Well, your buddy oughta watch out what he hears. And he really oughta watch who he tells what he hears.’ He returned to his lunch.

‘Look.’ The kid dug into his pocket and pulled out a wad of bills. Hundreds mostly. Keller’d been gambling 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 me any Sopranos crap. You gonna play poker, you play by the rules. And one of the rules is you play with your own money. If that’s stolen you can hike your ass outa here right now.’

‘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 two hundred thousand 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 the best.’

‘What’s this, some John Wayne gunfighter bullshit?’

‘Who’s John Wayne?’

‘Christ... You’re way outa 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 it’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 three hundred thousand dollars 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 five thousand one hundred and eight 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 chain 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 little old,’ the kid came back. But he smiled good-naturedly and the frown that crossed Stanton’s face slowly vanished.

Stanton was the banker and took cash from everybody and began handing out chips. Whites were one dollar, red were five, blue ten and yellow twenty-five.

‘Okay, Tony, listen up. I’ll be telling you the rules as we go along. Now—’

‘I know the rules,’ Tony interrupted. ‘Everything according to Hoyle.’

‘No, everything according to me,’ Keller said, laughing. ‘Forget Hoyle. He never even heard of poker.’

‘Whatta you mean? He wrote the rules for all the games,’ Lasky countered.

‘No, he didn’t,’ Keller said. ‘That’s what people think. But Hoyle was just some Brit lawyer in the seventeen hundreds. He wrote this little book about three bullshit games: whist, quadrille and piquet. Nothing else, no Kankakee, pass the garbage, put-and-take stud or high-low roll ’em over. And try going into the MGM Grand and asking for a game of whist... They’ll laugh you out on your ass.’

‘But you see Hoyle books everywhere,’ Wendall said.

‘Some publishers kept the idea going and they added poker and all the modern games.’

‘I didn’t know that,’ Tony said distractedly. He shoved his geek glasses higher on his nose and tried to look interested.

Keller said sternly, ‘Sorry if we’re boring you, kid, but I got news: it’s knowing everything about the game — even the little shit — that separates the men from the boys in poker.’ He looked over carefully. ‘You keep your ears open, you might just learn something.’

‘How the hell can he hear anything even if he keeps his ears open?’ Lasky muttered and glanced at the boy’s stocking cap. ‘What’re you, some kind of fucking rapper? Lose the hat. Show some respect.’

Tony took his time removing the hat and tossing it on the counter. He pulled the lid off his Starbucks cup and sipped the coffee.

Keller examined the messy pile of chips in front of the boy and said, ‘Now, whatever Jimmy Logan told you about playing poker, whatever you think you know from Hoyle, forget about it. We use the big boys’ rules here, and rule number one: we play fair. Always keep your chips organised in front of you so everybody at the table knows how much you’ve got. Okay?’

‘Sure.’ The kid began stacking the chips into neat stacks.

‘And,’ Wendall said, ‘let’s say a miracle happens and you start to win big and somebody can’t see exactly how many chips you have. If they ask you, you tell them. Down to the last dollar. Got that?’

‘Tell ’em, sure.’ The boy nodded.

They cut for the deal and Wendall won. He began shuffling with his fat fingers.

Keller gazed at the riffling cards in pleasure, thinking: There’s nothing like poker, nothing like it in the world.

The game went back nearly two hundred years. It started as a Mississippi river boat cheaters’ game to replace three-card monte, which even the most gullible slickers quickly learned was just a scam to take their money. Poker, played back then with only the ten through the ace, seemed to give them more of a fighting chance. But it didn’t, of course, not in the hands of expert sharks (the innocents might’ve been more reluctant to play if they’d known that the game’s name probably came from the nineteenth-century slang for wallet, ‘poke’, the emptying of which was the true object of play).

‘Ante up,’ Wendall called. ‘The game is five-card draw.’

There are dozens of variations of poker games. But in Keller’s games, five-card draw — ‘closed poker’ or ‘jackpot’ were the official names — was what they played, high hand the winner. Over the years he’d played every kind of poker known to man — from California lowball draw (the popular poker game west of the Rockies) to standard stud to Texas Hold ’Em. They were all interesting and exciting in their own ways but Keller liked basic jackpot best because there were no gimmicks, no arcane rules; it was you against the cards and the other players, like bare-knuckle boxing. Man to man.

In jackpot, players are dealt five cards and then have the option of exchanging up to three in hopes of bettering their hands. Good players, like Keller, had long ago memorised the odds of drawing certain combinations. Say, he was dealt a pair of threes, a jack, a seven and a two. If he decided to keep the pair and the jack and draw substitutes for the other two, he’d have a one in five chance of getting another jack to make a two-pair hand. To draw the remaining threes in the deck — to make four of a kind — his chances dropped to one in one thousand and sixty. But if he chose to keep only the pair and draw three new cards, the odds of getting that four of a kind improved to one in three hundred and fifty-nine. Knowing these numbers, and dozens more, were what separated amateur players from pros, and Keller made a very good living as a pro.

They tossed in the ante and Wendall began dealing.

Keller focused on Tony’s strategy. He’d expected the kid to play recklessly but on the whole he was cautious and seemed to be getting a feel for the table and the players. A lot of teenagers would’ve been loud and obnoxious, Keller supposed, but the boy sat back quietly and just played cards.

Which wasn’t to say he didn’t need advice.

‘Tony, don’t play with your chips. Makes you look nervous.’

‘I wasn’t playing with them. I—’

‘And here’s another rule — don’t argue with the guys giving you rules. You’re good. You got it in you to be a great player — but you gotta shut up and listen to the experts.’

Lasky grumbled, ‘Listen to him, kid. He’s the best. I figure I bought his friggin’ Mercedes for him, all the money I lost here. And does he bring it into my shop to get the dings out? Hell, no... Call you.’ He shoved chips forward.

‘I don’t get dings, Lasky. I’m a good driver. Just like I’m a good poker player... Say hi to the ladies.’ Keller laid down three queens and took the nine hundred dollar pot.

‘Fuck me,’ Lasky snapped angrily.

‘Now there’s another rule,’ Keller said, nodding at the body-shop man, then turning to Tony. ‘Never show emotion — losing or winning. It gives your opponent some information they can use against you.’

‘Excuse me for breaking the rules,’ Lasky muttered to Keller. ‘I meant to say fuck you.’

Twenty minutes later Tony’d had a string of losses. On the next hand he looked at the five cards he’d been dealt and, when Stanton bet ten dollars, shook his head. He folded without drawing any cards and glumly toyed with the lid of his Starbucks cup.

Keller frowned. ‘Why’d you fold?’

‘Losing streak.’

Keller scoffed. ‘There’s no such thing as a losing streak.’

Wendall nodded, pushing the cards toward Tony to deal. The resident Mr Wizard of poker said, ‘Remember that. Every hand of poker starts with a fresh shuffle so it’s not like blackjack — there’s no connection between hands. The laws of probability rule.’

The boy nodded and, sure enough, played his way through Stanton’s bluff to take an eight hundred and fifty dollar pot.

‘Hey, there you go,’ Keller said. ‘Good for you.’

‘So, what? You in school, kid?’ Lasky asked after a few lackluster hands.

‘Two cards,’ the boy said to Keller, then dealing. He replied to Lasky, ‘Been in computer science at the community college for a year. But it’s boring. I’m going to drop out.’

‘Computers?’ Wendall asked, laughing derisively. ‘Hightech stocks? I’ll take craps or roulette wheel any day. At least you know what the odds are.’

‘And what do you want to do for a living?’ Keller asked.

‘Play cards professionally.’

‘Three cards,’ Lasky muttered to Keller. Then to Tony he gave a gruff laugh. ‘Pro card playing? Nobody does that. Well, Keller does. But nobody else I know of.’ A glance at Stanton. ‘How ’bout you, Grandpa, you ever play pro?’

‘Actually, the name’s Larry. Two cards.’

‘No offense, Larry.’

‘And two cards for the dealer,’ Keller said.

The old man arranged his cards. ‘No, I never even thought about it.’ A nod at the pile of chips in front of him — he was just about even for the night. ‘I play all right but the odds’re still against you. Anything serious I do with money? I make sure the odds’re on my side.’

Lasky sneered. ‘That’s what makes you a man, for Christ’s sake. Having the balls to play even if the odds’re against you.’ A glance at Tony. ‘You look like you got balls. Do you?’

‘You tell me,’ the boy asked and laid down two pairs to win an eleven hundred dollar pot.

Lasky looked at him and snapped, ‘And fuck you too.’

Keller said, ‘Think that means yes.’ Everyone at the table — except Lasky — laughed.

The play continued with a series of big pots, Lasky and Tony being the big winners. Finally Wendall was tapped out.

‘Okay, that’s it. I’m out of here. Gentlemen... been a pleasure playing with you.’ As always, he pulled a baseball cap on and ducked out the back door, looking hugely relieved he’d escaped without being arrested.

Keller’s cell phone rang and he took the call. ‘Yeah?... Okay. You know where, right?... See you, then.’ When he disconnected he lit a cigar and sat back, scanned the boy’s chips. He said to Tony, ‘You played good tonight. But time for you to cash in.’

‘What? I’m just getting warmed up. It’s only ten.’

He nodded at his cell phone. ‘The big guns’ll be here in twenty minutes. You’re through for the night.’

‘Whatta you mean? I want to keep playing.’

‘This’s the big time. Guys I know from Chicago.’

‘I’m playing fine. You said so yourself.’

‘You don’t understand, Tony,’ Larry Stanton said, nodding at the chips. ‘The whites go up to ten bucks each. The yellows’ll be two fifty. You can’t play with stakes like that.’

‘I’ve got...’ He looked over his chips. ‘... almost forty thousand.’

‘And you could lose that in three, four hands.’

‘I’m not going to lose it.’

‘Oh, brother,’ Lasky said, rolling his eyes. ‘The voice of youth.’

Keller said, ‘In my high-stakes game, everybody comes in with a hundred large.’

‘I can get it.’

‘This time of night?’

‘I inherited some money a few years ago. I keep a lot of it in cash for playing. I’ve got it at home — just a couple miles from here.’

‘No,’ Stanton said. ‘It’s not for you. It’s a whole different game with that much money involved.’

‘Goddamn it, everybody’s treating me like a child. You’ve seen me play. I’m good, right?’

Keller fell silent. He looked at the boy’s defiant gaze and finally said, ‘You’re back here in a half-hour with a hundred Gs, okay.’

After the boy left, Keller announced a break until the Chicago contingent arrived. Lasky went to get a sandwich and Stanton and Keller wandered into the bar proper for a couple of beers.

Stanton sipped his Newcastle and said, ‘Kid’s quite a player.’

‘Has potential,’ Keller said.

‘So how bad you going to hook him? For his whole stake, the whole hundred thousand plus?’

‘What’s that?’

‘“Rule number one is we play fair”?’ Stanton whispered sarcastically. ‘What the hell was that all about? You’re setting him up. You’ve been spending most of the game — and half your money — catching his draws.’

Keller smiled and blew a stream of cigar smoke toward the ceiling of the bar. The old guy was right. Keller’d been going all the way with losing hands just to see how Tony drew cards. And the reconnaissance had been very illuminating. The boy had his strengths but the one thing he lacked was knowledge of the odds of poker. He was drawing blind. Keller was no rocket scientist but he’d worked hard over the years to learn the mathematics of the game; Tony, on the other hand, might’ve been a computer guru, but he didn’t have a clue what his chances were of drawing a flush or a full house or even a second pair. Combined with the boy’s atrocious skills at bluffing, which Keller’d spotted immediately, his ignorance of the odds made him a sitting duck.

‘You’ve also been sandbagging,’ Stanton said in disgust.

Score another one for Grandpa. He’d spotted that Keller had been passing on the bet and folding good hands on purpose — to build up Tony’s confidence and to make him believe that Keller was a lousy bluffer.

‘You’re setting him up for a big hit.’

Keller shrugged. ‘I tried to talk him into walking away.’

‘Bullshit,’ Stanton countered. ‘You take a kid like that and tell ’em to leave, what’s their first reaction? To stay... Come on, Keller, he hasn’t got that kind of money to lose.’

‘He inherited a shitload of cash.’

‘So you invited him into the game as soon as you found that out?’

‘No, as a matter of fact, he came to me... You’re just pissed ’cause he treats you like a has-been.’

‘You’re taking advantage of him.’

Keller shot back with, ‘Here’s my real rule number one in poker: as long as you don’t cheat you can do whatever you want to trick your opponents.’

‘You going to share that rule with Tony?’ Stanton asked.

‘I’m going to do better than that — I’m going to give him a first-hand demonstration. He wants to learn poker? Well, this’ll be the best lesson he ever gets.’

‘You think breaking him and taking his tuition money’s going to make him a better player?’ Stanton asked.

‘Yeah, I do. He doesn’t want to be in school anyway.’

‘That’s not the point. The point is you’re an expert and he’s a boy.’

‘He claims he’s a man. And one of the things about being a man is getting knocked on your ass and learning from it.’

‘In penny ante, sure. But not a game like this.’

‘You have a problem with this, Grandpa?’ Angry, Keller turned ominously toward him.

Stanton looked away and held up his hands. ‘Do what you want. It’s your game. I’m just trying to be the voice of conscience.’

‘If you play by the rules you’ll always have a clear conscience.’

A voice called from the doorway, Lasky’s. He said, ‘They’re here.’

Keller slapped Stanton on his bony shoulders. ‘Let’s go win some money.’

More cigar smoke was filling the back room. The source: Elliott Rothstein and Harry Piemonte, businessmen from the Windy City. Keller’d played with them several times previously but he didn’t know much about them; the two men revealed as little about their personal lives as their faces shared what cards they held. They might’ve been organised crime capos or they might have been directors of a charity for orphans. All Keller knew was they were solid players, paid their losses without griping and won without lording it over the losers.

Both men wore dark suits and expensive, tailored white shirts. Rothstein had a diamond pinkie ring and Piemonte a heavy gold bracelet. Wedding bands encircled both of their left ring fingers. They now stripped off their suit jackets, sat down at the table and were making small talk with Stanton and Lasky when Tony returned. He sat down at his place and pulled the lid off his new Starbucks, nodding at Rothstein and Piemonte.

They frowned and looked at Keller. ‘Who’s this?’ Rothstein muttered.

‘He’s okay.’

Piemonte frowned. ‘We got a rule, we don’t play with kids.’

Tony laughed and shoved his nerd glasses high on his nose. ‘You guys and your rules.’ He opened an envelope and dumped out cash. He counted out a large stack and put some back into his pocket. ‘Hundred large,’ he said to Stanton, who gave a dark look to Keller but began counting out chips for the boy.

The two new players looked at each other and silently decided to make an exception to their general rule about juveniles in poker games.

‘Okay, the game is five-card draw,’ Keller said. ‘Minimum bet fifty, ante is twenty-five.’

Piemonte won the cut and they began.

The hands were pretty even for the first hour, then Keller began pulling ahead slowly. Tony kept his head above water, the second winner — but only because, it seemed, the other players were getting bad hands; the boy was still hopeless when it came to calculating the odds of drawing. In a half-dozen instances he’d draw a single card and then fold — which meant he was trying for a straight or a flush, the odds of doing that were just one in twenty. Either he should’ve discarded three cards, which gave him good odds of improving his hand, or gone with a heavy bluff after drawing a solo card, in which case he probably would’ve taken the pot a couple of times.

Confident that he’d nailed the boy’s technique, Keller now began to lose intentionally when Tony seemed to have good cards — to boost his confidence. Soon the kid had doubled his money and had close to two hundred thousand dollars in front of him.

Larry Stanton didn’t seem happy with Keller’s plan to take the boy but he didn’t say anything and continued to play his cautious, old-man’s game, slowly losing to the other players.

The voice of conscience...

As the night wore on, Lasky finally dropped out, having lost close to eighty thousand bucks. ‘Fuck, gotta raise the price for ding-pulling,’ he joked, heading for the door. He glanced at the duo from Chicago. ‘When you gentlemen leave, could you bang inta some parked cars on the way to the expressway?’ A nod toward Keller. ‘An’ if you wanta fuck up the front end of his Merc, I wouldn’t mind one bit.’

Piemonte smiled at this; Rothstein glanced up as if the body-shop man were speaking Japanese or Swahili and turned back to his cards to try to coax a winning hand out of them.

Grandpa too soon bailed. He still had stacks of chips left on the table — but another rule in poker was that a player can walk away at any time. He now cashed in and pushed his chair back glumly to sip coffee and to watch the remaining players.

Ten minutes later Rothstein lost his remaining stake to Tony in a tense, and long, round of betting. ‘Damn,’ he spat out. ‘Tapped out. Never lost to a boy before — not like this.’

Tony kept a straight face but there was a knowing look in his eye that said, And you didn’t lose to one now — I’m not a boy.

The game continued for a half-hour, with big pots trading hands.

Most poker games don’t end with dramatic last hands. Usually players just run out of money or, like Grandpa, get cold feet and slip away with their tails between their legs.

But sometimes there are climactic moments.

And that’s what happened now.

Tony shuffled and then offered the cut to Keller, who divided the deck into thirds. The boy reassembled the cards and began dealing.

Piemonte gathered his and, like all good poker players, didn’t move them (rearranging cards can telegraph a lot of information about your hand).

Keller picked up his and was pleased to see that he’d received a good one: two pairs — queens and sixes. A very winnable one in a game this size.

Tony gathered his five cards and examined them, not revealing any reaction. ‘Bet?’ he asked Piemonte, who passed — chose not to bet at this time.

To open the betting in draw poker a player needs a pair of jacks or better. Passing meant that either Piemonte didn’t have that good a hand or that he did but was sandbagging — choosing not to bet to make the other players believe he had weak cards.

Keller decided to take a chance. Even though he had the two pairs, and could open, he too passed, which would make Tony think his hand was poor.

A tense moment followed. If Tony didn’t bet, they’d surrender their cards and start over; Keller would swallow a solid hand.

But Tony glanced at his own cards and bet ten thousand.

Keller’s eyes flickered in concern, which a bluffer would do, but in his heart he was ecstatic. The hook was set.

‘See you,’ Piemonte said, pushing his chips in.

So, Keller reflected, the man from Chicago’d probably been sandbagging too.

Keller, his face blank, pushed out the ten thousand, then another stack of chips. ‘See your ten and raise you twenty-five.’

Tony saw the new bet and raised again. Piemonte hesitated but stayed with it and Keller matched Tony’s new bet. As dealer, he now ‘burned’ the top card on the deck — set it face down in front of him. Then he turned to Piemonte. ‘How many?’

‘Two.’

Tony slipped him the two replacement cards from the top of the deck.

Keller’s mind automatically began to calculate the odds. The chances of getting three of a kind in the initial deal were very low so it was likely that Piemonte had a pair and a ‘kicker’, an unmatched card of a high rank, probably a face card. The odds of his two new cards giving him a powerful full house were only one in one hundred and nineteen. And if, by chance, he had been dealt a rare three of a kind at first, the odds of his getting a pair, to make that full house, were still long: one in fifteen.

Filing this information away, Keller himself asked for one card, suggesting to the other players that he was going for either a full house or a straight flush — or bluffing. He picked up the card and placed it in his deck. Keller’s mouth remained motionless but his heart slammed in his chest when he saw he’d got a full house — and a good one, three queens.

Tony himself took three cards.

Okay, Keller told himself, run the numbers. By taking three cards the boy signaled that he’d been dealt only one pair. So in order to beat Keller he’d have to end up with a straight flush, four of a kind or a full house of kings or aces. Like a computer, Keller’s mind went through the various odds of this happening.

Based on his calculations about the boy’s and Piemonte’s draws, Keller concluded that he probably had the winning hand at the table. Now his goal was to goose up the size of the pot.

The boy shoved his glasses up on his nose again and glanced at Piemonte. ‘Your bet.’

With a cautious sigh, the player from Chicago shoved some chips out. ‘Twenty thousand.’

Keller had sat in on some of the great games around the country — both as a player and an observer — and he’d spent hundreds of hours studying how bluffers behaved. The small things they did — mannerisms, looks, when they hesitated and when they blustered ahead. What they said, when they laughed. Now he summoned up all these memories and began to act in a way that’d make the other players believe that he had a bum hand and was going for a bluff. Which meant he began betting big.

After two rounds, Piemonte finally dropped out, reluctantly — he’d put in close to sixty thousand dollars — and he probably had a decent hand. But he was convinced that Keller or Tony had a great hand and he wasn’t going to throw good money after bad.

The bet came around to Keller once more. ‘See your twenty,’ he said to Tony. ‘Raise you twenty.’

‘Jesus,’ Stanton muttered. Keller shot him a dark look and the old man fell silent.

Tony sighed and looked again at his cards, as if they could tell him what to do. But they never could, of course. The only answers to winning poker were in your own heart and your mind.

The boy had only fifteen thousand dollars left on the table. He reached into his pocket and took out an envelope. A hesitation. Then he extracted the rest of his money. He counted it out. Thirty-eight thousand. Another pause as he stared at the cash...

Go for it, Keller prayed silently. Please...

‘Chips,’ the boy finally said, eyes locked in Keller’s, who looked back both defiant and nervous — a bluffer about to be called.

Stanton hesitated.

‘Chips,’ the boy said firmly.

The old man reluctantly complied.

Tony took a deep breath and pushed the chips on to the table. ‘See your twenty. Raise you.’

Keller pushed ten thousand dollars forward — a bit dramatically, he reflected — and said, ‘See the ten.’ He glanced at all he had left. ‘Raise you fifteen.’ Pushed the remaining chips into the center of the table.

‘Lord,’ Piemonte said.

Even gruff Rothstein was subdued, gazing hypnotically at the massive pot, which was about four hundred and fifty thousand dollars.

For a moment Keller did feel a slight pang of guilt. He’d set up his opponent psychologically, calculated the odds down to the last decimal point — in short, he’d done everything that the youngster was incapable of. Still, the boy claimed he wanted to be treated like man. He’d brought this on himself.

‘Call,’ Tony said in a whisper, easing most of his chips into the pot.

Stanton looked away, as if avoiding the sight of a roadside accident.

‘Queens full,’ Keller said, flipping them over.

‘Lookit that,’ Piemonte whispered.

Stanton sighed in disgust.

‘Sorry, kid,’ Keller said, reaching forward for the pot. ‘Looks like you...’

Tony flipped over his cards, revealing a full house — three kings and a pair of sixes. ‘Looks like I win,’ he said calmly and raked the chips in.

Piemonte whispered, ‘Whoa. What a hand... Glad I got out when I did.’

Stanton barked a fast laugh and Rothstein offered to Tony, ‘That was some fine playing.’

‘Just luck,’ the boy said.

How the hell had that happened? Keller wondered, frantically replaying every moment of the hand. Of course, sometimes, no matter how you calculated the percentages, fate blindsided you completely. Still, he’d planned everything so perfectly.

‘Time to call it a night,’ Piemonte said, handing his remaining chips to Stanton to cash out and added humorously, ‘Since I just gave most of my fucking money to a teenager.’ He turned to Rothstein. ‘From now on, we stick to that rule about kids, okay?’

Keller sat back and watched Tony start organising the chips in the pile. But the odds, he kept thinking... He’d calculated the odds so carefully. At least a hundred to one. Poker is mathematics and instinct — how had both of them failed him so completely?

Tony eased the chips toward Stanton for cashing out.

The sound of a train whistle filled the room again. Keller sighed, reflecting that this time it signified a loss — just the opposite of what the urgent howl had meant at the game with the Frenchmen.

The wail grew louder. Only... Focusing on the sound, Keller realised that there was something different about it this time. He glanced up at the old man and the two players from Chicago. They were frowning, staring at each other.

Why? Was something wrong?

Tony froze, his hands on the piles of his chips.

Shit, Keller thought. The sound wasn’t a train whistle; it was a siren.

Keller pushed back from the table just as the front and back doors crashed open simultaneously, strewing splinters of wood around the back room. Two uniformed police officers, their guns drawn, pushed inside. ‘On the floor, now, now, now!’

‘No,’ Tony muttered, standing and turning to face the cop nearest him.

‘Kid,’ Keller whispered sternly, raising his hands. ‘Nothing stupid. Do what they say.’

The boy hesitated, looked at the black guns and lay down on the floor.

Stanton slowly got down on his knees.

‘Move it, old man,’ one of the cops muttered.

‘Doing the best I can here.’

Finally on their bellies and cuffed, the gamblers were eased into sitting positions by the cops.

‘So what’d we catch?’ asked a voice from the alley as a balding man in his late fifties, wearing a gray suit, walked inside.

Detective Fanelli, Keller noted. Hell, not him. The cop had been Jesus Mary and Joseph enthusiastic to purify the sinful burgh of Ellridge for years. He scared a lot of the small players into not even opening games and managed to bust about one or two big ones a year. Looked like Keller was the flavor of the week this time.

Stanton sighed with resignation, his expression matching the faces of the pro players from Chicago. The boy, though, looked horrified. Keller knew it wasn’t the arrest; it was that the state confiscated gambling proceeds.

Fanelli squinted as he looked at Rothstein’s and Piemonte’s driver’s licenses. ‘All the way from Chicago to get arrested. That’s a pain in the ass, huh, boys?’

‘I was just watching,’ Rothstein protested. He nodded at the table, where he’d been sitting. ‘No chips, no money.’

‘That just means you’re a loser.’ The detective then glanced at Piemonte.

The man said a meek, ‘I want to see a lawyer.’

‘And I’m sure a lawyer’s gonna wanta see you. Considering how big his fee’s gonna be to try and save your ass. Which he ain’t gonna do, by the way... Ah, Keller.’ He shook his head. ‘This’s pretty sweet. I been after you for a long time. You really oughta move to Vegas. I don’t know if you follow the news much but I hear gambling’s actually legal there... And who’s this?’ He glanced at Stanton. He took Stanton’s wallet from one of the uniformed cops and looked at his license. ‘What the hell’re you doing in Ellridge when you could be playing mahjong in Tampa with the ladies?’

‘Can’t afford the stakes down there.’

‘The old guy’s a wise ass,’ the skinny detective muttered to the other cops. He then looked over Tony. ‘And who’re you?’

‘I don’t have to tell you anything.’

‘Yeah, you do. This ain’t the army. That name rank and serial number crap doesn’t cut it with me. How old’re you?’

‘Eighteen. And I want a lawyer too.’

‘Well, Mr I-Want-a-Lawyer-Too,’ Fanelli mocked, ‘you only get one after you’ve been charged. And I haven’t charged you yet.’

‘Who dimed me out?’ Keller asked.

Fanelli said, ‘Wouldn’t be polite to give you his name but let’s just say you took the wrong guy to the cleaners last year. He wasn’t too happy about it and gave me a call.’

Keller grimaced. Took the wrong guy to the cleaners last year... Well, that shortlist’d have about a hundred people on it.

Looking down at the stacks of chips in front of where Tony’d been sitting, Fanelli asked, ‘Pretty colors, red, blue, green. What’re they worth?’

‘The whites’re worth ten matchsticks,’ Rothstein said. ‘The blues’re—’

‘Shut up.’ He looked around the room. ‘Where’s the bank?’

Nobody said anything.

‘Well, we will find it, you know. And I’m not going to start in here. I’m going to start out front and tear Sal’s bar to fucking pieces. Then we’ll do the same to his office. Break up every piece of furniture. Toss every drawer... Now, come on, boys, Sal doesn’t deserve that, does he?’

Keller sighed and nodded to Stanton, who nodded toward the cupboard above the coffee machine. One cop took out two cigar boxes.

‘Jesus our Lord,’ Fanelli said, flipping through them. ‘There’s gotta be close to a half-million here.’

He glanced at the table. ‘Those’re your chips, huh?’ he said to Tony. The boy didn’t answer but Fanelli didn’t seem to expect him to. He laughed and looked over the players. ‘And you call yourselves men — letting a boy whip your asses at poker.’

‘I’m not a boy.’

‘Yeah, yeah, yeah.’ The detective turned back to the boxes one more time. He walked over to the officers. They held a brief, whispered conference, then they nodded and stepped out of the room.

‘My boys need to check on a few things,’ Fanelli said. ‘They’ve got to go corroborate some testimony or something. That’s a great word, isn’t it? “Corroborate”.’ He laughed. ‘I love to say that.’ He paced through the room, stopped at the coffee pot and poured himself a cup. ‘Why the hell doesn’t anybody ever drink booze at high-stakes games? Afraid you’ll get a queen mixed with a jack?’

‘As a matter of fact,’ Keller said, ‘yeah.’

The cop sipped the coffee and said in a low voice, ‘Listen up, assholes. You especially, junior.’ He pointed a finger at Tony and continued to pace. ‘This happened at a... let’s say a difficult time for me. We’re concerned about some serious crimes that happen to be going down in another part of town.’

Serious crimes, Keller was thinking. Cops don’t talk that way. What the hell’s he getting at?

A smile. ‘So here’s the deal. I don’t want to spend time booking you right now. It’d take me away from those other cases, you know. Now, you’ve lost the money one way or the other. If I take you in and book you the cash goes into evidence and when you’re convicted, which you will be, every penny goes to the state. But if... let’s just say if there was no evidence, well, I’d have to let you off with a warning. But that’d work out okay for me because I could get on to the other cases. The important cases.’

‘That’re being corroborated right now?’ Tony asked.

‘Shut up, punk,’ the detective muttered, echoing Keller’s thought.

‘So what do you say?’

The men looked at each other.

‘Up to you,’ the cop said. ‘Now what’s it going to be?’

Keller surveyed the faces of the others around him. He glanced at Tony, who grimaced and nodded in disgust. Keller said to the detective, ‘We’d be happy to help you out here, Fanelli. Do our part to help you clean up some — what’d you call it? Serious crimes?’

Stanton muttered, ‘We have to keep Ellridge the show-place that it is.’

‘And the citizens thank you for your efforts,’ Detective Fanelli said, stuffing the money into his suit pockets.

The detective unhooked the handcuffs, stuffed them in his pockets too and walked back out into the alley without another word.

The players exchanged looks of relief — all except Tony, of course, on whose face the expression was one of pure dismay. After all, he was the big loser in all this.

Keller shook his hand. ‘You played good tonight, kid. Sorry about that.’

The boy nodded and, with an anemic wave to everyone, wandered out the back door.

The Chicago players chattered nervously for a few minutes, then nodded farewells and left the smoky room. Stanton asked Keller if he wanted another beer but the gambler shook his head and the old man walked into the bar. Keller sat down at the table, absently picked up a deck of cards, shuffled them and began to play solitaire. The shock of the bust was virtually gone now; what bothered him was losing to the boy, an okay player but not a great one.

But after a few minutes of playing, his spirits improved and he reminded himself of another one of the Rules According to Keller: smart always beats out luck in the end.

Well, the kid’d been lucky this once. But there’d be other games, other chances to make the odds work and to relieve Tony, or others like him, of their bankrolls.

There was an endless supply of cocky youngsters to bleed dry, Keller reckoned and placed the black ten on the red jack.

Standing on the overpass, watching a train disappear into the night, Tony Stigler tried not to think about the money he’d just won — and then had stolen away from him.

Nearly a half-million.

Papers and dust swirled along the road bed behind the train. Tony watched it absently and replayed something that Keller had said to him.

It’s knowing everything about the game — even the little shit — that separates the men from the boys in poker.

But that wasn’t right, Tony reflected. You only had to know one thing. That no matter how good you are, poker’s always a game of chance.

And that’s not as good as a sure thing.

He looked around, making sure he was alone, then reached into his pocket and extracted the Starbucks cup lid. He lifted off the false plastic disk on the bottom and shut off a tiny switch. He then wrapped it carefully in a bubble-wrap envelope and replaced it in his pocket. The device was his own invention. A miniature camera in the sipping hole of the lid had scanned each card whenever Tony’d been dealing and the tiny processor had sent the suit and rank to the computer in Tony’s car. All he had to do was tap the lid in a certain place to tell the computer how many people were in the game, so the program he’d written would know everyone’s hand. It determined how many cards he should draw and whether to bet or fold on each round. The computer then broadcast its instructions to the earpiece of his glasses, which vibrated according to a code, and Tony acted accordingly.

‘Cheating for Dummies’, he called the program.

A perfect plan, perfectly executed — the only flaw being that he hadn’t thought about the goddamn police stealing his winnings.

Tony looked at his watch. Nearly 1 a.m. No hurry to get back; his uncle was out of town on another one of his business trips. What to do? he wondered. Marconi Pizza was still open and he decided he’d stop by and see his buddy, the one who’d tipped him to Keller’s game. Have a slice and a Coke.

Gritting footsteps sounded behind him and he turned, seeing Larry Stanton walking stiffly down the alley, heading for the bus stop.

‘Hey,’ the old guy called, noticing him and walking over. ‘Licking your wounds? Or thinking of jumping?’ He nodded toward the train tracks.

Tony gave a sour laugh. ‘Can you believe that? Fucking bad luck.’

‘Ah, raids’re a part of the game, if you’re playing illegal,’ Stanton said. ‘You got to build ’em into the equation.’

‘A half-million dollar part of the equation?’ Tony muttered.

‘That part’s gotta sting, true,’ Stanton said, nodding. ‘But it’s better than a year in jail.’

‘I suppose.’

The old man yawned. ‘Better get on home and pack. I’m going back to Florida tomorrow. Who’d spend the winter in Ellridge if they didn’t have to?’

‘You have anything left?’ Tony asked.

‘Money?... A little.’ A scowl. ‘But a hell of a lot less than I did, thanks to you and Keller.’

‘Hold on.’ The boy took out his wallet and handed the man a hundred dollars.

‘I don’t take charity.’

‘Call it a loan.’

Stanton debated for a moment. Then, embarrassed, he took the bill and pocketed it. ‘Thanks...’ He shoved the cash away fast. ‘Better get going. Buses stop running soon. Well, good playing with you, son. You’ve got potential. You’ll go places.’

Yeah, the boy thought, I sure as hell will go places. The smart ones, the innovators, the young... we’ll always beat people like you and Keller in the end. It’s the way of the world. He watched Grandpa limp away, old and broke. Pathetic, the boy thought. Shoot me before I become him.

Tony pulled his stocking cap on, stepped away from the railing and walked toward his car, his mind already thinking of who the next mark should be.

Twenty minutes later the gassy municipal bus vehicle eased to the curb and Larry Stanton climbed off.

He walked down the street until he came to a dark intersection, the yellow caution light blinking for traffic on the main street, the red blinking for that on the cross. He turned the corner and stopped. In front of him was a navy-blue Crown Victoria. On the trunk were words: Police Interceptor.

And leaning against that trunk was the lean figure of Detective George Fanelli.

The cop pushed away from the car and walked up to Stanton. The two other officers from the bust early that night were standing nearby. Both Fanelli and Stanton looked around and then shook hands. The detective took an envelope out of his pocket. Handed it to Stanton. ‘Your half — two hundred and twenty two thousand.’

Stanton didn’t bother to count it. He put the cash away.

‘This was a good one,’ the cop said.

‘That it was,’ Stanton agreed.

He and the vice cop ran one of these scams every year when Stanton was up from Florida. Stanton’d work his way into somebody’s confidence, losing money in a couple of private games and then, on high-stakes night, tip the cops off ahead of time. Fanelli’d blame the bust on some anonymous snitch, take the bank as a bribe and release everybody; poker players were so happy to be able to stay out of jail and keep playing that they never complained.

As for Stanton, the gaff like this had always suited him better than gambling.

I play all right but the odds’re still against you. Anything serious I do with money? I make sure the odds’re on my side.

‘Hey, Larry,’ one of the cops called to Stanton. ‘Didn’t mean to be an asshole when I collared you. Just thought it’d be more, you know, realistic.’

‘Handled it just right, Moscawitz. You’re a born actor.’

Stanton and the detective walked past the unmarked squad car and continued down the dirty sidewalk. They’d known each other for years, ever since Stanton had worked as head of security at Midwest Metal Products.

‘You okay?’ Fanelli glanced down at Stanton’s limp.

‘I was racing somebody on a jet ski up at Lake Geneva. Hit a wake. It’s nothing.’

‘So when’re you going back to Tampa?’

‘Tomorrow.’

‘You flying down?’

‘Nope. Driving. He pulled keys out of his pocket and opened the door of a new BMW sports car.

Fanelli looked it over admiringly. ‘Sold the Lexus?’

‘Decided to keep it.’ A nod toward the sleek silver wheels. ‘I just wanted something sexier, you know. The ladies in my golf club love a man in a sports car. Even if he’s got knobby knees.’

Fanelli shook his head. ‘Felt bad about that kid. Where’d he get the money to sit in on a high-stakes game?’

‘Tuition money or something. He inherited it from his folks.’

‘You mean we just dipped an orphan? I’ll be in confession for a month.’

‘He’s an orphan who cheated the pants off Keller and everybody else.’

‘What?’

Stanton laughed. ‘Took me a while to tip to it. Finally figured it out. He must’ve had some kind of electronic shiner or camera or something in his coffee cup lid. He was always playing with it on the table, moving it close to the cards when he dealt — and the only time he won big was on the deal. Then after the bust I checked out his car — there was a computer and some kind of antenna in the back seat.’

‘Damn,’ Fanelli said. ‘That was stupid. He’ll end up dead, he’s not careful. I’m surprised Keller didn’t spot it.’

‘Keller was too busy running his own scam, trying to take the kid.’ Stanton told him the pro’s set-up of Tony.

The detective laughed. ‘He tried to take the boy, the boy tried to take the table and it was us old guys who took ’em both. There’s a lesson there someplace.’ The men shook hands in farewell. ‘See you next spring, my friend. Let’s try Greenpoint. I hear they’ve got some good high-stakes games over there.’

‘We’ll do that.’ Stanton nodded and fired up the sports car. He drove to the intersection, carefully checked for cross traffic and turned on to the main street that would take him to the expressway.