Drawing Dead (50 page)

Then I re-raised.

You want to bet your stack on it?

I let that sink in.

Bruno leaned back. Put his hands behind his head. Looked at Butch again. Stared me down.

It was looking like a standoff.

I’m going to get some drinks, said Lola.

Andy got up, went with her.

Hey, Bruno said after a few hours of the stare-down. Tell you what.

Yeah?

I got an idea.

Care to share it with us?

Tell you what, he said. I’ll play you heads up. Winner take all.

Where? Here?

There’s a poker room in the back.

Aha. The mysterious back room. Peter had been right. Partly right, anyway. Just not quite the type he’d been thinking of.

Eleven grand, said Butch. Freeze-out. I win, I take the cash and you fuck off. You win, you take the cash and I tell you some shit.

Bruno smiled. His every pore was oozing self-regard. There was no room in his fat head, I was quite certain, for the thought that he might lose a heads up match to me; it was a no-risk deal for him. Just another opportunity to humiliate me.

I had a different view.

You got it, I said. Butch holds the stakes.

My cash is at the cage, he said.

I thought you’d say that. You could go get it. But let’s get this thing going. You got something you can put up? It’s not like I exactly trust you, fine individual that you are.

Sure, he said, laughing. Whatever you say, cowboy.

He reached into his jacket pocket. I reached for the Mauser. He held up his hand. A key chain. I let go of the grip.

It’s out back, he said, tossing the Harley keys to Butch.

I nodded. All right, I said. That’ll do. The cash and the truth. Or the bike.

I knew he’d never give up the bike.

Butch had had enough. He leaned over, whispered in my ear. The fuck are you doing? he said.

It’s okay, I muttered back. This is just for my ego. And to get him away from that crowd. I lose, we shoot him in the knees. Meanwhile, you get what you can from Andy and his boyfriend.

All right, Redman, Butch nodded. You crazy asshole.

B
RUNO LED THE WAY TO THE BACK ROOM
. Butch went off to find the theatrical troupe.

Bruno, I said, to be fair, I don’t have the cash on me. Not eleven grand.

Don’t worry about it, he said. I know you’re good for it.

The mind games were starting already. I didn’t trust him, he’d trust me. If I’d trusted him, he’d have gone the other way. You want to create all the tension you can.

Careful what you think you know, I said. I just got out of the poker hospital.

You did? he said, feigning amused surprise.

Yeah. It hasn’t been a great two weeks.

Shit, sorry to hear that.

Yeah, I thought. About as sorry as he’d feel if his grandmother died. And left him a couple hundred grand.

I’ll take the chance, he said.

Meaning he’d take it out of me in body parts, I didn’t pay up.

And I knew that I’d known that from the get-go. But that’s what keeps you going. The big gamble. And what choice did I have?

Ashley! Bruno called to a small, dexterous dirty-blonde number. You want to deal for us?

Sure, she chirped. But I gotta ax Barry.

Don’t worry about Barry, Bruno said. I’ll take care of Barry.

Nice to be on top of the world, I thought. I was also thinking, how did he come up with eleven thousand as the stakes? That was just about
exactly enough to get me even with Evgeny. Leave a few bucks for the hotel bill.

Coincidence? Or were aliens really poised to take over Fort Knox? And the Pentagon? Had they created those crop circles? Was Bruno an alien? He certainly had that air. And what more deceptive way for them to culminate the master plan for world domination than this—an ostensibly innocent heads up poker game with me, Rick Redman, Putative Private Investigator, Overall Loser?

The question answered itself.

I prepared myself to defend the honor of our planet.

I still gotta ax him, Ashley said.

Barrrry … Bruno blasted out in his reverberant baritone. Can Ashley deal for us?

Sure, sure, Barry’s voice came from somewhere behind a wall. I’ll call in another dealer.

Nice to have pull, I said.

Yeah, Bruno said.

All right, I said. Ashley, can you get us some chips? Twenty-two grand.

Okay, she said, fluttering upstairs like the cuddly bunny she was, or so very much wanted to be.

While we’re waiting for the chips, Bruno starts telling me a story about the clubs in L.A. He’d took the Commerce guys for a couple hundred grand, he said. Went to a bar with some guys we know. He tells me about the scene. Some singles party going on at the bar. An enormous woman in pink chenille. Sunken chin and beginner jowls; tiny plump hands and sharpened pointy nails; she looks lost, distressed, out of her element. But it is, of course, her element. Or as much element as she’s going to get. The guy, he’s got a suit and tie. Who the hell told him to wear a suit and tie? He’s got that look on his face. Serious. Self-possessed. I’m no loser, it proclaims.

The fucking loser, says Bruno.

The guy’s staring around the place, Bruno goes on. Looking for a friendly face. He knows nobody. Shit, he doesn’t have a friend in the world. Except maybe his fat fuck computer geek friend from the software store, that he wouldn’t be caught dead with in a place like this, lest the loserosity rub off on him and show up on his Sears sucker jacket. He’ll stand there, just like that. For an hour. Or two. Nobody will talk to him. Nobody will come up. No girls will catch his eye. And
he’ll go home. To his studio apartment. The one with the dartboard on the wall. And play Doom 13 for four, maybe five hours. Drink a few beers. Fall down.

Bruno kind of surprised me with that one. I mean, he really was a shit-heel. But he knew how to tell a story.

Ashley came down with the chips. We went to the back room. The tables were full. A wild 25–50 no limit game, stacks of fifty grand all over the table. A tighter 10–25, chip stacks of maybe ten to thirty. A couple guys playing gin on a kitchen table. Another guy I knew from New York, LSD Dan, and a guy Bruno told me was Moishe the Yid, a notoriously sick gambler, playing red card black card for five grand a pop on a coffee table. Very intense. Couldn’t get in the middle of that kind of sick compulsive gambling shit. We had to drag a folding table out of a closet, steal a couple chairs from under the asses of the railbirds. We were paying time, the railbirds were there for the free entertainment, or waiting for a seat in a game; we had the dibs on the chairs.

Bruno stole an extra one. Stacked it on top of the first.

Back bugging you? I asked, with as false an air of innocence as I could muster.

Nah. Just want to intimidate.

That may be the only true thing I’ve heard you say, ever, I said.

Bruno smiled the smile that he no doubt thought was his enigmatic smile. In reality, it was just a slight variation on the same shit-eating I’m-bigger-better-looking-richer-and-more-successful-at-the-poker-table-than-you’ll-ever-be smile that he used for just about every occasion.

I didn’t tell him that. Saved it for later.

Ashley deals the cards.

I look down at Queen, Jack.

I toss in three hundred bucks.

Bruno folds.

My, I’m thinking. How un-Bruno-ish. Folding the first hand? Maybe he’s going to adjust. Or maybe he just has Seven, Two off? Doesn’t want to chip me up right away? Get my confidence up? We’ll see.

It goes back and forth. A lot of dodging and weaving. Small pot poker. Neither of us indulging in the power game. No all ins. No ridiculous over-bets. Not even a whole lot of the usual banter.

Bruno seems way serious.

I’ve never seen him like this.

I’m able to push him out of a few pots, my stack getting bigger, his getting smaller. I can tell he’s getting more and more nervous. This is a new Bruno. When he was on a roll, you couldn’t touch the guy. But, I was discovering, when things didn’t go his way, the cards fell against him for a while, he wasn’t invulnerable. And I could take advantage of that.

Poker’s like chess, or golf. Or life. You let your emotions rule your actions at your peril.

About an hour into the match, he’s in first position and raises. I look down at Jack, Ten of clubs. Hmm. Pretty good hand, heads up. I call. The flop comes King, two rags. No clubs. Bruno bets out about three-quarters of the pot. I look him over.

He’s stroking one hand with the other. Very small movement, but discernible. Bruno, self-soothing? This isn’t the Bruno I know. But then, who the hell said I’d ever known Bruno?

Now, this kind of self-soothing behavior can be a fairly reliable tell. The guy’s nervous. But then you have to figure out, is he nervous because he’s bluffing and doesn’t want a call, or because he hit a monster, and he’s worried you might fold and deprive him of his just deserts? He could have been hit big by the flop. Ace, King or King, Queen would be hands he would raise with in first position, for sure. Or he could have a pair lower than Kings, be nervous that the flop had hit me, and be betting for information. Or he could have Ace, Queen or some such hand, have missed the flop, and be trying to push me out.

Of course, a lot of this thinking is irrelevant: I’ve got nothing at all, not even a flush draw. In most situations, against most players, I would have, should have, stopped overthinking the hand and just mucked it. But I’d been pushing him around. He was nervous. You have to push every edge, against a strong opponent. I can push him out of one more hand, I’m thinking. I’m feeling it strongly. And it isn’t going to cost a big part of my stack to try.

I re-raise him. About two and a half times his bet.

He looks worried. He thinks for a long time.

And calls me.

Okay. He called me. Hand over. Go away, Redman. You took your shot. If he bets the turn or river, fold. If he checks, check behind him. He called. He has a hand. You don’t.

And I tell myself all that. But then, when he checks the turn and I check behind him, and the river comes another rag, he checks again.

This is very strange.

There’s a lot of money in that pot. He’s showing extreme weakness. He still looks nervous as hell. I’ve got him well covered, so he’ll be risking a big part of his remaining stack to call. So …

I push in a pot-sized bet. Shove it in. Put it to him. Eat this, I’m saying. All you can eat.

Yes, I am a fool.

Although …

He thinks a long, long, long time …

Before calling.

And showing Ten, Nine. Off suit.

He thought he might have me, with Ten high?

Inconceivable.

Yet true.

I turn over my crap. My better crap than his.

I knew what had happened. Bruno had convinced himself I was bluffing, and even though he didn’t have a hand that could even beat a lot of bluffs, he figured if he did win that hand, his call would seem almost supernatural. It would have totally freaked me out. Put me off my game. So it was a risk he was willing to take.

But it didn’t happen.

And Bruno went on tilt.

It was beautiful to see.

I’d never seen Bruno on tilt before. Maybe it was because he rarely got taken for a big pot. He was, after all, a sick good poker player. Maybe the added metaphorical weight of this encounter affected him. I doubted it, though. Despite his earlier demonstration of storytelling prowess, I was fairly sure that Bruno did not know what a metaphor was.

He hunkered down low in his double-high chair. His biceps throbbed. Or at least, some veins in his biceps throbbed. Another novelty. Shit, I thought, is this a tell I’d never picked up before? Or a new one, specific to the occasion?

I watched the veins. Autonomic response. By far the most reliable. Only the most accomplished sociopath could control an autonomic response. It did not escape me, of course, that Bruno might qualify as a highly accomplished sociopath, but on this night, at least, he didn’t seem to be fully in control.

It went like that. I’d slow play a monster, King, King with another King on the flop. He’d jam his two pair. I’d call, he’d throw his disgust across the table, muck his second-best hand. Another pile of chips in my corner. I’d jam a pair of Deuces, he’d fold his Jacks. I’d show my hand. He’d steam like a hot turd on a cold sidewalk.

Sometimes it just goes like that.

It was a beautiful thing.

I took his whole stack.

He sat back, eyed me with something on the fine hard edge between homicidal intent and respect.

All right, he said. You win.

I’m okay with that, I said magnanimously.

I counted the chips. Twenty-two thousand, as agreed. My eleven, his eleven. I’d deliberately ignored my stack during the session. You can’t let your current situation affect your judgement. Or, well, you can. You should. But not in this situation. I knew any excess thinking or emotion would kill my game. So I just let the chips stack up. Knew I was ahead. That was enough. Once we were done, and only then, I counted them up, racked them up, handed them to Ashley. Took a deep breath.

Bruno tossed two stacks of five grand at me, another grand loose.

Victory. It was sweet.

Survival was better.

Information was best. Information was survival.

Information was everything.

T
ALK TIME
, I said to Bruno.

He took it in stride. Wasn’t the bad loser I’d expected.

Shoot, he said. Wait a minute, he interrupted himself. Don’t take that literally.

I laughed.

I’m impressed, I said. You know the word ‘literally.’

Fuck you, Redman.

I laughed again. He smiled. The genuine smile of the defeated.

It was starting to look like maybe he wasn’t such a bad guy after all.

All right, man, I said. Tell me about it.

About what?

Well, for starters, how do you know Andy, Delgado, whatever the fuck his name is?

I get around.

Come on, Bruno. Listen. I already know half of it. Just spill me the other half.