Hunter's Moon (26 page)

“Mostly what you see here,” Jake answered.

CJ smiled and reached into his pants pocket for the roll of bills he’d taken to carrying since Janet froze him out of the checking account. He was glad Artie didn’t object to paying him in cash. But there was something bothering him—aside from his interest in the newly revealed head of all the prisons in Franklin County—and it wasn’t until he caught Dennis’s eye that it came to him. All of the men around the table were businessmen, albeit of varying degrees of success. Dennis didn’t fit that profile, and he was CJ’s age—younger than everyone else.

Dennis gave a halfhearted shrug before turning his attention to his cards, but Rick intuited CJ’s unspoken question.

“Geronimo’s loaded,” Rick said. “And he’s a bad cardplayer.”

CJ’s eyebrows almost climbed clear off his forehead, and when he aimed a questioning look at his friend, Dennis said, “I won the lottery four years ago.”

CJ couldn’t have been more surprised had Dennis stood up on his chair and started singing show tunes.

“How much?” he asked.

“Twenty million,” Dennis said.

“Twenty million dollars?” CJ repeated.

“Tell him how,” Harry said to Dennis.

Dennis ignored the request for as long as it took him to take and expel a single deep breath. Then, as if recounting the purchase of a twenty-million-dollar ticket was as mundane as filling up at the 7-Eleven, he said, “I played the number of home wins the Sabres had over the previous six years.”

“You’re kidding.”

“Nope. I checked,” Jake confirmed.

“Tell him what you bought,” Harry said to Dennis.

“If I tell him, can we just play cards?” Dennis asked with a sigh. He looked at CJ. “Sabres season tickets.”

“Ten sets of season tickets,” Harry corrected.

At CJ’s puzzled look—especially as he hadn’t witnessed Dennis making any trips to Buffalo to attend hockey games—Dennis explained.

“I thought I owed them,” he said.

Maybe it was the deadpan delivery, or perhaps it was the fact that he’d just discovered that one of his closest childhood friends was a millionaire, but CJ found the moment extraordinarily funny.

He let go of a loud laugh that made him feel a whole lot better than he’d felt all day. When the laughing faded, he set the money he’d been holding on the table and took a peek at his cards.

“Dennis said you and Artie took an eleven-point,” Harry said, cigar jumping as his lips moved.

CJ nodded, still feeling a chuckle rumbling around in his stomach. “We did. Big boy too.”

“How far was the shot?” Jake asked.

“Maybe eighty yards.”

Harry rearranged the cards in his hand. “Your shot or his?”

“Mine,” CJ said.

“Artie would have taken him at a quarter mile,” Rick said. He held his cards in one hand while his other riffled through the bills in front of him.

“Without a doubt,” Weidman agreed.

CJ didn’t say anything. He’d known Artie was an experienced hunter, but not that he was considered a great shot. For some reason, that bit of knowledge made him even more grateful that the hardware store owner had let him take the deer.

He looked at his hand again and found a pair. The ante was a dollar, and CJ tossed his in. Once the action came back to him, CJ slid three cards across the table, then picked up the three that Harry dealt him. CJ raised on his three of a kind. Dennis and Harry both folded in frustration. CJ reminded himself that he was late coming to the game, and it appeared it hadn’t been Harry’s night, as evidenced by a pile of cash that had dwindled to practically nothing.

Poker had always fascinated CJ, principally because of what the game coaxed from the people who played it. And one thing he’d learned early on was that it didn’t matter how much money one could afford to lose. What mattered was seeing someone else sweep your money into their pile. CJ guessed that Dalton hadn’t lost more than a few hundred dollars tonight, and that likely meant little to him. Poker was a game of principle. And right now principle was rankling Harry Dalton.

Rick stayed in the game, while Jake spent time eyeing his cards, as if he expected them to change under his perusal. Finally, he met CJ’s five-spot and followed it with one of his own.

“I meet and raise you five,” he said.

CJ looked at the money in the center of the table and then at his hand, and the three sevens that hadn’t gone anywhere. A decent hand; it gave him a good shot. His free hand moved toward his money, even though an annoying and responsible voice inside was reminding him that he was locked out of his checking account. He suspected he could call the bank and get them to release the block, mainly because he was the one who’d opened the account in the first place, but it was just one of those things that he hadn’t done yet. And another one of those things that was coming back to bite him.

“Can’t be shy my first time at the table,” CJ said, tossing his money in.

Rick looked at the growing pot, then back at his cards, and tossed them facedown on the table. “Well, this isn’t my first rodeo, and I’ve got no one to impress.” He left the table, disappearing into the kitchen.

When CJ looked at Jake, he found the man watching him, a sly smile on his face. Without taking his eyes off CJ, he reached for a ten-spot and tossed it in.

“Belle of the ball or wallflower?” Jake asked.

The corner of CJ’s lip curled upward as he met Jake Weidman’s gaze. He winked at Jake and threw in to match.

“Call,” he said.

When the cards came down, CJ’s sevens beat Jake’s pair of tens.

As CJ scooped the pot toward him, Jake chuckled and said, “You play cards like your father.”

The comment stopped CJ cold for a fraction of a second, but he recovered and finished gathering his newfound wealth.

With the others sliding their cards toward CJ so he could deal, CJ glanced over at Dennis.

“So you’ve got twenty million dollars,” he said. “Tell me again why we’re spending our evenings and weekends working on a house?”

His question seemed to hit Dennis in the sweet spot, because he looked down at the table, his brow furrowed. After several seconds, he looked up and said, “It’s something to do.”

“I could think of several other ways I’d spend my time if I had that kind of money,” CJ said, shuffling the cards and starting to deal.

It seemed like his friend took a long time to answer, and when he did it was with the tone of someone who had just realized something.

“Wait a m-minute. I know what P-Paramount paid you for the rights to your last b-book. Even if your wife gets half, you’re n-not hurting. So why are
you
spending your w-weekends w-working on a house?”

CJ finished dealing and set the rest of the deck on the table. He poured himself a drink, looked at Dennis, and shrugged. “It‘s something to do.”

That brought chuckles from around the table, and CJ smiled in tune, which helped him cover up the inadequacy of the response. If he was going to be honest with Dennis, he would have said he was working on the house because he was unmoored. Because he didn’t have anywhere in particular he needed to be. And because his wife had him in a financial vise. But that kind of answer wasn’t the sort one trotted out at a poker game.

And after an evening of brooding, he was in far too good a mood to be sucked back into anything beyond cards and Frank singing from the other room.

Chapter 20

The poker game had lasted well into the morning, finding added energy in CJ’s presence—a new player who had added a bit of unpredictability to the gathering.

CJ felt pretty good about walking away from the table a few hundred dollars richer than when he’d walked in, and was especially pleased that the lion’s share of his winnings came from the scourge of evildoers and miscreants everywhere. To hear the others tell it, Jake Weidman rarely went home with less than he’d brought with him. Rick lamented that Jake was the luckiest man he’d ever met, and the reason he kept inviting him to play cards was that he was hoping for some of that luck to rub off on him.

Last night, though, CJ had taken Weidman nearly every hand, which had led Rick to comment that he might have found a new rabbit’s foot. In the too bright light of day, CJ determined that was more ludicrous than it had sounded last night. He personally couldn’t detect any thread of luck running through his life over the last month. So if Rick wanted to use him as a charm, he needed to prepare himself for fate’s wicked backhand.

The only thing arguing against that was the fact that he’d run into Weidman in the first place, and that his luck at cards might manifest itself more fully as he tried to determine what role the man played in the subject of CJ’s article.

CJ was tired when he showed up at the Lyndale house, and his elbow throbbed from where he’d banged it on the new granite countertop he and Dennis had installed this afternoon. The house they were remodeling was starting to come together, even in the short time they’d been working on it. In fact, they were making such good progress that Dennis was worried the job wouldn’t last through the spring as he’d hoped. When CJ had mentioned that Dennis was loaded and didn’t need the job anyway, Dennis hadn’t responded except to grab the nearest power tool, which happened to be a drill, making it impossible for CJ to say anything else to him.

The whole thing continued to confuse CJ. The only way he could make sense of it was to pretend that Dennis wasn’t worth twenty million. When he removed the money from the equation, everything else made sense. Without the money, smart business practice. With the money, lunacy.

But as CJ ascended the steps of the Baxter place, he thought
he
might be the real lunatic.

They’d had Edward call, knowing that of all the immediate family, he got along with Uncle Edward best. But they needn’t have bothered with the ruse; he would have come regardless, if only to see how his presence in town was affecting everyone. The reason for the dinner meeting was somewhat muddled, which could have been due to Edward’s delivery. But if CJ’s memories of family dinners were at all accurate, he suspected the occasion would indeed be a muddled affair.

What surprised CJ was that even after the passage of so many bitter years, he wouldn’t have missed this for the world. For some strange reason he felt an odd kinship with these people, and it had nothing to do with the fact that they shared blood. He couldn’t quite figure it out, but between the time he’d received the invitation to when he parked the Honda and began walking up toward the house, he suspected it had something to do with the new book percolating in his brain. The book he would get down to seriously working on over the next couple of weeks, once he’d turned in his current project to
The Atlantic
. It was the first time a project had excited him in a long while—since he’d finished writing
The Buffalo Hunter
—and he enjoyed the way his mind kept disappearing down rabbit holes, developing the backstory before he’d written a word.

He didn’t knock but just walked in, and he heard the sounds of a large gathering as he made his way down the hallway toward the dining room. Before stepping out of the dimly lit hall and into a room crowded with relatives, he stopped and listened to his family talk. It was the typical stuff—work, politics, church, sports, bills. The things a normal family would discuss at the dinner table. He couldn’t figure out how he felt about that until he realized he was smiling.

When he walked into the room he saw that Edward was true to his word. The place was filled. The dining room had long been the focal point of the home. A table that could seat twenty comfortably dominated it—and it spoke to the age of the house, to a time that placed greater importance on the gathering of the family around the table. And gather they had; it appeared to CJ that nearly every seat was occupied, and that the collection of relatives included people whose names he couldn’t recall at first glance.

Uncle Edward, who had doubtless been watching for him, spotted him first, and CJ noticed the empty chair next to him, close to the head of the table at which sat CJ’s father. The food was already on the table, which was what CJ was aiming for when he chose to arrive fifteen minutes late. While he was okay eating with these people, he had little desire to engage in any pre-dinner mingling.

Everyone else had noticed him now, and as he walked around the table to get to his spot, he fielded a flurry of handshakes and warm greetings. Most had not seen him since Sal’s funeral, and his conversations were limited that day, so this was the first occasion for most of the more distant relatives to interact with him.

It was as he was trying to disengage his hand from the hand of one of his second cousins that he saw Julie. She sat at the other end of the table, talking to the person seated next to her—another of CJ’s cousins—and almost as soon as his eyes found her, she looked his way. Just for a split second, and then she was gone.

He extricated himself from his cousin’s handshake and slipped into the chair next to Edward, who slapped CJ on the back, so hard it nearly brought tears to his eyes.

“Glad you could make it,” Edward said.

CJ tried to respond but all that came out was a cough.

“Sorry about that,” Edward said, once he realized what he’d done.

CJ waved him off and reached for his water glass, taking a long drink. Out of the corner of his eye he saw Julie looking his way, the hint of a smile on her lips.

Years ago CJ’s grandmother would have been responsible for the feast spread out on the table. But she’d died the year before he left for Vanderbilt.

“Who cooked?” he asked his uncle.

“Meredith and Julie,” Edward answered.

The first time CJ met his brother’s wife was at the funeral, and they’d spoken only briefly. But if half of what was spread out on the table was her doing, then he decided Graham had married well. And he already knew that Ben had hit the jackpot, regardless of how good a cook Julie was.

“Hey, little brother,” Graham said, flashing CJ his warm campaign smile. The serving dishes had already made the rounds, and Graham’s plate was piled high. With ham as the entrée, Graham took it upon himself to slice a generous slab for CJ.