Last Call (Last Call 1)

Scott had less than eight thousand, and he was going home to car payments and a girl friend who liked steak and lobster and first-growth Bordeaux wines.

And he had heard that next year Benny Binion, the owner of the Horseshoe, was going to host a World Series of Poker, with all the best Poker players converging there to determine who was the very best. Scott could remember having met old Binion once, at a restaurant called Louigi's on Las Vegas Boulevard. Scott had been only three or four, staying out late with his long-lost real father, but he remembered now that Binion had ordered the house's best steak and had then shaken ketchup onto it.

He was sure he could win this competition … if he could come into town with enough money to spread a good-size net.

"I've got to go, Oz. My roll's short, and the season's over."

"Your roll?" The grin was fading from Ozzie's face as he raised his head to look at Scott. "What you've got in your pocket is a hair less than twenty-five percent of our roll, yours and mine and Diana's. We've got thirty-one and a half, and if that ain't lavish to live a year on, I don't—"

"I've got to go, Oz."

Ozzie now wearily forced himself back up onto his feet. His gray hair was disarranged, and he needed a shave. "Scott, it's on water. It's Tarot cards. You want to play, take our money to any of the hundred games in town here. But you can't go play there."

You can't go play there, thought Scott, as the beer amplified his own massive fatigue. That's what you say to a kid who wants to ride his tricycle to a park where there might be bad boys.

I'm twenty-six, and I'm a damn good player on my own—not just as Ozzie's kid.

The cross-cut wooden grip of his .38 revolver was poking up out of the dirty shirts in the open suitcase on the bed. He pulled the gun free and shoved it into his jacket pocket.

"I'm going," he said, and went to the door and pulled it open and strode rapidly down the hall toward the door to the stairwell.

And he was crying by the time he stepped out of the cool darkness of the casino into the brassy afternoon sunlight, because for at least several floors he had heard Ozzie shuffling in his stocking feet down the stairs behind him, calling and pleading weakly in his frail voice as he forced his exhausted old body to try to catch up with his adopted son.

CHAPTER 6: We're Now Thirteen

"Assumption," Newt said.

He was talking quickly, hunched over the steering wheel of his Cadillac as the hot dark desert swept past on either side. "This guy Leroy won't play it unless there are twelve other people at the table with him. A hundred dollars ante. Everybody's dealt two down cards and one up card, and then there's a round of betting, two hundred a bet, and then one more up card and another round at two hundred."

Scott popped the cap off a fresh bottle of beer. "That's fifty-two cards," he said blurrily. "You're out of cards, except maybe for a Joker."

"Nah, he won't play it with a Joker, and actually there's four more cards left, 'cause there's an extra face card in each suit, the Knight. And the suits are different, they're Sticks and Cups and Coins and Swords. But anyway, no more cards are dealt."

The lights of the bars and brothels of Formyle swept past. The Cadillac was now four miles out of Las Vegas and must, Scott thought, be doing a hundred by now.

"What happens then," Newt went on, "is that each four-card hand in turn goes up for bid. The term is 'the mating.' Say you've got two Kings down and a Three and something up, and you see a hand with a King and a Three showing; well, you'd want to bid on that hand, 'cause if you got it, you'd have a Full Boat in your eight-card hand—or, if one of his down cards turned out to be the [case] King, you'd find yourself with four Kings, get it? When you put the two hands together, yours and the one you bought, they say that the resulting eight-card hand has been conceived, rather than completed or something. With the bidding you usually wind up paying a guy, for his hand, a hundred or so more than what he's got in the pot. A lot of guys never mean to stay for the showdown, they just want to sell their hands at the bid, at the mating. And when it gets down to the last three guys who haven't bought a hand or sold theirs, the competition gets hot 'cause nobody wants to be left out in the cold holding an unsold and unplayable—unconceivable—four-card hand."

Scott nodded, staring out through the dusty windshield at the dim bulk of the McCullough Range denting the dark sky ahead. "So there might be as many as … six guys in at the showdown."