Last Call (Last Call 1)

The man to his left was white-suited Ricky Leroy, who showed a Six and a Five, and Scott decided to buy Leroy's hand and hope for a Full Boat and not just a low Two Pair.

The round of betting showered another twenty-six hundred-dollar bills into the pot.

Leroy proved willing to let the hand go to Scott for twelve hundred dollars—and when the four cards were flipped to him, all face up as the rules demanded, Scott made sure that he only blinked sluggishly, as if he were too tired and drunk to have focused on them yet.

The four cards were the Six and the Five that had been showing and a Deuce and a Six. Crane now had four Sixes.

With a steady hand he lifted his glass and took a sip. So Leroy's houseboat lists a little, he told himself when he noticed the tilted surface of the beer; so what?

The rest of the mating seemed to take hours, but at last there were six players still in the game with eight cards each, two down and six up. Leroy had walked away to the bar.

"Three Sixes bet," said the man who was dealing.

"Uh," said Scott, peeking again at his down cards, "check."

The man to his left bet two hundred, the next man folded, the next two called, and the last man raised it another two hundred. The stack of bills in the middle of the table looked like a pile of green leaves that some gardener would eventually bag up and haul away.

"That's four hundred to the three Sixes," said the dealer.

"See the four," said Scott, peeling six bills off his roll, "and raise it two."

"A check-raise from the Sixes," noted the dealer.

Everyone folded but the man who had raised. He stared at Scott for a long time. He was showing two Knights and two Tens and two worthless cards. "And two," he said finally.

He thinks that the three Sixes are all I've got, Scott thought, or that at best I've got a low Boat. He's got a high Boat, probably Knights over Tens, and he knows the Aces and Queens and Kings are effectively gone.

"And two," Scott said, throwing the bills out onto the table.

The other player didn't move, but a glow seemed to go out of him. "Call," he said, pushing two more hundreds across the felt.

Scott flipped over his two down cards, and the other player bowed his head and tossed his hand into the discards.

"The Four of a Kind beats the Boat," pronounced the dealer.

Scott started to reach out with both arms for the pile of money, but Leroy, who had left the table after selling his hand to Scott, had returned and now stepped forward.

"Maybe not the houseboat." He grinned, showing big, even white teeth. "There's thirteen thousand six fifty in there, I believe." He took a leather billfold from inside his jacket and carefully separated out of it thirteen one-thousand-dollar bills and six hundreds and a fifty. He leaned forward and pressed them down onto the heaped money.

Hot, dry desert air sighed in through the open portholes, and Scott's throat burned with the smell of hot stone.

"I'm claiming the Assumption," Leroy said.

CHAPTER 7: It's All Yours

Scott sat back, put his hands on the edge of the table and grinned curiously up at this new opponent. Somehow he had forgotten Newt's telling him that Leroy liked this bet.

Scott had sunk $3,050 into this pot, counting the $1,200 he had paid for Leroy's hand. If he lost the cut, it would take him down from the more than $25,000 he had thought he had before Leroy had spoken—about three times what he'd walked aboard with—to less than $12,000. But if he won it, he'd be sitting on nearly $38,000. And at least the odds were in Scott's favor.

The dealer shrugged, gathered in the cards and shuffled them several times, handed them to another player to cut, and then slid the deck, solid as a brick, to the patch of felt in front of Scott.

The cigarette smoke was a narrow, upright funnel in the middle of the table now, like a tiny slow-motion tornado.

Still grinning, Scott slid his fingers halfway down the card-edges and lifted off the top half and showed the exposed card to the company—getting in return some looks of sympathy—and then he looked at it himself.

It was the Three of Cups. There were only four cards in the deck lower than that, the Deuces, and only three that would tie it. Seven cards out of fifty-five. One chance in about eight and a half.

Still holding the card up, Scott finished his beer, proud that his hand didn't shake in this almost certain defeat. He didn't have to tip the glass back very far at all.

He laid the top half back down on the deck and pushed it across to the dealer, who reshuffled and passed it for the cut and then slid it to the place where Leroy had been sitting.

Leroy leaned forward and curled his brown hand down over the cards; for a moment he seemed to be kneading them gently, and Scott was dully sure that the man was cheating, feeling for a crimp or an unshaved edge. Ozzie had taught him long ago that cheaters were to be either used or avoided, but never challenged, especially in a game with strangers.