Authors: Kay Keppler
Tanner glanced up and saw Hope approach—and had the breath knocked out of him again. She had that glow. That drop-dead radiance that made his heart stop. It wasn’t anything she wore. Clothes had nothing to do with how beautiful she was. It was like a golden aura that surrounded her.
“If you’re tired of playing poker, we could do the Big Shot,” he said as she neared, trying to sound normal. “Might be good for a cheap thrill.” He squinted at the brochure. “Or maybe not so cheap. Thirty bucks to toss your breakfast. There’s a concept.”
“Isn’t that the bungee jump? From forty stories up, or something?” Hope said, coming up and looking over his shoulder at the brochure. “Just what I need—more free fall. Where’s Marty?”
Tanner shrugged, enjoying how close Hope was. “He got into a game that didn’t end on time. He should be done in a while. The other guys are in place.”
“Why didn’t he call me?”
“Because he called me.”
She looked at him, uncertain.
“I guess because I’ve got the cell plan with the fewest dropped calls. Look, you’re covered, Hope. You want to do this or not?”
She exhaled, looking a little embarrassed. “Yeah. I do. Sorry. I just have to get a quick cup of coffee first.”
“Fast coffee, our specialty.” He put the brochure back in the rack and led her into the casino. “If you’re not too fussy about locale, they have decent brew at the bar.”
They pulled up two stools at the nearly empty bar. Tanner nodded to the bartender and ordered plain coffee. They made it the way he liked it: strong and hot, and it tasted good going down. Hope sagged onto a bar stool and sighed in relief while she drank. Tanner eyed her over his own cup.
“So how are you doing so far?”
Hope frowned, taking another swallow. “I did okay last night. I didn’t win, but I didn’t melt down.”
“Any thoughts on why you didn’t win?”
“The thirty-dollar tables are a whole different level of play. Everything is stepped up.”
“Got that right. You playing into any inside straights?”
Hope snorted. “I know better than
that.
”
Tanner grinned. “Just checking. Okay. Take a look at that table over there. The one with the Harley Davidson tee-shirt. The dealer is just starting out. Tell me how the players will bid.”
Hope stared at him. “How can I tell? I’m not in the game.”
“Not the amounts. Just how they’ll play.”
Hope stared at him and then turned her back to him to watch the game twenty feet away.
With her back to him, he could see the curve of her neck, the strong set of her shoulders. Shoulders? He’d never bothered to notice a woman’s shoulders before.
Crap.
He had it bad.
“I know I’m supposed to be looking for tells,” she said, turning back to him. “But I don’t see how I can see anything. Don’t you have to study the players for a while to know how they’ll play? Like several hands? Or several years?”
“Not necessarily.” Tanner took a deep breath and regrouped, putting all thoughts of Hope’s shoulders temporarily aside. “Okay, the Harley tee-shirt. What’s he all about?”
Hope looked at the player at the end. “He likes motorcycles?”
Tanner laughed. “Are you
sure
you’re not playing into any inside straights?” he asked. “Look at his hands. His fingers. He’s got them laced together.”
Hope looked again for a few seconds. Then she turned to Tanner, her eyes bright with anticipation.
“What does that mean?” she asked.
Tanner smiled, warmed by her infectious enthusiasm. “Generally speaking, it means the player has low confidence. It’s not much to go on. Low confidence could mean he thinks he has a bad hand, or he thinks he has a good hand but he doesn’t know how to play it. And there’s all kinds of exceptions. He could be bluffing. He could have some other tell that he’s trying to conceal by locking his fingers together like that. But when you sit down at a table and you’re first gathering information, go with the customary read. Interlaced fingers means low confidence.”
“So I could bluff him.”
“You could.”
She beamed at him, and Tanner felt himself fall into her smile. “What else?” she demanded.
“What else,” he said, glancing at the table, wanting to find something that would make her smile at him like that again. “Guy in the blue shirt.”
Hope looked at the man in the blue shirt for several seconds. Tanner watched her narrow her eyes and glare at the unoffending player before she turned back to him.
“What?” she said.
“Thumbs in waistband. Tell you anything?”
“He ate too much breakfast.
What?
”
Tanner grinned. “He ate too much breakfast.”
“Hey!” Hope said, but she laughed. “You’re supposed to be teaching me
here!”
Tanner shook his head. “He ate too much breakfast,
and
it’s another low-confidence tell. Thumbs in waistbands or pockets generally are low-confidence tells.”
“Thank you. Was that so hard?”
“Good thing I’m so trustworthy. I could be telling you this stuff all wrong.”
Hope leaned back, an arrested look on her face. “I probably shouldn’t listen to you at all. I have to go.” She jumped off the stool.
“Wait a minute.” Tanner put out his hand to stop her, feeling her flesh, firm and smooth under his fingers. “I was just teasing you. But that reminds me—one thing you do need to learn, and the sooner the better—patience. What’s your starting hand?”
Hope jerked her arm away. “It depends.”
“If you say it depends on your position at the table, that’s the right answer. Even so, you need to decide what your opening hand is for where you sit in the betting round, and then stick to it. It’ll save you a lot of poor decisions down the road.”
Hope was looking at him like he was pond scum. What had he said that had made her mad?
“You have to be aggressive, like we talked about, but selective. Wait for the right hand, and then play the hell out of it. You’ll be better off.”
She was still frowning at him. He couldn’t believe it. Here he was,
helping.
“You can trust me, Hope. Marty does.”
She looked at him for a long moment and then took a deep breath. “Yeah, I trust Marty. For some things. He’s my
uncle
, after all. But he’s not exactly a pillar of the community, either. Where am I playing first?”
Tanner felt disappointed, but he pulled his phone out of his pocket and checked his messages.
“Isaiah says he’s got a ringer over at the Casbah. Let me check if that game is still in progress.”
He called briefly, listened to what Isaiah had to say, then hung up.
“You’re due at the Casbah,” he said, “the game at the east corner, guy with the Hooters cap.” Hope rolled her eyes, picked up her bag, and headed out of the casino.
“Also a sign of low confidence,” Tanner called after her.
Tanner sat on the bar stool, drinking a second cup of coffee while he watched the tables. This job was incredibly boring. He was sitting alone indoors on a beautiful morning, watching tables for bad players so that he could coordinate with six other guys who were also watching tables, so that a relative novice could move in and score.
The only reason he was wasting his time this way was because he wanted to get some nonworking time with Hope as a reward. She must have been holding a huge marker on these guys, to get six professional players to fly out from Jersey for a week and help her out this way, without payment or even the expectation they could earn back their expenses.
Interesting, though, how she didn’t seem to trust any of them fully—certainly not him, but not even Marty.
He’d give a lot to know what
that
was all about.
With one eye on the tables, he fielded calls from Sharp Eddie Toombs, Pete Wisniewski, and Jim Thickpenny, which is why he didn’t notice when Agent Roy Frelly of the FBI came up from behind him and slid onto the stool Hope had recently vacated.
“Wingate,” Frelly said. “Tell me what the hell you’re doing here, and make it good.”
“Ah, drinking a cup of coffee?” Tanner said, taking a sip. “It’s good. I recommend it.”
“I know what you’re doing, and you’re not just drinking coffee,” Frelly said. “You’re scoping out the tables.”
Tanner felt his heart sink. Watching tables wasn’t illegal. You could watch all you liked, and you could play based on your observations, and you’d never break a law. Laws were broken only when you’d done something to artificially alter the outcome of the game—like when he’d used card tricks when he was nineteen. But he hadn’t played crooked since then—almost twenty years.
That didn’t mean the casinos liked it when you won based on watching tables. Just ask those MIT kids who were banned from all casinos for playing in teams and betting high when the cards would stack—entirely legitimately—in their favor.
If there was one thing Tanner didn’t want, it was to be kicked out of the casinos. He earned his living in the card rooms here. And he didn’t want the Jersey players and Hope kicked out, either. Frelly might not be able to accomplish that, but he could certainly make trouble for them. And Tanner didn’t want to give Frelly any more power over his life than he already had.
“Like I said, just enjoying the coffee,” Tanner said. “What are you doing here?”
“I’m looking for trouble,” Frelly said. “Like I always do. And I think I found me some.”
“Not me,” Tanner said virtuously, hoping his phone wouldn’t ring, announcing the losing attributes of a poker table at another casino. “I am as clean as the driven snow.”
“Yeah, tell me another one,” Frelly said, snorting. “You’re so clean, that’s why we got you by the short hairs for twenty long ones.”
“Frelly, did you come by just to annoy me, or do you have something to say? Because if not, I’ll be going.”
Frelly raised his finger and the bartender brought him a cup of coffee. The agent took a careful sip.
“You’re right. This stuff ain’t half bad,” he said. “Okay, we got a tip that we should be expecting trouble. Mafia-type trouble.”
Tanner rolled his eyes.
“But Agent Frelly, we’re in
Vegas
. Is there
gambling
here? There
is?
I’m shocked,
shocked
, that organized crime wants a piece of it.”
Frelly shook his head. “Once a smartass, always a smartass. No. What I’m asking you now is whether you seen anybody unusual or people shouldn’t be here who could be a part of organized crime.”
The Jersey crew.
They weren’t exactly
organized,
but some of them probably were criminals. More or less.
“So I’m a snitch now?” Tanner asked. When he thought about it, Frelly had just insulted him. “I get paid extra for that.”
Frelly snorted again. “You get paid nothing, like always,” he said. “I’m asking you, as a respon—as an
observant
member of the general public, have you seen anything that can cause trouble.”
The bartender came by with the coffee pot and refilled their cups. Tanner turned to him.
“Skip, you seen anything that can cause trouble around here?”
The bartender shrugged. “Just that blonde you were with earlier. She looks like big trouble to me.”
Tanner winced. So much for keeping Hope out of it.
“What blonde?” Frelly asked.
“Somebody Tanner here has the hots for,” Skip said obligingly. “But she’s got marriage and kids written all over her. Not our Tanner’s type at all.”
Frelly shrugged, losing interest. “I got a photo.” He reached into his jacket pocket, briefly exposing his sidearm, and pulled out a sheet of paper. He unfolded it and showed it to Tanner and Skip. “You seen this guy? Russian. Goes by the name of Johnny Red.”
Not one of the Jersey crew.
Tanner felt his tension fade.
But Skip staggered back in feigned astonishment. “Johnnie
Walker
Red? We got him right here on our shelf.”
Frelly glared at him and then Tanner. “A bunch of smartasses. This guy’s trying to take over the Jersey action. The office in Newark sent us a tip that he came out here. For business or pleasure is what we’re trying to find out.”
He came out here for Big Julie Saladino
, Tanner thought.
“I think he’s coming to take out Big Julie Saladino,” Frelly said. “What are the odds?”
If Johnny Red does take out Big Julie, I won’t have to play cards with the Mob,
Tanner thought.
Works for me.
“Haven’t seen him,” he said.
“Just my luck,” Frelly said. “I’m two damn weeks from retirement and I got some Jersey goons gonna duke it out on my patch. They couldn’t go to Atlantic City? This is gonna mess up my pension, I can feel it.”
“Well, everybody’s got problems,” Tanner said, edging off the stool. “Gotta run.” Over Frelly’s shoulder Tanner had seen Marty enter the casino and head toward the bar. On his home turf Marty counted most of the police force from Passaic to Piscataway among his friends and beneficiaries. He wouldn’t normally worry about running into one depressed FBI agent. But Marty might not be so relaxed about meeting an FBI agent when they were casing tables for Hope.