2 Pushing Luck (3 page)

“Shhhhh.” I put a finger up to my lips. “I’m practicing my poker face.”

“Did you know that Patrick has moved on?” Jamie informed me. “I just saw him with his hand high up on some old woman’s backside, and it’s all your fault.”

“Maybe he’s just putting up a brave front,” I said.

She gave me a heavy-lidded sideways look. “I half expected you to come knocking on my door last night. Were you with one of the rental properties after chasing mine away, Mr. Hypocrite?”

My world became a very narrowly focused thing. I had always kind of had a thing for Jamie, and she smelled aroused and scared. But I wasn’t exactly in the mood and couldn’t afford any distractions even if I was. And even if neither of those things were true, my body wasn’t currently a safe place for Jamie to hide under. Or on top of. Or beside.

“I got pulled into another game,” I said. “I didn’t get to bed until after five.”

“Where was this game?” Jamie was intrigued. “Who was it with?”

“It started in the kitchen,” I told her. “I was playing with some of the household staff.”

Jamie clicked her tongue. “Nobody can give you the four-one-one on other people like domestic staff. You always have an angle, don’t you?”

“Not always,” I said, and then, because I couldn’t help myself: “If I had come by your room, would you have let me in?”

“In one possible reality I would have let you in,” Jamie explained carefully. “In one possible reality I would have kept you out. Both possible realities exist until I open the door. It’s like Schrodinger’s cathouse.”

I smiled, but I was distracted. If I blew Jamie off, the rakshasa would know that I wasn’t planning on taking her to a storage shed outside Charleston. If I didn’t discourage her, she might hang around after the tournament.

“Why don’t we meet up at Dimitri’s Monday at five?” I said. “We can catch up. Winner buys dinner.”

“Dimitri’s closed down years ago. Are you afraid that I’ll use my feminine wiles on you before the final round?” she teased.

“Something like that.” I turned my head to say something else and saw Russell Sidney being pushed into the room in a wheelchair by the rakshasa. I don’t know what everyone else was seeing, but Russell was a horror show. His skin was tinged with blue blotches the same color—or discoloration really—as the rakshasa’s. Russell’s brownish-red hair had become coarse and wiry, and his nose seemed to be in the process of collapsing in on itself. His mouth was being pulled wide by some migration of his cheek muscles and he couldn’t close his lips, tooth stubs emerging from his gums like crooked tombstones and causing drool to spill over. The worst part was his eyes; they were barely visible within the bloating face folds, but the eyes were Russell’s, and they were just sane enough to be self-loathing and helpless and terrified.

“I told you,” Jamie murmured quietly beside me.

There’s always been some confusion about where rakshasas come from. In some stories they are evil spirits that possess people’s bodies. In other stories they are creatures with bodies of their own capable of physically reproducing. But I understood, then, how rakshasas make new rakshasas. Russell Sidney wasn’t being possessed. He was being changed, the same way people who become werewolves or vampires are changed.

Maybe it starts with corrupting their victims, getting them to hate themselves one weak decision at a time, leading them into increasingly destructive behaviors and desperate and selfish acts against others. Somewhere along the way feeding their wards human flesh must be part of the rakshasa’s magical induction ceremony too. But whatever was involved, Russell Sidney was some kind of horrible caterpillar in the middle of a transformation.

He wasn’t going to become a butterfly.

The rakshasa grinned at me from across the room, a proud new parent.

When I went back up to my room later, the guard’s head was gone.

That night, Jamie came to my room.

“You’re right,” she said quietly when I opened the door. “There’s something wrong about this place, and I can’t figure it out and can’t shake it off. I’m scared.”

She really was too. Her heart was hammering and the pheromones she was putting off were a dense mix of lust and terror.

What was I going to say? One of the rakshasa’s henchmen was standing in the hallway, not even trying to be subtle. He was another big guy but kind of old for muscle work, sparse-haired and gray-skinned with lots of burst capillaries close to the surface on his face. He looked like the survivor of a Charles Bukowski poem.

A loup-garou would take Jamie into the room and use her for all she was worth. Well, less than what she was worth, really. The fact that he was planning to kill her later would be gravy.

I let her in.

The first thing Jamie did was sit on the edge of my bed. She was wearing a short and tight black dress and she had reapplied her makeup. Her knees weren’t touching. “Can I just stay here for a while?” she asked me. “Without any funny business?”

As it turned out, she couldn’t.

I couldn’t figure out how the rakshasa was cheating. The cards were fresh out of the pack and smelled like it. The dealer probably was a mechanic, but I was watching carefully and didn’t see any sign of bottom dealing. If the rakshasa was a hand mucker, it was the best one I’d never seen. Maybe it was just a better card player than me.

The kid across from me was another fish in the rakshasa’s barrel. The pudgy little bastard was a better card player than the congressman had been, a pretty good player actually, but he was nowhere near as good as he thought he was. He had the same last name as a famous cereal brand, and presumably that wasn’t a coincidence. He played with the confidence of someone who had always had more than he could lose, the kind of confidence that is a huge advantage in life until it leads to disaster.

Jamie was sitting on my right and playing a conservative game of duck and cover, staying even until one of us eliminated the other. At the moment, I was the only one bleeding chips.

Russell Sidney was propped in his wheelchair and sitting at the table next to the rakshasa. He barely moved, and when he did, it was with spastic jerks and twitches. He occasionally made gargling sounds that could have meant anything as long as it wasn’t good.

“You see, Edwin, this is what separates the winners’ table from every other round,” the rakshasa told the fish. “This table has more to win and more to lose, but there’s less tension in the air. We all understand that the money itself isn’t the most important thing.”

How attractive was the rakshasa’s illusion of “Nicole” anyway? It spoke with the light assurance of the truly beautiful.

“Speak for yourself,” Jamie put in. “For me, the money is the only important thing.”

The rakshasa laughed in a horrible grinding parody of lightness. I almost wished I could hear what everyone else was hearing. “I’m not saying there isn’t tension. I’m saying it isn’t in the air. Look at Mr. Mark Powell over there. The man is a locked box. He could be a bomb. He could be a birthday present.”

“You seem to know what I’m holding,” I observed.

The rakshasa waved this off. “One should never underestimate the value of luck. You can’t plan for it, you can’t count on it, but it is a factor.”

“I don’t believe in luck.” I said. “Things just appear random because we can’t see the bigger picture. Like Einstein said, God doesn’t play dice.”

The rakshasa pursed its thick, gummy lips. “I don’t believe in God. Like Friedrich Nietzsche said, God is dead.”

“I’m pretty sure God said Friedrich Nietzsche is dead,” I observed. “Guess who won?”

“Is this going to be one of those poker games?” Jamie complained mildly. “Philosophy classes are one of the reasons I dropped out of college.”

The rakshasa ignored her. Its lips parted and fangs peeked out at odd angles. “See, that’s what I’m saying, Edwin. Mark here is the absolute last person I would have expected a sermon from. Is he just saying whatever he thinks will yank my chain, looking for the right crowbar to pry my armor off a little? Or is he other than what he seems? A locked box.”

“You seem to have found the key,” Edwin said, laughing as I lost three tens to the rakshasa’s three queens. It was a high school bully’s laugh though I had no doubt he had developed it in a series of private schools.

“Not yet.” The rakshasa laughed. It was the laugh of someone who ate high school bullies. “But I am like a child that way. Show me a locked box, and I want to know what’s inside it. That’s why poker is so much fun. Each hand a mystery. Each hand a revelation. We’re all still children, really, we’ve just gotten better at hiding it. That’s why we find children so…delicious.”

And the rakshasa actually licked its lips, watching me while it did so. Its tongue was thick and long and gray, emerging like a tentacle.

Screw it. The next round, I had the opening bid with an ace and a five showing, and I was also holding two other fives and a nine. I held on to four cards as if I were drawing for a straight or a flush and traded in the ace. I slipped the new card under my others without flipping it over. If some hidden watcher around or above me was giving the rakshasa hand signals, let it make anything out of that.

The rakshasa also took one card. It was bizarre, watching those sausage fingers holding the cards delicately between talons.

The fish took two cards. Jamie took two.

I shoved all of my chips into the middle of the table. Three hundred and forty thousand dollars’ worth. “I’m all in.”

The room went silent.

“Mark, you haven’t looked at your pull card,” Jamie observed.

Neither has anyone else
, I thought, but I didn’t say it aloud. There were too many…well…I won’t call them innocent…but there were too many bystanders in the room. “Just trying to keep things interesting.”

“There’s nothing interesting about giving up,” the rakshasa observed shortly. Its eyes were oil slicks, and an emotion briefly rippled in their dark and filmy surface like some dead sea creature. For the first time since the game had started, the rakshasa was bothered.

“I’m not giving up. I just thought I’d take an actual chance,” I taunted. “Instead of just talking about it. That’s why it’s called gambling.”

The rakshasa made a low, wet snorting sound. “I think you’re holding three of a kind and trying to act like a suicide bomber. I call.”

Again, was it cheating, or was it that good at reading me?

The fish smirked and pushed three hundred and forty thousand dollars of his not-earned money forward. “So do I.”

Jamie folded.

I turned my cards over. I had pulled the five of clubs. Four of a kind.

The rakshasa stared at my hand for a long moment. Something in its eyes ignited, a deep smoldering rage that wanted to burn the world down. It threw its cards in without any urbane chatter.

Well, at least I knew I wasn’t facing a cold deck. The fish made a big deal out of having three kings. Jamie didn’t comment one way or another.

On the next hand, I had four hearts with a six and a nine showing. I drew one card, again keeping it facedown without looking at it.

“Does Mark always play this eccentrically?” the rakshasa asked Jamie.

She shrugged.

Three raises after opening on a pair of jacks, the fish went all in.

We all knew the fish was bluffing. He had an odd, resigned calm when he was bluffing and simmered slightly when he wasn’t.

Jamie folded.

I called. If I won, the fish was out of the game.

“You still haven’t looked at your card,” the rakshasa remarked. It didn’t quite manage to sound neutral. It sounded the way someone with obsessive-compulsive disorder might sound while casually mentioning that your socks didn’t match.

“I’m not betting on my cards,” I said.

“What are you betting on?” it asked politely. It wanted to remove my eyeballs and put them on toothpicks and eat them.

I smiled. “I’m betting against you. I think your luck has run out.”

The rakshasa used its buy-in and called. I had found its button. It could not abide my hint of anything resembling order or greater purpose in the universe.

The fish sheepishly unveiled…a pair of jacks.

I turned my cards over: a six, a seven, an eight, a nine, and a ten of hearts. A straight flush. The watchers went crazy.

I have no explanation for it. I am not an overtly religious man, but I do believe there is something in the universe more than chaos and selfishness. Of course, a lot of people who have that feeling while gambling wind up in rehab. You can believe what you want.

The rakshasa was absolutely still. It stared at the cards, then looked at me with those murky eyes. When It got up and left the table, it did so without saying a word.

It was so agitated that it forgot to wheel Russell away with it. I addressed Russell while I was leaning forward to rake in the chips. “I’ve been wanting to say something to you, Russell. This thing inside you that’s eating you alive? I don’t know how much you have left in you, but you need to fight it. Fight it with everything you have. Because it can be beaten.”

“You have some experience with cancer?” These were the first substantive words Jamie had spoken to me since the game started. It was just her and me now.

I didn’t take my eyes off Russell. “I know what it is to feel like something is taking your life over inside and out. It’s not enough to just not want to die. We all die. The only thing worth fighting for is being who we really are.”

Any brief sense of oneness with the universe or destiny had left me. In fact, I couldn’t seem to draw a good hand from that point on. With a considerably lesser stake, Jamie proceeded to annihilate me. I didn’t care. The rakshasa was somewhere doing something and it had been right when it said that the money really wasn’t the most important thing to me.

I didn’t use my buy-in.

“I’m sorry,” Jamie said later.

“You’ve never been sorry for winning in your life,” I said.

We were in a small parlor lined with portraits of Russell Sidney’s ancestors. I was closing the door behind us when something sharp bit into my back. My whole body turned into a big seized muscle full of light.