Against The Odds (Anna Dawson #1) (7 page)

I shook Mr. Chow’s hand, nodded goodnight to everyone and started to leave the room. I turned back, went to Paulie and Carla. “Something’s up at home. Tell Vince I may need a couple of days to make arrangements.”

Carla nodded, a look of empathy on her face. “Sure, hon, we’ll tell him. Hope everything’s okay.”

Paulie had a look of suspicion—who could blame him. People probably gave him sob stories everyday about their debts. I had myself years ago, before I’d learned it wouldn’t get me anywhere.

 
But on closer inspection, the suspicion gave way to curiosity. I had never tried this tactic with him. And I sure as heck never walked away from a game when I was winning.

I shrugged. He nodded. I walked out of the room and to the elevators. Then walked—and ran at times—as quickly as I could back to the parking deck at the Bellagio.

Chapter Five

I
squealed out of the parking deck. Cursed the pedestrians that walked across the no walking flashing light. Made my turn as soon as I could and once off the strip, headed to Summerlin. I let my mind wander.

Ben was eighty-two years old. I knew he wouldn’t live forever. But I never really allowed myself to think of life without him.

Other than his hip, and arthritis in his other bones and joints, he was in good health. His mind was sharp as a tack.

If he’d been hurt—really hurt—he wouldn’t have been able to call me. It would have been Lorelei on the phone.
 

Making the call I’ve been dreading since the day I’d met Ben.

T
en Years Ago

“Excuse me, are you watching that?” the old man in the wheelchair next to mine asked.

“What? Hunh?” I answered, coming out of my self-pity and pain killer-induced trance.

“Are you watching that?” he said again, pointing to the television. I looked at the screen, which apparently I’d been watching, though for the life of me I couldn’t say what was on. Some kind of detective show.

“No,” I said. “Help yourself,” I added, leaning down to the coffee table in front of me to get the remote for him. I felt a twinge of pain race up my side and I sat back in my chair quickly, breathing hard. I started forward again, more gently this time, but he laid his hand on my arm.

“I’ll get it, dear.” Ashamed that a man so old—in a wheelchair no less—was more agile than myself in this state, I sat back in my chair and looked away. I moved to cross my arms across my chest—the universal body language symbol for stay away from me—but even that hurt.

I prayed that the nurse would come soon to tell me they were ready for me in physical therapy so I wouldn’t have to make small talk with this old man.

I’d be here for a few hours every day enduring PT for the next few weeks, but my thoughts were on what I was going to do after that.

How I’d survive.

The man took the remote and changed the channels and a basketball game came on the television. “Ahhh,” the man said, a sigh almost.

I looked at him, to see if he was in pain—that would give me an excuse to call for a nurse and hopefully get taken out of the waiting room/lounge area and into my session. Or at least take the old man into his.

But he wasn’t in pain. His look was almost euphoric as he watched the game.

The game was just ending. “Your team win?” I asked.

He shrugged. “Yes. No. Both,” he said. He looked at me with a little smile on his face, a bit of a twinkle in his brown eyes. He reminded me of some old actor. Lee Strasberg, that’s his name. With his small stature, and his tuft of white hair standing up on all ends. Dead ringer.

“Both?”

He gave a small chuckle and pulled a small pad of paper from the side pocket of his chair. Not as big as those steno pads reporter use. The kind that fit in the pocket of a man’s shirt. He flipped back a couple of pages and then laid the pad on my wheelchair arm. I looked down, read out loud, “Stanford by five. Over/under one thirty-seven and a half.” I looked up at him, not getting it. “So?”

He pointed to the television. I looked at it as the final score of the game flashed. Stanford
 
seventy-one, Arizona sixty-six. I quickly did the math. “Was this game taped or something?”

He smiled widely. “No.”

“I don’t get it. How did you know that?” Before I even let him respond I added, “Who do you like in tomorrow’s games?”

He laughed, hard, then winced and placed his hand on his waist. I grimaced, knowing his pain. “I’m sorry,” I said, but he was already waving it off.

He stuck his hand across himself to me, withered and wrinkled, but still a strong grip when I took it. “I’m Ben,” he said.

“Johanna,” I said. “But everyone calls me Anna.”

“A pleasure to meet you, Hannah, but I’m sorry for the circumstances,” he said, indicating our shared convalescence.
 

I was just about to correct him and tell him my name was Anna, but I let it go. It sounded nice coming from him, with a tiny hint of New York and Yiddish accent.

Besides, after today, I’d probably never see him again.

“H
ow much you in for?” Ben asked me three days later. We’d met in the lounge everyday before and after our PT sessions. Watching television, playing cards, talking. Sometimes just sitting.
 

I was in no hurry to get home, that’s for sure.

I could pretend to misunderstand him, but I didn’t want to insult his intelligence. Or mine. “Twenty-five,” I answered.

“To Vince Santini?”

If I hadn’t been surprised that he’d figured out
what
put me in the hospital, I was dumbfounded to realize he also knew the
who
. Well, not exactly the who. Vince didn’t do his own dirty work; as I’d found out a week earlier.

I nodded. “How could you possibly know that?”

He pointed to my arms, bare to the short sleeves of my tee-shirt. I’d worn long sleeves at first, but was so warm during PT that I finally gave up on vanity. Besides, I’d figured people would think I was in a car accident, or at the very least, had an abusive boyfriend.

Even that wouldn’t be as shameful as what had put me here.

“Classic Santini. No bruises that you can see. And always the broken foot,” Ben said.

I looked down at my mangled foot. “Yeah, that’s a real bitch.”

“Vince thinks of himself as different. Above the fray. He’d never do something as cliché as broken thumbs or a kneecap.”

I snorted. “Great. I had to find a loan shark with originality.”

“Paulie do it?”

I nodded again, seeing Paulie’s face as he hit me again and again. The only saving grace was that I think it actually pained him to do it.

Not as much as it hurt me, though.

There was no judgment from Ben as he asked these questions. No pity either. Which made me wonder. I pointed to his wheelchair. “Not you too?”

He chuckled. “No, Hannah, not me. I was too close to the odds to know the house always wins in the long run. In my younger days I liked to play the ponies a little, but…”

He didn’t finish, so I did. “But you were never stupid enough to get mixed up with a man like Vince?”
 
My self-disgust was evident in my voice.

“Oh, I was stupid enough—and young enough,” he added, pointedly looking at me, and I felt a teensy bit better. “To get mixed up in trouble, but it was never with people like Vince.”

I wanted to ask more, but before I could, he asked, “How long have you been in Vegas?”

“Three years.”

“And how old are you?”

“Twenty-four.”

“Ahh,” he said, his little head bobbing as if figuring out something. “How long after you turned twenty-one were you on that bus coming from,” his eyes narrowed at me, “Minnesota?”

“Wisconsin,” I said. He seemed pleased he’d gotten so close, but disappointed not to have been dead on.
 

An odds maker till the end.

“Two weeks after my birthday,” I admitted.

“School?”

I sighed. “A term shy of graduation.” He was the only person I’d told out here that I’d quit school early to come here and gamble.

His eyes grew wide. “And your parents?”

“Didn’t take it very well,” I summed up. No need to tell him about my mother’s tears and my father’s threats.

“You got the gambling bug, when?”

“My father taught us kids to play poker and we’d have family games. But I had a boyfriend in college who played in a regular game. That’s where I really learned to play.”

He thought about that for a minute, nodding, then said, “And you…did you… follow a boy out here?”

I nodded. He seemed disappointed until I smiled and said, “The Jack of Hearts.”

He laughed, deep and crackly. “Well, he’s about as likely to break your heart as any of them, I suppose.”

“He has at that,” I admitted.

“Any good runs in there?”

“I’ve made about three quarters of a million in poker since I’ve been out here,” I said with pride.

“And you’ve lost how much?”
 

I smiled. “About three quarters of a million and twenty five thousand.”

“And how do you live? What kind of house?”

I didn’t really want to tell him, but I knew he’d see through any sugarcoating. Besides, he’d seen me take a cab away from the hospital each day. Ben had different men pick him up.
 

“I share an apartment with four other people. Two gambling addicts. Two drug addicts.”

“Not a good way to live,” he said, though he didn’t need to.

“No,” I said, though I didn’t need to.

He put his hand on mine, careful to avoid the bruises on my arm. “Hannah, dear, why don’t you come by Arizona Charlie’s for breakfast tomorrow morning. Before you have to be here. I have some friends I’d like you to meet.”

T
he next morning I met The Corporation, and had breakfast at the Sourdough Café before PT. I continued the ritual for the next week. They had the same table everyday, and, it appeared, the same no-nonsense waitress.
 

After hospital food, and then the sparse pickings at my apartment, the breakfast was great, but being a fly on the wall and listening to these old timers talk about odds and gambling was even better.
 

The day before my last PT session, I was on my way to the workout room, happy to be on crutches instead of in a wheelchair, when Paulie caught up to me in the hallway.

“Hey, Anna, how you feeling?”

I started to shrink away from him but stopped. He seemed almost hurt. “Anna, it was nothing personal. You know that, right? Just business.”

“Yeah, I know that.” And I did, intellectually. But my gut didn’t.

And what gambler didn’t rely more on their gut than their intellect?

“’Cause I really like you, Anna,” He said. “I think that we—”

“What’s up Paulie? Why are you here?” I said, cutting him off. I did not want to know where he was going.

“I’m here to make arrangements for payment.”

“Oh, you mean bruises, pissing blood and two weeks of PT didn’t wipe the slate clean?”

“Aww, Anna, c’mon. Don’t be that way.”

“Listen, Paulie. To pay back Vince I have to play poker. And to be able to do that I need to be able to move around. Which is why I’m in physical therapy. Besides the twenty-five K I owe Vince,” I held up a hand as Paulie made to interrupt me. “I know, I know. It’s not twenty-five any more. Interest. But, besides that, I now have one hell of a huge hospital bill—thanks to you—to add to that tab.”

His face turned to stone. “Then quit, Anna. Play enough to pay Vince, pay your bills and quit. Go to college. Get a regular job. Find a guy and settle down. Do anything but gamble.”

A wave of panic washed through me. “I…I…”

The stone turned to disgust. “No. Of course not. You won’t quit. Not until you’ve totally destroyed yourself.” He ran his hands across his face, let out a deep breath. “And I’m the scumbag, right? I’m the low-life muscle for a loan-shark.”

I was just about to say his name when I heard someone else say, “Paulie? I thought that was you. Could I have a word with you for a moment?’

Paulie whirled around, and I hobbled to the side to see Ben sitting in his chair a few feet down the hall, the boys standing behind him.

“Ben?” Paulie said. “Ben Lowenstein? What are you doing here?” He seemed to realize exactly what Ben was doing in the hospital—the wheelchair was probably a big clue. “I mean, what happened? Are you okay?”

“Broken hip,” Ben said. “And I’ll be fine. Thank you. Today is my last physical therapy session.”

I hadn’t known that, but I was glad. Though I knew the boys in The Corporation would bring him, I didn’t like the thought of Ben here each day without me.

I didn’t like the thought of me in that rat hole apartment without him to talk to daily, either.