Death On the Flop (14 page)

I choked back a sudden sob. Frank stopped, put his hand on my elbow and scanned the area for what might have set me off. “What’s wrong?” he demanded. “Did you see Conner?”

I shook my head and dashed away a tear from the corner of my eye. I broke free of his grip and marched on. “No. I just thought about the future for a moment and the recent past caught up with me and bit me on the butt.”

Jogging to keep up with me, Frank chuckled. “You Texans sure have a way with words.”

While we waited for the elevator, Frank asked, “So I’m betting there’s more than just your surprise trip to Vegas and your brother’s disappearance, isn’t there?”

I sighed. What the hell. He already thought I was the queen of eye bags, he might as well know I was a loser in love too. “Good bet, gambler. This week I turned forty, lost my fiancé and cratered my career in that order.”

My tone must have been about dirge level, because Frank looked at me carefully. “Your fiancé, did he die?”

“Ha! I wish. I found him banging his barely-legal administrative assistant on his office desk. We’d dated for six years.”

“Damn, I’m sorry, Bee. Remember, all men aren’t ass-holes.” Frank’s crow’s feet crinkled as he flashed a rueful grin. “Of course, I don’t know for a fact it’s true, but I’ve heard it said.”

I couldn’t resist smiling too as we entered the elevator. Frank waited for the couple who rode up with us to vacate on the tenth floor before he asked, “So what happened with the ad career?”

“Well, it’s my fault. Toby was the head of the agency, you see. I tried to be professional and stick it out. I gave it four hours after I threw his ring at his private parts, but I couldn’t stomach that image of the two of them springing up in my mind every time I saw his door closed. Besides, I couldn’t bear the pats of sympathy on my shoulders as my colleagues walked by. You’d think at forty I would’ve been a little more mature.”

Frank’s eyes darkened. He didn’t look sympathetic, he looked angry. “You were betrayed. And you’re proud. That is not something to apologize for.”

I offered a small smile in thanks, and then voiced what had been popping up in my head over the past couple of hours.

“You know, it’s funny, I love the ad business, and I’ve worked in it since I graduated from Southern Methodist eons ago. But maybe I’m ready for a change. Of course, that’s the way I feel one minute, and feel totally adrift another.”

“The rug’s been pulled out from under you this week.” Frank motioned me to go ahead of him through the open elevator doors on the twenty-fifth floor. “We’ll find Ben and then you can figure out what you can do when you grow up. Maybe be a world class poker player.”

I laughed out loud at that one. “Ha! If I survive one hand in this tournament it will be some kind of miracle.”

Frank slid his keycard in and held the door open for me. “Let’s get busy on creating the eighth wonder of the world, then.”

I gasped when I walked into the suite. A poker table complete with chips and cards sat in the middle of the living room. “Where did that come from?”

“Can’t have miracles without an angel or two in the wings.”

I shook my head as we sat down. Frank poured two glasses of iced tea from the bar and brought them to the table. “I don’t know if you noticed down there, but you can have a drink at the table but not
on
the table. Usually, the casino keeps a drink cart of some sort nearby.”

I shook my head. “I think I’ll be too nervous to drink anything.”

“Wrong move. Definitely keep a drink there. Try to talk to the waitstaff before the tournament and see if you can order ‘the same’ or ‘another’ when the waitress comes by the table. That way, no one knows what you are drinking—you could be sucking down straight vodkas for all they know. You hope they assume that, anyway. It’s just one hand in the mind game.”

We sat down. “Remember, Frank,” I said as I watched him slide the deck out of the box and start to shuffle. “You have to go back to kindergarten with me. I don’t play cards, aside from Old Maid with my cousin’s kids, and I have never gambled in my life. I don’t even buy lottery tickets.”

“Why not?” Frank asked curiously.

“It must be an offshoot of good ole Catholic guilt. Or perhaps it is the product of an upbringing where I was told life was fair. Intellectually, I know it isn’t. Emotionally, I can’t give up hope that one day it will be. So, I feel like if I won the lottery, then the natural consequence would be that something bad would happen to me.”

Frank dealt as if there were nine players at the table. He didn’t look at me, but his crow’s feet were crinkling. “What if the something or somethings bad happened first? Maybe you should go buy three lottery tickets right now. You could win without any repercussions.”

“Hmm,” I murmured. “I never thought about it that way. But why three instead of four?” I held up fingers. “One, Ben is missing. Two, I lost my job. Three, Toby threw me over for a girl young enough to be my daughter.” Ouch, that hurt saying it aloud.

“Which in the end is a good thing for you,” Frank put in.

I shrugged. “I suppose. And, four, I turned forty.”

“I didn’t count the birthday as a bad thing because I consider turning forty an improvement for any woman.” Frank said it lightly but with a shadow in his eyes that made me think the ex-wife might be younger than forty. A lot younger.

“Why do you say that? Because of the extra ‘bags’ we carry around?”

“You’re never going to forget that are you?”

“Not likely.”

“Guess I’ll have to find a way to make up for it.”

I tried not to read more into that statement, even though he’d hitched that teasing right eyebrow when he’d said it. “Teaching me how to sit in at the tournament long enough to give us time to find Ben would be the best way.”

“Okay, first you need to get in the right mindset for Hold ’Em. I call it guarded cockiness. You’ve got to be realistic in this game, you have to be able to count the cards and weigh the calculated odds, but you also have to hope to win every hand. It’s confidence that you want to exude so you can knock other players out of the game when the cards won’t.”

“Without tapping too hard on the aquarium, of course,” I added in sudden inspiration.

Frank’s eyes lit up. He pointed with the deck at me. “You’re good. Keep it up.”

For some reason his flattery embarrassed me. I squirmed and swept my hand around the empty seats. “You haven’t introduced me to the rest of the table.”

“Actually, I’ve never taught anyone to play poker quite this way before, but since you’re smart and observant, this is a crash course and we have a lot at stake, I think it might work.”

“Just don’t tell me it’s strip poker, because I’ve already had that offer in the last twenty-four hours.”

Frank’s head snapped up. “From who?”

“Oh, just some hard-up kid. He was kind of cute.”

“Smart kid.”

I squirmed in my chair again. I wasn’t used to an appreciative man in my life. Ben was a good guy, but way too preoccupied with himself to dish out many compliments. Toby, well, I shouldn’t even go there. Just suffice it to say that Toby would have considered even a mild compliment from a stranger as encroaching on his property. He probably would’ve tried to go search the poor guy out to threaten him. For a long time I’d thought his protectiveness was cute, lately though, I’d begun to realize that’s all I was to Toby—one of his things.

I was nothing to Frank, so of course he wouldn’t go offer to deck the kid. But his response was so unexpected that I was . . . uh . . .

“Let’s get started,” I said quickly, before I figured out exactly what I was feeling.

Frank, who’d been scribbling something on a casino notepad, shot me an odd look out of the corner of his eye. He finished what he’d been writing and shoved it my way. “There is the list of hands that can win, from best to worst. You can refer to it for an hour then I’m taking it away.” Royal Flush, Straight Flush, four of a kind, full house, flush, straight, three of a kind, two pair, one pair and high card “kicker,” which means you have the highest single card on the table.

“How long are we playing, anyway?” I asked in alarm as I read through the list again.

“Until I think you have a decent handle on it,” he said.

Yikes. “That might not be until the start of the tournament.”

“Oh, I’ll let you have a little nap. I don’t want you too tired for the tournament and besides, all you learn will be cemented into your brain by sleep,” he assured me.

“Great, then you can really call me blockhead.”

Chuckling, Frank waved at the table. “I’ve dealt extra hands so that you can see how the number of players changes the expected odds and the possible plays. You can expect to win a lot less with fewer players than with more. With more cards in play, full houses will win with regularity. With two players, called playing ‘heads-up,’ winning with a pair is common, and even a high card will claim the pot. You need to stop me and ask questions if I go too fast or use lingo you don’t understand.”

I looked at my hand rankings cheat sheet again. “What are the suit rankings? If two players both have identical royal flushes, which suit wins?”

“Good question. But the answer is, both flushes win and split the pot. In Hold ’Em all suits are equal, which should make it one less thing for you to worry about.”

I nodded silently and reached toward my cards.

“Stop.” Frank said. I froze. “First you need to set out your blind. Look for the dealer button. That’s in front of me. The player to the left of the dealer is the small blind, or half the minimum bet, the one to the left of him is the big blind, or the minimum bet for the first round. In Hold ’Em, blinds are used to seed the pot instead of an ante, like in other types of poker and gambling games. We will play ten-twenty. So ten is the small blind; twenty is the big blind. To stay in the game, the rest of the players will have to come up with at least twenty.”

“So what is the advantage of being the small blind? If I want to stay in the game, I’ll have to ante up another ten anyway. Right?”

“Right, but you have the advantage of seeing what everyone else bets. If the five guys after you all raise, and all you have are a two of hearts and an eight of clubs, you should fold. If everybody just calls, and you have a pocket ace, Queen then you might go ahead and call.”

“A pocket ace?”

“In your pocket means what’s in your hand—the two cards you were dealt.”

I nodded, shoved one white chip in front of me, then picked up the two cards dealt face down at my place. Frank put his hand on mine to shove the cards back on the table. His hands were warm and broad with nice long fingers. Hmm.

“Remember,” he said, tapping his thumb on my wrist. “Never pick your cards up off the table. Never. Just raise the corners, shielding them from others. Look at them just long enough to commit them to memory and let them back down again. Picking them up not only risks flashing them to others, it also signals you as a novice or a fish. Don’t look at them again.”

He lifted his hand off mine. Internal sigh. I needed to get my focus back on the game. I made a mental promise to ignore the maleness of Frank from now on for Ben’s sake. I flipped up the corners, keeping my hand between the table on my side and his side. Queen of clubs and a three of clubs.

“Better,” Frank approved, glancing at his cards. Then reaching around the table and putting each player’s chips out as a call. “We’re going to assume that all these guys stayed in to see The Flop. It doesn’t happen that often, but I want you to see how the cards play out if it does. So you need to call the big blind bet too for instruction’s sake.”

I put another white chip on top of my small blind. “What’s The Flop? Sounds painful.”

“Sometimes it is,” Frank agreed, as he took one card off the top of the deck and laid it face down off to the side.

“What’s that?”

“The burn card. Between each round of play, the dealer discards a card off the top of the deck on the off chance that anyone saw it during the deal or the last card up.” He threw the next three cards down in the center of the table face down, then scooped them up and flopped them face up: a five of hearts, four of clubs and seven of clubs.

“That is a semipainful flop. Someone could be working on a club flush. Also a straight or a straight flush are possible. Someone with a low pocket pair could get lucky. It’s kinda risky to rely on one of those to win you a pot with this many players, though.”

“So, how many cards are you going to be flopping out there in all?”

“I’m sorry, I skipped that, didn’t I? I guess I don’t make a very good teacher.”

“It probably depends on what you are teaching,” I suggested.

He raised his right eyebrow. Oo-la-la. I didn’t mean that. But . . .

Ben was missing. In less than thirty hours, I was playing in a tournament whose finals would be broadcast on national TV and I didn’t even know how many cards made a hand.

Back to the cards, Bee.

“Only the first three community, or shared cards, are called the flop. There are two more community cards dealt, the fourth called The Turn or Fourth Street and the final called The River or Fifth Street. You can use any three of the five community cards with your two cards to create your hand, or use all five cards up. That’s called ‘playing the board’,” Frank explained patiently. He seemed like he might be patient in everything. “Bee? Did you get that?”

I nodded so hard I felt like a bobble head. Someone needed to slap some sense into me. I should’ve brought Shana after all.

Frank sighed a standard I-don’t-get-women sigh, burned a card and threw the next card out. The Turn, I told myself. King of hearts.

“Now that would be a scare card for anyone who was working on a straight or a flush, meaning the odds are pretty good that someone would have a pocket King and now a high pair and likely knock the others waiting for The River card out of the pot. But we’ll see.”