Dead Man's Hand (2 page)

So instead of attempting
something that had zero chance of success, I decided to use different tactics
and try to keep him from learning things that would only upset him.  One
such tactic had been ignoring his phone calls so he wouldn’t be able to ask me
who was orchestrating the tournament.  When I originally found out about
the tournament and entered my reservation, I honestly had no idea who was
pulling the strings, and I hadn’t cared.  I only knew that in order to
play, one had to either have a direct invitation or a referral from someone who
had one. I had the latter.  Thus, I had a roughly vague idea of what I was
willingly walking into. Matt, on the other hand, was never much of a risk
taker, which is fine. There will always be men who dine upon caution, they
balance men like me.

But I had decided that I
needed to keep his level of caution away from the game, and that was before I
even found out who was in charge.  Now it was a downright necessity.
 He would
either politely ask me to withdraw, or somehow
get down to New Orleans, and
physically drag me away from the
tournament.  Okay, so I knew which was more likely, and I didn’t want to
deal with that.  Truth be told I had contemplated withdrawing for a day or
two once I learned who was backing everything.

I certainly could have
done that, after all this tournament had quite a long waiting list, which those
not fast enough with their reservation had learned very quickly.  But I
decided to stay in, despite the man behind the curtain.  And it was not
the money that kept me around.  While it was quite the enticement, I
didn’t really need it, I mean I could always make more on my own whenever it
got a little scarce.  No, the real reason I stayed was simply the allure
of the challenge.  I had a real weakness for
hold’em
,
and it was getting harder and harder for me to find a game back home.

Unfortunately, trying to
keep Matt from finding out about the game now meant trying to withhold certain
information, and that simply worked better when I wasn’t asked a direct
question.  So I bit my lip and decided to take my chances and try to fib
my way out after all, “You know Matt, I haven’t quite been able to track…”

“Not a chance
Marcus!”  Did I mention that Matt knew me fairly well?  He sniffed
out that lie from the word go.  “I’ve known you far too long for you to
try and pull something like that.  Who’s running this tournament of
yours?  I knew that was why you’ve been ignoring my calls, so tell me
now.”

That was quite the leap,
even for Matt; there was no way he could have known what I knew.  But I
wasn’t done trying to weasel my way out of answering the question so I decided
to try and irritate him into forgetting the question entirely, it worked
sometimes.  I laced my voice with absentmindedness and started speaking,
“Excuse me…”

“Don’t play games with
me, Marcus!”  And there went that idea down in spectacular flames.  I
could plainly hear just how upset he was, there was real ire in his voice now.
“Not with me!  You only beat around the bush like this when you KNOW
exactly what you need to say but, for whatever reason, you’re unwilling to say
it.  Now spit it out.”

Resigned that I would be
treading a potential minefield I took the necessary time to prepare myself for
the ordeal.  I could mitigate the blowup if I was careful and, at that
moment in time, I had to be extra careful.  “From what I have seen through
my glass circle and the fact that he’s the only real power in that part of the
city, my guess is that Dempsey is the puppeteer.”  This was a lie, but it
was rooted in enough truth that I thought, maybe, I could get away with
it.  Unfortunately for me, I knew Dempsey was the one backing the
tournament.  I had known this little fact for almost a week. I hoped that
Matt would be too irate to realize how long I had known this information.
 

After a few moments of
silence that were being tortured into an eternity, I began to think that maybe
I had unnecessarily feared Matt’s reaction.  When had he managed to mellow
out without my knowing about it?  But I quickly dismissed this idea, there
was no way he could be so calm.  With a twinkle in my eye I thought that
just maybe the call had been dropped.  Perhaps even, maybe it had dropped
before I had mentioned Dempsey’s name.  Ever the optimist, I pulled the
phone away from my face so as to check the display.  No luck, we were
still connected.  Had I sent him into cardiac arrest or something, why was
he so silent?

As I was bringing the
phone back to my ear Matt finally broke his silence.  “What in the name of
all that’s good and holy would convince you that walking into that tournament
is a good idea?”  I yanked the phone away from my head as fast as I could,
but it barely helped.  I hadn’t realized that the speaker on this phone
was so powerful or that Matt had that type of lung capacity.  With my ear
drum ringing I latched upon the only positive in the tirade, it sounded as if
he had truly missed the timing.  Granted, it wasn’t much, but under the
circumstances I would take what I could get.

Matt was never one to
remain irate for long so I let him get it off his chest. Fortunately, I was
pretty certain he failed to notice the sound of my phone hitting the ground and
he didn’t seem to expect an answer to his question, at least, not yet. 
Since I could still hear him with my phone on the floor, I figured I would wait
until he finally took a break.  Leaving the phone where it was, I went back
to watching the surveillance, which I had lost track of since starting this
wretched conversation.  And, of course, it was in those distracted moments
that something happened on screen, or at least I thought it did.

I had been watching the
feed for almost three days and had seen nothing.  Granted, it was entirely
possible that any and maybe all of the work had been done prior to my arrival,
but I had figured that there would be something to see. Otherwise, I would have
just skipped that little excursion.  But as I was bringing my attention
back to the camera I thought I saw some more motion.  Before I could do
anything with the camera I realized that Matt’s voice was no longer filling the
room.  When had he stopped talking?  Shaking my head I quickly
grabbed the phone off of the floor while straining to see something that might
have moved, when my ears underwent another assault.

“Marc, answer me.”

I was so frustrated with
Matt that a growl actually emanated from my throat before I could contain
it.  Not wanting to go deaf, I kept the phone a good six inches from my
ear as I answered.  “Yes Matt, I can hear you.  In fact I think the
folks in the rooms next to me were able to hear you.”  Taking a short
calming breath I pressed on before he could scream at me again.  “There is
no reason to shout like that.  And on top of the auditory damage you’re
causing me I think you just made me miss something on the video feed.”

“No!  You don’t get
to change the topic that easily Marcus!”  Matt exclaimed, still using the
same volume.  “I know you.  You’re planning to run some kind of game
on Dempsey and he isn’t just some local thug. He owns almost everything and
everyone east of the Mississippi and south of the District.”

Due to the nature of our
conversation I was simply unwilling to place Matt on speaker.  But, I had
to do something; I turned down the volume. When he actually wanted to have a
conversation with me, rather than just deliver a diatribe, I would turn it
up.  This was the reaction I had been expecting and had planned to deal
with after the tournament.   So I waited, hopefully it wouldn’t take
him too long to calm him down a little.  When Matt’s tirade paused, I
assumed he was simply catching his breath or, who knew, maybe getting himself
something to drink.  Either way I decided to use the opportunity and
started my well-rehearsed speech.

“Matt, you know the
story, and that’s all it is.  I’m sure that all of Dempsey’s influence has
just been exaggerated, most of the stories probably originated with him.
Besides even if, and I cannot stress that word enough, he was controlling an
empire of that size, you do remember who this tournament was engineered for,
right?  You do remember how we found out about it don’t you?  The
spoiled rich kid from one of our longer cons? He called me up and told me about
it.  But before you can object, I’m sure there will be a mix of pros and
his goons, but the majority will be like our friend.

After all who else can
afford to throw that kind of money away on something like this?  Now, also
keep in mind that those very kids are by their nature not the most
tight-lipped, they don’t really understand what they have been given, for most
of them it is just money.  Dempsey has to know that this would eventually
spill over and become known.  I would be shocked if the local police
didn’t already know of the game’s existence, they probably don’t know where it
is, but I’m sure they know about it.

Another fact for you to
chew on is that our friend said this game is a yearly occurrence.  Now,
armed with all of this knowledge, we can safely assume that Dempsey views these
people as walking, talking piggy-banks.  I’m also willing to bet he likes
to add banks to that collection.  Yes, yes, he could break the little,
well in this case I should say rather large piggy-banks, but then he would not
be able to revisit them over and over and over again.  Besides nothing
that I am carrying with me tomorrow has been directly procured with any of my
transformations.  This is just a simple tournament and you know that I’m
more than a fair hand at
hold’em
.  You know
that.”

As I sat there waiting
for Matt’s reply, a sudden chill ran up my spine.  Was he simply gearing
up for another verbal assault? But that would be out of character for
him.  Then I remembered what I had done less than a minute ago and quickly
turned the volume on the phone back up.  When I was able to hear his voice
again I managed to catch the tail end of his response.  “…cut and run.”

With what I had already
heard and what I knew about Matt, it wasn’t all that difficult to fill in the
missing words.  “Listen Matt, you’re worrying too much.”

“No Marc.  I’m
not!  You are only as good as you are at
hold’em
because you change the occasional card.  The local tables you went to
don’t use cameras and you’ve been lucky to boot.  You can’t rely on luck
to keep avoiding the trouble you’re due.”

“Would it make you feel
any better if I told you that Dempsey doesn’t use cameras on his tables
either?”  His rather loud scoff answered the question as clearly as
anything he might have said.  But I was getting impatient with the length
of this argument so I elaborated.  “When he first started this thing yes,
he used cameras, five years ago he stopped it when it became painfully obvious
that no one was cheating him.”

Exasperated, Matt
automatically replied, “Just because he stopped doesn’t mean he can’t or won’t
bring them back.”

“Matt, you just have to
trust me, I’ll be fine.  Besides I’ll fit the part of a spoiled rich
kid.”  Biting my lower lip I mentally hoped that his curiosity would latch
onto that crumb.  At least with that conversation I would be able to turn
some of my attention back to the video stream.

“Yeah?  And just how
are you going to manage that?”  The resignation behind this question told
me that while he was still reluctant to change the topic, he knew that I would
never back down and withdraw from the tournament.  He didn’t like it, but
he was accepting that it was my decision. A decision that I would probably pay
for later.

“You’d be surprised just how
far you can go with one million dollars, despite needing to keep half for my
fee.”

“You managed to loot a
million dollars on your trek down there?” 

I had been hoping that
the sheer amount of what I had been able to collect would bring him around, but
while a part of him was definitely impressed as a whole, he was still
distracted.  I felt like screaming at him to forget that Dempsey was
involved.  I mean collecting that money had been part of the reason I
decided to do this in the first place.  While we had more than enough
funds in our petty cash buckets to both pay the fee and deck me out for
tomorrow, I had wanted to test myself and figured that a cross-country trip
would allow me to do just that.  Of course, I had had to start relatively
small, but once I had managed to get the first quarter it was smooth sailing
the rest of the way.

“Is any of what you’re
bringing one of your transformed goodies?”

If I had not mentioned it
earlier, this would have been a fair question.  The only thing that
absolutely had to be real was my entrance fee, the rest I could have simply
made, but where would the fun be if I cheated even a little bit?  And
since everything I had, from the cash all the way down to my shiny new
accessories, was legitimate, I felt like boasting.  “I can’t speak for the
money that I used to buy it all, but everything I have now is nice and clean.”

“Wait a minute!”  I
could hear the shock in his voice, it was so thick I had trouble recognizing
his voice.  “That would mean that your current car is nice and legal.”

Chuckling, I tried to
comment but I was unable to get the words out past my genuine amusement. 
When I was finally able to speak my voice was still tinged with laugher. 
“That was an odd experience.  Did you know this is actually the first car
I’ve legally owned?”