Jordan sat at the end of the table between Luis and Carroll, feeling like the Jabberwock, readying himself to strike. The dealer was at the center of the table on the long side. Her back was to the window, a seat that none of the players would have desired. Jordan sat opposite the married couple from Toronto. As soon as they sat down, they ignored each other and chatted with the players to either side instead. Jordan smiled. They had almost certainly met over a poker table. They would be his designated victims for the night.
One at a time, the dealer traded chips for the stakes pushed toward her by the players. Jordan handed over his money and pulled the stacks of chips toward him to arrange as he liked. The dealer opened a new pack of cards, Bicycle blue diamond backs, removed the jokers, and shuffled it.
"What game, madam and gentlemen?" the dealer asked, flashing a brilliant smile at them.
"Texas hold 'em," Jordan said at once.
"Oh, yeah," Luis said, eagerly. "How about it, folks?"
"Sure," said Len, his face giving away nothing. "We play a little of that up North."
"Very well," the dealer said. She placed the button in front of Len, and play began.
Jordan examined his cards long enough to see that he held queen-seven, suited. Not an easy winning hand, but buildable, depending upon what the flop showed. He used the time, instead, to observe his fellow guests.
Luis was expansive during play, talking about his business, his three children and seven grandchildren, and how much Florida was changing.
"There are shopping malls everywhere," he said. "And the snowbirds, they don't go to the beaches when they come down--they go shopping! It's good for the economy, but why bother to come to Florida and spend your whole day in the air-conditioning? The sun and the sea, baby! That's what's great about Florida."
The chatter, Jordan quickly discovered, was to cover up the number of nervous tells that Luis displayed. If his hand was bad, he darted his eyes back and forth. If it was good, he kept drumming his fingers on the back of his cards. If it was marginal, he played with the edges of the cards. It was a marvel no one had cleaned him out based on reading him alone. But unconscious tics aside, Luis was a careful player. He did not overbet. In fact, he underbet so badly on good hands that Jordan wanted to take his money just to teach him a lesson. But he was not there to teach them to play cards; on the contrary, the better they thought they were, the fewer defenses they had against him.
Carroll had the fewest tells. He kept himself very still except when drinking a sip of white wine or eating a canape. Jordan would not have been able to tell what he held simply by reading his body language. He could glimpse reflections of the hand in the man's corneas, but only occasionally. Carroll kept his eyes slitted. It would take a psychic, not a dragon, to get more information from him.
But the Canadian couple was easy. Len led with his left hand when his hole cards were good.
As he had predicted, Jordan had to fold the queen-seven. His next two hands were also unremarkable. He tossed in a three-two unsuited as soon as it appeared. The pair of sevens he kept until he knew by the avid look on Marion's face that she was holding something solid. She and Luis ended up in a modest series of raises until Luis finally dropped out. Jordan saw that he had been holding a trio of tens against Marion's three twos. He closed his eyes to shut out the pathetic sight. All the more reason, therefore, to continue with his plan.
The dealer expertly shot him two new cards. He knew by the residual energy on the first that it was the queen of hearts he had held before. Once he had touched the thin pasteboards, he could identify them anywhere in the room. The other card, at which he had to look, was the ace of hearts. Good enough. When it was his turn to bet, he pushed fifteen hundred into the pot. Luis's eyebrows went up. The Miami native launched into another story.
"Did I tell you about my daughter-in-law?" Luis asked. "She bought one of those laptops, but she didn't understand about the CD drive that pops out of the side?"
"Don't tell me she used it for a drinks holder," Marion shouted jovially.
"No, no, not that bad," Luis said. "She put a program CD in it and wondered what happened to the music!"
Jordan chuckled. Luis was going to be nothing for him to worry about. He won the hand.
The group settled down to watch one another and make the most of advantages as they arose. They were all fairly experienced, so no one had to learn as it went along. Texas hold 'em was not Jordan's game of choice, but it had become so popular that it was almost certain that any group would have a majority of aficionados or at least players who had watched one of the televised series. As it was so much newer than five-card or seven-card draw or stud, many of the older players had not completely adjusted their playing style to conceal their feelings about the hands they held. That was changing rapidly. Jordan's usual task for the elders was to monitor human behavior and report its progress according to region.
After ten or twelve hands, the young dealer gathered up the deck of cards and dropped it into a plastic bucket at her side.
"New cards," she said, brightly. She reached into a basket lined with a chintz cloth that contained rows of boxed decks of cards still in their cellophane. She stripped the wrapper off with expert fingers, opened the deck, fanned it, removed the jokers, and shuffled. The crisp sound was satisfying to the ear. "The old ones were getting a little tired, madam and gentlemen."
"I'm the one who's tired," Luis joked. "Can you get a new one of me out, too?"
Len laughed. "Me, too, miss," he said. The dealer smiled at them and sent cards flying around the table.
Jordan understood the necessity of changing decks. An expert card mechanic could mark a deck after a short time, by notching the sides or backs of the cards with a fingernail, or bending the corners slightly. When a cheat could cause thousands of dollars to be lost in a single hand, it was simpler and cheaper to open another deck and make the cheat start over. He deplored the fact that he was the one who must begin again, but the stakes were high.
With nothing to give away what he held or what he was thinking, Carroll took an early lead. He smiled at the jokes, nodded acknowledgment of Luis's stories, and exchanged brief pleasantries with everyone else, but he was there to play poker. Jordan appreciated his application. In fact, he would have enjoyed the game very much if he had not been there to lose spectacularly.
The second time the young woman collected the cards, Marion let out a noise of protest.
"But that looks so wasteful just to toss them out!" she exclaimed.
"Oh, don't worry, ma'am," the dealer explained. "We used to just throw them out, but now we take the bucket down to the men's shelter about once a week. They separate out the decks again."
"For sale?"
"No, ma'am, they play with them. Gives them something to do. They donate some to the VA hospital and the long-term wards at the hospitals."