What the hell, he thought, at least you're fairly sober.
He flipped out the cylinder. All six chambers were still loaded, and he pushed up the ejection-rod to get one out. One hundred twenty-five-grain hollow-point cartridges, as he remembered. He let it fall back in and snapped the gun shut again and tucked it into his belt, hearing the cartridges rattle faintly in the chambers.
When he opened the front door, he paused.
"I might be a little late," he called to the empty house.
He stopped at a nearby 7-Eleven store for hero sandwiches, a couple of twelve-packs of beer, a box of No Doz and a dozen decks of cards, and then he got on the freeway.
Back to chasing the white line, he thought as the lane markings of the 5 Freeway flew past like fireflies under the tires of his old Ford. I can remember a hundred, a thousand nights like this, driving with Ozzie along the 66 and the 20 and the 40, through Arizona and New Mexico and Texas and Oklahoma. Always a game behind us and a game ahead of us.
It had been what Ozzie called a semi-retired life. They traveled and played during the three months of spring, and then lived off their winnings in the Santa Ana house during the other three seasons.
Scott had been five years old when Ozzie had found him, in the back of a boat on a trailer in a Los Angeles parking lot. Apparently he had been a messed-up little kid—one eye split open and dried blood all over his face. Ozzie had talked to him for a few minutes and had then driven him in his old truck to a doctor who owed Ozzie a lot of money.
Old Dr. Malk had fitted up young Scott with his first glass eye. The eyes were still real glass in the forties, and for kids they were round, like big marbles, to fill the orbit and make sure the skull grew correctly. The next day Ozzie had taken the boy home to the house in Santa Ana, and had told the neighbors that Scott was his cousin's illegitimate child and that he was adopting him.
Ozzie had been about forty then, in '48. He had quickly begun teaching Scott all about Poker, but he had never let the boy play with anyone else, and never for real money, until the summer of '59, when Scott was sixteen, and they went off on one of the annual trips together.
"You never play for money at home," Ozzie had said. "You don't want the cards to know where you live."
Scott had become known as Scarecrow Smith, because before about 1980 doctors couldn't effectively attach glass eyes to eye muscles, and so it was more natural-looking for him to turn his whole head to look at something than to have only one eye move to the side; to some players this had made his eyes seem painted on and his neck appear unnaturally loose. And "Scarecrow" had fitted with his adopted father's nickname: whenever Oliver Crane was asked where he lived, he had always just said, "Oz."
In fact, Ozzie had not let anyone in the Poker world know where he lived. He used the name Smith when he played and insisted that Scott do the same, and he always kept his car registered to a post office box.
"You don't want to take a chance on your work following you home," he'd said. To make that even less likely, he had always bought new tires and had his Studebaker tuned up before setting out, and he never went to a game without a full tank of gas. And there was always a twelve-gauge pump shotgun under a blanket on the back seat to supplement the pistol in his belt.
And he had made sure Scott understood when it was that you had to fold out of a game.
That had been the advice Scott had ignored in the game on the lake in '69.
"If the drink in your glass starts to sit at an angle that ain't quite level, or if the cigarette smoke starts to crowd in over the cards and fall there, or if plants in the room suddenly start to wilt, or if the air is suddenly dry and hot in your throat, smelling like sun-hot rock, fold out. You don't know what you might be buying or selling come the showdown."
By the end of the spring of 1969 Ozzie had been sixty or so, and Scott had been twenty-six.
Both of them had been wanting to get back home to Santa Ana—Scott had a girl friend whom he hadn't seen in three months, and Ozzie missed his other foster child, Diana, who was nine years old and staying with a neighbor woman—but they had decided to hit Las Vegas before once again burning on home across the Mojave to southern California.
They had got in on a Five-Stud game that started in the Horseshoe on Fremont Street in the evening, and at dawn they had moved it upstairs to one of the rooms, and in the middle of the afternoon, when all but Ozzie and Scott and a pudgy businessman called Newt had been eliminated, they had declared a sleep-and-food break.
"You know," Newt had said slowly, almost reluctantly, as he finally unknotted his tie, "there's a game on a houseboat on Lake Mead tonight." Newt had lost more than ten thousand dollars.
Ozzie had shaken his head. "I never gamble on water." He tucked a wad of bills into his jacket pocket. He had increased his roll from about twelve to about twenty-four thousand in the past twenty hours. "Even when they had the boats out there in the ocean, three miles off Santa Monica, I never went."
Scott Crane was down. He had had ten thousand when they'd driven into Las Vegas, and he had about seven and a half now, and he knew Ozzie was ready to declare the season finished and start for home.
"What kind of game?" Scott had asked.
"Well, it's odd." Newt stood up and walked to the window. "This guy's name is Ricky Leroy, and ordinarily he's one of the best Poker players in town." The stout young businessman kept his back to them as he talked. "But for the last two or three days he's been playing this game he calls Assumption—weird game with a weird deck, all pictures—and he's losing. And he doesn't seem to mind."
"Assumption," said Ozzie thoughtfully. "Twenty years ago a guy was hosting a game of that out on a boat on Lake Mead. Different guy—George something. He lost a lot, too, I heard."
"My luck's gone here," Newt said, turning around to face them. "I'm going to drive out there tonight. If you want to come, I'll be standing under the million-dollar-display Horseshoe at eight."
"You may as well just go," Ozzie told him. "This was our last game of the season; we're going to sleep twelve hours and then drive home."
Newt had shrugged. "Well, I'll be there just in case."
Back in their own room at the Mint Hotel, Ozzie had at first been unable to believe that Scott wasn't kidding when he said he wanted to go meet Newt and get into the game on the lake.
The old man had kicked off his polished black shoes and lay down on one of the beds, and he was laughing with his eyes closed. "Sure, Scott—on water, tamed water, with a guy that always pays for hands, and playing with what obviously is a Tarot deck, for God's sake. Shit, you'd win a few signifying hands, and a month later you'd find out you've got cancer and you're getting arrested for crimes you never heard of and you can't get it up anymore. And then one day you'd walk out to the mailbox and find your goddamn head in there."
Scott was holding a glass of beer he'd picked up on the way to the elevator, and now he took a long sip of it.
Most Poker players had superstitions, and he had always conformed to Ozzie's, out of respect for the old man, even when it had meant folding a cinch hand just because some cigarette smoke was moving in ways the old man didn't like or someone had kicked the table and the drinks were wobbling.
Ozzie had folded some good hands, too, of course—hundreds, probably, in his forty years of professional play. But Ozzie could afford to: He had made a lot of money over the years, and though he rarely played the very-high-stakes games, he was regarded as an equal by the best players in the country.