The four cards were the Six and the Five that had been showing and a Deuce and a Six. Crane now had four Sixes.
With a steady hand he lifted his glass and took a sip. So Leroy's houseboat lists a little, he told himself when he noticed the tilted surface of the beer; so what?
The rest of the mating seemed to take hours, but at last there were six players still in the game with eight cards each, two down and six up. Leroy had walked away to the bar.
"Three Sixes bet," said the man who was dealing.
"Uh," said Scott, peeking again at his down cards, "check."
The man to his left bet two hundred, the next man folded, the next two called, and the last man raised it another two hundred. The stack of bills in the middle of the table looked like a pile of green leaves that some gardener would eventually bag up and haul away.
"That's four hundred to the three Sixes," said the dealer.
"See the four," said Scott, peeling six bills off his roll, "and raise it two."
"A check-raise from the Sixes," noted the dealer.
Everyone folded but the man who had raised. He stared at Scott for a long time. He was showing two Knights and two Tens and two worthless cards. "And two," he said finally.
He thinks that the three Sixes are all I've got, Scott thought, or that at best I've got a low Boat. He's got a high Boat, probably Knights over Tens, and he knows the Aces and Queens and Kings are effectively gone.
"And two," Scott said, throwing the bills out onto the table.
The other player didn't move, but a glow seemed to go out of him. "Call," he said, pushing two more hundreds across the felt.
Scott flipped over his two down cards, and the other player bowed his head and tossed his hand into the discards.
"The Four of a Kind beats the Boat," pronounced the dealer.
Scott started to reach out with both arms for the pile of money, but Leroy, who had left the table after selling his hand to Scott, had returned and now stepped forward.
"Maybe not the houseboat." He grinned, showing big, even white teeth. "There's thirteen thousand six fifty in there, I believe." He took a leather billfold from inside his jacket and carefully separated out of it thirteen one-thousand-dollar bills and six hundreds and a fifty. He leaned forward and pressed them down onto the heaped money.
Hot, dry desert air sighed in through the open portholes, and Scott's throat burned with the smell of hot stone.
"I'm claiming the Assumption," Leroy said.
CHAPTER 7: It's All Yours
Scott sat back, put his hands on the edge of the table and grinned curiously up at this new opponent. Somehow he had forgotten Newt's telling him that Leroy liked this bet.
Scott had sunk $3,050 into this pot, counting the $1,200 he had paid for Leroy's hand. If he lost the cut, it would take him down from the more than $25,000 he had thought he had before Leroy had spoken—about three times what he'd walked aboard with—to less than $12,000. But if he won it, he'd be sitting on nearly $38,000. And at least the odds were in Scott's favor.
The dealer shrugged, gathered in the cards and shuffled them several times, handed them to another player to cut, and then slid the deck, solid as a brick, to the patch of felt in front of Scott.
The cigarette smoke was a narrow, upright funnel in the middle of the table now, like a tiny slow-motion tornado.
Still grinning, Scott slid his fingers halfway down the card-edges and lifted off the top half and showed the exposed card to the company—getting in return some looks of sympathy—and then he looked at it himself.
It was the Three of Cups. There were only four cards in the deck lower than that, the Deuces, and only three that would tie it. Seven cards out of fifty-five. One chance in about eight and a half.
Still holding the card up, Scott finished his beer, proud that his hand didn't shake in this almost certain defeat. He didn't have to tip the glass back very far at all.
He laid the top half back down on the deck and pushed it across to the dealer, who reshuffled and passed it for the cut and then slid it to the place where Leroy had been sitting.
Leroy leaned forward and curled his brown hand down over the cards; for a moment he seemed to be kneading them gently, and Scott was dully sure that the man was cheating, feeling for a crimp or an unshaved edge. Ozzie had taught him long ago that cheaters were to be either used or avoided, but never challenged, especially in a game with strangers.
Then Leroy had raised a segment of the deck, and the exposed card was the Deuce of Sticks.
There were sighs and low whistles from the other players, but Scott's ears were buzzing with the realization that he had won after all.
He reached out and began raking in and stacking the bills, glad of the revolver pressing against his hip-bone under his sweater.
Leroy sat down in the chair beside him. Scott glanced at the man and said, "Thanks."
Leroy's pupils were wider than normal, and the pulse in his neck was fast. "Yeah," he said levelly, shaking his head, "I don't know when I'm going to learn that that's not a smart bet."
Scott paused in his gathering and stacking. Those are tells, he thought; Leroy is faking dismay.
"You're taking the money for the hand," Leroy observed.
"Uh … yes." Again Scott was aware of the bulk of metal against his hip.
"You sold the hand."
"I guess you could put it that way."
"And I've bought it," Leroy said. "I've assumed it." He held out his right hand.
Puzzled, Scott put down some bills and reached across and shook hands with the big brown man in the white suit. "It's all yours," Scott said.
It's all yours.
Now, twenty-one years later, driving his old Ford Torino north up the dark 5 Freeway toward the 10 and Venice, Scott Crane remembered Ozzie's advice about games in which the smoke and the drink levels behaved strangely: Fold out. You don't know what you might be buying or selling come the showdown.
He had not ever seen Ozzie again after the game on the lake.
The old man had checked out of the Mint by the time Scott got back, and after Scott had rented a car and driven west across the desert to Orange County and Santa Ana, he had found the house unoccupied, with an envelope tacked to the front door frame.
It had contained a conformed copy of a quit-claim deed giving the house to Scott.
He had talked to his foster sister Diana on the telephone a few times in the years since, most recently in '75, after spearing his own ankle, but he had not seen her again either. And he had not any idea where she or Ozzie might now be living.
Crane missed Diana even more than he missed old Ozzie.
Crane had been seventeen when he and Ozzie had driven out to Las Vegas to pick up Diana in 1960. The game on the lake had still been nine years in the future.
He and Ozzie had been driving home from a movie—Psycho, as Scott recalled—and the radio was playing Elvis Presley's "Are You Lonesome Tonight," when Ozzie had pulled the Studebaker over to the Harbor Boulevard curb.
"What's the moon look like to you?" Ozzie had asked.
Scott had looked at the old man, wondering if this was a riddle. "The moon?"
"Look at it."
Scott leaned down over the dashboard to look up at the sky; and after a few seconds he had opened the door and stepped out onto the sidewalk to see more clearly.
The spots and gray patches on the moon made it look like a groaning skull. The bright dot of Venus was very close to it—about where the moon's collar-bone would be.