King of Diamonds Read online

  The characters and events portrayed in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.

  Text copyright © 2018 Ted Thackrey, Jr.

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.

  ISBN: 1941298619

  ISBN 13: 978-1941298619

  Published by Brash Books, LLC

  12120 State Line #253,

  Leawood, Kansas 66209

  www.brash-books.com

  Also by Ted Thackrey Jr.

  The Preacher

  Aces & Eights

  CONTENTS

  A SERMON

  ONE

  A SERMON (CONTINUED)

  TWO

  A SERMON (CONTINUED)

  THREE

  A SERMON (CONTINUED)

  FOUR

  A SERMON (CONTINUED)

  FIVE

  A SERMON (CONTINUED)

  SIX

  A SERMON (CONTINUED)

  SEVEN

  A SERMON (CONTINUED)

  EIGHT

  A SERMON (CONTINUED)

  NINE

  A SERMON (CONTINUED)

  TEN

  A SERMON (CONTINUED)

  ELEVEN

  A SERMON (CONTINUED)

  TWELVE

  A SERMON (CONTINUED)

  THIRTEEN

  A SERMON (CONTINUED)

  FOURTEEN

  A SERMON (CONTINUED)

  FIFTEEN

  A SERMON (CONTINUED)

  SIXTEEN

  A SERMON (CONTINUED)

  SEVENTEEN

  A SERMON (CONTINUED)

  EIGHTEEN

  A SERMON (CONTINUED)

  NINETEEN

  A SERMON (CONTINUED)

  TWENTY

  A SERMON (CONTINUED)

  TWENTY-ONE

  A SERMON (CONTINUED)

  TWENTY-TWO

  A SERMON (CONTINUED)

  TWENTY-THREE

  A SERMON (CONTINUED)

  TWENTY-FOUR

  A SERMON (CONTINUED)

  TWENTY-FIVE

  A SERMON (CONTINUED)

  TWENTY-SIX

  A SERMON (CONTINUED)

  TWENTY-SEVEN

  A SERMON (CONTINUED)

  TWENTY-EIGHT

  A SERMON (CONTINUED)

  TWENTY-NINE

  A SERMON (CONTINUED)

  THIRTY

  A SERMON (CONTINUED)

  THIRTY-ONE

  A SERMON (CONTINUED)

  THIRTY-TWO

  A BENEDICTION

  THIRTY-THREE

  AMEN

  THIRTY-FOUR

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  A SERMON

  Dear friends,

  Our text today is taken from the Gospel according to Saint Matthew, seventh chapter, fifteenth verse:

  “Beware of false prophets, which come to you in sheep’s clothing, but inwardly they are ravening wolves.”

  The words are from the Sermon on the Mount, and their message certainly seems simple enough: All you have to do is stay away from people like that.

  And of course, they’ll cooperate by wearing signs around their necks saying “False Prophet! Beware!”

  ONE

  Playing poker to lose is like trying to make love to a woman who won’t wake up—unsatisfactory even if you succeed. And even worse if you don’t.

  The problem, I suspect, is one of ego: Poker has been my chief occupation for more than a decade, and for a man in that position losing is simply not an option. To the contrary, confidence that you will go out the door richer than you came in is the single most important weapon in the professional’s armory. Anything else is for chumps. Losers. Or gamblers. And I never gamble. I just play poker.

  But I was playing to lose now, actually making an effort to contribute my own stake to someone else’s personal Wealth and Welfare Fund. And that made the reactions of the gaunt and balding man who was betting into me all the harder to understand.

  The poor bastard was scared stiff, and I purely could not see why.

  He had all the best of it—paired aces showing against my three exposed diamonds. Not a sure winner, perhaps. I did in fact have another red lozenge in the hole. But you still had to call an 11-to-10 edge for his hand in the seven-card stud game we were playing. I really couldn’t see him chasing the pot this far, five cards bought and two to go, without at least a third ace or high pair in the hole. And even if he was running a cold bluff, the result couldn’t be too much of a catastrophe.

  This was casino poker, in California, and while a sign on the wall might advertise “No-Limit Action,” the reality was that a player’s betting was restricted to the amount he had showing on the table when the hand began.

  The pot we were after held less than $400, and the total left in his stake would hold the final count well below $500.

  No pain. No strain.

  But panic-sweat kept rolling off him all the same, and I was spending more time wondering about that than I was playing my own hand . . . which is bad news in any game.

  We were head-to-head in the pot now. I had raised him ten dollars and he dearly wanted to bump the action. It would have been the right move; make the guy with only three-fifths of a flush prove he’s got at least one more fifth in reserve. But he couldn’t make himself do it. And you could hear the other players at the table starting to shuffle their feet.

  Time is at a premium in California casinos; management collects a fee for every minute spent at the table, and for that reason the play tends to be faster than in private games or the kind where the house takes a percentage of each pot. Time to move in or fold. But still he hesitated, counting the exact number of one-dollar chips that would see my bet into one pile and arranging the rest of his stake—the raise he wanted to go for—into another, and toying with them in turn before shoving the ten-dollar pile into the center of the table.

  His hand was shaking, and the redolence of his emotions was a burden on the air.

  There is no mistaking the odor of fear.

  It is distinctive. Excitement, frustration, anticipation, and sexual arousal all have their telltale effluvia, but true fear—that bleak midnight of the soul—is a world of its own, and its olfactory signature for the human animal is unmistakable. It is the sour-lemon scent of overripe bread dough. Of yeast gone wrong. I had smelled it before and applied the information to my advantage. I smelled it now and tried to think of some way to make it help me lose. But I was fresh out of inspiration.

  He just wasn’t making sense . . .

  I used the split second between his decision and the arrival of our next cards to try to touch his wa—the personal aura that surrounds the essence of each individual—in the hope of getting some clear idea of his problem. But the effort was no more successful than it had been the other times I’d tried. Either the man was perfectly shielded, which I just didn’t believe, or the wa was so meager as to be almost nonexistent. Hard to swallow, either way. If there was a third alternative, though, I couldn’t seem to remember what it was.

  The card that landed in front of me was a heart. It paired a trey I had showing, but was no help.

  I glanced at the other hand.

  Now he had trips showing: three aces, shining like the end of the rainbow.

  So, all right, then! He had me cold! Three aces or four, a full house at the very least against a busted flush—and nothing for me to do but buy the next card, unless he bumped the action high enough to force me out. I made up my mind to let him do it if he would. I wasn’t in this game f
or the money.

  The decision was all his. The exposed cards were clear winners, and he even went so far as to line up all his remaining checks in marching order, ready to move into the center. But even before he pulled his hand back, I knew he wasn’t going to be able to do it. No need to sample the atmosphere or try to touch the wa this time. It was all there in his eyes. They changed as the last fluid ounce of confidence oozed out of his body and volatilized in the air conditioning. No way, José.

  He blinked, swallowed dryness, and finally managed to whisper the single word that told it all.

  “Check.”

  All right, then. Screw you, buddy! Enough is enough.

  Taking time for a not-too-careful eyeball estimate of his remaining resources, I nudged a few blues, reds, and whites loose from my own pile and shoved them into the pot with a motion that was harder than I wanted it to be, but not nearly hard enough to get rid of what I was feeling. The neat piles spilled sideways, but the dealer didn’t bother to count them or restack. Everyone at the table knew what had happened and what had to follow. Win or lose, I had done the only thing I could do, and there could be only one possible response.

  He knew it, too. But he didn’t want to know it, and no hands ever moved more slowly than the ones that closed around the remainder of his stake and guided it across the green baize surface of the table.

  Chatter is a normal part of poker, especially in California. Players gossip, argue, exchange insults, and turn the whole thing into a kind of commercialized social event. Town meeting for lunatics of purest ray serene. But conversation had ceased at our table, and the other players seemed to be holding their breath as the final two cards were dealt . . . and landed face up.

  In the normal course of things, this would have been a foul; the seventh card is supposed to be concealed. This time, however, there could be no further betting. The cards would tell their own story because one of the two people left in the pot was tapped, unable to raise, therefore effectively preventing any new action.

  The gaunt man had caught the eight of clubs.

  Nothing.

  And I was staring down at the fifth diamond of my flush.

  His move. He looked at the cards and then at me, and I think he wanted to swallow again, but he couldn’t do it and when he showed his hole cards I knew why. They were a king and queen.

  For one brief moment, I thought about folding the hand without showing my winner. The look in his eyes and the smell that now seemed to fill the entire room said he needed that pot in a way that no man should ever need or want anything. But it was impossible. The all-in pot and his all too obvious terror had already drawn far too many pairs of eyes in our direction, and the off chance that someone would see the concealed winner and realize that I had lost by choice was simply more than I could afford—at least until I had some clear idea of what was really going on around me.

  I turned my hole cards to show the deuce of diamonds and kept my eyes on the gaunt man, assessing his reaction.

  He seemed to be holding his breath. And he went on doing it long after the spectators had exhaled and used the wind to exercise their vocal cords—swearing, chortling, ordering drinks or coffee, and generally easing our little island of silence back into the fabric of casino sound. The hand was over, a new one ready to start. But not for the loser. Stricken and silent, he sat staring with a kind of fixed and terrible attention at the fourteen cards still exposed on the table, as though willing them to change their faces and show him something he wanted to see.

  I waited for the dealer to break the spell. All he had to do was his job—rake in the cards and shuffle. Take the poor bastard off the hook. But he didn’t seem in any hurry to do it.

  And that was yet another puzzle.

  Back in the days when California poker was limited to high and low versions of draw, the tables were round and the casinos actually rotated the dealing chore among the players after the established custom of Friday night games in your brother-in-law’s recreation room. No reason for anything else. The kind of players attracted to that kind of action might try to cheat, but few were good enough at it to make a real nuisance of themselves.

  The alterations in California law that sparked the poker casino-building fever of the late seventies and early eighties, however, changed a lot of things—and one of them was the shape of the poker table. Suddenly it was kidney-shaped, like the ones in Las Vegas, with space on the concave side for a hired dealer. And the people employed to occupy that seat were professionals.

  Trained in their work and supervised by pit bosses on the alert as much for ineptitude in customer relations as for possible malfeasance, they were specialists in the care and handling of losers. Move them away from the table; let the pit boss make sure they have bus fare home if it’s needed. No problem.

  So why were we all sitting around like painted scenery?

  And suddenly I understood.

  Two faces at the table explained it all with the clarity of a printed page, and it was exactly the kind of information I had come there to get. But it left me a little queasy all the same.

  That lemon-weighted odor of fear was stronger than ever; the gaunt loser had stopped staring at the cards and turned his gaze to the dealer. His face was a study in terrified pleading, a soul-sick frenzy of despair that could not possibly have been directed toward a stranger or even a casual acquaintance. The eyes said they were brothers. Compatriots. Comrades-in-arms whose demand for aid and comfort could not be ignored or refused. But diamonds are made of softer stuff than the stare that came back to him from the silent man in the vest-and-tie poker dealer’s uniform. He raked in the two remaining hands and swept the cards into a single pack and starting the ancient ritual of shuffle-and-cut for the next hand.

  The red button moved one position to the left, but nothing else happened for a long moment.

  The dealer’s motions had been mechanical, unconnected to the stony eyes that remained locked on those of the gaunt man, and one or two players tossed their antes into the center of the table before they noticed that something besides poker was going on around them. And then suddenly, as if on subliminal signal, it was over. The dealer’s face was full of nothing as he glanced over his shoulder to where the pit boss sat on his high stool and said the first words I’d heard him utter since we sat down at the table.

  “Open seat,” he said.

  The seven-card pit boss spared him less than a split second of attention and appeared to need no further information about which player was leaving. His expression was neutral as he reached out to erase the name Geller from the list of players at his number three table, and his voice offered no hint of inner temperature as he selected a new player from the waiting list and announced the name over the casino PA system.

  But something had happened, nonetheless. Abruptly. I found that I could touch the gaunt man’s wa . . . and wished I hadn’t. It was cold, painted in shades of black, and tuned to the frequency of death and doom and despair and betrayal and outer darkness. My guess about his relationship to the dealer—and to the other casino employees—had been accurate enough. He was one of them. But he had failed, and sympathy was no part of the deal.

  Their faces said they were looking at a dead man. A corpse.

  And to hell with him.

  I stood up, raked my stake into the tail of the Harry Truman Aloha Special I was wearing in place of the preacher-black suit and string tie that are my usual working uniform, and shook my head at the dealer when he started to ask a question.

  Later, man. Much, much later. Time to leave now. Cash the checks and get out of this miserable place. Forget me; I am history.

  The pit boss had been eyeballing the table, but his face still offered no comment as he moved to rub out the chalked name Armbruster, which I’d given when I entered the game nearly six hours earlier, and I had a private moment or two to total up the wins and the losses en route to the cashier’s window. And be depressed by the result.

  Some days you j
ust can’t lose.

  Even when you’re trying.

  I was still having a go at myself ten minutes later when I sat down at the casino’s bar and barely controlled the urge to order mineral water. It is the beverage of choice for poker professionals; players who make their living at the table and like to give themselves the advantage of a clear mind while they’re doing it.

  But not for slobs who can’t even figure a safe and convincing way to screw up.

  “Budweiser,” I said after a moment of hesitation that the bartender didn’t seem to notice. He nodded and went away, leaving me to consider my options in solitude.

  Bad shit.

  The memory of that last hand—combined now with the sight of myself in the back-bar mirror—was doing terrible things to what little morale I had left. Not that there had been much to work with in the first place.

  The man in the mirror wasn’t me, and I was glad of it, because he was a disaster: slightly overweight (carefully tailored padding at the waist and cotton-ball inserts for the cheeks) and gray-haired (two hours at an overpriced but highly efficient salon in Beverly Hills) and bespectacled (window glass in the left lens, with an ultra-dark shade in the other to disguise the right eye I don’t possess) with just a bit of awkwardness in gait (rubber bands wound tightly around the big toes). A gaudy Hawaiian shirt—worn tail-out, of course—and expensive new sandals (over black silk socks with ankle clocks) completed the picture of the displaced mid-fiftyish businessman I was pretending to be.

  Good Old George Armbruster.

  Charter member of the Elks Lodge. Kiwanian. Still in charge of entertainment for the Junior Chamber a dozen years after he should have dropped out. A secret boozer whose interest in the nineteenth hole had overtaken his concern with the other eighteen too long ago for anyone to remember.

  Good Old George.

  He set my teeth on edge—all the more, perhaps, because I knew he was almost real, someone I might have turned out to be in slightly different circumstances.

  The beer arrived in a sparkling pilsner glass. Someone in the casino’s purchasing department had a touch of class. But it didn’t make me want the brew, and the single sip I took for the sake of form was more than enough.