Certified Male

by Kristin Hardy

  “Stay with me, please,” she said in a rusty voice.

  “You sure?”

  She nodded. “Not to, you know…I just really don’t want to be alone right now.” Just then the idea was impossible to face.

  Del turned and folded her into his arms. “I’ll stay with you as long as you want,” he murmured, kissing her hair. And he swung her up in his arms and carried her back to the bed, lying down next to her to hold her—just hold her—as the tears and shudders finally came.

  11

  SO NOW HE HAD A PRETTY PUZZLE on his hands, Del thought the next morning as he sat at his desk and checked voice mail. Gwen needed help, he’d offered it. But she wasn’t telling him everything, and for all he knew, she could be conning him. He didn’t want to believe it, thinking of how it had felt to hold the warm, fragrant bundle of her against him. The problem was, he just didn’t know and he didn’t know what to do about it.

  He did know what to do about the call from Greg Jessup at the Globe city desk, though. It was probably only to set up a phone interview, Del told himself as he dialed Jessup’s number. Still, it meant he had an opening, a chance.

  The tones rang in his ear, then with a click the line connected.

  “Jessup.”

  “Del Redmond, Greg. You called?”

  “Hi, Del. Yeah, Perry over in sports handed along your application for our opening in metro. I wanted to talk with you about it a little if you’ve got the time.”

  If he had time? He’d make time. “Sure.”

  “You’ve got a track record with the paper and Perry gave you a thumbs-up, so I don’t really need to go into the usual who, what, where. I guess what I’m really wondering is why. You’ve got a solid long-term career on the sports desk. Perry tells me you’ve got the second highest reader-response rate of all his columnists. Why are you coming after what’s practically an entry-level job in metro?”

  Jessup was a newsman to the core, Del reflected. No time wasted getting to the point. “I had a chance to do a series last year on the whole doping scandal. Investigative. I dug up sources, wormed my way in where I didn’t belong and I came away with information solid enough that the folks running the litigation wanted to talk with me.”

  “I hope you cited the fifth.”

  Del grinned. “I told them to do their own jobs. The thing is, it gave me a taste for investigative work. I want to do more of it. Work on real stories, you know?”

  “Well, that’s just the problem. You understand you wouldn’t get to at first, right? And you’d have to take a pay cut.”

  “Yep.”

  Jessup was silent for a moment. “I don’t know, Redmond. I hear where you’re coming from, but I’m just not sure you know what you’re in for.”

  “Who’ve you been interviewing for this job? What kind of background do they have?”

  “They’re young,” Jessup admitted.

  “Doesn’t experience count for something?”

  “Not when it’s all sports columns.”

  “It’s not. Take a look at the BALCO series.”

  “I did. It was good work,” Jessup acknowledged, “but it was still sports. I want to see how you handle something that’s not a game.”

  “Give me an assignment.”

  “That’s just it. If you’re a reporter, no one’s going to give you an assignment. There’s nothing so easy as the nightly game to write up. You’ve got to be out there digging, fighting for the stories and getting them before the competition does. You’ve got to constantly be alert.”

  “I am digging up stories. Hell, I’ve stumbled into something out here in Vegas that’s about as juicy as they come.”

  “Mob corruption?” Jessup snapped to attention.

  “What would you say to a heist, a poker tournament and a couple of the rarest stamps in the world?”

  “Sunday-supplement stuff.”

  “You think? If four and a half million’s at stake?”

  “That makes it sexier. What do you know about it?”

  He’d blurted it out without thinking. Now he backpedaled. “Not a whole lot yet. I’m just giving you an example. The point is, I know how to dig.”

  “The point is, you’re onto a story that we could use. You want me to take a second look at you, you’ll hunt down that story.”

  “I don’t know if this particular one—”

  “This was a real story, right, Redmond? I mean, you weren’t just spinning something out of your ass to impress me, were you?”

  Del controlled the surge of irritation. “It’s real.”

  “Good. Then get it on my desk.”

  And he disconnected with a click.

  “NOW SEE, THIS IS THE WAY TO start out a tournament,” Roxy told Gwen. The first wave of round one had opened up earlier that afternoon. They watched now from a few rows up on the temporary aluminum bleachers that lined the perimeter of the playing area. From there they could get a good view of the forty tables that crowded the room, supplemented by the view from the wide-screen televisions that hung overhead. “No stress, just a chance to sit back and keep an eye on the ones who are taking the big pots, see who you need to worry about in the next round.”

  The ballroom had changed from the night before. It was perhaps crowded with as many people, but gone was the social atmosphere. Now a sort of hyperintense circus giddiness had taken hold. Some wore outlandish costumes. Others carried lucky tokens ranging from rabbits’ feet and coins to photographs. The players were a mixed bag, from guys barely out of high school who’d probably soaked up their strategy from computer simulators to craggy-looking graybeards with a lifetime of poker experience etched into their features.

  “Hey, what about that hunka hunka burnin’ love?” Roxy gestured to a sideburned player in a sequined Elvis-style jumpsuit. “I think I want his baby.”

  “I can see it now. You’ll have him in an Elvis pompadour and teething on poker chips.”

  “Who said anything about having a he?”

  Only a bit over ten percent of the three hundred and sixty people who’d opened the first wave would advance to round two, breaking the losers hand by hand. In the end only five percent of the tournament entrants would finish in the money. For now, though, everything was possible.

  “I can’t believe they’re going to cut down all these players to forty in only two days.”

  “And then do it again for our half of round one,” Roxy reminded her.

  “I wish they’d let us just start all at once.”

  “Maybe they don’t have enough tables. Last year they had the whole opening round start at the same time. Smaller, I guess. We just played every day until we hit their target.”

  “How late?”

  “Eleven one night, two in the morning the next. The deeper you get, the slower they go. Minimum bets start at a hundred dollars and go up every two hours for the rest of the tournament. This group will winnow down pretty quickly. I’m guessing they’ll take it until ten or eleven tonight.”

  “Makes my behind hurt to think about it.”

  “They give you breaks and dinner, so it’s not so bad.” Roxy propped her feet up on the bench below them. “The tough part is the way they’re constantly consolidating the tables as people go out. Just about the time you get used to how one group plays, either you’re getting tossed to another table with an opening or someone with a whole mess of chips drops into yours.”

  It made Gwen just a bit queasy to contemplate. “Why don’t they just play each table down to one winner.”

  Roxy shook her head. “Changes the dynamics of the game too much when you drop down below six players. You lose the advantage of being the late bettor.”

  “On the other hand, lower pocket cards are stronger with a shorthanded table,” Gwen reminded her. “You might try using a suited queen eight to beat five players where you wouldn’t trust it to beat nine. I think they like to keep the pressure on.”

  “Keeps things exciting. That’s why they let the play go o
n so long if they need to—when you’ve been at it for ten or twelve hours and you’re brain-dead, that’s when you find out what you’re made of. Watch and learn, grasshopper. Watch and learn.” Roxy stared across the room. “Hey, there’s your boy. Now that is what we call in Montana a fine-looking specimen of a man.”

  Gwen followed her pointing finger and felt the jump of adrenaline in her system. Under the pitiless lighting over the tables, a five-o’clock shadow darkened Del’s jaw. A dark gray Alcatraz T-shirt stretched over his shoulders. His hair was a little disordered, as though he’d had his hands in it. From the grandstand she could look her fill at his hollow cheeks, the firm line of his mouth. Only his eyes were hidden, behind mirrored sunglasses. The eyes were the single biggest tell in poker. Expression could be controlled, but the expansion of the pupil at a good hand or contraction at a bad hand was involuntary. Del, apparently, was taking no chances.

  “I could turn into a poker groupie for a guy like that. I’m sure I could give him a few Hold ’em lessons.”

  “Down, girl.”

  Roxy gave her a sidelong glance. “Didn’t you tell me before that you didn’t want to get involved with him?”

  “I don’t,” Gwen said firmly.

  Roxy studied her and looked out at the tables. “Yeah, maybe I’ll hold off. Never been a poacher and I’m not gonna start now.”

  “There’s nothing going on between us.”

  “Oh, really?” Roxy’s eyes were amused. “You’ve got to bluff a whole lot better than that if you want to make it out of round one, honey.”

  Gwen glowered at her and turned to watch the games.

  Del and Jerry were playing at different tables, though as she’d already seen, that could change at a moment’s notice. Still, competition at this point wasn’t head-to-head so much as a matter of holding enough chips to stay alive.

  “Who’s that asshole?” Roxy asked, pointing.

  Pointing at Jerry. He wore a baseball cap turned backward and a shiny silver Oakland Raiders warm-up jacket. Compared to his tournament persona, he’d been positively low-key when they’d played a few nights before. He was, in short, a punk. Cocky and hyper, he stood and paced, he talked to himself, he gloated when he won and sulked when he lost. “If he were at my table, I’d have to kill him,” Roxy observed.

  He was already earning decidedly hostile glances from some of the players at his table. Unfortunately for them, he was more than holding his own. He had that edge of instability that made him impossible to predict and could tip him into either riotous success or disaster at a moment’s notice. For now, the cards were with him. His increasing hoard of chips stood haphazardly in uneven, tilted towers that he fiddled with constantly.

  Del, by contrast, was a study in calm. Whether he held a made hand with a pair of aces or a hand begging to be folded, he maintained the same focused expression, watching everything, reacting to nothing.

  If he was composed, he was also a predator, ruthlessly competitive, able to sniff out the weaknesses of his opponents. Traditionally the player who was the big blind was in a position of vulnerability compared to the rest of the table. Del seemed not to know that. He fearlessly attacked from the blind, throwing his competitors off balance so that at the end of the hand they discovered they’d been expertly fleeced as Del raked in their chips. He relentlessly sought out his competitors’ vulnerabilities while presenting a smooth, inscrutable wall to them. His neat stacks of chips rose steadily.

  Gwen had seen him play, so she hadn’t expected him to be dead money in the first round, but she hadn’t been prepared for his lightning attacks and parries. Jerry appeared to carelessly throw out chips on a hunch. Del wagered with an inexorable authority that made it clear he was pushing to do just what he wanted. He’d clearly mastered the other players and was picking off their chips at his leisure.

  The hand at Del’s table ended, and a skinny, jumpy looking guy who looked as if he was on break from college raked in the pot. He’d knocked out one player on the hand and taken a surprising amount of chips from the others, including Del. Now the table was down to Del, the young kid and five others.

  And raw nerve.

  “This should start getting interesting now,” Roxy murmured into Gwen’s ear. “Looks like your boy’s the big blind.”

  Gwen watched Del push out a stack of thousand-dollar chips as though they were Necco wafers. If he had no visible nerves, though, she was awash with them, her mouth dry as dust. The kid pushed out the small blind and the dealer dealt the pocket cards. With the lazy elegance of a master fencer toying with his opponent Del casually raised without even looking at his cards.

  “So, does he have steel ones or are they actual flesh and blood?” Roxy whispered to her.

  “They felt like flesh and blood, but they might have changed since I saw them last,” Gwen whispered back.

  The tension ratcheted up.

  The rest of the players at the table folded after a glance at their pocket cards. Del took a quick glance at his and raised, putting pressure on his foe.

  The kid rose from his chair, bouncing a little on his toes and muttering to himself. He curved his fingers around his stacks of chips. For a moment he held on, licking his lips. Then he pushed them all forward. A little mutter rippled through the crowd around the table. All in, Gwen thought tensely. It would be up to Del whether to match him or to check, refusing to bet.

  The kid stared at his chips with a certain fascinated horror, paced around a little, swinging his hands.

  Del sat in his chair, taut and coiled, studying the kid as much as his hand. Seconds ticked by. Nerves twisted in Gwen’s stomach. Finally in a smooth, decisive move Del pushed his chips forward to match the kid.

  It was like that moment on a roller-coaster ride after the first descent, when the car was racing up the next hill. The tension had eased a fraction, but everyone in the room knew that the stomach-dropping stuff was yet to come.

  Both players turned up their pocket cards. It was pointless to hide anything, since no more betting was possible. The kid had a pair of kings. Del had a suited jack and ace. The rest of the hand would play out quickly.

  The flop held a jack and a king. Gwen clenched her hands together. Three kings versus two jacks—the kid had him. This was it. There was no possibility of retreat. Folding was meaningless. Everything was at stake.

  Two cards still remained in the hand, though, and anything could happen. The dealer flipped over the turn card to reveal another jack. It gave Del three of a kind, but the kid’s three kings still outranked Del’s hand.

  It all came down to the river card.

  The dealer laid the card facedown on the green baize. He paused a moment, with innate theatricality. Gwen wanted to scream with the tension. The kid scrubbed his hands through his hair. Del sat, as relaxed as though he were back in his room watching television.

  The dealer put his hand on the river card and flipped it over.

  And the ace of spades lay on the baize.

  Gwen whooped and clapped before she even realized she was doing it. Del had taken the hand with a full house. He’d nearly doubled his chip count in a single hand.

  Victory.

  He looked up and winked at her.

  “Looks like your boy knows how to play Hold ’em,” Roxy observed.

  “That he does,” Gwen said, “that he does.”

  12

  PLOTTING TO PLY JERRY WITH drinks and get him drunk enough to tell her something was a good idea in theory but not nearly so entertaining in practice. So far she’d been regaled with a replay of every hand of his round, though the details had been glossed over somewhat in Jerry’s favor. He dragged out the description of his final winning hand that bumped him to the next round until she wanted to scream.

  “An’ then the flop gives me my other ace. I know these other two guys at the table and they’re acting like they’ve got something good but the guy on the end is blinking too much and the guy next to me is beginning to sweat. I figure
they’re bluffing, so I go all in. Balls to the walls, you know? I figure I’ll either win big or I head on up to 5111 and call it a night.”

  A little leap of excitement went through her. At least she had his room number now. It was a start, anyway. “What would you have done if you hadn’t gotten the full house on the flop?” she asked him. “You just coughed up ten thousand to enter the tournament. That’s a lot of money.”

  He snorted. “Chump change. I could go out tomorrow and come back with fifteen, twenty grand, easy.”

  “Really,” she said, with a pretty good idea of just how.

  “Oh, I’m set, all right. This time next week I’m gonna be rollin’ in dough. Yo bartender!” He thumped the bar. “’Nother round here. My ladyfren’s fallen behin’.”

  The bartender gave him a glance. “I think you might have had enough, friend.”

  Jerry straightened up. “I think I know when I’ve had enough,” he said, clearly taking pains to speak distinctly.

  The bartender gave a long look at Jerry and a longer one at Gwen. “Buddy, everybody’s got a job.”

  “An’ yours is to pour drinks.”

  “It’s also to take care of you. That includes not letting you get drunk and rolled by some pretty lady.” He paused. “No offense,” he added with a look at Gwen.

  “None taken, I’m sure,” she said coolly.

  “I wanna drink,” Jerry said obstinately.

  “You go out of here and hurt yourself or somebody else, the law says it’s my responsibility,” the bartender told him. “You look like you’ve got a pretty good buzz as it is. Why don’t you ride it?”

  Jerry fumbled in his pocket and slapped his card key down on the bar. “I’m staying at the hotel, pal, so I ain’t gonna get in any car. Now bring me a drink.”

  The bartender flicked a look at the security camera at the end of the bar, then back at Jerry impassively.

  Jerry gave him back a stubborn stare. “Dammit, everybody thinks they know what’s good for me.” He stood unsteadily and leaned toward Gwen. “Gotta go…you know. Be right back, okay. Make him give us a drink.” And he weaved off to the bathrooms.