With all the turmoil, no one reacts to Kim the first time she says, “The poker game.”
My accusations must have made Rob curious. While still holding me back, he asks, “Didya do something, Jesse?”
“I didn’t do anything.” Jesse’s voice is sterner now.
“Yes he did. Don’t listen to his calm Mr. Niceguy act. He did something. Tell me what you did!” My words fire out, strung together in one long garbled scream.
“The poker game.” When she repeats herself, everyone turns to Kim. “Dennis Cane’s big game. It’s in two days. One million dollar buy-in. Winner takes all. Piper, you said there are always like twelve people who enter, right?”
For the moment, I let go of my wrath towards Jesse and let the fresh possibility sink in. Kim is right. Dennis Cane’s biannual million-dollar buy in poker tournament is only two days away. Assuming as many people play as normal, the winner would walk away with more than enough money to get Sophie back.
I had an opportunity to save Sophie through poker, and I failed. Am I getting a second chance?
“Is it a winner takes all tournament?” asks Rob.
“Yeah, it is,” responds Kim.
Mars adds, “Through our cons, we could never put together ten mill’ to get Sophie back, but we could probably put together one million. Enough to enter the game.”
“And if you win…” Rob trails off. A smile on his face.
And once again, hope has squeezed its way through the dark, stubborn clouds to shine down on us.
--Darkness. There’s darkness in him. That darkness seeps into his desires and even his decisions.--
CHAPTER ELEVEN – I can beat him
The rest of us are all about this new possibility, brainstorming all the short cons we can pull in the next 36 hours. Calculating which cons both bring the largest profits and can be put together in the shortest amount of time. We never thought we could get ten million dollars this way, but one million? The rest of us consider it possible.
Except Max. He fights it. Every step of the way.
“The poker tournament starts in 36 hours. There’s no way we’ll get our hands on a million dollars before then.” Max continues to shake his head, as if to repeat “no way.”
“We got this,” says Rob.
“Max, we can do it,” I add.
Normally, minimizing risk limits our income. And when it comes to Rob, Mars, and Kim, a lack of motivation limits it as well.
On any given day, Rob might get distracted from picking pockets by girls in a bachelorette party. Mars might take a two-hour lunch and watch sports in a casino before he returns to the pool hall. Kim might spend hours reading the Wall Street Journal that she could spend counting cards.
Motivation won’t be an issue now. Not with Sophie’s life on the line. Sure, we’ll take a few more risks than normal, but we’re not dealing with normal.
I clutch Max’s arm as I plead with him. “Between Mars’s hustling, my cons as an escort, Rob’s pickpocketing, and Kim’s counting cards, who knows how much we could rope in?”
Jesse can’t pull any long cons in such a tight window, but he can provide assistance to our cons when needed and maybe pull a quick grift or two himself.
“Fine, let’s imagine for a second that you can miraculously pull together a million dollars. Fine, let’s pretend that pipedream strikes oil. That’s only the entrance.”
“Max-”
Before I can speak, Max continues his tirade. “You still have to win, Piper. You still have to win.”
A point I hoped he wouldn’t raise. And a fair one. Max did watch me lose before, and I know it was tough on him, seeing me determined to win and then lose it all. But he knows how much I’ve played since then. He knows I’ve improved.
“She could win,” says Jesse. “She will.”
Our eyes connect. And linger. And for a moment, I forget about this new possibility of winning the poker game as my mind travels back in time just a few minutes. To the chaos that Kim’s suggestion interrupted. I was ready to kill Jesse. Did he do something to foil the Ladislav jewel heist? I get that the root of his decision would have been concern. His goddamn brotherly concern. Just as I see it as my job to protect my sister, maybe Jesse sees it as his responsibility to protect his sister. But even if he was looking out for me, how could he interfere with the best plan to get Sophie back?
“I’m not saying she can’t win,” says Max. “I’m just saying it’s no guarantee.”
“There’s nothing else, Max. There are no other options.”
Even though I say it to Max, I look at Jesse as the second statement slips out of my mouth. But my guilt trip doesn’t expose guilt. Jesse’s stony poker face somehow still hides the truth.
Max starts pacing as he rambles about Charlie Moses and going back to him to ask for more time. He goes through all the options we already concluded were impossible. He even suggests going to the police.
The police? Max normally remains a very calm, logical man. I’ve never seen him like this.
“Max, we already vetoed going to the police,” I say. “Even you said there was too big a chance it could get Soph killed.”
In place of a verbal response, Max sits down. He grinds his foot into the floor and keeps wiping his hand across his face as if trying to rub in sunblock. He appears frustrated and frazzled. I understand frustrated. What I can’t pinpoint is the frazzled. I keep trying to talk him through it. Eventually, he stops answering my questions and just puts his head in his hands. Like a child who doesn’t want to deal with the world and thinks he can cover his head with his dinosaur bed sheets to make everything go away.
I’ve never seen him like this. Is it the pressure of getting Sophie back? Is it too much for him?
“Max, what the hell is going on?”
He ignores my question. Kim and Rob try next. Then Mars talks to him with his soothing monotone voice. All of us trying to get through to him. But different tones, different words, different people…none of them make a difference. Max ignores all of it.
We wait for him to speak. The penthouse becomes quiet enough that we can hear a clock ticking at least fourteen feet away.
The clock has a dollar bill theme to it. One o’clock, one dollar; two o’clock, two dollars; seven o’clock, a five and two ones – and so on. I can’t remember the last time the penthouse was quiet enough to hear the clock tick.
Tock. Tick. Tock.
Finally, Max blurts it out. “Piper, the game is rigged.”
“What?”
“Dennis Cane rigs the games.”
“What do you mean, he rigs the games. How?”
“There are cameras built into the table.”
“In the table? What are you talking about, Max? The table’s not even clear.”
“It’s tinted fiberglass. It’s clear enough. Just clear enough for the cameras to see the cards, but just opaque enough so the players can’t see the cameras.”
“How do you know that? How do you... Wait. Wait… When did you find this out?”
His silence answers the question. For what feels like the millionth time in the last few days, I lose my shit. “You knew? You knew the game was rigged, and you let me put everything into it? How could you…”
Everyone waits for him to respond. Even though they weren’t there that day, Jesse, Mars, Rob, and Kim all know the story of what happened. They know I wanted to try to win enough money to move Sophie from Vegas. They know Max got me into the tournament. And they know I lost to Dennis Cane when my three jacks fell short of his full house.
As the anger builds inside me, it feels like the acids in my stomach are going to boil over, and I’m going to puke everywhere.
Max stands. But before he can speak and defend himself, my silent rage gives way to logic.
“You didn’t want to lose me. You were afraid I’d win the game and leave you. You did it to keep me here. So you could keep making money from me.”
Max’s shaking head suggests I’
m wrong, but I keep going. “You knew I could win the game. You knew I could win enough to leave, but you set me up to lose. All so you could keep using me to make money for you.”
“I did it to protect you.”
“Protect me?!?!” My voice cracks; I’m screaming now.
“Yes, to protect you! I did it so you could learn a lesson early on. One that took me fifteen years to learn. I lost my fiancé, my job… my whole life. I didn’t want you to lose the people who love you…later in life. I didn’t want you believing you could support the ones you love by playing cards. By gambling.”
“It wasn’t your place. How could you–”
“I really did it to protect you. I don’t expect you to understand, Piper. No parent ever wants to see their child suffer something they’ve suffered. You’re like a daughter to me. I would do anything to protect you.”
“Even lie to me? Even enter me into a poker tournament you knew I’d lose?”
Max sighs. He sits, and his shoulders slump back. Done arguing.
I see some logic buried in his betrayal. Some logic to what he’s saying. That he hurt me then to protect me from being hurt in the future. But he used his past gambling problem as a corollary, and that is where the logic fell apart.
I haven’t put a dime into a slot machine since I was twelve. I’ve never played roulette or blackjack or craps or any of that other crap. Those games, as Max correctly taught me, are poison. If you play them long enough, you will lose. Simple math. Max lost all his money playing blackjack and roulette. No one makes a career out of playing roulette. No one. But there are hundreds if not thousands of people who make a living playing poker. I can hear Max’s retort to this. He’d say, yeah, Piper, there are maybe a couple thousand people who make a good living from playing poker, and there are hundreds of thousands of people who have destroyed their lives playing poker.
I sit down on the ground, stare up at Max. “If you hadn’t done that. If you had let me play somewhere else, I might’ve won. And if I had, I’d’ve taken Sophie out of here. And she wouldn’t be a prisoner right now.”
I can tell from Max’s face that he already made that leap. Already bears that guilt.
“What do you want me to say, Piper? I did it to protect you. If I had known this would happen to Sophie…”
Max doesn’t finish his sentence. Just paces back and forth. I glare at his every step. Then he turns and looks back at me. “Ask any degenerate gambler, and they won’t tell you the worst thing that ever happened to them was the big bet they lost. It’s the big bet they won early on. The bait that got them hooked.”
I lie down on my back. It feels like my emotions have been torn to shreds and scattered all over the floor. Sophie is gone. I’m still 95% sure it was Jesse who somehow tipped off Ladislav. And now I find out Max let me enter a fixed poker game, let me lose my life savings. But as much as my emotions are split amongst these various furies, none of them matter now. I have to focus. I sit back up.
“How does it work? The game. How is it fixed?”
“He’s got a various tiny high optic cameras built into the table. In another room, he has a third party viewing the feed. This third party lets Dennis know everyone’s cards via a tiny ear piece.”
“Jesus. So the cat wins every time,” Rob says.
“No. Well, he could. But Dennis is smart. He knows curiosity killed the cat. So Dennis loses every once in a while just to ward off suspicions.”
Kim nods, then chimes in. “It makes sense. If he won every time, no one would ever come back.”
Jesse speaks up next. “How do you know this, Max?”
“The lady who runs the camera. She and I go way back. She used to be a concierge and she would tip me off to gullible tourists. We pulled a few cons together before she started working for Dennis Cane as a dealer. Eventually she stopped working as his hands and started working as his eyes.”
“Does Dennis Cane know you know?” I ask.
“No.”
I look from Max to Jesse. From Jesse to Max. Both seem to have my interests at heart. Jesse interfered with Ladislav because he didn’t want me to get killed, and Max let me lose my savings to prevent me from becoming a gambling degenerate. But both of their manipulations have interfered with bringing Sophie home.
“What are our other options?” Jesse asks.
“We could borrow it.”
I turn to the source of the naïve suggestion. “You can’t just borrow ten million dollars? From who? A bank? Rob, a bank needs collateral. And no loan shark is going to lend that kind of cash.”
Rob shrugs. He doesn’t know how real world things like banking work. I barely understand any of that shit, but Rob’s ignorance, by comparison, makes me think I do.
“Is there any way we could pull enough cons?” Mars asks the same question on all of our minds: Could we put together ten million dollars from our regular cons? The reality is we were struggling to see a path to a measly one million dollars. Ten? It’ll never happen.
As Mars and Rob debate whether or not it’s possible for us to pull together 10 million in less than three days pulling short cons, I start to tune them out. I can’t stop thinking about Dennis Cane.
Meanwhile, Kim brings up a totally new strategy. “Maybe we can pull a heist on the poker game.”
For the next ten minutes, they toss around the idea of robbing the game. The amount of money needed to get Sophie back would be in the restaurant’s safe down in the basement. But, as Max points out, Dennis has a couple security guards in addition to the safe. Plus, we wouldn’t just be robbing Dennis, we’d be robbing the other players entering the tournament – we’d have to elude all of them as well. No one really has any idea how to pull off that kind of a heist. Or no good ones at least.
“Max, you can come up with something,” says Rob. When Max doesn’t respond, Rob continues. “You came up with that dope plan to steal Ladislav’s jewels.”
Now Max raises his voice. “The Ladislav jewel job was nothing like this. I had an inside person in the escort service and an inside person that tipped me off to where the jewels would be. We have no inside person on the poker game.”
“What about this lady who told you the game was rigged? Couldn’t she help us pull off the heist?” asks Kim.
“No,” Max says. “Her loyalty lies with Dennis Cane. She’d never screw him over.”
After everyone agrees some heist will never work, Mars stands up. His hands shoot outward as if he’d been struck by lightning. “Blackmail! We blackmail Dennis Cane! Think about it. If word got out that Dennis Cane had been rigging poker tournaments for years, that would destroy him. We know he’s rigging the game, so how about we go to him and demand ten million in exchange for our silence.”
“That’s b-rilliant,” says Rob.
Even I give it a moment’s consideration, but Max is quick to dismiss it. “Trying to blackmail someone as powerful as Dennis Cane is suicide. He’d kill someone before he’d be blackmailed like that.”
Rob and Max argue back and forth on how we could possibly blackmail him but avoid being killed. When Rob won’t give up, Jesse and Kim chime in that they agree with Max.
I stay out of the whole conversation because my mind lingers on Dennis Cane.
“I can beat him.”
No one even hears me.
Did I even say it aloud?
Their argument about the blackmail continues. Jesse tries to reason with Rob. “Imagine you’re Dennis, right? Someone comes to you and says give me ten million or I’ll tell everyone your game is a sham. If you pay the ten million, who’s to say you’re safe? The person blackmailing you still knows the secret. They could still tell someone. They could blackmail you for more money.”
Rob starts to see their argument but remains stubborn. “It could be worth a try.”
I slam my hands down on the table.
“I can beat him.” Now they all hear me.
“What?!?!” Mars, Kim, and Max all ask in unison.
Suddenly an adrenaline-fueled confidence hits me. “I can beat him. Get me in the game, and I’ll beat him.”
“Piper, the game is fixed,” says Max. “You can’t–”
“I can. I will beat him.”
“Hell yeah!” yells Rob. Fired up simply because I’m fired up.
But the others ogle me with open mouths and blank stares.
My lips curve into a subtle smile. “I just need to make sure I make it down to the last two players. And then… I’ll beat Dennis Cane in one hand.”
--Darkness. There’s darkness in him. That darkness seeps into his desires and even his decisions. I guess I’ve always known that.--
CHAPTER TWELVE – A grift bender
Forty-eight hours. That’s the deadline to deliver the ransom to Charlie Moses. Thirty-six hours. That’s when Dennis Cane’s million-dollar poker tournament begins.
Max already spoke with Dennis – 11 people have signed up to play. A day and a half from now, I could be playing against those 11 players.
In the next 36 hours, Mars, Rob, Jesse, Kim, and I will try to pull together one million dollars. It’ll be a super-hyper version of our normal work. Max wants him and me to talk to everyone individually about their assignments. He calls Kim into his bedroom first.
“Kim, for you to be successful, it’s all about teamwork. Have you spoken with Vivi?”
“Yeah. She’s in.”
Kim’s friend Vivi came up in one of those MIT card-counting clubs. Vivi rowed crew for a couple years at MIT until she realized counting cards was more lucrative than counting strokes. Since the club disbanded, Vivi has counted with Kim on numerous occasions.
“I know she’s good,” I say. “But how far is she willing to take it? Is she willing to risk getting caught?”
A large reward and limited risk accompany counting cards. Since it’s legal, the only risk is being banned from virtually every casino in Las Vegas. I know Kim’s willing to risk this for Sophie. But Vivi has never even met Sophie.
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