Just like that, she had lost six cents. Tim knew even less about poker than he did about basketball, but he didn’t like the direction this was taking so far. He certainly hoped Rose knew what she was doing. Looking at Julie, Tim noticed that she seemed to be thinking just about the same thing, but Billy looked downright chill, which comforted Tim a bit. After a few more rounds of betting by the other players, Tom won the hand with a pair of aces.
Rose dealt next, betting two cents to ante, and another two cents to stay in after the cards were first dealt, since nobody decided to raise anything beyond the obligatory extra two cents this time.
After the other players asked for their cards and Rose handed them out, she announced, “And dealer takes two.” She drew two cards from the top of the deck, put them in her hand, and studied her cards. A brief grin flashed across her face, but she quickly hid it. Tim hoped nobody else had noticed it, because the one thing that he did know about poker was that there was such a thing as a ‘poker face’ you were supposed to have when playing, and that it did not allow for big grins when you got cards you liked.
Benny scoffed and threw down his cards. “She just smiled!” he explained. “I’m not going to bet if she’s that pleased with her cards!”
One at a time, the other players set their cards down, deciding not to bet any further.
Rose collected the 20 cents in the middle of the pile, and all of a sudden, she was up by ten cents.
As she was placing the cards in her hand on top of the pile, though, Benny grabbed her cards and looked at them.
“Hey!” Rose said. “You don’t get to look!”
Benny ignored her protest, but yelled indignantly, “You had a king high! I thought you said you knew how to play!”
Rose smirked, “Yeah, I know the hand wasn’t worth anything. They call it a bluff.”
At that point Benny’s hand moved, almost instinctively, it seemed, to his waistband. He was about to take his shirt out of his pants and reveal the knife again when Dave put his hand on Benny’s arm.
“Relax, Benny,” said Dave calmly.
“Yeah,” said Tom with a little laugh, “you’re just upset because you didn’t think of it yourself.
Benny swore, but removed his hand from his waistband. He anted up, and everyone else did, too. Although Rose anted up, she bowed out of the betting before trading in cards, so she only lost two cents on the hand, still up eight cents from their original starting money.
The next hand, Rose asked for two cards, and Tim thought he saw a trace of a smile flicker across her face this time, too, when she received the new cards, but nobody called her on it this time. In fact, when she raised the current wager of a nickel by a dime, placing fifteen cents into the growing pot in the middle of the group, Benny muttered, “I bet she’s bluffing again.”
There were two dollars and change in the pot by the time the betting stopped, a little over fifty cents each from Rose and Benny, who were the last two not to fold. Finally, Benny said, “Let’s see what you’ve got, then.”
Rose had three Tens, which beat Benny’s two pair.
Rose pulled the coins of the pot toward her and Tim noted with satisfaction that the pile was about quadruple what it had been when she had first sat down. They were up about a dollar fifty, with a little over two dollars all told.
Rose gave a quick look around the circle, and then picked up a handful of the coins sitting in front of her. She handed them to Billy and said, “Well, that was bunches of fun, but we only just arrived here in town and have quite the busy morning planned. Besides, I wouldn’t want to take away all your money or you might not want to be my friends, so… I’m going to take my winnings and leave, I think.”
“You think wrong, then. I didn’t want to let you play in the first place, and now you think you can just play a couple hands and walk off without giving me a chance to win my money back? That isn’t how things work around here” said Benny, in the most menacing tone his thirteen year old voice could muster. Slightly more menacingly, however, he stood up and reached down to his waistband again and pulled out the knife he’d shown them earlier.
Tim’s stomach tightened with fear. Suddenly about a hundred downsides of making bets in a back alley in one of the shadiest parts of San Francisco flooded his mind. The whole reason the Tenderloin was known as a hotbed of gambling and other illegal activities was that the cops turned a blind eye to what went on there most of the time. Besides, supposing the mayor had decided to make a particular effort to clean up the streets of The Tenderloin on that particular fall day, there would no doubt have been much more pressing matters to attend to than the small matter of four idiot teenagers getting stabbed in an alleyway.
In spite of this, Tim’s hand moved instinctively to his pocket where he was almost surprised not to find the familiar form of his cell-phone. This trip was probably the first time he had been out without a phone in years, and he had no earthly idea where he could find a payphone to call the cops.
While these thoughts were running through Tim’s head, Benny seemed to be enjoying the gasps and wide eyes that drawing his knife had provoked.
Billy, on the other hand, sprang into action. He stood, reached into his pocket and grabbed the can of mace. He tossed it to Rose as he said, “Rose, heads up!” Benny looked confused as Billy took a step toward him.
Tim gained a bit of inspiration from this turn of events. He stood up and did his best to look confident as he scanned the other boys to see if any of them were planning to back up their loud-mouthed leader.
It seemed to have come to Dave’s attention that one way or the other, this poker game was basically over, and it might soon be time to flee the scene. He was scooping his coins into his pocket as his eyes darted from Benny to Billy, to determine when would be a good time to bolt.
Meanwhile, Frank stood up and Tim took what he hoped was a courageous looking step toward him. Then, an awful lot of things happened at once.
Benny reached up with his knife to stab Billy, but Billy’s reaction time was way quicker than Benny’s and he managed to grab the kid’s wrist before Benny was able to get the thing much closer than a foot away from him.
Simultaneously, Rose stood up and pointed the mace at Benny so that only a half second after Billy grabbed Benny’s hand, Benny’s eyes were filled with the stinging chemical. Billy let out a groan, indicating that he had suffered some residual backsplash.
Frank, on the other hand, turned out also to have a sharp knife and little hesitation to use it, but luckily also not a great deal of foresight going into that use. So, instead of stabbing Tim in the ribs, an act which might have killed him, he made a kind of slashing movement with the knife. Still, the slash was aimed pretty well at Tim’s eye, and could have been very effective had Tim not shown better reflexes than he knew he had and blocked the knife with his arm.
It sliced through the sleeve of Tim’s shirt and jacket and left a painful cut on Tim’s arm. But it also gave Rose enough of a chance to figure out what was going on and treat Frank to his own dose of pepper spray before he had a chance to try a second time.
Now, between the yelped cusses of Frank and Benny, and the fact that he had just gotten done transferring his coins to his pockets, Dave decided that this would be a dandy time to take off. So he did just that. Apparently he had decided that there was no reason for him to get hurt or lose money simply because Benny was an idiot.
Tom, on the other hand, was looking with nervous eyes back and forth between Dave’s retreating form and his two seemingly wounded friends.
“Was that Dave who just ran?” yelled Benny, pain mixing with anger in his voice.
“Uh… yes!” said Tom.
“I can’t see!” complained Benny. “What did you do to me?!” He started slashing with the knife blindly.
“Relax… Stop swinging the knife and we’ll let you be. Your eyes will get better, just get out of here,” Billy instructed, calmly but forcefully. “If you don’t stop messing around
, though, I will take that from you.”
Tom, by far the calmest of the thirteen year olds remaining, since he was the only one without substantial amounts of unwelcome chemicals in his eyes, said, “Let’s just go!”
Within a few moments all three boys were gone. Tom managed to pick up his own coins, but in the excitement of losing their eyesight for the moment, Benny and Frank seemed to forget that they were leaving a pretty substantial amount of money behind as they walked away from the alley, following Tom’s voice as they felt their way along the walls of the buildings on either side of the alley.
Rose was hardly able to hide her excitement, even from the group of thirteen year olds that was two-thirds blinded with their backs turned. She did at least wait until they were out of earshot to actually squeal.
“That’s almost two dollars I won, and… It looks like about two dollars they left. So we’re up to four dollars now! Not bad for a game of poker!” Rose bragged.
There was about half a second when Tim wondered whether it was morally wrong to take the money they had left on the ground. Then again, the adrenaline that had allowed Tim to stand up to Frank was wearing off and he was becoming more aware of the sharp pain in his arm. So, sure, whatever, they could take Frank and Benny’s money.
Tim wasn’t the only one who remembered his cut. As Billy and Rose were collecting their booty and storing it in Billy’s now heavily jangling pockets, Julie came over and gently took the hand of the arm that had been injured.
“You doing okay there, buckaroo?” Julie asked, as she gently lifted his arm to examine the cut. It was hard to see what was going on through the layers of suit that he was wearing, so Julie helped Tim take off his jacket and rolled up the sleeve of his shirt to reveal the bare skin of his right forearm.
“I’m fine,” said Tim, although he was unsure how true this was.
There was a pretty substantial amount of blood.
“You’re going to need a new shirt, for one thing,” said Julie, who didn’t seem squeamish about the blood at all. “You’ve got a hole in your shirt, and your jacket, too. On the bright side, I’m more concerned right now about the hole in your arm, and the fact that you’re not going to be using this jacket anymore means we can maybe use part of it as a sort of bandage or something… You’ve probably noticed already that I’m not a doctor.”
Tim smiled. “You don’t say.”
“But I have had enough scrapes of my own to know that a doctor would probably ask you when your last tetanus shot was,” Julie said.
“Er… About a century from now?” said Tim doubtfully. “But, no, I mean… I was in tenth grade, I think. So that ought to be good enough.”
“So it should,” said Julie. She placed her fingers on the skin around the cut and poked around it a little bit. “Well… again, I have no real way of knowing whether this is true, but I don’t think it looks too deep. Honestly, we should probably send you back to our time for treatment, but if you leave you won’t be able to come back.”
“I don’t want to leave you guys,” said Tim.
“Right, I don’t want that either,” said Julie. “But I don’t want to be selfish… You’ve got to tell me if you start feeling weird or anything, and first chance we get we’re going to put something on it to clean it. In the meantime, let’s just assume we’ll send you back in case of emergency but not otherwise.” As she was saying this, she had also set to work tearing apart his jacket to make a bandage. She used the hole that the knife had produced as a starting point. Soon enough, she had a piece of fabric wrapped around the cut and had wiped away the excess blood with the remaining fabric from the jacket. After he rolled up the other sleeve to the elbow so that both sleeves of his shirt matched, you couldn’t even see that the shirt he was wearing had been cut. Overall, he looked wounded, but not ridiculous.
Rose and Billy had been watching all this for the last couple minutes, since they had finished picking up all the pennies, nickels, dimes, and quarters that had been left scattered around the alleyway.
Now, Billy spoke up. “Way to take one for the team, there, pal,” he said. “Still, I think we’d better get moving here. The mace will be wearing off any moment, and I’m still not thrilled about our odds if all four of them come back looking for their money.”
In fact, after a little discussion, they decided to leave the Tenderloin all together for the day and focus on a slightly less shady part of town as they tried to answer questions like where someone could buy food in San Francisco or how they could avoid having to sleep on the street that night.
Of course, the other question on their minds was how they were going to discover who was getting ready to set off a bomb that would change the course of world history. But after such an eventful morning, there seemed to be a tacit agreement amongst the four teens to stick with the type of questions that didn’t seem impossible to answer, at least for now.
Chapter 15
The YMCA
“Let’s take it from another angle. Let’s try to think like we’re one of the Emperors of Time,” suggested Julie, who kept throwing an apple into the air and catching it as she talked.
It was the evening of the same day they had arrived in San Francisco. They were tired, and justifiably so, since their day had been twice as long as it was supposed to be after they had time-travelled from the evening in their own time to the morning in San Francisco.
But it had also occurred to them that they only had three more days before Election Day, so they really ought to come up with a plan as soon as they could, tired or not. After all, they had already been successful with their other tasks of the day, finding some food to eat and a place to stay. They’d spent fifty cents on a bunch of apples, a loaf of bread, and a can of tuna fish. This hadn’t made for much of an exciting meal, but they’d decided to hold off eating anything too fancy until Billy won them some more money from Saturday’s football games. And besides, it all tasted pretty spectacular by the time they sat down to eat, given that they had all skipped at least one meal and had walked all around the city of San Francisco since their arrival.
Finally, they had found a place to spend the night, a room at the YMCA. There were a couple of problems with the arrangement, but it turned out to be the best option they found before the sun started to go down, so they took it.
The first problem was that since the YMCA was the Young Men’s Christian Association, the girls were not allowed to stay there. They were there now anyway, having snuck into the room that the group was renting under Billy’s name. Sneaking in wasn’t a huge problem, but there were only men’s showers in the communal bathrooms, which would present a problem once the girls started smelling profusely. But they decided to leave that problem for another time.
A problem that was going to present itself sooner was that they could only afford one room with their tight funds. Even then, Billy had to work out a payment plan. He paid a dollar up front and had to pay the second dollar of the weekly rent on Monday night, so that they didn’t lose all the poker money before they bet on the football games. All of this meant that the four teens were sitting in a small room with a twin bed, a small dresser, a closet, and precious little floor space.
“And how do the Emperors of Time think?” asked Rose, in response to Julie’s suggestion. She held her hand out, and Julie tossed the apple to her. She tossed it back, and they continued passing it back and forth, absentmindedly, through the conversation.
“Well, they’ll probably get someone to do their dirty work for them. Who would want to set off a bomb on Election Day?” asked Julie.
“Well… politicians, I guess,” said Tim. “I mean, if the Emperors of Time convinced them that setting a bomb off would disrupt the election in a way that it would help their guy, this could be a good looking opportunity to an immoral Hughes supporter.”
“Right,” said Julie. “Which means that maybe we should be hanging out where politicians hang out in this city.”
“Like… city hall?” aske
d Billy skeptically.
“Well, no, nobody’s going to hatch a plot like that in city hall. But… I dunno, maybe if on Monday we check out where people come and go from city hall, maybe tail a few people, we can find out where political junkies spend their time. Like maybe a bar or something. And if we’re lucky, someone there will know something about the plot,” Julie said.
“It’s a longshot,” Tim pointed out.
“But it’s all we have at the moment,” said Julie. “How about we keep coming up with ideas and if that’s the best we’ve got Monday, we do it.”
They all agreed.
Billy yawned and said, “It might be easier to think of ideas if I could… you know…”
“Think straight?” supplied Rose.
“Exactly,” Billy agreed. “It’s like ten hours since I should have gone to sleep last night, and today’s been rough.”
Rose nodded. “Well… two people can sleep on the bed, probably, if they squeeze. And maybe they should be the same gender as each other…”
“You girls should take the bed,” Billy said.
“Really? I mean, Tim’s been injured today and everything… maybe you guys should have it,” countered Julie.
“No, it’s okay, really,” said Tim, who was pretty sure he’d sleep better on the floor himself than knowing that Julie and Rose had to sleep down there. Besides, he was so tired he could have slept in his current position leaning up against the closet door if he had to.
“You know… Every freaking time I travel back in time a hundred years, I always forget to bring my pajamas,” Rose complained.
“Don’t worry, nobody’s going to look,” said Billy. “My eyes are scheduled to be closed for the next ten hours anyway… In fact, it’s eight o’clock now, so let’s keep to that… If we wake up at six, we’ll hopefully have no problem getting to the Tenderloin and finding somewhere to bet before nine here… Which of course is noon eastern time.” He picked up the alarm clock that was sitting on the dresser and started fussing with it.
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