by Pati Nagle
“Jane!” he said in surprise.
“Howdy, Bill,” called the grinning face beneath the feather.
He knew that face. It surged forward out of the cloud, separating itself into a single, battered figure that drifted down to stand before him. The initial surprise having worn off, James now wished he hadn’t said anything. Calamity Jane wasn’t his favorite person on earth, or off it.
“What the hell are you doing here?” he demanded.
“Watching you win this damned card game,” Jane said. “That was a fucking great hand you just played!”
James glanced at the bleachers, where most of the audience sat ignoring the moving pictures of Weare and Gaeline, staring at him and Jane instead. “Watch your mouth, Jane,” he muttered. “There’s ladies present. This ain’t Deadwood.”
“It sure as hell ain’t!” she replied cheerfully. “Damn, Bill, I never thought to see you in a high-stakes game like this’un!”
“Yeah, well, me neither,” said James, watching as Penstemon descended on them like a bull.
“Excuse me,” Penstemon said, stepping up to Jane with a nod toward James. “I’m afraid you can’t stay here. Only paid ticketholders are permitted to watch the live tournament. You’ll have to leave.”
Jane’s eyes flashed. “Oh, yeah? You just try and make me!”
The polite smile vanished from Penstemon’s face. He took a step back and raised his hands. Blue lightning crackled back and forth between them.
“Hold on,” said James. “She ain’t the only one.”
He glanced significantly toward the ceiling. Penstemon followed his gaze and let out an exasperated sigh. The next second he bent his knees, hopped into the air and sailed on up to the cloud. Upon his arrival, it arranged itself more orderly like, becoming a gaggle of forms more or less identifiable as people.
Ghosts, must be. James stared at them out of curiosity. So that’s what he had looked like? All gray and floaty?
Penstemon looked like he was talking to a bunch of folks all dusted with chalk. He was the only bit of color up there, standing in the middle of the air by the ceiling. James could see the soles of his shoes, good leather, slightly scuffed.
“Word’s got around,” said Jane. “Everbody’s all het up over the big tournament.”
James looked at her. Same old Jane in the same old battered buckskins, colorful despite being colorless.
“Yeah?” he said.
“Sure thing! I tried to get old Charlie to come along, but he was feeling shy on account of you’re more famous now than when you was alive.”
“Charlie Utter, shy?”
“Yeah, funny ain’t it?”
James nodded, musing. He wondered why he’d never seen Charlie, or Jane or anyone he knew for that matter, during all the time he’d been dead. Maybe because he’d hung around Deadwood, instead of moving along. He glanced at Jane, who looked happy enough that he doubted she’d been in hell all this time, though she surely couldn’t have gone to heaven.
Well, neither had he. He hadn’t been to hell or heaven either. He’d just sort of drifted. Seemed a waste of time, but then time didn’t run the way you’d expect when you were dead.
Movement overhead drew his gaze upward again. The ghosts were filing off toward the bleachers. The people and critters in the audience gawped at them, pointing and whispering. Penstemon floated back down and landed lightly before James and Jane.
“This here’s Calamity Jane,” James hastened to say. “She’s a famous old Deadwooder, too. Jane, this is Mr. Penstemon. He owns the Black Queen.”
“How do,” said Jane stiffly.
“I’m honored to meet you,” said Penstemon with a little bow. “Please accept my apologies. You’re welcome to watch the tournament from the—ah—gallery over there.”
He waved a hand toward where the ghosts were arranging themselves back of the bleachers, up by the ceiling out of the way. The audience down below were craning their necks, staring at the gray assemblage.
“Nice of you to be so accommodatin’,” said Jane with an edge of sullenness to her voice.
“Calamity Jane?” said Sebastian, stepping up between James and Penstemon. His eyes were lit with interest. “Pardon my interrupting, but I just had to say I’m a great admirer of yours, ma’am.”
“Well, thankee,” said Jane, unbending a little. She flashed Sebastian a smile and a coy glance.
“You were a fair hand at cards yourself, if I recollect aright,” Sebastian went on.
“Aw, pshaw,” said Jane, waving away the compliment. “I was just a piker. Liked to play, but never won much.” She looked pleased, nonetheless. Her cheeks got a little brighter gray.
“Perhaps we’ll set up an all-girl match down the road,” Penstemon said.
“Hell, I’d rather play with the boys,” said Jane. “Always did.”
One of the camera men waved a hand to get Penstemon’s attention and held up five fingers. Penstemon nodded, then turned to the group again.
“I’m afraid it’s time for you gentlemen to resume your places. Miss Jane,” he added, bowing again before going off to talk to Gaeline.
“Well, Jane,” said James, “it’s good to see you.”
“Give ‘em hell, Bill! You, too,” she said to Sebastian with a wink, then she pushed off the floor and floated on up to join the others in the gray gallery.
Sebastian had a wistful look on his face, watching her go. He noticed James’s gaze and gave a lopsided smile.
“I always wanted to be famous. I was going to go play the Mississippi riverboats when I’d built up enough of a stake.”
He glanced down, then turned away without another word and walked toward the poker table. James watched him go, thinking to himself that being famous wasn’t all the fun it was cracked up to be.
Being famous meant every cocksure young buck with something to prove tried to provoke you into a fight. Being famous had got him killed.
A stab of resentment hit him, he didn’t quite know why. Shaking off the thoughts like a dog shedding water, James strolled back to the table and took his seat.
CUE INTERVIEW 1:
“So, Mr. Weare, you’ve never played poker before, is that right?”
“That’s right, love.”
“How do you like it?”
“Well … it grows on one. A game that’s designed for liars is refreshing, I find. You have to know your opponent in any card game, but it seems especially important in this one.”
“And what is your opinion of your opponents in the Black Queen Tourney?”
“Able players all, m’dear. Able players all.”
“Do you think you’re going to win the tourney?”
“I have every intention of doing so. Care to help me celebrate my victory?”
“Ha, ha—”
“Hey! Hands off, you! He’s mine!”
Alma, seated in the front row of the bleachers with the other most honored guests, came storming toward William, who happened to be chatting with Gaeline. The startled hostess took a backward step before the onslaught of the righteous redhead clad in clinging forest green velvet and wearing heels that could be considered a deadly weapon.
William grinned and intercepted her, catching her in his arms. “It’s just for show, love. You know that.”
Alma shot an angry glance at the hostess. “Yeah, well, I meant it! Keep your mitts off!”
“You’re adorable when you’re in a jealous rage.” William chuckled and kissed the tip of Alma’s nose.
She melted a bit at that and cast him a shy, meek look, comically at odds with her wrath of the moment before. William glanced up at the screen where his interview played on.
“You’re missing the best bit,” he said, and guided her back toward the stands where Joanie, with an expression of determined cheerfulness, sat waiting.
“What do you plan to do if you win the tournament, Mr. Weare?”
“I expect I’ll stay in Atlantic City. Perhaps visit Las Vegas�
��well, I rather think I must. But this is closer to England, you know.”
“Will you be going back to England eventually?”
“I really don’t know. I haven’t a home there any more. I think I might like to settle down, marry and have a family. I never wanted to do that before, but you know … dying changes one’s perspective.”
“Indeed. Thank you, Mr. William Weare. Best of luck to you in the game.”
“Ah, thank you, my dear.”
“And now, back to the tournament!”
~ Round 1 ~
“Thank you,” Clive said to the waiter who brought him a glass of bourbon. He couldn’t help staring at the drink floating toward his hand, and as he accepted it he felt a brush of something cold and tingly. Suppressing a shiver, he looked up at where the waiter’s face should be and tried to smile, then turned away and took a large swallow of the drink.
This left him facing the stands where the audience sat chattering and fidgeting, waiting for the game to resume. They were an amazing and peculiar sight, but Clive found his gaze drawn above them to where the ghostly ranks drifted, no less restlessly than the live audience, near the ceiling.
He searched the gray faces for anyone familiar. There were a lot of women, but none he recognized other than Calamity Jane, who was plucking at the clothes of an old man in a round-topped hat. They were arguing, it appeared.
“See anyone you know up there?”
Clive glanced at Rothstein, who had come up beside him without his noticing. “No,” he said, and took another sip of bourbon.
“Me neither. Looks like just a bunch of gawkers.”
The slight sneer in his voice caught Clive’s attention. Rothstein was a pretty quiet man, and meticulously polite. His dark brown eyes were full of intelligence and speculation, but just now they also held a hint of revulsion.
Rothstein turned his head to meet Clive’s gaze. “Thought I might see Mishka here. You met her?”
“Mishka? No.”
“She’s the one who brought me here. Who brought you?”
Clive blinked, trying to remember the name of the youth who had escorted him to the Black Queen’s boardwalk entrance. “Fidgety fellow,” he said. “Shadow, that was his name.”
“Shadow? Nickname, eh?”
“He didn’t give any other. Penstemon called him Shadow.”
“Hm. What was he like?”
“Young,” said Clive, feeling strangely old as he thought about it. He’d been thirty-two when he was killed, and had never felt as old as he did now.
“Time to sit down, gentlemen,” said Penstemon’s voice behind them.
Clive turned around. Rothstein was already walking toward the table. Penstemon gave him a brief smile, then did the same.
Clive had a feeling of wanting to ask the man something, but he didn’t know what. Frowning, he returned to his seat.
He looked at his somewhat depleted stack of brightly colored chips with dissatisfaction. They represented money, he knew, but it was hard to think of them as valuable. He had always played for cash, for bank notes or preferably good, solid gold or silver coin. Chink of coins in his pocket—he missed it.
He glanced up at the ghosts again. Someone up there bothered him, made him uncomfortable. He looked from face to face, trying to discern who. It wasn’t Calamity Jane—or was it?
“Blinds, please.”
The dealer had changed, a dark-complected young man whom Clive had not previously seen now sat in the chair to his right. Clive glanced at the table and put in the small blind.
He played conservatively, still feeling his way into the game. It was strange not to hold his cards in his hand. He wanted the comfort of feeling those little bits of paper in his grasp.
The dealer was looking at him. He hadn’t even checked his cards. He glanced at them and folded, watching the dealer sweep his blind bet into the pot.
Why was he here? Perhaps that was what he had wanted to ask Penstemon. The others were all famous in one way or another. Weare hadn’t been famous until after his death, but he seemed perfectly comfortable about that and about all of this. Clive was not comfortable at all.
He watched Weare scoop up a tidy pot, ruffled cuffs dangling out of his sleeves and a large emerald winking on one finger. The Englishman looked at home in his quaint attire. Clive, though the clothes he wore were his own, felt awkward.
He was not famous. He had no wish to be famous, not in this way. He had wanted to make a name playing on the riverboats, but that opportunity was long gone.
There were riverboats still, he had learned, but they were now only tourist attractions, antiquities, curiosities. If he played cards on one, it would be as a carnival freak, as bad as all the hucksters down on the boardwalk.
A curiosity. That’s what he was.
“Your action, sir.”
Another hand had started. Clive pushed his cards across the line without looking at them. He was scarcely paying attention to the game at all. He shouldn’t be playing in such a mood. If he kept this up, he would inevitably lose.
He picked up a half-dozen chips, riffling the stack against the table as he mused. Runyon, across the way, was splitting a rather larger stack in two and shuffling them together one-handed. Very showy. Clive supposed he could teach himself such a trick—he was nimble-fingered, after all—but it wasn’t the sort of thing one practiced in public.
He sighed. There was no way to adjust this game to his benefit, not that he could see. Too risky to try to palm a card for later, for the dealer would surely notice the missing card when there were only two to a hand. He could try to get a matching deck, but the deck had changed with the dealer, and how was he to anticipate what the next deck would be? He’d have to have cards stashed all over his person. No good.
He tried to imagine himself winning the tournament on skill alone. He could do it, he thought, but the vision of victory gave no comfort. It wasn’t just money he wanted, and the realization came to him accompanied by a wash of cold. It was his money.
His money, stolen from him by that rogue, Jones. What had the bastard done with it, he wondered? Bought a new piano for the Slipper? The one that had graced its shabby saloon had been ghastly.
Clive closed his eyes, thinking of all the patient toil he had invested whilst a passenger on that cursed boat. All the hours he had spent gently fleecing the sheep who came to the card table, attracted by the riffling sound of the cards as he had shuffled them. Like lambs to the shepherd’s call they had come, and he had made them feel at home. Bought them bourbon, complimented their play, commiserated with them on their bad luck, and encouraged them to hope for fortune’s turn.
He glanced around the table. These men were no sheep. No fleecing to be done at this table, unless by sheer arrogant bluffing. That was more Runyon’s style than Clive’s. To win here, he’d have to rely on his wits, observation, and luck.
On the next deal he received an ace of spades and a queen of diamonds. He was sorely tempted to palm the ace, but knew it was not worth the risk. There were cameras taking photographs of every movement at the table. If he were not caught at the moment of palming, he might well be observed in the pictures later on.
He called the blinds after Hickok folded. Runyon called as well, and Rothstein put in chips to match the big blind. The dealer gathered the bets and dealt the flop: two of hearts, king of clubs, jack of spades.
Clive watched the others. Rothstein tossed in his cards with a frown of disgust. Weare put in the minimum bet, and Clive called it. Two cards yet to be dealt, and if either was a ten, he’d have a straight to the ace.
“Raise five thousand,” said Runyon, pushing a stack of chips forward.
Clive looked at him. Little bloodshot pig eyes stared sullenly back. Back in his day, such a fellow was generally an ugly customer and Clive had preferred not to play with them. He had no choice about it now.
From the cards on the table, he must assume that Runyon had either paired the king or held a pocket pair. Th
e straight, if he made it, would beat that hand. Or he might pair the ace and beat it that way, unless Runyon held an ace, in which case they might split the pot.
“Call,” Clive said after Weare folded. He pushed five thousand chips across the line and watched the dealer sweep them into the pot.
The next card was another deuce. Clive watched Runyon closely for any sign of gleeful reaction that might mean he held a third deuce in his hand. Seeing none, he checked to Runyon, who bet ten thousand. Clive called this as well and waited for the river card.
Queen of spades. The black queen. It gave him a pair, but kings would beat it. Disappointed, Clive gazed narrowly at Runyon.
“Check,” he said.
“Fifty thousand,” Runyon said instantly, and pushed two large stacks of chips onto the table, then leaned on his elbows, staring mulishly at Clive.
It could be a bluff. Runyon was arrogant in that way. With a pair of deuces on the board, Clive’s queens would stand against anything except a pair of kings or pocket aces. If Runyon had held aces he’d have gone all in, Clive decided. Probably would have gone all in on the kings, come to think of it.
“Call.”
Clive counted fifty thousand and pushed them across the line. It was the largest bet he had made so far, leaving him with less than a hundred thousand.
Runyon turned over his cards. King seven.
Clive stared angrily at them. He’d lost. Dammit to hell.
Applause from the audience for Runyon’s play. The pig was grinning now, blowing kisses to someone in the stands. Clive watched the dealer push his chips over to the bastard, and for a moment saw Jones’s face instead of Runyon’s.
His hands clenched with the urge to throttle as his blood surged with rage. Jones’s image flashed so clearly in his mind and he realized it was the image of his killer—he saw Jones as he had looked bending over him, saw the cap topple off his head, revealing the thinning hair Jones always tried to hide, saw the foul grin as the bastard went through his pockets and then picked up Clive’s beaver hat, putting it on his head as he backed away.