2 Pushing Luck Read Online Free

I cleaned George out, the congressman lasted maybe three minutes. The Albanian was solid, but his eyes looked slightly to the left whenever he was using the creative side of his brain to try to bluff.
    Winners of the first round were allowed to buy twice as many chips for the second. I won over six hundred thousand dollars.
    *  *  *
    The smell hit me before I went into my room. I opened the door anyway. The head of the security guard who had been sitting at the monitor station was on the windowsill facing me. Wet tendons and flaps of flesh spread out beneath his neck like flower petals. For some reason, the black eye was the most bizarre part about it. Beside the guard’s head, a word balloon had been smeared on the white wall in his own blood, with a little tail end pointing to his open mouth. In the middle of the red circle was the word: YES.
    Yes what?
    Then I remembered. I had told the guard to ask the rakshasa if it still thought I was fun.
    *  *  *
    “Why so serious?” Jamie plopped down onto the empty space next to me on the love seat, except I’m not sure they call them that anymore. Names change a lot when you live a long time. “You’ve won almost a million dollars. That means you’ll still have half a million after I beat you tomorrow.”
    I put the memory of the dead guard in a storage closet in the back of my mind. I had to shove the door a little; it was getting kind of crowded in there.
    “Shhhhh.” I put a finger up to my lips. “I’m practicing my poker face.”
    “Did you know that Patrick has moved on?” Jamie informed me. “I just saw him with his hand high up on some old woman’s backside, and it’s all your fault.”
    “Maybe he’s just putting up a brave front,” I said.
    She gave me a heavy-lidded sideways look. “I half expected you to come knocking on my door last night. Were you with one of the rental properties after chasing mine away, Mr. Hypocrite?”
    My world became a very narrowly focused thing. I had always kind of had a thing for Jamie, and she smelled aroused and scared. But I wasn’t exactly in the mood and couldn’t afford any distractions even if I was. And even if neither of those things were true, my body wasn’t currently a safe place for Jamie to hide under. Or on top of. Or beside.
    “I got pulled into another game,” I said. “I didn’t get to bed until after five.”
    “Where was this game?” Jamie was intrigued. “Who was it with?”
    “It started in the kitchen,” I told her. “I was playing with some of the household staff.”
    Jamie clicked her tongue. “Nobody can give you the four-one-one on other people like domestic staff. You always have an angle, don’t you?”
    “Not always,” I said, and then, because I couldn’t help myself: “If I had come by your room, would you have let me in?”
    “In one possible reality I would have let you in,” Jamie explained carefully. “In one possible reality I would have kept you out. Both possible realities exist until I open the door. It’s like Schrodinger’s cathouse.”
    I smiled, but I was distracted. If I blew Jamie off, the rakshasa would know that I wasn’t planning on taking her to a storage shed outside Charleston. If I didn’t discourage her, she might hang around after the tournament.
    “Why don’t we meet up at Dimitri’s Monday at five?” I said. “We can catch up. Winner buys dinner.”
    “Dimitri’s closed down years ago. Are you afraid that I’ll use my feminine wiles on you before the final round?” she teased.
    “Something like that.” I turned my head to say something else and saw Russell Sidney being pushed into the room in a wheelchair by the rakshasa. I don’t know what everyone else was seeing, but Russell was a horror show. His skin was tinged with blue blotches the same color—or discoloration really—as the rakshasa’s. Russell’s brownish-red hair had become coarse and wiry, and his nose seemed to be in the process of collapsing in on itself.