2 Pushing Luck Read Online Free Page B

Edwin, this is what separates the winners’ table from every other round,” the rakshasa told the fish. “This table has more to win and more to lose, but there’s less tension in the air. We all understand that the money itself isn’t the most important thing.”
    How attractive was the rakshasa’s illusion of “Nicole” anyway? It spoke with the light assurance of the truly beautiful.
    “Speak for yourself,” Jamie put in. “For me, the money is the only important thing.”
    The rakshasa laughed in a horrible grinding parody of lightness. I almost wished I could hear what everyone else was hearing. “I’m not saying there isn’t tension. I’m saying it isn’t in the air. Look at Mr. Mark Powell over there. The man is a locked box. He could be a bomb. He could be a birthday present.”
    “You seem to know what I’m holding,” I observed.
    The rakshasa waved this off. “One should never underestimate the value of luck. You can’t plan for it, you can’t count on it, but it is a factor.”
    “I don’t believe in luck.” I said. “Things just appear random because we can’t see the bigger picture. Like Einstein said, God doesn’t play dice.”
    The rakshasa pursed its thick, gummy lips. “I don’t believe in God. Like Friedrich Nietzsche said, God is dead.”
    “I’m pretty sure God said Friedrich Nietzsche is dead,” I observed. “Guess who won?”
    “Is this going to be one of those poker games?” Jamie complained mildly. “Philosophy classes are one of the reasons I dropped out of college.”
    The rakshasa ignored her. Its lips parted and fangs peeked out at odd angles. “See, that’s what I’m saying, Edwin. Mark here is the absolute last person I would have expected a sermon from. Is he just saying whatever he thinks will yank my chain, looking for the right crowbar to pry my armor off a little? Or is he other than what he seems? A locked box.”
    “You seem to have found the key,” Edwin said, laughing as I lost three tens to the rakshasa’s three queens. It was a high school bully’s laugh though I had no doubt he had developed it in a series of private schools.
    “Not yet.” The rakshasa laughed. It was the laugh of someone who ate high school bullies. “But I am like a child that way. Show me a locked box, and I want to know what’s inside it. That’s why poker is so much fun. Each hand a mystery. Each hand a revelation. We’re all still children, really, we’ve just gotten better at hiding it. That’s why we find children so…delicious.”
    And the rakshasa actually licked its lips, watching me while it did so. Its tongue was thick and long and gray, emerging like a tentacle.
    Screw it. The next round, I had the opening bid with an ace and a five showing, and I was also holding two other fives and a nine. I held on to four cards as if I were drawing for a straight or a flush and traded in the ace. I slipped the new card under my others without flipping it over. If some hidden watcher around or above me was giving the rakshasa hand signals, let it make anything out of that.
    The rakshasa also took one card. It was bizarre, watching those sausage fingers holding the cards delicately between talons.
    The fish took two cards. Jamie took two.
    I shoved all of my chips into the middle of the table. Three hundred and forty thousand dollars’ worth. “I’m all in.”
    The room went silent.
    “Mark, you haven’t looked at your pull card,” Jamie observed.
    Neither has anyone else , I thought, but I didn’t say it aloud. There were too many…well…I won’t call them innocent…but there were too many bystanders in the room. “Just trying to keep things interesting.”
    “There’s nothing interesting about giving up,” the rakshasa observed shortly. Its eyes were oil slicks, and an emotion briefly rippled in their dark and filmy surface like some dead sea creature. For the first time since the game had started, the rakshasa was bothered.
    “I’m not giving up. I