Ring Game Read Online Free

until his teeth pulsed painfully, causing his chickenshit alter ego to bury itself deeper in his brain. Fucking Little Leslie, any little thing, and he’d shit his pants. Beaut tipped his head back, pointing his chin, holding Crow’s eyes, ignoring Little Leslie’s frantic scrabbling, thinking that if Crow didn’t look away soon, he’d have to either step back or give him a short one to the solar plexus.
    Crow said, “You have an opportunity here, Beaut.”
    Beaut was so startled he felt his jaw go slack. Have I been dissed? he wondered. He wasn’t sure, but that was how it felt, like the guy was fucking with him, like the guy was the fucker instead of the fuckee. Beaut concentrated on holding Crow’s gaze—he wasn’t going to be the first one to look away.
    “You have the opportunity to do nothing.” Crow’s eyes were calm, almost sleepy. Almost inviting. Something in his voice frightened Little Leslie badly.
    Beaut said, “What the fuck are you talking about?”
    Crow’s brown eyes remained flat and opaque.
    Little Leslie was going into crisis. Beaut heard himself say, as if from a distance, “Someday somebody’s gonna fuck you up good, Crow.”
    Crow smiled. “It will be worth it.”
    Little Leslie moaned. Beaut watched Crow turn and walk away.
    A few weeks before, Beaut had been leaving T.G.I. Friday’s when a drunk, a guy Beaut had had a few words with earlier that evening, had come roaring across the parking lot in a Chevy Blazer. Beaut had jumped out of the way with no room to spare—he’d felt the Blazer’s bumper tick the heel of his shoe. The way he’d felt then—once he realized he wasn’t hurt—that was the way he felt now. Numb, and relieved that he hadn’t wet his pants.
    Beaut heard a noise, turned his head to see Flowrean looking right at him, laughing, snorting through her nose, white teeth flashing in the fluorescent lights, goldfish dancing.
    Crow took a leisurely shower, keeping his eyes open, half expecting Beaut to follow him into the locker room and try something. He didn’t want it to go anywhere, but he wasn’t going to cut back on his shower time.
    Beaut didn’t show. That was good. Crow wasn’t sure it had worked, getting in Beaut’s face that way. A bully like Beaut, the way to put the fear into him was to let him know that you didn’t care if you got hurt. It usually worked. You could never be sure what a guy like that would do, but he had another rule: Always bet into weakness.
    A few weeks earlier, during an otherwise astonishingly unproductive afternoon, Joe Crow had taken up a pencil and, on the cover of the Minneapolis Yellow Pages, scribbled a list of things to remember when playing poker. That original list had contained seven items. Since then, he had added more rules as they occurred to him. He was up to about twenty-five. He thought some of them were pretty good.
    On his way out, Crow glanced back into the chest room. Beaut was alone, pumping himself up again with the cables. Bigg gave a glum nod as Crow passed the front counter. Crow crossed the hot parking lot to his GTO, which was parked over near Bigg’s two white rental stretch limousines. He tossed his gym bag onto the passenger seat, cranked the engine into life, and rumbled out onto the street. Minutes later he was on the freeway entrance ramp winding out the big V-8, slamming the transmission into third gear when he noticed, just above the wiper blade, a red smudge, as if someone had planted a kiss on his windshield.

3
When you go fishing, beware the fish.
    —Crow’s rules
    M ID-AFTERNOON ON WHITING LAKE : The thermometers tacked to the walls of the lakeshore cabins had peaked half an hour ago, some at eighty-one, some as high as ninety-two. Later, holding sweating cans of Pig’s Eye beer, the owners of the cabins would stand around their smoking Webers and argue about how hot it had gotten, each defending their own thermometer’s accuracy, citing location, poor vision, and manufacturing