Stacked Deck

Chapter 23

Chapter 24

Chapter 25

Chapter 26

Chapter 27

Chapter 28

Chapter 29

Chapter 30

Chapter 31

Chapter 32

Chapter 1

Las Vegas, March

Bethany James, a twenty-eight-year-old Vegas poker phenom, stared at her quarry with a hunter’s gaze as he riffled his chips, little columns neatly folding between his fingers. The tempo grew faster. It was one of his “tells.”

“So you want to gamble,” he said when she pushed her bet in. “Did you hit the river?”

“Jump in and find out.”

She ignored the familiar buzz on her PDA for the fourth or fifth time as she studied her opponent’s face, her unflinching stare boring into him like a surgeon’s scalpel, cutting away the outer layer, seeing the tightened muscles beneath his expression of calm.

He was bluffing all the way and she was going to take him down.

“One way to find out.”

When he was weak, he had the habit of putting his card protector, a small gold skeleton, down on his cards with authority, and he’d done that.

I’ve got you now, she thought. To needle him a little more, she said, “I should put the clock on you.”

“I think you have fours with an over card.”

“You wish.”

The other three men, all under thirty years of age, had already been small-stacked and eliminated one at a time.

Truth, as her gambler father once said—quoting his hero, the great billionaire gambler Kerry Packer—is what is left when all the lies and secrets, those little “tells,” have been revealed and your lie is the last lie standing. That is the moment when you take control of the game.

She waited for her opponent to play his mind games, knowing he was already looking to come over the top, maybe even go “all in” after she’d set him up by limping in with a small bet to look weak, enticing him into believing he could buy the pot with a bluff.

Through the window to the right of the dealer’s head, over the empty flower box, beyond the patio of this estate on Sunrise Mountain, Beth stared for a moment to rest her tired eyes, her gaze lingering on the shimmering sea of orange that was the neon metropolis of Las Vegas.

Someone once said of her that she was just like the city she grew up in. A chameleon, a changeling, an impostor.

Yes, true. Survival demanded it.

“You checked on the opening bet. Played slow. What do you have?” he said in a low whisper.

He was searching, hoping to see something. All night she’d been building the fake tell for him to see. Three times she’d bluffed and when she did, she’d pulled her bottom lip in between her teeth and chewed lightly on it. If he picked that up, he would jump all over her.

She pulled her lip in and gnawed away.

Beth could see nearly all the casinos from where she sat and she was outlawed from just about every one of them. Because of her card counting days, she was forced to use disguises when she did attempt entry. Now she mostly played in high-stakes private games like this one.

“You didn’t hit a set, did you?” he teased.

She didn’t respond.

The city below was laced with traffic, like a vast tangle of white and red snakes, and in the darkening sky to the east planes stacked up like a string of bobbing Chinese lanterns as they descended on McCarran International Airport.

Her eyes rested, she returned her focus to the game.

This twenty-three-hour marathon of Texas Hold ’Em was nearing its denouement. She glanced to her left at the man she was heads-up with: black shaggy hair, an angled face and whiskey-colored eyes. She could smell blood, see it in his play, the faltering steps of a confused and tiring animal.

She knew her adversary was a member of a sophisticated cheating crew, but tonight he was freelancing.

The owner of this house was a friend of hers and knew something was going on between her and the man she was now heads-up with. The man was an addicted gambler who believed that, with or without cheating, he could take down anyone, especially a woman.

Beth knew a lot more about him than she had told her friend. She knew he needed a big score to service his debts.

She’d set the bait and her prey was ready to walk into the trap. Just you and me, babe.

She gave him a stone-cold stare and worked her lip.

The buy-in for this winner-take-all game had been fifty thousand. The quarter-mil take would pay the bills for a long time, but Beth had another use for her money.

She had two income streams, both intermittent. Playing cards for herself, and getting paid to bust cheating crews on behalf of those who’d been taken by them. But this particular game was strictly personal.

The man she was about to crush belonged to one of the largest and most sophisticated cheating crews working the international circuit, a crew that had started twenty years ago in Vegas. The one her father had once belonged to before he was murdered and dumped in a garbage bin sixteen years ago.

The crew was directed and financed by a secret backer who was either her father’s killer, or knew that killer’s identity. To find out who the backer was she had to flip one of his people. She’d chosen carefully.

She knew the one she’d chosen as the weak link was mortgaged to the hilt, his sources tapped out and in deep hock to loan sharks. He’d borrowed heavily for this last stand and she was going to snatch the prize away from him.

Once she had him at her mercy, she’d make him an offer he couldn’t refuse.

He did as she expected and came over the top of her bet with an all-in push. If she followed him in and won, it would be over.

A dog without tricks, she thought, as she followed his all-in, much to his surprise and chagrin.