Against The Odds (Anna Dawson #1)

Anna Dawson is a professional poker player. And she’s good. Very good.
 
 
She’s also a compulsive sports gambler. Not so good.
 
 
When Anna gets in deep to her loan shark, she becomes her alter-ego JoJo and fixes college basketball games to erase her debt. Hey, it’s better than the alternative, which is a drive into the desert with a shovel in the trunk. 
 
When one of Anna’s friends is murdered, and another one shot at, Anna teams up with detective Jack Schiller, a man fighting his own demons. 
 
Anna tries to juggle protecting her friends, helping Jack, and finding a murderer, all without letting anyone learn about JoJo.

Published by
Copper Country Press LLC

Copyright 2012
Mara Jacobs

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems—except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews—without permission in writing from the author at
[email protected]
. This book is a work of fiction. The characters, events, and places portrayed in this book are products of the author’s imagination and are either fictitious or are used fictitiously. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental and not intended by the author.

For more information on the author and her works, please see
http://www.marajacobs.com/

ISBN: 978-1-940993-90-4
         

To my father, Ted.

Who showed me how to play the hand you’re dealt with grace and class.

Chapter One

G
et it together, I told myself.

 
This isn’t life or death. It’s just college basketball. Nobody was going to die from what I was about to do.

And yet, if not death, it could be very…unpleasant if I failed. I could almost hear my foot screaming out from remembered pain.

I quietly practiced a street twang. I tried to conjure up all the female bad-asses I’ve seen in the movies but couldn’t picture Lara Croft doing what I was about to.

Finally, I just let JoJo come out.

I adjusted the gold lamé tube top to show optimum cleavage for my very average bosom, hiked my mini skirt up, set the grocery bag I was holding on the carpet, looked up and down the empty hallway then pulled the thong wedgie out of my butt.
 

It’s not like I hadn’t done this before, but that thought didn’t make it any easier. It only made me slightly sick to my stomach to find myself in this position again.
 

Enough with the self-pity, I only had myself to blame.

I took a deep breath and knocked on the hotel room door.

After a moment, the door opened and I came face-to-face, or face-to-chest, with a giant. I looked up at the man, boy, really, smacked my gum in a way that would have made my mother cringe, and said, “You Mr. Smith?”

“Hunh?” came the laconic reply. He reminded me of Lurch, a baby-faced Lurch. “Mr. Smith. You him?” I repeated.

He looked down at me, then out into the hallway, as if someone there could give him the answer to his identity. “Hunh?” he grunted again.

“Who is it, Lurch?” came a voice from inside the room.

I mentally smiled to find I wasn’t the only one to peg the giant with the nickname. And it hadn’t even been in the team’s media guide.

“Don’t know,” Lurch said to the voice behind him as he kept his eyes on me. Me and my cleavage.

The giant was brushed aside—not an easy task—and a much smaller, and much darker man took his place.
 
Ebony and Ivory. Mutt and Jeff. The two were complete mismatches, but it only confirmed that I had the right room.

“I think I’ve got the wrong room,” I said.

Lurch seemed to accept the mistake, nodded and turned back into the room. The other kid, however, was not quite ready to see his unexpected visitor leave. Probably pretty damn boring for these kids being cooped up in a hotel room with just text books to study and TV to watch.

“Whoa. Whoa. Whoa. Who you looking for darlin’?” His eyes roved over my body and I had to hold myself very still instead of smacking him one. “Mr. Smith? I could be Mr. Smith.” He spoke with an urban slang to his voice.

South side of Chicago. Hell, I even knew who his eighth grade coach was. His mother and sister sang in the church choir and here he was trying to make time with some floozy who showed up at his hotel door.

But then he flashed a grin that spanned his whole face—surely that was way more teeth than a human head could possibly hold—and I forgave him for the leer.

I almost—almost—smiled back.

 
I hid my amusement and instead raised my brows and licked my lips. I looked him up and down, jutted my hip out at a hard angle and said,
 
“You sure, sugar? You don’t look like you could afford me.” My voice sounded so foreign to myself and I waited to see if the kid would call me on it or if he would bite.

“Awww shit, baby, give me an hour and you’d be paying me.”

Hook, line and sinker.

I snorted with laughter, turned to leave, and then pretended to see someone down the hall. My feigned look of fear alerted Mr. Smith who started to step into the hallway to take a look for himself. Before he could, I placed my hand on his chest, pushed him backward and followed him into the room, shutting the door behind me.

“Wasss up?” Mr. Smith said with a drawl.

“Just give me a minute, sugar, ‘kay?”

“Somebody out there?”

I nodded. “Yeah, security.”

“Hotel security?” Mr. Smith asked.

“Oh shit,” Lurch said behind us.

I brushed past Mr. Smith, walked further into the room, and set my grocery bag on the desk. I took a quick glance around the room. Duffel bags, gym shorts, and tee shirts were strewn all over. And all adorned with Central Iowa Wild Hogs logos. Definitely the right room.

“No problems, honey,” I said to the nervous Lurch. “Let me just make a quick call, wait for security to scram and I’ll be out of your hair.”

Lurch breathed a sigh of relief while Mr. Smith grunted his disapproval. “No need to be hasty. Stick around. Make sure the coast is good and clear.”

I turned around and looked at Mr. Smith. I gave him a pitying smile. “Don’t get your hopes up sweetie, I didn’t sign on for a party of three.”

“Lurch here was just leaving, weren’t you, Lurch?” He gave Lurch a hopeful look.

“Hunh?” Lurch said, looking from Mr. Smith to me.

I chuckled. “You don’t wanna throw your poor roommate out in the cold, honey. That’s not neighborly.”

The black young man waved a hand of dismissal at his sidekick. “Aw man, he can go crash with any one of the guys. We already had bed check, nobody will know.”

I made a show of looking around the room, pretending to notice the athletic gear for the first time. “You on some kind of team or something?”

Both male chests puffed out but it was Mr. Smith that answered. “We’re the Central Iowa
 
Hogs, defending conference champs. Final Four.”

And I could list both their stats for the last three seasons. But I swallowed my pride, looked back and forth between them, put a bored look on my face and said, “That’s basketball, right?”

The chests deflated. “Yeah,” Lurch said and then turned and sat on one of the two beds, pulling an open text book that had been lying on the bed onto his lap. His eyes, however, stayed on me. Or, more accurately, on my chest.

I pulled a cell phone from my large, bejeweled purse and punched speed dial. “Stu. What the fuck, man? You gave me the wrong damn room number,” I said into the phone, careful to turn away from the men so they couldn’t hear Stu’s response. So they couldn’t hear that there was no response.

No Stu. Just a dead phone.

“Yeah. Right. That’s where I’m at, Stu. And there ain’t no fucking Mr. Smith here.” I
 
shot Mr. Smith a warning look over my shoulder, correctly halting a smartass comeback. “You got a number?” Pause. “No number, Stu? That’s fucking great.” I turned back to the room, looked at the men staring at me. “I’m wasting valuable date time here watching two college kids get hard at the sight of a working girl in their room.”

Lurch pulled his textbook higher up on his lap. Mr. Smith flashed me a toothy grin.
 

It was impossible not to like the kid. Which only made me feel shittier.

“Yeah, that’s fucking right you owe me.” I disconnected the unconnected phone and threw it into my god-awful purse. I reached into the grocery bag and pulled out a bottle of Jack Daniels and a six-pack of Coke. “Christ, I need a drink.”

“All right. Let’s get this party started,” Mr. Smith said, walking toward me.

“Hey, Raymond, man, you better not,” Lurch warned.

 
“That’s right, Raymond, you better not. You got a game or something tomorrow?”

“Yeah, but man, we can beat Minnesota with one hand tied behind our backs.”

“Really? But can you beat them with a hangover?”

“I’ve played with ‘em before.”

“Come on, Raymond,” Lurch whined.

I grabbed three glasses from the vanity area, poured Coke in all three, opened the bottle of Jack and turned to Raymond. “You sure, sugar?” Raymond nodded. I turned back to the desk I used as a bar. I made sure neither man could see the glasses and then grabbed a small baggie from my purse and quickly dumped the contents into two of the three glasses, swirling them until the powder dissolved. I poured just a drop of the Jack into one of the glasses, then turned my body slightly so they could see, and made a show of pouring Jack into the third glass.

I took one of the glasses and handed it to Lurch. “This one’s virgin, honey.” Raymond snorted. “That’s about right,” he said. Lurch gave him a scowl.

I handed Raymond the glass with the Jack, took the Coke only glass myself. I raised my arm in a toast. “To the Somewhere Iowa…what did ya say you were?”

“The Hogs,” Raymond and Lurch said simultaneously. Proudly. It was the most emotion Lurch had shown during the whole evening.

Never again, I told myself. Never again will I put myself in a position to snatch the pride from young kids who have nothing to do with my stupidity.

But I’d said that before, and yet here I was. Again.

“What’s your name?” Lurch said. Raymond looked at him with surprise that Lurch would think of something so practical.

My hand went to my neck, but what I was looking for was gone. Idiot. I never wear it in these situations. I quickly dropped my hand. “You can call me JoJo,” I said, then took a long sip of my drink. I sat down in the desk chair and nodded for Raymond to sit, which he did on the other bed. “Just give me a minute to finish my drink, boys and I’ll be outta here. There’s still a lot of night left for JoJo.”