Against The Odds (Anna Dawson #1) (21 page)

“When we got back, we came through New York and the first place I went—even before seeing my own mother—was to see Rachael.”

I leaned forward, this was one story I’d never heard. Saul always seemed too pained to talk about Rachael. Maybe Danny’s death and Gus’ shooting had made him take stock, too.

I noticed Ben’s hands had gone still, his cards leaning forward—which Jimmy took advantage of and snuck a peek. Ben’s face seemed to fall right before my eyes. Of course Rachael had been one of his best friends. From what I’d heard, the three of them had been inseparable.

“That night she agreed to be my wife. I was the proudest man in all of Brooklyn, isn’t that right, Ben,” Saul said and looked at his best friend.
 

Ben’s eyes grew misty, he nodded. “That’s right, Saul,” he said quietly.

Saul pointed to the picture my hands still traced. “Remember the day that was taken, Ben?”

Ben looked at the picture, his face pained. “Yes, Saul, I remember.”

“Rachael had gone back to New York for several months. Her mother was dying and she went to look after her and then help her father adjust after the funeral. That was my Rachael, always thinking of others.”

Ben nodded again still looking at the three of them, frozen in time.

“She got back the night before. And that very next morning we went to see Ben at the casino. She wanted us to all be together again. The three of us.”

Saul placed his cards down on the table. Jimmy gave up all hope of the game ever resuming and threw his cards into the middle of the table.

“To have my Rachael back. To be the three of us again. It was a good day.” His voice was nearly a whisper at the end. He pushed back his chair, making a shrill sound that ran a chill down my spine. “If you’ll excuse me, I think I’ll call it a night.”

“It’s still early,” Jimmy pleaded, wanting the car game to continue.

“I’m sorry, Saul. I didn’t mean to bring up painful memories.”

“Ah, no, Hannah darling. Talking about Rachael just makes my heart
plotz
, that’s all. I’ll be good as new in the morning,” he said. He walked past me, patted my cheek, squeezed Ben’s shoulder as he walked by him and left the room.

“You sure know how to kill a card game,” Jimmy said with an accusing glance my way.

“And I was actually winning,” Lorelei said, though no accusation was in her voice.

“Sorry,” I said.

Ben patted my hand. “There are more important things than card games.”

Jimmy raised a brow at me and I couldn’t help but smile.

Ben sighed. “Well, to
most
of us there are more important things than a card game.”

Jimmy said his goodbyes soon after and Lorelei cleared the sideboard with my help and then shooed me out of the kitchen when I tried to help with cleanup.

“Go back and talk to Ben,” she said. “He seemed so sad when Saul was talking about the old days.”

I brought Ben a refill of coffee and sat in the chair next to him. The picture of him, Saul and Rachael was right in front of him, he’d obviously moved it while I was helping Lorelei.

“You never know how it will turn out, do you Hannah, dear?” he asked quietly.

“No, Ben, you don’t,” I said thinking of the three people in the picture. If I had my dates correct, Rachael would be dead a few years after that picture was taken.

“Danny had a good marriage to a woman he loved. Saul found the love of his life at sixteen but lost her early. Jimmy married a woman who could never love him for what he was and they were miserable. Gus…ah Gus…he had a love of his life every three or four years.”

A small smile crossed my face. “And you, Ben? Did you ever find love?”

He’d never talked about a woman in those terms before. I’d met some “lady friends” of his past since I’d known Ben, but not one seemed like it was ever anything more than…well, what Jeffrey and I had, I supposed.

He patted my hand, left his warm, wrinkled one on top of mine. “I did. I did. But I was young and I was a fool.”

I turned my hand palm up, clasped his in mine. “We’re all fools about love when we’re young, Ben.”

“I thought there was plenty of time. I thought…” his voice croaked, he cleared his throat. “I always thought there’d be more. That we’d be together eventually. That we’d have children. Lots of them.”

His hand trembled in mine as he continued, “That I’d be surrounded in my old age by family that loved me and wanted to take care of me.

I leaned over, putting my arm around his bony shoulders, kissing his wrinkled face. “You are, Ben, you are.”

B
en let me help him to his room where he decided Saul had the right idea about using sleep to chase away the demons. I only wished I could hit the hay early too, but I had to come up with a game for Vince.

After seeing Ben to his room, I went back to the main house intending to head to the office and start doing some research for JoJo’s next crusade when the doorbell rang. Jimmy had just left. Ben, Saul and Lorelei were in their rooms.

Strangers at the door had been very bad news of late.

As I opened the door to Jack Schiller and his dour cop face, my only thought was that the streak seemed to be continuing.

“Is something wrong?” I asked, stepping back for him to enter, but he stayed in the doorway.

“There’s been no change in the case. Gus is still fine. We’re tracking down information on the Pittsburgh guys.”

I exhaled a huge sigh of relief, my body relaxing until Jack reached out and grasped my wrist.
 

“But yes.
Baby
,” he said in a perfect imitation of Paulie calling me baby at the airport. “Something is definitely wrong.”

Chapter Seventeen

“Y
ou don’t really think that Paulie and I—” my voice cut off at Jack’s incredulous expression.
 

“Please,” he said with exasperation. He walked past me, still holding on to my wrist, checked out the living room, which was empty, and led me to the couch where we plunked down side by side. Only then did he let go of me. A part of me wished he hadn’t let go. After this conversation I wasn’t sure Jack would want to touch me ever again.

“Although I’m not sure what bothers me more, that you could be involved with that low-life romantically, or that you aren’t —” I tried to set the record straight, but Jack held his hand up for me to stop and continued. “Which would mean you’re involved with him for gambling reasons.”

“It’s what I do, Jack. You know I’m a professional gambler.”

He waved that explanation away like it was an unwelcome house fly buzzing around our heads. “Bullshit. There’s nothing professional about Paulie Gonads,” he said, surprising me that he knew Paulie’s nickname. Jack worked homicide in a huge city, so I’d assumed he wouldn’t know a lowly loan shark enforcer. But Jack surprised me yet again.

I sat back on the couch, crossed my arms over my chest. Universal body language for back the hell off.

“Are you in deep?” he asked softly, reading my temperament.

 
“Nothing I can’t handle,” I said.

He looked at me for a long time. I met his gaze, held it, tried to convey sincerity while secretly praying I wasn’t struck by lightning.

He shook his head. “If you had been in that dive motel room for one more minute—”

“You followed me?”

“You really think I was going to let you walk away with that scumbag and not make sure you were all right?”

Ben and Lorelei care about me. Deeply. My family back in Wisconsin love me. I know this. But I don’t remember the last time somebody looked out for me that way. “Jack…I…” I had no idea what to say.

He leaned forward. “Johanna,” he whispered as his mouth met mine. It had only been hours ago that we’d been together in Pittsburgh, but he kissed me like it’d been years.

Thoughts of Saul and Rachael meeting again after years and a war flew through my mind. And then to lose each other too soon. How fleeting it all can be.

I moaned and wrapped my arms around Jack, pulling him into me. He tasted of coffee and bourbon, a taste I figured I’d come to recognize if I was lucky enough to have him kissing me after tonight.

We sank back into the couch and I silently blessed Lorelei for her choice in soft, cushy, plush couches when I heard her clearing her throat from the doorway.

“I…I’m sorry…I thought I heard Detective Schiller’s voice and I thought there might be some news.” She was clearly embarrassed, but in true Lorelei fashion, she regrouped quickly.
 

“No news,” Jack said, straightening up away from me. I still lay sprawled on the couch, too content to get up.

“Jo, I need to run out and get a few things,” Lorelei said to me. I didn’t know if she really did or if she was making a point of leaving because of Jack.

“Okay,” I said, finally sitting back up. “I’m here for the duration, so take your time. You must need a break, Lor, you’ve been with the boys nonstop since Gus was shot.”

She shrugged, like that was all part of the gig. And it was, but that was supposed to be
my
part of the gig. I told myself I went to Pittsburgh to get information, and that’s probably what Lorelei—and maybe even Jimmy—believed. But I knew I’d have never left Ben’s side if I weren’t into Vince for money.

Lorelei grabbed her purse and keys from the foyer table and one of her many tablets of paper. “By the way, Ben couldn’t sleep. I heard him rustling around in his room, so he might be on his way out here. Just in case you guys…” She made smooching sounds and then laughed her girlish giggle. “You’ll have to tell me later how this…
case
…developed.”

I tossed a pillow from the couch at her. “Thanks, Lor.”
 
She nodded, still giggling, and left. I turned back to Jack, ready to get a couple more kisses before Ben made his way out here. A make out session on the couch. Man, it must have been high school since I’d had one of those.

But Jack’s cop face was back in place and he was reaching into his jacket pocket. He pulled out an envelope. One I recognized.

“Here’s your money back,” he said and tossed the envelope of cash Lorelei had left for me in my desk two days earlier.

“Same envelope,” I said.
 

He just shrugged. “It was what that guy at Ralph’s house gave it to me in.”

“Mr. Lee,” I said.

“Whatever. You started with twenty k, right?” I nodded. “That’s in there. I took what I started out with out, there was a few hundred left. I’m going to donate it to Danny O’Hern’s family.”

The cash stared at me accusingly. “I can’t take this. You won it. I can’t stand that you did. But you won it.”

“Yes you can. Pay Vince back and be done with it.”

Oh. Jack thought I’d borrowed money from Vince to get into that game to help Ben. Why, that almost sounded…noble. My heart sank a little as I came to the realization that I wasn’t going to set him straight. If he wanted to see me in such a favorable light, I’d damn well let him.

Twenty thousand wasn’t going to get me out of my troubles with Vince…but it might pacify him long enough to work something else out.

JoJo enlisting a player to throw a game was a line I did not want to cross if I could help it. One of the two rules I lived by. Rules I clung to. A sense of morality I could wrap around myself when dealing with people like Vince.

“Besides,” Jack said. “If you borrowed from Vince Santini to get in that game in Pittsburgh so that you could help with an investigation? Well, that’s like the money the police department gave me to do the same thing.”

That made me wonder. I guess I never thought about how Jack came up with the buy-in money for that game. I’m frequently around people who can easily come up with that kind of money for a poker game. “The Las Vegas police department gave you that kind of money? To play in a game you might lose?”

He shrugged. “Well not exactly. Not all of it.”

“How much of it?”

“Plane fare and hotel.”

“How’d you get the…you know what. Never mind. It’s none of my business.”

“My savings. And Botz’s.”

“What if you’d lost?”

“I’m a better cop than I am a poker player. I knew I’d find a way to get some names to check out before I lost too much of it. Then I’d bow out. Turns out I didn’t lose after all.”

I tried to raise one brow at his jab, but he just laughed at my attempt.

I wanted to take the money and run out the door, straight to see Vince, but instead I gave one last half-hearted attempt to be the person Jack saw somewhere in me. “Really. Jack, I can’t. You won this. Totally up and up.”

He sighed heavily. “I’m a cop. I was on duty playing in an illegal card game. There’s no way I can keep that money.”

Well…when he put it that way, it was really my civic duty. I took the envelope.

Another thought went through my suspicious mind. “You didn’t just give that back to me because we slept together did you?”

He snorted. “Johanna. It was good. Damn good. But you aren’t worth twenty thousand.”