Betting on Hope (12 page)

That’s what Weary had said last night, Hope realized. Figure out what you did wrong. Evidently Marty had a plan.

“I gotta plan,” Marty said.

Hope stopped in the middle of the casino floor and beamed at him. “You’re the best,” she said. She put her arms around him and gave him a hug.

“Hey, what?” Marty said, startled and embarrassed. “What did I do? Come on. Stop.”

“Okay,” Hope said, letting go. “What’s the plan?”

“We gotta be careful about it,” Marty said, and Hope felt her dreams fade.

“Nothing illegal,” she said.

“Oh.” Marty looked thoughtful. “Well, it’s not
illegal
.”

“If it’s not illegal, what is it, then?” It would have to be
something.

Marty glanced at her, cleared his throat. “Well. Ah. It’s, ah, disliked. Probably. Yeah. Disliked.”

“Disliked?”

“Here’s the plan.” Marty took Hope aside. “You know about them kids from MIT.”

Hope nodded. Who didn’t? In the eighties and nineties, a bunch of really smart kids at MIT had figured out how to win at cards by beating the odds. They watched tables and counted which cards had been played. When tables had a disproportionately large number of high-value cards left to play, they placed big bets, knowing that although they would lose sometimes, they had a higher proportionate chance of winning big, too. The students won possibly millions of dollars before they were discovered. But when the casinos finally figured out the scam, the students were banished for life from all the gaming establishments in the country.

“
Jeez,
Marty. We can’t do that.” Once she won the ranch back, Hope didn’t much care if she herself was banned from the casinos and never saw another card room again. But she couldn’t let the uncles jeopardize their careers for her.

“It’s nothing like that. Don’t worry.”

“What
is
it like, then? You’re scaring me. What exactly is the plan?”

“First off, you’re gonna move back to the twenty dollar tables until you build up your stake.”

Hope nodded. “That was my plan, too.”

“Okay, then we’re on the same page. We’ll split up. All of us. We’ll watch the tables. Here at the Desert Dunes, across the street at the Golden Palace. At the Casbah. Six casinos, one guy each. We’ll be looking for a full table with a couple of lousy players. When we see a setup like that, we’ll give you a call, and that’s the table you play. You got your cell?”

Hope nodded.

“Okay. You play the table until you get too much competition or you beat their socks off and they walk away, whatever. When the table’s done, you walk away. Then you call me, and we’ll pick you a new table. You gotta be ready to move around.”

“You think that’ll work?”

“Worked for the MIT kids,” Marty said. “Two worse-than-average players in a standard hold’em table of nine means that the guy who wins takes home twenty times the income than he would if everybody was evenly matched.”

“Really?” Hope said.

“Yeah,” Marty the Sneak said. “You wanna win these days, you gotta study. Statistics. Probability theory. Regression analysis.”

“Regression analysis?” Hope said, amazed at Marty the Sneak’s apparent intellectual bent. “Really?”

“No,” Marty agreed. “I’m just kidding about that. But that other stuff—that’s part of the game now. You gotta know what your odds are to win a pot, what you have to win to make the bet worthwhile, like that.”

“Won’t the casinos notice you guys staking out their tables?”

“We have Little Hope they’ll discover us,” Marty said with ponderous humor.

Hope grinned at him. The jokes on her name were silly, but she liked them anyway. If her father had to have been a card player, why couldn’t he have been Marty the Sneak? Marty probably was too involved with organized crime and he probably broke some laws, too, and he might have made a bad father, but here he was, helping her.

“You be careful,” she said. “All of you. I don’t want to spend my stake bailing you out of jail.”

“When did I get in trouble for something like this?” Marty asked, justifiably miffed. “You just pay attention to your cards. Concentrate. Remember what Weary told you last night.”

“So where do I start?” Hope said.

“Eddie said a couple minutes ago he had a good table for you in here. Lemme check with him it’s still going.” Marty punched a number on his cell phone.

“Eddie? What’s happening?” He listened. Then he nodded.

“She’s on her way,” he said into the phone. “These things are great,” he said, closing the phone and putting it into his pocket. “How did we get by before we had cells? Them and ATMs. They’re a bonanza for card players. Okay. Over by the north door, about two tables in. You’re looking for the table with the guy in the red check shirt, a second guy with a Dodgers baseball cap. They both play too loose, Eddie says.”

They bet on bad hands
, Hope thought. “That should help rebuild my stake,” she said.

“That’s the plan,” Marty said.

By three o’clock Hope had won seven thousand dollars at the twenty dollar tables. She beamed at the uncles while she banked her winnings.

“I love this plan! Are you sure no one spotted you?”

“We’re good, Hope,” Pete Wysniewski said.

“Well, they
spotted
me,” Weary Blastell said. “But no one
suspected
me.”

At six-foot-five, with his former-football-player’s build, a person would have to be blind not to spot Weary, Hope realized

“You be careful, Weary,” she said. “You don’t exactly blend.”

“I blend better than Cuisinart,” Weary said. “Don’t worry about me.”

“Plus, now we know every card player in Vegas who’s sitting at the twenty- and thirty-dollar tables,” Isaiah Rush said. “And we know how to beat them.”

“Speaking for my colleagues here, I feel confident in saying that we plan to increase our own earnings by substantial margins,” Jim Thickpenny said. “We anticipate major breakthroughs in profitability.”

“Bing-bing-bing!” Sharp Eddie concurred.

“You’re doing good,” Marty said to Hope. “Tonight you go back to the thirty-dollar tables. What time you coming in?”

“Seven o’clock?” she asked. “Does that work? At the flower arrangement again?”

“Someplace different,” Marty said. “The little coffee shop. We gotta talk strategy anyway, before you go out there.”

Hope nodded. “Maybe I can teach you about regression analysis,” she said.

“If that works for seven card stud, eight or better, high-low split, count me in.”

Chapter 9

Tanner was home putting a new washer in the kitchen sink faucet when his cell phone rang.

“Yeah,” he said. He could hear noise in the background; it sounded like the casino.

He coul

“Tanner, it’s Marty.”

Tanner put down the wrench and pulled out a chair. Apart from poker tournaments, he hadn’t had as much face time with the Jersey crew in his entire life as he’d had in the last two days.

“Marty. What’s up?”

“Listen. About last night. What you said to Hope.”

“What I said to her? I just told her to go home.”

“Yeah, I know what you said. Weary told me. Don’t say crap like that no more to her.”

“What do you mean, Marty? She was at the bar, she was on her way to having too much to drink, she’d lost too much money. People got problems with losing, they shouldn’t play.” Tanner shook his head. It was probably a good thing he didn’t see more of the Jersey gang. He was starting to talk just like Marty.

“Not Hope. She got scared a little, is all. She’s out of practice, but she’s a fine card player. And now she needs the money.”

“What’s so important that she’d jeopardize everything?”

“She isn’t jeopardizing everything, you numbskull. That’s what I’m telling you. She played cards and she lost a few hands. That’s it. Now listen to me. You made her cry, and that ain’t right.”

“I made her cry?” Tanner was shocked. He was used to Troy’s tantrums and tears, and sometimes to his dismay he’d evoked tears from women he’d dated when he failed to meet their expectations. But when he’d seen her, Hope hadn’t cried. She’d told him to go to hell. He hadn’t thought he’d gotten through to her. Maybe he had. But he sure as hell didn’t want to bully women in bars until they cried. Even if it was for their own good. Which, apparently, Marty the Sneak didn’t think it was.

He wouldn’t have wanted to make Hope cry in a million years.

“She cried, because of what you said,” Marty went on. “You made her feel bad. Question herself. And you set her back a half-day. She’s playing on a clock here, and we all gotta pitch in. If you’re gonna help, okay. If not, find somebody else in the card room to preach to.”

“Marty, really, I wasn’t preaching, I just—”

“Yeah, yeah, I know, you saw Hope, a real pretty girl, and you got an itch you wanted to scratch. I understand that. But she ain’t your type. I known her a lot longer than you, so you can trust me on that.”

“Marty, hold on here,” Tanner said. “You’re way ahead of the game. I—”

“No, I ain’t,” Marty said. “I seen the way you look at her, and I know how long you date somebody, about twice each one, am I right?”

“That’s a little exaggerated. I—”

“I got nothing against you, Tanner. I like you, even, as much as I know you. You straightened up. You’re a good card player. But right now, Hope don’t need no distractions. She’s in the casino to work. So either help her or butt out.”

“Well, I could help,” Tanner said, feeling flattened.

“Just so you understand,” Marty said, and hung up.

Tanner blinked, staring at his phone, before he finally hung up, too.
What did I do?
I just wanted to save a damsel in distress
. And before he knew it, Marty had torn a strip off him.

At least now he understood why the McNaughton sisters called the Jersey crew their uncles. Nobody could have protected Hope better.

That’s what he’d tried to do last night, too, but evidently he’d been on the wrong track. Help her, Marty had said. Tanner picked up his wrench. Well, okay then. He’d help.

Promptly at three-thirty, Hope rang the bell on Baby’s suite, and Drake opened the door.

“Oh, you,” he said. “The comedian.” He walked away, leaving the door open for her.

“Anybody could get in here,” Hope called after him. “I could be somebody
dangerous.
”

“I wish,” he called back, and Hope heard the television in the background.
Sports
, she thought, but when she walked through, looking for Baby, she saw it was an investment program on cable.

“Grain futures tanked,” Drake said. “Too late now, if you were in deep.”

“Not me,” Hope said. “The only thing I’m deep in is unpaid bills.”

“Better than grain futures,” Drake said, as Hope moved on to the bedroom, still looking for Baby.

Baby was standing in front of the mirror, staring at herself but not making any adjustments.

“Baby?” Hope entered the room. “Is something wrong?”

“I think so,” Baby said. “Big Julie, he always wants to do me in the morning. I dint even
see
him this morning. He said he was out all night playing cards, and he fell asleep drunk at the game. Do you believe that?” She turned to look at Hope.

Hope blinked, not sure if Baby was being rhetorical or really wanted an answer. “Um,” she said.

“But then he finally shows up like at noon, and he doesn’t want to do me? That’s the best time for him.” She lowered his voice. “He’s not young anymore, you know? He used to take Viagra, but then he didn’t need it with me. That’s what he said. But he sure needed it this morning.”

“Maybe you shouldn’t be telling me this,” Hope said. “Big Julie probably wouldn’t like it.”
As much as I don’t
.

“I shouldn’t say he didn’t
want
to do me,” Baby said. “We got naked, all right. He was all, Baby, take your clothes off, and I was all, anything you want, Big Julie. So he goes, do me a little dance, and—”

“Baby,” Hope said. “Maybe we should go shopping?” But even the magic word failed to penetrate Baby’s misery.

“So I’m doing my little dance but it’s going nowhere, if you get the picture, and after a half-hour at least, he just rolls over and falls asleep! What does that mean?”

“I think there’s a sale at the premium outlets, if you want to go there.” Hope tried to keep the desperation out of her voice. She’d gotten much more of a picture than she wanted.

“I’ll tell you what I think it means,” Baby said. “It means he don’t want me no more.”