Read Lucky at Cards for Free Online

don’t get that many years, Bill. You have to hold onto them, make them swing for you. I don’t want to throw three of them away.”
    “It’s worse to throw them all away.”
    She was clinging to me and her face was pressed against my throat. She sagged, and I held onto her to keep her from crumbling. Then I felt her chest swell as she gulped in air. Her breasts were tight against me. I let go of her and she straightened up.
    “I started to fall apart,” Joyce said.
    “Forget it. You’re all right now.”
    “I’d like to stick with you. Live with you, travel with you. You’re my kind of people, Bill.”
    I didn’t say anything.
    “But I like his money. I have a big thing for his money. Wouldn’t it be nice if we could find a way to put the two together?”
    She let that one hang in the air for a few seconds. Then her face changed and she gave me a fast smile. She did a patchwork job on her lipstick, tossed her purse over her arm.
    “I’ve got to run,” she told me. “I’m supposed to be downtown on a minor shopping spree. I’ll have to duck into a department store and buy a few sweaters in a hurry, then get back to our little ranch-style castle. Will you be staying in town for a while, Bill?”
    “I suppose so. I don’t have any place to go.”
    “I thought you were going to New York.”
    “So did I.”
    She looked at me, and her lips parted in a pout a little subtler than the Marilyn Monroe pose, but not much. “Then we’ll be seeing each other,” she said. "Goodbye, Wizard.”
    After she left, I took the elevator down and let the hotel barber shorten my hair. When he was finished, I was a little less shaggy and a little more ex-Ivy League. I stopped at the desk on the way through the lobby and picked up my bill. The room clerk took my money and said something pleasant when I told him I’d be sticking around for awhile. I left the hotel and took a walk along Main Street.
    Wouldn’t it be nice if we could find a way to put the two together? Not two, though. Three. Joyce and the money and me. We three, we’re not a crowd. We’re just a starry dream.
    There was a classic answer to the classic problem.
    The problem read Boy meets Girl, Girl has Rich Husband, and the answer read, Boy kills Husband, Boy gets Girl and Money. But we didn’t fit the classic problem. If we killed Murray we didn’t win anything but the electric chair. If he died, there was no money for the weeping widow.
    It was just as well. The heavy-handed touch is not exactly the hallmark of the card mechanic. The brute type doesn’t bother slipping a deck of readers into the game or filling a flush from the bottom of the deck. The brute type takes his mark into a handy alleyway and hits him on the head with something heavy.
    A mechanic is just a con man. He cons with a deck the way another man cons with a pool cue or a pair of wrong-way dice or a portfolio of Canadian moose-pasture stocks. And a con man plays the game with certain rules operating inside of his head. The direct approach is not on the preferred list.
    Sometimes matters are ridiculous. When I had been dealing for Guiterno, we had a game set up for a Texan who liked to play big-money blackjack. That’s a dealer’s-control game—if you can deal seconds, and if you use marked cards or know how to do top-card peeks, you can make your mark lose every hand. A wide-hipped hooker steered the Texan to our game and he was the only live one in the crew. I was dealing and there were four of five shills playing with Guiterno’s money. It was all set up for the Texan.
    And the Texan had been stoned to the gills on charcoal-filtered bourbon. He moved into the room where the game was floating, plumped himself down in the seat we had carefully kept open for him, and slapped a wad of long green on the table. He was so blind he couldn’t see the spots on the cards. He didn’t know where he was or what he was doing there, and we could have pocketed his money and put him out to