Read Lucky at Cards for Free Online Page A

pasture in the middle of the street without worrying about any mess in the morning. He wouldn’t remember a thing.
    But we took his roll one hand at a time, and we kept playing hand after goddamned hand until fifty-four yards of his money had made the pilgrimage from his side of the table to our side. I even dealt hands to the shills, and the shills played out the hands religiously, and we took that Texan’s money just the way it says in the book, hand by hand and bet by bet. A few times he bet a hundred dollars on a card and lost and paid off with two bills stuck together. And I very honestly separated the bills and gave one back to him so that he could lose it on the next round.
    We had cleaned the Texan according to the con man’s code, such as it is.
    So it was just as well that Murray Rogers wouldn’t solve our problems by dying, or by being killed. Because I wasn’t trained for that kind of action.
    I smoked a few cigarettes, stopped at a few diners and lunch counters for coffee. I thought about packing a suitcase and catching the plane to New York, but I didn’t think very seriously. I knew damned well I wasn’t going to do it, and I knew why.
    Joyce Rogers hadn’t come to my room for a quick tumble and a chorus of Auld Lang Syne . And I wasn’t staying in town for another grab at her sweet brass ring or another poker session with Murray and Sy and the boys. We were both looking for an angle, the same angle. An angle that would give Maynard the Magnificent a pile of money and a green-eyed girl with hair the color of chestnuts.
    The angle had to be there. All I had to do was find it.

5
    I returned to the hotel in time to pick up a message from Sy Daniels. The terse little slip said I was supposed to call him. I put the call through from my room and reached him at his office. He wanted me to have dinner over at his place. It didn’t especially appeal but I seemed to be locked into it; I couldn’t very well turn him down two days running. I accepted the invitation with a certain amount of enthusiasm and he told me to drop over to the office around five-thirty and he’d give me a lift.
    “Never mind,” I told him. “I rented a car a few hours ago. I may be in town a few days and I’d just as soon be able to drive myself around.”
    I took down the address he gave me and the instructions on finding the place. I tucked this valuable information away in my wallet and found the Hertz outfit. A tired old man with cigarette-stained fingers took a long look at my driver’s license and condescended to rent me a car.
    I asked for a stick shift. He had a hard time getting it through his head that I didn’t want automatic transmission and kept telling me that Hertz paid for the gas anyway. I told him I liked to feel as though I were doing the driving. Finally he gave me the car I wanted and wrote me off as an enemy of progress.
    I took the car out and drove it around to get the feel of it. It was a piece of tin with nothing much in the engine department, but I didn’t feel much like a Gran Prix contender myself. I just drove.
    Half of my mind worried about the driving. The other half fooled around with a green-eyed girl and her rich husband. Renting the car had been a commitment, if one were needed. I wasn’t going to catch a plane to New York, I was going to stick around, me and my tinny rental, and something was going to happen.
    We couldn’t kill him. He had to be alive, and he had to have the money taken away from him. Well, I’d been taking money away from men for years. But I wasn’t going to beat Murray Rogers for a few hundred thou with a deck of cards. When a man worth somewhere around a million can pick a kick out of buck-limit poker, he doesn’t exactly fit the high-roller class. So my talent as a mechanic wasn’t going to be all that helpful.
    There were a few possibilities. Murray Rogers could flip his lid and be committed to a funny farm. That would leave him alive and keep his loaded will from