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  Praise for

  DEATH ON THE FLOP

  “A great poker/murder cozy…A fun way to spend an afternoon. And maybe, if you follow Bee’s tips at the end of the book about Texas Hold ’Em, you might be able to become the next Las Vegas poker champion!”

  —ReviewingTheEvidence.com

  “A cracker jack of an introductory novel of a series…A plot that could belong to an old classic film…Fast, imaginative and great fun.”

  —MyShelf.com

  “Engaging enough to keep you glued to the pages. All in all, I’m hooked and can’t wait for the next book in this vibrant series.”

  —Roundtable Reviews

  The Poker Mysteries by Jackie Chance

  DEATH ON THE FLOP

  CASHED IN

  HOLD ’EM HOSTAGE

  HOLD ’EM HOSTAGE

  JACKIE CHANCE

  BERKLEY PRIME CRIME, NEW YORK

  THE BERKLEY PUBLISHING GROUP

  Published by the Penguin Group

  Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

  375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, USA

  Penguin Group (Canada), 90 Eglinton Avenue East, Suite 700, Toronto, Ontario M4P 2Y3, Canada (a division of Pearson Penguin Canada Inc.) Penguin Books Ltd., 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England Penguin Group Ireland, 25 St. Stephen’s Green, Dublin 2, Ireland (a division of Penguin Books Ltd.) Penguin Group (Australia), 250 Camberwell Road, Camberwell, Victoria 3124, Australia (a division of Pearson Australia Group Pty. Ltd.) Penguin Books India Pvt. Ltd., 11 Community Centre, Panchsheel Park, New Delhi—110 017, India Penguin Group (NZ), 67 Apollo Drive, Rosedale, North Shore 0632, New Zealand (a division of Pearson New Zealand Ltd.)

  Penguin Books (South Africa) (Pty.) Ltd., 24 Sturdee Avenue, Rosebank, Johannesburg 2196, South Africa

  Penguin Books Ltd., Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental. The publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.

  HOLD ’EM HOSTAGE

  A Berkley Prime Crime Book / published by arrangement with the author

  Copyright © 2008 by The Berkley Publishing Group.

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced, scanned, or distributed in any printed or electronic form without permission. Please do not participate in or encourage piracy of copyrighted materials in violation of the author’s rights. Purchase only authorized editions.

  For information, address: The Berkley Publishing Group,

  a division of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.,

  375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014.

  ISBN: 9781101372975

  BERKLEY® PRIME CRIME

  Berkley Prime Crime Books are published by The Berkley Publishing Group,

  a division of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.,

  375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014.

  The name BERKLEY PRIME CRIME and the BERKLEY PRIME CRIME design are trademarks belonging to Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

  This is for everyone who ever believed in me…

  and especially those who didn’t disown me

  when I was at my craziest

  and those who offered a word of encouragement

  when they had no idea what they were doing!

  Katie Day (she’s the long-suffering editor—applause, please!),

  Jake, Cristina, Katy, Kelly, Betty, Ann, Bob, Donna, Jake,

  Nancy, Ben, Frances, John, Donna, Deb, Pam, Pam, Evelyn,

  Martha, Alison, Merrily, Annie, Steve, and Wanda

  “Poker is a microcosm of all we admire and disdain about capitalism and democracy. It can be roughhewn or polished, warm or cold, charitable and caring or hard and impersonal, fickle and elusive, but ultimately it is fair, and right, and just.”

  —Lou Krieger

  Contents

  Prologue

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-one

  Chapter Twenty-two

  Chapter Twenty-three

  Chapter Twenty-four

  Chapter Twenty-five

  Chapter Twenty-six

  Chapter Twenty-seven

  Chapter Twenty-eight

  Bee’s Buzz

  Prologue

  “Bee-Bee, you’re a total luck vampire.”

  A serious game of Texas Hold ’Em with friends and family at the table is a recipe for disaster. But as my entire existence since I turned forty seemed to have been a recipe for disaster, I supposed this was just an ingredient in a five-course gourmet meal called Belinda Cooley’s Life.

  Don’t think I’m negative. I was in the grocery store line and picked up my horoscope booklet. The first line read: You have more drama in your life in one week than everybody else has in a lifetime.

  So there.

  My twin brother, Ben, owner of the aforementioned luck vampire comment, sat across from me, glaring and down to his last ten-dollar chip, having just lost almost everything to me heads-up. My best friend, Shana, wiggled around in her chair, two to my right, giggling and drunk on a half dozen Midori daiquiris. We’d entered a sit and go $100 tournament at the Image casino on a lark as we arrived in Vegas. I want to point out that I was the one to sit down first. The two boneheads paid their way into my table instead of waiting for another game to start. Duh. The way I look at it, with sit and gos, in which only the top two players are in the money, it’s best to play against strangers, definitely not with people you have to sleep next to later. As it was now, even if the best scenario occurred—two of us won the thousand dollars at stake—one of us still would be losing a C-note. Someone would be cranky, which I wouldn’t consider if we weren’t sharing a comped suite at the swanky Mellagio hotel and casino down the road.

  Shana went all in when a two/seven off-suit hit the board on Fourth and Fifth Streets after a Royal Flop. I shook my head. I flipped over my ten/Ace for a straight. She threw her cards in with a particularly colorful Spanish invective (which I find ironic since she is half-Filipino/half-Irish and zero Hispanic but heck, we are from Texas, where everyone swears in Tex-Mex), pushed back her chair and knocked into a man working his way between her and the table behind us. The force of her water-bra-enhanced chest catapulted a ten-inch serrated, bloodstained knife out of his jacket pocket. It bounced across our table, finally coming to rest, point buried in the felt, pointed straight at me.

  The knife wielder fled. Shana screamed and fainted into the arms of the Matthew McConaughey look-alike at the neighboring table with whom she’d been flirting mercilessly. Hmm.

  Ben rose and headed for the door, only to be stopped by a phalanx of casino security.

  We’d officially boarded the roller coaster that is Las Vegas.

  And that was just the beginning.

  One

  “Honey Bee,” Frank Gilbert purred into the phone. Most people would think this an endearing tone. I knew better. My quasi boyfriend was stri
ving for patience. “I leave you for twelve hours and you get into trouble.”

  “I didn’t get into trouble. Trouble found me,” I argued. Out loud, that statement really didn’t sound as good as I hoped it might.

  “Uh-huh,” Frank answered, patience unraveling. “You managed to be still long enough for it to catch up with you.”

  “I’m offended.”

  “You should be.” I could hear the smile in his voice.

  “So, when are you going to get here so I don’t have to spend my entire vacation at the Clark County lockup?” I glanced over at the door. The cops had with amazing speed sequestered us in separate rooms, ostensibly so we wouldn’t compare notes on what happened in the poker room. As I sat in the only chair in the room, I couldn’t help glancing at what was on the desk in front of me, and I decided that I was in the office of the head of housekeeping.

  “Surely you don’t need me? If you’re innocent, then you should be able to walk out of there anytime you want.”

  “First of all,” I said carefully, now the one striving for patience, “you know better.”

  “About your innocence?” The laughter in his voice was undisguised.

  “No! About the cops letting me go anytime I want. Come on. The knife was bloody. It was pointed at me. My überadroit traveling companion was the one who crashed into him.”

  “Who’s the perp? What kind of blood was on the knife?”

  “Well, the cops are so chummy with me that we’re going out to the Black Bear Diner for breakfast later. I’m sure I’ll find out over a cup of joe and some oatmeal hotcakes.” I couldn’t help the sarcasm—food deprivation made me cranky. And anything involving syrup sounded so good right now. My mouth watered. My stomach rumbled. “They’ve already asked me who I work for, meaning, of course, which pimp. Men!”

  “Honey Bee.” Frank sighed. The pause stretched on long enough to talk. Another sigh preceded his question. “Honey Bee, what are you wearing?”

  I looked down at my clingy silver lamé hip-length sheath, Lucky jeans and Swarovski-crystal-covered strappy stilettos designed by up-and-comer Angel Rodriguez, who’d just hired my fledgling advertising agency to run his first campaign. I smiled at my sexy shoes. “Um, jeans?”

  “And?”

  I glanced down again. Okay, maybe the toenail polish in Hottie Mamma was slightly over the top. “I, um, have some new shoes. I know you’ll like them.”

  I could feel him shaking his head through the phone line, although he reserved comment. He might have a future after all. “Have you asked about Captain Patterson? He’d remember you.”

  “I did. He’s busy getting a tan—snapped up by Dade County, Florida, because he handled the media so well during our last fiasco here. He moved to Miami two weeks ago. Poor guy. I think I’d rather be in Vegas.”

  I heard Frank swear under his breath. “Without his help it might get a bit sticky, especially if someone connects you to the Steely Stan case, but don’t worry. It’ll all work out. I’ll be there as soon as I can. My flight leaves in an hour.”

  “That is, unless one of your famous mystery missions pops up between now and then.”

  “Don’t start with that,” Frank warned. Our last big trip, which was supposed to have been our first big trip together, was a poker cruise and had turned out to be a lot more and a lot less than we’d bargained for—more adventure, less romance. Suffice it to say, Frank wasn’t by my side when we’d set sail, but he was when we docked back in Galveston. As for why and how that happened, well, that’s another story.

  What Frank did for a living was another story too, one I couldn’t tell. He owned a company called FBG Enterprises and carried a business card that read “Security” but don’t be envisioning a rent-a-cop on a donut diet. Frank was built like a human panther, carried a concealed Glock and handcuffs, knew how to use both, had an assistant named Joe who looked like the Marlboro Man and acted like Rambo, a part-time PR woman who could be a supermodel and, oh yeah, Frank kept the director of the CIA on speed dial on his phone. Don’t you dare tell him I know that last detail, which I garnered through less than honest methods. A breach in privacy that Mr. Security would no doubt disapprove of.

  Thinking about those methods made me feel a little guilty, and besides, I was freaked out. I’d seen the county jail on my way to the morgue my last trip to Sin City, and it scared me. Heck, half the folks on the streets in Vegas scared me, so I shuddered to think of what the ones behind bars would do to my fear factor. I sucked in a deep breath and steeled myself to beg. “I’m sorry, Frank. I…I just need you right now.”

  Ouch, that cost my pride a notch or two.

  But it worked.

  “Aw, Honey Bee,” he purred. I heard the door click open behind me, but I couldn’t hang up. Not until I heard the rest. “Don’t worry. Nothing’s gonna keep me away from you. Let me tell you what I have in mind when I see you….”

  A hard finger poked my shoulder. I tried to sneaky-slide my RAZR phone into my cleavage as Frank kept talking. I heard “whipped cream” and “massage” as it disappeared.

  “Miss Cooley!”

  I smiled apologetically at the mammoth towering over me who had a Clark County badge conspicuously hanging off the pocket of his pearl-snap plaid shirt. A cowboy cop. Being from Houston, you’d think I’d be used to those types but to tell the truth, my only brushes with the law had been when I was out of my hometown and on vacation. I really should learn that all work and no play was a healthier condition for me. Badge Man cleared his throat. I shrank in my chair. He glowered, unmoved by my charmingly submissive behavior, then spat a wad of chewing tobacco into the garbage can at my knee. Suddenly I was more afraid for my Luckys than my freedom. “Hey, watch it.”

  “You’re the one who’d better watch it.” He looked at my cleavage without an ounce of interest in anything nonelectronic. Thank goodness. Not that I haven’t been known to use my feminine wiles to get me out of scrapes before, but using them with a snuff dipper was above and beyond. Although, throwing him a sidelong glance, I realized he kind of reminded me of Bruce Willis in the last Die Hard, ironic mouth and all. Then I remembered Bruce was really good at killing people. He glared. I quivered, just a little. “You were warned. No talking on cell phones. Hand yours over.”

  “Even if I promise not to do it again, Officer?”

  Shaking his head, he opened up his hand and waited. Impatiently.

  I retrieved the phone and tried to put it to my ear to see if I could catch the tail end of what Frank had to say but the spoiler snatched it away before I could, severing the connection as he did so.

  “Stay here and don’t think about using that landline.” He nodded at the receiver on the desk. “We’ve temporarily disconnected it.”

  I couldn’t help frowning back at him. For some reason he brought out the second grader in me.

  He narrowed his eyes and jutted his lower jaw like the playground bully. Guess I did the same to him. “Someone will be here shortly to take you to be interviewed. I’m Detective Sergeant Dale Trankosky and you’d better wish it won’t be me.”

  The next time the door opened, about five minutes later, I could see that my friend had sent his alter ego. This cop had spent more on regular facials and manicures than Trankosky spent on a year’s worth of chewing tobacco. His smile oozed a studied charm it took salesmen years to perfect. His well-cut spring suit could’ve made the cover of GQ. I was immediately relieved, not because I liked him—quite the contrary—but because this was the kind of man I could work. Salesmen sometimes were the easiest sells. Cops not running for office rarely came with this mentality so I counted myself lucky this time.

  “Miss Cooley?” he asked, smiling and extending his hand. I accepted it, along with the strong, quick shake. A clunk in the hallway called his attention and I noticed the tattoo on his neck, peeking out from the collar of his yellow dress shirt—a snake’s fanged open mouth, a clawed hand holding a serrated scythe, a shark’s tail. The creature’s bo
dy was hidden beneath the suit. I was going to comment on it, but before I could open my mouth, he’d spun around, looking at me with eyes a bit cold for my taste. I reminded myself I wasn’t marrying him. And cold was preferable to Trankosky’s heavy distaste.

  “I apologize for this terrible inconvenience. I’m here to make sure you won’t be detained much longer. Follow me please.”

  I returned his smile and sighed. “How kind. Thank you.”

  Before I could work on him for a dinner from my favorite Egyptian restaurant on The Strip (I was still starving!) while I was being interviewed, his phone rang as we walked down the narrow office hallway that spilled into the Image’s exotic gardens of amazingly real-looking fake greenery. “With me,” he answered after holding the phone to his ear for a moment. He paused again, then lowered his voice, “I had to get her away from the five-ohs.”

  I assumed I was the “her,” but I wondered what a “five-oh” was. Was that copspeak for the media? I made a mental note to ask Frank, or perhaps I could ask my GQ escort once he got off the phone. Hmm. He was currently doing a lot of rather unhappy listening to his cell phone. I tapped his shoulder. What was his name again? Um. I don’t think I’d asked. I don’t think he’d offered. Uh-oh.

  I was following a stranger. I’d presumed he was a cop but he could be many other things. He could be hotel security trying to look like an undercover cop; he could be an undercover cop trying to look like hotel security; he could be a crime boss executioner trying to look like either of the above.