Hold ’Em Hostage Read online

  I wasn’t wrong. Frank led me to Spago. I’d never been to Wolfgang Puck’s famous eatery but heard it was fabulous. It sat right on the Forum promenade, great for people watching.

  “I wanted to take you to a quiet dinner, but I think we’d better keep our eyes open for Dragsnashark and his friend. Just in case.”

  It was probably a good thing Spago’s was a crowded, electric atmosphere instead of a candlelit, romantic one, because over a bottle of Chianti, his legendary meat loaf and my seafood fettucine, Frank insisted on lecturing me on changing my life.

  “Honey Bee,” Frank began. “I just want you to consider a new hobby. Trouble follows you when you hold cards.”

  “Does that include you?”

  “What?”

  “I met you because of Texas Hold ’Em.”

  Frowning, Frank shook his head. “You know that’s not what I meant.”

  “Life is trouble, Frank. If I weren’t having it playing poker, I’d be having it somewhere else.”

  “Not necessarily.”

  “Come on.”

  “What was your hobby before you started playing Hold ’Em?”

  I thought for a moment. “My job and my fiancé.”

  Frank raised his eyebrows.

  “I didn’t realize it at the time but I did the laundry list of things Toby asked me to do. I kept myself up the way Toby wanted me to, and all that took a lot of time. Beauty maintenance, what a drain. There was no time for anything else. I don’t want that hobby again. Ever.”

  “Should I be insulted?”

  “Are you my fiancé?”

  “No.” Frank shook his head to punctuate his answer.

  “Well, then, I guess you shouldn’t be insulted.” I tried not to look at the emotions playing through his dark eyes. I’d never be able to figure them out and even when I thought I had, I’d be wrong. There were too many of his ghosts I knew nothing about. “Look, Frank, I have a hard time ‘playing’ for the sake of fun. I always have. Everything I’ve done for ‘fun,’ I’ve turned into work. When I was in Brownies, I pressured myself to get all the badges so I was working so hard, none of it was fun. When I was in a sorority in college, I had to organize this fundraiser and that membership drive. When I joined a country club for a while, I had to be number one golfer every week or I was unhappy.”

  “And how is Hold ’Em different? You are ranked as a pro. You have a website. A fan club. It’s a second job to you.”

  “Hey, now, you can’t blame me for the website. You sicced Ingrid on me and that was her idea. And, if you will notice, I delegated all the work away except the little intro I write every month and the e-mails I answer.”

  He shrugged, conceding the point. I continued, “Despite all that you mentioned, I don’t think about working at playing poker—except when I am forced to play to save my goddaughter’s life. I just play and have fun. Probably because I think luck plays such an incredible role that hard work and talent don’t matter all that much. I can relax when I sit down at the table and try to read the players, hope for some decent cards, get a charge when I win, chalk it up to entertainment when I lose.”

  “I just don’t like the way I feel when you’re in danger,” Frank finally admitted, obviously grudgingly.

  A sudden flash of intuition struck me with no warning. Perhaps my psyche had finally read what lurked in a shadow behind those sexy dark eyes. “Frank, did something happen to your ex-wife?”

  The color drained from his face for only an instant. He slipped his aviators down over his eyes and stood abruptly, throwing some bills on the table. “We have to go, to get you back to the tournament in time if you are so dead set on playing.”

  His body was wracked with tension, although he still put his fingertips on the small of my back as was his protective habit. Even through them I could feel anger, hurt and defensiveness.

  And guilt.

  The picket line was in full force as we arrived back at the Fortune. Phineas Paul was at the other end preaching to a group of onlookers about the evils of gambling, most especially that of poker. “It is as seductive as sex. Texas Hold ’Em requires no skill, no brains and is driven by greed and temptation. If you want to break every commandment our Lord God has sent down, then sit down at a felt table.”

  “Amen!” chorused the picket line, rather desultorily, I thought.

  “Do you notice something about the picketers?” I asked.

  Frank looked them over carefully as he held the door for me to enter. I was immediately flanked by a phalanx of security. Frank elbowed his way back next to me and spoke in my ear. “They are predominantly teenage white girls.”

  “Isn’t that weird?” I asked. “How many teenagers do you know are born-again Christians? Maybe young, idealistic twentysomethings, but not many teens. It’s against their hormonal religion.”

  “Every now and then I’m struck with the fact that you would be a good investigator, and then you pull a stunt like the King Neptune thing and I know I’m wrong.”

  Ever the master of the backhanded compliment, Frank left me feeling simultaneously deflated and uplifted. Go figure.

  The chimes rang us back to the tables. Frank whipped out his trusty notepad and jotted down my description of Dragsnashark’s possible partner. “Maybe I can get a look at the security tape,” he mused. That’s how he’d kept me out of jail after the Poseidon’s incident. He knew someone on the inside. Sometimes Frank’s life was so labyrinthine it gave me a headache, and I was sure I only knew a tenth of it, if that.

  He brushed a kiss on my cheek. I resisted the urge to move my mouth into it. “Remember our code. I’ll contact you or you contact me if they close the tournament down sooner than expected. The security here is watching you, but only when you are near the Main Event action, understand?” I nodded as he continued, “So you make sure you stay here until I get back or I send Joe or Ben or Ingrid to take you back to the room. Under no circumstances do you leave alone—got it?”

  I smiled and waved as I made my way to my table, trying to ignore his dark gaze boring into me. Another player from a short table was moved to ours. Without introducing himself, the short, dark man who reminded me a bit of Joe Pesci shook my hand with a quick smile. He paused halfway into his seat, his eyes hung on something on the felt in front of me.

  “Excuse me, ma’am, but where did you get that marker?” he asked with a studied calmness as he eased into the chair.

  I fingered the worn wooden piece Frank had given me as a lucky charm before my first tournament. Made of rare Hawaiian koa wood, it had some faded marks on it that neither I, nor anyone I asked, could discern. Frank wouldn’t tell me the story behind it. Maybe this guy had stayed at the same casino and remembered what it had looked like when new. Maybe it had been won in a underground tournament in some shady bar in Casablanca. Believe me, I’d spun those stories and more.

  I tried to contain my excitement when I answered: “Why do you ask?”

  “Because the man I lost that marker to ten years ago is the coldest killing son of a bitch our department has ever known.”

  Nine

  “How do you know it’s the same marker?” I asked when I finally found my voice. Many questions had rolled through my mind along with my version of the answers, including deciding that the guy’s department was with the SPCA—after all, Frank did have a hunting license. I’d found it when I pilfered his wallet one early morning. But, if it weren’t the same marker, then all the questions and answers didn’t matter because we weren’t talking about the same guy, right?

  The dealer had demanded we post blinds so conversation was suspended for the bets. With my mind reeling, I couldn’t remember now what my pocket cards were so I just checked, while waiting for my neighbor’s response. It didn’t come immediately. He seemed terribly intent on the hand. Come on, guy, my boyfriend might be an infamous murderer. Who cared about poker at a time like this? I cleared my throat. He glared and slow played a little longer, until finally the dealer nu
dged him into a bet.

  When two Aces fell on The Flop I remembered what was facedown in front of me—bullets. I had four of a kind and I couldn’t even get excited about it. Normally, I would stay cool, draw everybody in to staying until The River, but I so wanted the hand to be over that after a check-raise, I went all in. A chorus of groans went up around the table. Blackie shook her head, her first show of any sort of normal communication, and I was almost distracted out of my intensity toward Marker Man. I don’t know what skin it was off her nose, anyway. After all, I’d saved her several bets’ worth of chips by being stupidly impatient. The whole table folded to me.

  As I quickly raked the chips toward me, I accidentally flipped over a card. Two of diamonds? Huh? The table howled. “She bluffed us!”

  I guess I did. Had I been so upset by Marker Man that I’d mistaken what was in my pocket? Sheesh. Good thing I hadn’t known or my blood pressure would’ve been dangerously high. I really don’t bluff, especially not in the first day of a tournament.

  “Of course it’s the same marker,” my neighbor answered in an undertone as one of the WSOP officials came to see what the ruckus was about. She leaned down to whisper in the dealer’s ear as Marker Man continued, “Look on the other side and find the tiny Y-shaped crack. It’s filled with crimson paint.”

  I found it. Damn.

  “I suppose you topped the man in a game to get it,” he said. “That’s the only way he’d give it up, unless of course, you killed him. And if you did, I won’t tell.”

  I suppressed a shiver at his matter-of-fact tone. Still, I knew he had to be mistaken. Markers were a dime a dozen, thousands out there alike. Surely all old markers like this one wore in a similar pattern.

  “So are you going to tell me his name?” I asked finally, three hands later, after I’d lost nearly two thousand in chips in my distraction.

  “You tell me where you got it.”

  I shook my head. “No.”

  “He favors white T-shirts, Levi’s and Luccheses.”

  The liquor made me swallow a gasp as I shrugged coolly. “That could be half the cowboys where I come from.”

  “You from L.A.?”

  Uh-oh.

  “Guess it’s the same guy.” My Italian seatmate nodded knowingly. “You sure got talkative eyes.”

  Averting the offenders, I dropped my Gargoyles back over them and spent the rest of the next hour just playing my hands, slowly regaining what I’d lost on the table, if not in my heart.

  “Can I buy you a drink?” I asked my seatmate when the chimes indicated our next break.

  As we meandered our way to the nearest bar in the Fortune, I found out his name was Rudy Serrano. He didn’t drink anything but Mountain Dew by the truckload, he said, when he was playing cards. He’d lost two hundred thousand dollars, his entire life savings, one night two years ago in a cash game in a dark corner of San Luis Obispo drinking ouzo. From then on, he didn’t swear off alcohol, just alcohol when he was playing Texas Hold ’Em, which was his great white hope for earning back a retirement fund.

  “What do you do for a living?”

  “I’m retired from the Los Angeles Police Department, detective, first grade, but have to work as a rent-a-cop for an apartment complex to supplement my pension until I win enough playing poker.”

  I wanted to tell him not to give up the day job but concentrated on information instead of self help. “You said some pretty strong things about Frank. I want to know the story.”

  “I guess you didn’t beat Gilbert at a game of poker to get that marker, then, huh? And I’d say from the look on your face when you say his name, you didn’t off him to get it either.”

  “No. I’m, uh, a friend of his. He taught me how to play.”

  “You were taught by one of the best, I have to say that. To play Hold ’Em, that is.”

  I ignored his implication, and he finally continued when I didn’t elaborate on our relationship. “I’d say Gilbert was one of the most successful Texas Hold ’Em cash players there ever was—before the game was a household name, that is.”

  “Why did he quit?”

  He shrugged. “He quit playing when he quit his marriage and started drinking. Who knows why. Maybe he was just turning his back on everything in his life except the job. Most men have to have a job to breathe. He’s no exception.”

  “Turned his back. Even on his kids?”

  “No.” He took a swallow of his Mountain Dew. “He sees them on a regular basis.”

  “His wife, he sees her too?”

  “No. Not at all, except by accident.”

  That would be tough. See young kids, not wife. Hmm. Weird. How did he manage that? Maybe they were transferred by nanny. And how did this guy know so much? I sucked in a deep breath as my companion watched a couple arguing in the corner of the bar. I knew I had to be careful. This guy was smart and just telling me as much as he wanted to. His motivation concerned me, but not as much as my desire to know answers to all my questions. I had to ask them in order of importance before he decided to clam up.

  “So, who did he kill?”

  “Sheesh. You finally got around to asking what a man would ask first. Gilbert was in the middle of an international investigation when his wife was tortured and almost killed on orders from the principal in the case. It was supposed to be a warning to Frank to back off. It was a death sentence for themselves instead. Ronald Trucek and two of his associates were tortured and killed not twelve hours later. An eye for an eye. Frank works for—or used to work for—a government law enforcement organization. I can’t tell you if it’s the CIA, or something deeper, something none of us has ever heard of. The murder was personal, I can promise you that, but whoever signed his paychecks made sure he got a free ride. We were told to look the other way. It pissed me off, because it plays hell with your stats, wrecks promotion possibilities. I got a helluva lot of grief from the media for not solving the case. I never really got my mojo back. My boss told me to lie, make up a story about the associates turning on Trucek and him killing them before he died himself. I couldn’t do it. Couldn’t ask the detectives working for me to do that. Instead, we still have an open case in the LAPD books, one of the most notorious killings in our history is unsolved.”

  “If the incidents were similar, nobody put two and two together?”

  “The details of Monica Gilbert’s attack were kept under wraps. The same with the Trucek murders. Most of what you think you know about some cases actually comes out at trial. Neither of these went there. So you, the public, will end up knowing little.”

  I almost didn’t want to ask, but knew I had to. “What happened to Monica?”

  “She was hospitalized for a month, touch and go for nearly three weeks, in rehab six months. Frank was a stay-at-home dad during that time—the kids being only two and five. It was easier than being home after she returned, though. From what I hear, she never blamed him, but he blamed himself every time he saw her limp, struggle to stand, every time her eyes filled with tears of frustration when she couldn’t lift one of the kids up when they begged her, ‘Mommy, carry me.’ Gilbert couldn’t see her every day and live with his own guilt.”

  This was worse than my wildest imaginings. “He left her because she was crippled?”

  He shook his head. “He left because he was emotionally crippled. He couldn’t see her and not blame himself 24/7 that his job had almost killed her and left her almost worse than that for the rest of her life.”

  I’d become accustomed to the image of a model-beautiful woman who wasted her days shopping Rodeo Drive, playing tennis at a Hollywood country club and toting mini-Frank and mini-her to overdone birthday parties where every child got a Chihuahua á la Legally Blonde as a party favor. Of course ex–Mrs. Gilbert was gorgeous but cold, a decent mother (because Frank let her have the kids), but never a decent wife. Perhaps she cheated on him in my mind once or twice. Perhaps she’d remarried the plastic surgeon who’d done her fifth needless cosmetic surgery i
n as many years. Perhaps she’d been a heartless workaholic who never had time for him.

  But in my mind, she’d never been a good-hearted woman, crippled by a maniac set upon her by Frank himself, whom he’d loved, who loved him. Who’d been a hapless martyr. Never.

  “You’re retired now.” I interrupted the negative direction my imagination was taking me. “Why don’t you turn Frank in and solve the case?”

  “Frank and I were friends once. Law enforcement compadres of a sort. He doesn’t have much of a life left, but I can’t take away what little is left—even if I can’t ever look him in the eye again after seeing what he did to another human being.”

  I shivered at the stark reality in his voice. I couldn’t ask the details of the murders. My mind’s eye was doing more than his words could anyway. Instead, I asked something that would prove infinitely more painful.

  “Do you think he still loves her—Monica?”

  Rudy Serrano paused thoughtfully—considering more my feelings than the truth, I was certain. “Yes. Yes, I’m sure he does love Monica, in his own way.”

  “And she loves him?”

  “Yes, I’ve talked to Monica. There’s no doubt about that.”

  Great. I was in love with a vicious killer who still loved his wife.

  Could it get any worse?

  I knew better than to ask that question.

  “Any idea where Gilbert is right now?” Serrano asked.

  There were lots of answers to that one, but I decided that the most precise would be the safest. “No.” I shook my head, took a sip of pinot grigio and shook my head again. “I sure don’t.”

  Ten

  Because Ben, morose and brooding, had arrived at the Main Event to escort me back to the Mellagio, I’d missed the opportunity to see Frank’s reaction to his supposed old friend Rudy Serrano. I cursed fate or perhaps Frank’s sixth sense that seemed to alert him to potential dangers. I’d needed that reaction to know how to proceed—whether to interrogate him, avoid him or to continue to trust him until I found out more. I loved him, but more importantly right now, I felt like I knew who he was, under his skin. Or I thought I had. The man in Frank’s skin might well have killed someone to avenge a loved one, but wouldn’t have tortured him on top of it. The man in Frank’s skin wouldn’t have left his crippled wife to raise two babies on her own.