Корнелл Вулрич - A Treasury of Stories (Collection of novelettes and short stories)

“Are we playing or making love?” Wallace demanded sourly.

You’ll find out in a minute, mister, she thought with an inward chuckle. She stepped back into the clear, and watched.

He had reason to be sour. He’d gotten the lowest card in the deck, a two, just now. His cards seemed to be getting worse all the time.

One more card to go.

“Well,” Joe drawled, “suppose we just make that another fifty.”

Wallace drained his glass, and a little piece of ice still left at the bottom of it clicked noisily against his teeth. “And still another,” he said imperturbably.

Joe should call him now, she kept thinking frantically, Joe should call him now. Nothing can beat what Joe’s holding. But she supposed he wanted to clean up good by raising him still further on the next card.

Wallace hadn’t gotten a picture-card through the whole deal. He got a four on the fifth card.

Joe got a six this time, but it didn’t matter, he already had it made.

Suddenly, she noticed something for the first time that nearly made her keel backward in consternation. The order in which the cards had come out had covered it up until now.

Wallace had gotten 5, 3, 2, 4. And even as she stared, horrified, he moved one of them out of line and rearranged it: 5, 4, 3, 2.

If his hole-card was a six — but no, she couldn’t believe in such sheer, blind, uncanny luck as that. The odds and averages were all against it. Even to build upward would have been incredible enough, but to build downward to a straight! And have every card come out to you, almost as though it were magnetized. That wouldn’t have been skill, that would have been pure magic.

He must be bluffing. And Joe must know that he was bluffing, bluffing flamboyantly, because Joe himself was holding three of a kind. Joe was a firm believer in the law of averages; he had once told her that. And the odds against there being a six-card in that hole were — well, with four sixes in a deck of fifty-two cards, and Joe himself holding one of them, were: three to forty-eight. Or in other words, one to sixteen. Joe’s favor. You couldn’t get any better odds than that. Joe knew what he was doing.

She breathed more freely again.

“It’s going to cost you,” Joe said thoughtfully, “five hundred dollars to stay in here.”

Wallace poked the tip of his tongue against the lining of his cheek and made a little lump there for a minute.

“I’m staying, at those prices,” he said calmly.

Joe must have felt he’d played around with him long enough; thought it was time to put him out of his misery. “Show me what you’ve got,” he said gruffly. He turned over his own ace-in-the-hole.

Wallace turned up a lowly six, but it gave him 6, 5, 4, 3, 2.

She heard the sound of a deep, shuddering moan coming out of someone, and it was herself.

Wallace got up and stood there waiting, hands on the top of his chair.

“I haven’t got enough cash on me,” Joe said. “Will a check do?”

Wallace didn’t answer for a moment. He looked over at her for some unfathomable reason, as if he were including her in Joe’s figurable collateral. Then he said quietly, “If it’s good.”

“It’s good,” Joe said, adroitly refusing to take offense.

She was suddenly terrifically frightened. How could he give him a check? Her eyes rounded when she saw him a check? Her eyes rounded when she saw him flip a pad of pale-blue blank checks onto the table-top.

“What first name’ll I put down?” he asked curtly.

“The initial M’s good enough,” Wallace said, equally short.

The two were hating each other, she knew, the way men sometimes did after the pent-up rivalry of a card-game such as this one had been.

Joe signed the check and spun it insultingly across the table to Wallace. His face was white as chalk. He was cleaned out. She knew it and he knew it. He wiped sweat off his eyebrows with the side of his thumb-joint. She was ready to cry, but what good would it have done?

Wallace picked up the check and waved it tauntingly almost in Joe’s face, pretending to dry it. Then he folded it, once over at each end, and put it inside his pocket. “Let’s hope for the sake of everybody concerned,” he said pointedly, “there isn’t any hitch when I cash this in the morning.”

No good-nights were said.

He went over to the door, opened it, and turned to look back at her. Then he had the unmitigated gall to wink at her over the top of Joe’s sombrely inclined head. The door closed after him.

The moment it had, she flew over beside Joe. “Joe—!” she began in a stricken whisper.

He flicked his hand warningly toward her, so she’d wait until Wallace was out of earshot.

She went over to the door and listened. Then she came back again, distractedly pounding her knuckles into her open palm. “Joe! Why did you give that to him? There is no bank. There is no account. Where’d you get them from, anyway?”

“I stopped in and told them I needed some one day. They thought I was a depositor and gave me a batch. I figured they’d come in handy to flash around once in a while.”

“But flashing around isn’t filling one out. Joe, don’t you know it can spell jail? And he’s the kind will make sure it does. Joe, you shouldn’t have, I tell you!”

“I couldn’t do anything else,” he said, bunching a fist and backing it away from his luck, somewhere out there in front of his eyes. “Even the deal before I didn’t have enough cash to cover my losses. He wouldn’t take I.O.U’s, you heard him say that. I kept hoping I could win back on that last deal—”

“If it had only been a Saturday night, then we’d have until Monday morning at least to figure something out. But it’s a Friday, they stay open half a day tomorrow, and he’ll take the check around the first thing in the morning. Joe, we’ve got to get out of here, right tonight if we can.”

“We can’t,” he said. “Don’t you understand? We haven’t a nickel. We haven’t even enough to pay for this room. We’d have to skip out the back. We haven’t even enough for train-tickets. We’d have to walk along the side of the road looking for a lift from a horse and wagon. We’d be picked up in no time flat.”

“Then we’ve got to get it back.” She began to pace the floor, with her arms tightly wound around her, as though guarding some thought or idea she was carrying inside her. “We’ve got to get it back.” she kept repeating.

“Sure,” he said. “I suppose you think all I gotta do is knock on his door, ask him for it, and he’s going to let me have it, as simple as that.”

“No,” she admitted, “I know he wouldn’t give it to you.” She emphasized the pronoun, the “you,” a little, but he was too engrossed in the over-all problem to notice that.

“Joe,” she said suddenly, “take a drink.”

He poured one out for himself.

When his glass was down, she said: “Joe, take another.”

He took a refill.

He kept taking them after that, and she kept telling him to.

It seemed like only a minute later that his head was down on the table cushioned between his wrapped arms and she was standing over him shaking him awake.

“Joe,” she said briefly. “Here’s your check back.”

“Where’d you get it from?” he asked, looking blearily from it to her and back to it again.

“From the party you gave it to,” she said tersely.

His anger was slow’ to mount, but remorseless. Like fire flickering up a pile of dry leaves, and then at last — dazzling combustion. He’d risen to his feet. His eyes were sizzling like shorted fuses.

“So you went in there and got it,” he said. “Just like that.”

“I got it, that’s what matters.”