Cameron Haley - Mob rules

I spent some time with my head in the toilet and took a shower. By the time I was dressed, I felt just about good enough to go back to bed.

Instead, I called Adan. I had a small glass vial loaded with the potion, and I needed to hook up with him long enough to deliver the goods. I was thinking dinner, since I didn't have much to show for the burrito and it would give me the best chance to dose him.

"Not dinner," Adan said when I made my suggestion. "I don't want us to get predictable."

I rolled my eyes. This thing was complicated enough without having to worry about rules of dating etiquette. I mentally ran through other options that would involve the ingestion of food or drink. "We could go to a club, do some dancing, have a few drinks."

"I've had enough of nightclubs for a while. How about the Commerce?"

"Poker?"

"Yeah, they have decent no-limit games."

"You play poker?"

"Sure. Everybody with too much money and no job plays poker these days…people like me and Ben Affleck."

"Okay, that sounds fun. Do we have an angle?" All the big poker rooms in town have spotters with a little talent whose only job is to make sure people like me aren't juicing the games. We could still cheat the old-fashioned way, though, playing partners and working the rest of the table as a team.

Adan laughed. "I'm dating a thug. We're just playing for fun, Domino." Cheating is fun, but I was secretly relieved. I'd be better off playing it straight. I'd be able to sit next to Adan, and it would make it a hell of a lot easier to slip him the potion.

"All right, sounds good. Pick me up at eight."

"You pick me up. I tend to drink a little when I play cards. And bring plenty of money-I'm pretty good."

"You shouldn't have told me that. You might have been able to hustle me."

"Now I've got you thinking about it. You're doomed."

"True. See you at eight."

"Later."

The Commerce Casino opened in 1983, about ten miles from downtown L.A. just off the Santa Ana Freeway. It had expanded a couple times, and now it was the largest card room in California. I've heard it's the largest in the world.

It's also one of the largest juice boxes in town. With over two hundred tables and all the cards and chips and probabilities dancing twenty-four hours a day, it's like a numerological ritual the size of an amusement park. Rashan didn't have a piece of it, though. If anyone was tapping it, they were much bigger fish than the L.A. outfits.

The City of Commerce itself isn't much to look at, and the casino sticks out like the proverbial twenty-dollar necklace on a two-dollar whore. It's supposed to be Vegas glitzy, I guess, but doesn't get all the way there. There are cheap red lights running up to the entrance to let you know you're on the right track. A garish statue in the lobby that might be a female sphinx is about the only thing suggestive of a theme.

I surrendered my car to the valet and looked at him long enough to make sure he'd be nice to it. We went in, and the floor manager I knew got us adjoining seats at a no-limit table with a four-hundred-dollar buy-in. I had an idea to show off a little, but he seemed to know Adan better than he knew me. He seemed to like him better, too.

I'm a decent player, even when I can't cheat. I'd been playing since I was a kid, so I'd seen enough hands to feel comfortable with most of the situations that come up. In most of those games I was using enough juice to know what the other players were holding, but even without the juice, I can usually tell if a guy is strong or weak, and I can usually figure out what he thinks I'm playing.

In this game, I just wanted to loosen up the table and make sure Adan was having fun. I ordered drinks and kept them coming often enough to set a fast pace.

For the first hour or so, I played just about any two cards and I played passively enough that everyone was eyeing me like a malfunctioning ATM. I handed out my four hundred pretty fast and bought in again. I did it with such good humor that everyone had a nice time.

When I felt like Adan had to be feeling the drinks, I switched gears. I was sitting to his right, and I started to put some pressure on him. I wanted him thinking about his cards and his chips more than what I was doing with the drinks I was passing him.

Finally a hand came along that allowed me to get heads-up with him. I drew jack-ten of hearts on the big blind, which meant Adan was the first to bet. He stacked off four ten-dollar chips. That kind of bet in first position told the rest of the table he was playing a premium hand, probably a big pair. The guy on the button had been playing almost as loose as I had, and he cold-called Adan's open. I did the same, adding thirty dollars to the big blind that was already on the table.

The flop came down nine, eight, deuce, and the last two were hearts. This was just about the perfect flop for me. I had an open-ended straight draw and a flush draw, which gave me better than even odds to get ahead of Adan's big pair by the river. I'd also be the first to act and Adan would be sure to raise any bet I made. That kind of action would likely be too much for our third wheel, and Adan and I would play the rest of the hand mano a mano.

I opened for seventy dollars, a little more than half the size of the pot. Adan could see the straight and flush possibilities as well as I could, and he wanted to take the pot down right there rather than give them a chance to hit. He pushed all his chips in. The guy to my right pretended to think about it a while and then threw in his cards.

Now it was on me to either call Adan's bet or fold. It really wasn't much of a decision. I was almost certainly behind in the hand-Adan's bets told me he had a pair, and I had nothing. But I'd win the hand if I caught a heart, queen or seven on either of the last two cards. The rest of the table couldn't know I had so many outs, though, and that gave me license to stare at Adan a while.

I probably stared at him longer than I had license to-long enough for the dealer to remind me a couple times that it was my action, and long enough for the cocktail waitress to deliver another round. Everyone else at the table was staring at Adan, too, trying to pick up something on him. He stared straight ahead, looking at nothing.

I leaned back in my chair, tipped the waitress, took the drinks off her tray and poured the vial I was palming into Adan's Scotch.

"Well," I said, "at least I've got a fresh drink," then I pushed my chips in and called Adan's raise. Adan let out a deep breath and everyone laughed, then nodded sagely when we turned over our cards. Adan was holding kings. The eight of spades came on the turn and the four of diamonds on the river, neither of which was any help to me.

"You should have folded," Adan said, smiling as he raked in my chips. I didn't mind, because everyone at the table wanted to tell me I misplayed the hand.

"I thought you were bluffing, you bully."

"I never bluff," he said, and winked. Then he lifted his drink to his lips…and froze. He frowned.

"Something wrong?" I asked. My blood pressure spiked a hell of a lot higher than it ever did during the poker hand. Did the potion have an odor? Honey hadn't said anything about it…

Then Adan laughed and took a drink. "No," he said, smiling at me over his glass, "I was just thinking that I'm getting drunk, but then I decided that was probably your plan."

I laughed, too. "Sure," I said, "that's obviously the only way I'm going to get my money back."

"You sure that's the only reason?" he said, and a boyish grin brought those dimples out.

"A player never shows her cards."

"I call," he said and drained his glass.

I woke up at about ten the next morning draped over Adan's chest. He was still asleep, and his soft breaths raised goose bumps on my skin.