Blind God's Bluff A Billy Fox Novel - By Richard Lee Byers Page 0,14

grizzly.

“Wotan,” he rumbled. He stood up to offer me his hand.

Since I had a hunch what was coming, I wasn’t eager to take it. But table image matters, and I didn’t want to look scared. I got up again, and we shook.

If you want to call it that. Actually, he did his best to crush my hand. Since I’d been expecting it, I was able to squeeze back, but it still hurt. And creeped me out a little more, if that was possible, when I felt that he even had hair growing on his palm.

He stared into my eyes as we strained to mangle one another. His eyes were a muddy, bloodshot brown.

“I hope you realize,” he said, “a champion can lose as much as his lord. Sometimes he loses more.”

“And sometimes,” I said, just like I actually knew anything about it, “he kicks everybody else’s ass.”

“True enough,” the Pharaoh said. “I saw it happen in Punjab, two hundred years ago. So why not let go of him, Wotan, and we’ll see if he can do as well.”

Wotan couldn’t resist one last bone-grinding squeeze, but after that, he turned me loose. I sat back down and slipped my hand under the table, where I could flex the throbbing ache out of it without being obvious.

We didn’t have a dealer. We players were taking care of that ourselves. Queen was on the button, and her complicated four-handed shuffle was like a juggling act.

I took a breath and checked my stack. Timon wasn’t the chip leader, but he’d finished the previous night in decent shape. I checked everyone else’s. Wotan had the most, and Gimble, the least.

Six is a short-handed game, and so more hands were playable. Still, I decided to be a rock for at least the first hour, while I watched how everyone else was playing.

In other words, I was trying to push everything that was strange or scary out of my mind and make this just another poker game. It seemed like the best way to keep from freaking out.

And there were moments when it almost felt like a normal game. We all shielded our hole cards with one hand as we lifted the corners with the other. Or, in Queen’s case, one of the others. The decks rustled when we shuffled; the Pharaoh managed without any problem, and I wondered just how feeble and fragile he really was. Leticia waved over the girl with the backward legs and ordered an apple martini, and while I had the chance, I asked for a ginger ale. Wotan fired up a pipe the shape and nearly the size of an alto sax and added its stinking smoke to the blue haze of the mummy’s cheroots.

And, off and on, the lords chatted. They talked poker, chess, archery, and horse racing, but also games and sports I’d never heard of. They gossiped about scandals I didn’t understand and told jokes I didn’t get. Still, it was table talk, and the tone and rhythm of it felt familiar, too.

Eventually I started to relax, at least a little. Whatever the tournament involved when the players weren’t at the table—and it would have been an understatement to say that I still didn’t have much of a handle on that—between midnight and dawn, it was cards. And cards, I understood.

I started playing more hands. A couple times, I opened from late position with garbage and managed to steal the blinds. I took a chance with suited connectors, made a flush on the river, and took down a nice pot from Leticia. Who revved up the bedroom eyes and teasing smile to congratulate me.

Fifteen minutes later, I caught pocket jacks and felt pretty good about it until Wotan raised from first position, and the Pharaoh came over the top. Then I mucked, and watched cards come out that would have given me a full house. I tried to swallow my annoyance and remember that folding had still been the right play.

See, just another night at the poker table. Until Wotan jumped up out of his chair.

In a way, that was normal, too. I’d seen gamblers get mad and even violent before. But I’d never seen anybody anywhere move as fast as Wotan circled the table. It was like watching a high-speed train hurtle down the track.

I tried to scramble out of my own seat, but I was too slow. Wotan would have caught me still sitting if he’d been after me. Fortunately, he wasn’t. He lunged past me,