Headed for Trouble - By Suzanne Brockmann Page 0,26

in a town that shut down and went to bed at 2030 every night, was about as nasty as Jenk had ever seen.

It did, however, include the essentials: a bathroom, a shower, beds to sleep in, an air conditioner that wheezed and chugged as it cooled down the room, a deck of cards, and a mini-fridge filled with beer.

So okay, the cards were Jenk’s and the mini-fridge was Gillman’s—one of those insulated coolers you could carry in your truck and plug in when you reached your destination.

Izzy turned to Jenk, injury in his voice and on his face. “You didn’t hear me strapping on the bullshit meter when Fishboy here was telling his lesbian supermodels-in-the-airport story, did you?”

Jenk had just been dealt three aces—his best hand all night. There was actually a chance he’d win back the money he’d lost over the past few hours. “Let’s just play cards.”

Now Izzy’s disgusted exhale was for Jenk.

Jay Lopez, as usual, tried to restore harmony. “So she’s beautiful and she comes up to you, and says …?”

“I need a huge favor. And I’m thinking, Well, it’s your lucky night, because I’ve got a huge favor,” Izzy told them. “Only I managed to not say that. Probably because she was stupifyingly beautiful. I think what I ended up saying was Durh …? And I probably enhanced it with a little drool, you know, on my chin.”

Izzy took two cards from Lopez, dealing him two new ones. Danny Gillman took only one—which meant he either had a great hand or he was bluffing.

Jenk stared at him, willing him to do it. Scratch his chin with the back of his hand. Gillman did it every time he bluffed—it was the most obvious tell in the history of mankind.

But Gillman didn’t move, because at the start of the game, Izzy Zanella had let it slip that Gillman had a tell.

In true Izzy fashion, he’d refused to share with Gillman exactly what that tell was. And no one else was going to let on that they knew, so Gillman had sat nearly stone-still for the entire game, terrified that, by moving, he’d subconsciously and inadvertently activate his tell.

He was stone-still, that is, except when Izzy pissed him off. Or when he tried to piss off Izzy in return.

Of course, for the first time in all their years of poker playing, Gillman was winning. Big.

“I’m doomed.” Tony Vlachic, aka Chickie, aka the New Guy, didn’t have a tell. He simply announced whenever his hand sucked. This was his first time playing poker with them, and he’d good-naturedly put up with all of their crap. He had a Pepsi in front of him because they wouldn’t let him have a beer, insisting he was too young.

“Maybe next year, when you turn thirteen,” Izzy had told him.

Now Chick took another slug of his soda and traded the limit—three cards.

“She goes, I told my brother you were my boyfriend. Will you help me fool him into thinking we’ve been together for a while?” Izzy scooped up Jenk’s two discards and gave him two replacements to go with his trio of aces and …

A four and a seven, both hearts. Crap. Jenk kept his face carefully blank as Izzy traded three of his own cards for three new ones.

“And that, boys and girls,” Izzy continued with his story, “was when she kissed me.”

“Yeah, right,” Gillman scoffed.

“She did,” Izzy countered. “Chickie was there. Tell ’em, Chick.”

Tony looked up from frowning at his no doubt unbelievably crappy hand. “She definitely kissed him,” he verified. “For close to three minutes, without coming up for air.”

“And when she finally does surface,” Izzy said, “she goes, Do you have a car, because I really need a ride. So I tell her, yeah, I got a truck, is that okay? And she’s like, You really don’t mind? And something’s up—I mean, besides the obvious—because she’s got tears in her eyes and she’s kind of shaking, and that was when I knew. I mean, I’m a good kisser, but … So we go out to my truck, and she tells me she’s gay, that her parents sent her to this rehablike place to make her straight, and she had to pretend she was ‘cured’ in order to get out. The brother follows her around, making it impossible for her to see her girlfriend, who, by the way, is also gorgeous. Long story short, I drove them both to Vegas. I get email from them every now and then. But Maddy,