The Odds - Jeff Strand Page 0,43
supposed to give you the clue.”
“Yeah, because he made us battle with butcher knives and meat cleavers! Was that part of the game?”
“I’m not answering that type of question.”
“Does what happened invalidate this round?”
“I wish it did,” said Rick.
“So I’m going to have a coke dealer coming after me now?”
“You should go home and get some sleep.”
“Are you out of your mind? You think I’m going to go home and go back to bed as if nothing happened? What the hell’s the matter with you? For all I know, the cops are on their way to my house right now.”
“They aren’t.”
“Oh, sure, you’re a guy I can trust!”
“I’ve never lied to you,” said Rick. “I’ve withheld information as part of the game but I haven’t lied. And because I can tell you’re extremely emotional right now, I’m going to assure you that you can go home, take a relaxing shower, and get some sleep.”
“Why would I believe you?” asked Ethan. “Seriously, Rick, why would I believe you?”
“Don’t do anything stupid. I’ll call you before you get home.”
Rick called The Claw Man again. “What?” his boss asked, sounding annoyed.
“Ethan’s a flight risk,” said Rick. “I think he’s going to go home, pick up his family, and flee. Or else he’ll call the police. We have a completely unstable situation happening right now.”
The Claw Man sighed. “All right. End it.”
“You mean this challenge?”
“You know perfectly well what I mean. End his game. Terminate him.”
“No,” said Rick. “If we’re going to be so damn concerned with the integrity of the game, we can’t kill him just because of what I think he’s going to do. He hasn’t done it yet. By the guidelines we’ve established, he doesn’t get penalized until he breaks the rules.”
“You just said we have a completely unstable situation.”
“We do. So we need to stabilize it. We have to fix it, not end his game.”
“You’re acting like you’ll get executed if he loses.”
“I’m not concerned with whether my player wins or loses,” said Rick. “I’m concerned with what’s fair. I’d rather figure out a way to stop him from violating the rules than have to clean it up later, or kill him prematurely.”
The Claw Man sighed again, longer and louder this time. “It sounds to me like you made a bad choice with your player.”
“I disagree. I made a bad choice with the crackhead. If I’d been able to do a full psychological profile on him before I gave him a hundred bucks to give Ethan an address, I’d have chosen somebody different.”
“How are you proposing we course-correct this?”
“The players don’t know how the points work, right? None of them have been told.”
“Correct.”
“So we tweak the rules. We tell Ethan that he can give up a point in exchange for bypassing a failed challenge. The whole idea of the briefcase filled with cocaine gets thrown out.”
“Do you think that will be enough to keep him in line?” The Claw Man asked.
“I’ll make sure it is.”
“We’d have to offer that option to the other players, too.”
“Great! What’s wrong with that? I think it’s a solid addition to the rules. Shouldn’t we try to keep strong players in the game longer?” asked Rick.
“See, now this is where I’m starting to question your motive. Ethan wussed out on the $100,000 broken arm challenge. He failed to save the woman in the grave. So you’re not going to convince me that we’d be losing an all-star player here.”
“That’s a fair comment,” said Rick. “That’s totally fair. But isn’t it better to keep players rather than lose them? We’re not lowering the stakes, technically, we’re just not letting one moment of bad luck destroy their chances. And we wouldn’t let them do it more than once. So if you, say, had three points, you couldn’t get a free pass on three different challenges. I honestly think that if this idea had come up in the planning stage, everybody would’ve been on board with it.”
Gavin walked over to the phone. “Hey, Claw Man, it’s Gavin. I’ll say that I agree with Rick. It’s not a bad idea.”
They both looked over at Butch.
“Yeah, hey, it’s Butch. I like the idea, too.”
“Well,” said The Claw Man, “your consensus doesn’t mean much to me since you’re all on Team Ethan. We do it for him, we have to do it for everybody. Harry in Tampa just got shot four times. How is this new rule fair to Harry?”
“He’s not dead yet,” said Rick. “He can use a point on