TWENTY-EIGHT

Monk had to go to Atlantic City, and there were two reasons why.

He needed the money, true enough, but he needed something else just as much.

Another failure with selling the dome meant he had to come up with the means to keep making double payments until the damned thing finally sold, and the continuing disintegration of his mind meant he had to prove to himself he could still use it at the tables.

It was five o’clock in the afternoon when he got to Bally’s.

As he walked through the massive glass doors into the tumult of chimes, buzzers, and mind-numbing electronic musical ditties, he found his strides growing longer the closer he got to the poker room at the rear of the casino. The room wasn’t as noisy as the rest of the house, Monk saw when he got there. It wasn’t crowded—not like it would be in a few hours—and with luck, he’d make his score early and be back at the loft by midnight.

He wandered around the poker room, watching the action for a few minutes, looking for the best game to join. It was pretty much all Hold ’em these days—the movies and ESPN had made Texas Hold ’em the game du jour—and that was fine with Monk. It was the perfect game for a man with his skills.

He saw a table in the back. Three men and a woman. Had to be careful about women. They could play, for one thing, and they were by far the hardest to “pick.” He didn’t have the time for the five or six hours it would take to learn to read her. So he moved toward the table nearest the entrance. That one would do, he decided, after watching the six men around it. It was a pot limit table, for one—which meant semiserious players—and their faces were impassive, which was another good sign. Contrary to the stereotype, the very best poker players weren’t stone-faced. The top players confounded their opponents with movement, gave off so many tells that you couldn’t pick the one that counted. But these guys weren’t top players, and he’d have no problem reading them. Didn’t mean he’d win every hand, of course, but all a serious gambler needed was an edge.

He moved up to the table and took an empty chair. The dealer nodded as he sat down. “Good afternoon, gentlemen,” Monk said. “Good day to win a little money.”

The man to his left blew a lungful of cigar smoke across the green felt. “Shoulda been here earlier, pal,” he growled. “Coulda had a bunch of mine.”

“Chips, sir?” the dress-shirted dealer asked. Good, Monk thought. The dealer hadn’t made him as a player or he would have used the insider word “checks.”

Monk pulled a roll of hundred-dollar bills from his pocket, peeled away twenty of them, handed them across the table. “Two thousand. Mix ’em up.”

“Counting two thousand dollars,” the dealer said, as he counted the money, then pushed several stacks of red, yellow, and green chips—five, twenty, and twenty-five dollar chips—to Monk, before stuffing the cash into a slot in the table.

The man to his right glanced at his chips, a small stack for a pot limit game. “Hope you’re not planning to stay long.”

“Just long enough.”

God, he loved the lingo of gambling. From his buy-in for chips to the good-natured taunting of the players, it was all so damned good. He glanced around, listening for a moment to the raucous laughter, the brief but colorful language. Robert Frost had said it best. “Home is the place where, when you have to go there, they have to take you in.” Frost had to have been a player himself. At least Monk liked to think so.

But for Monk, the “juice” had started way before he actually got here.

It started back at the dome, when he took the credit cards out of his pocket and stuffed them away in the drawer of his desk. When he opened the secret compartment in his briefcase and removed the cash he was willing to wager, and when he slid his lucky gold-nugget ring on his pinky finger. The electric tingle got better and better on the plane and heightened even further when he walked through the casino doors. In the same way a new lover sets your whole body aflutter, the noise, the smoke, the stink of too many people in one room, all of it made Monk feel more alive.

It was the one place where he could be as irresponsible as an infant, the one place where the horrors of the world didn’t exist. In here, nobody was dying of cancer, nobody’d been dumped by a lover. In here nobody was losing his mind to dementia. Nobody was lying, except to himself or herself. They didn’t even have clocks in the casino. Noon was the same as three in the morning. Time was suspended, and your money was as good as anyone’s.

In a casino there were only two absolute truths.

The first was that winning or losing was less important than playing. It was more fun to win, of course it was, but in the end it was the thrill of putting it on the line, of letting it ride, that really mattered.

The second truth was that anything could happen in a casino, and a casino was one of the few places on earth where that was true. When a player drew three cards that turned his hand into a royal flush, it was as though the planet stopped spinning, and gravity disappeared. The player would stare at his hand for a moment, but his first thought wouldn’t be about the money. What mattered first was telling somebody, and the knowledge that he’d be telling people for the rest of his life. And that others would carry his tale. Gamblers everywhere would hear about the day the earth stood still. It was an achievable way to immortality. One day the player would die, but as long as people rode into town on gambler-busses, his name would live on forever.

And the beautiful part was that he might be anybody in this casino … sitting at any one of these tables.

He might even be Puller Monk.

Just the thought of it made Monk eager to start.

He tossed a red chip into the center of the green-felt table. The man to his left added two red chips. The dealer burned the top card off the deck and dealt two facedown cards to each of the players. Monk looked at his. Jack of hearts, nine of hearts.

The betting started to his left and went clockwise. There were several raises and Monk had to slide out two greens to keep himself in the game. He looked at his cards again. Several possibilities came to mind, although it was far too early to get excited. Hold ’em was a much quicker game than stud. Worst thing you could do was get caught up in the pace.

Again the dealer burned his top card, then dealt the flop, the three cards that now lay faceup on the table. A “rainbow,” Monk saw. Ace of spades, queen of hearts, nine of clubs. He thought about his possibilities. Flush. Straight. Straight flush. He grinned. He scratched his head, bounced a little in his chair. The guy to his right looked at him and shook his head.

Everyone was aggressive, and when the bet came around, Monk had to toss in two greens and two reds to stay. The dealer burned the top card again, then dealt the turn, the fourth up card, or fourth street. Six of diamonds. There goes the flush and the straight. Forty dollars to Monk, when the betting came around. He threw in two greens. “And ten,” he said.

“Big-timer,” the guy at the far right end said, as he threw his cards facedown on the table. Two others folded but didn’t bother to comment. Three left, three to beat. The dealer burned his top card before dealing the river, the last card. A four of diamonds.

Monk looked at the board and began to identify the “nuts,” the best possible hand that could be made with the faceup cards on the table.

Anybody holding two aces was the automatic winner. Nobody could beat three aces. Anybody who had a pair of any other card in the flop would beat his pair. The man to his immediate right called the twenty dollars to him and bumped another ten. Thirty dollars for Monk to stay. He didn’t like the feel of it. He tossed his cards on the table, facedown. The hand played out and went to the man on the right with three nines.

Three hours passed in a blink. Winning and losing, down maybe eight hundred, nothing to get worried about. Fidgeting, groaning, scratching. Bluffing, losing, grimacing, bluffing even more. The others really getting tired of it.

And finally getting the hand he’d been waiting for.

His first two cards were both fives, a spade and a diamond. The flop gave him the two more he needed. “Yes!” he yelped.

The guy to his right snorted. “You ever get a hand you don’t like?”

Monk laughed far too loudly as he threw in twenty dollars. By now they were all convinced he was nothing more than a “fish” ready to be gutted. Three bumps later, the dealer dealt the turn. Jack of diamonds to add to the diamond on the board now, with the nine. Monk still liked his quad fives, and bet them hard. This time there were four raises before it got back to him. He bumped it another twenty. Everybody stayed.

The river turned up the eight of diamonds. Monk stared at it, and did the nuts. His fives beat anything but a royal flush and a straight flush. He grinned even more broadly. The two guys to his far right glared at him.

“Goddammit,” the first one said. “I just don’t know about you.”

“Only costs a few bucks to learn.”

“Phooey!” The guy threw in. His seatmate did the same.

Now there were five.

The betting went around the table until there were only two players. Monk and the guy sitting next to him on the right. Monk looked at his chips. Not many left, but the pile in the center was a beautiful thing to see.

And it got bigger as they faced off, each of them raising, trying to run the other out of the game.

The last bet was to Monk. To call, he had to throw in all but one of his green chips. He looked at his opponent. He’d been watching the guy for hours, but hadn’t seen any sort of tell, not one he could rely on anyway. Not for this kind of money.

“To you, sir,” the dealer said to Monk.

He nodded, but never took his eyes off his opponent. And that’s when he saw it. The guy had bags under his eyes, and one of them had twitched. There it was again. Almost unnoticeable, but definitely there. He was bluffing. He didn’t have the straight flush.

“I’ll have to see ’em,” he told Baggy Eyes.

“You know the price.”

Monk tossed three green chips onto the pile.

Baggy Eyes laughed as he laid down his cards. Diamonds, both of them. Seven and ten. Monk felt the blood run out of his face.

“Jack high,” the guy said. “All red, all in a row.”

“Fuck,” Monk said quietly. He rose from his chair, slid his last chip to the dealer, and walked away.