The gray-haired woman in the flowered headscarf turned up her collar against the late October chill and entered the park. Under skies that threatened an unseasonably early snowfall, the place was deserted.
In the summer, the park would be an oasis, crowded with college students throwing Frisbees, kids playing touch football, moms pushing strollers, families picnicking on blankets spread out beneath the willows, dogs on leashes or running free.
Today, though, the grass was brown, the branches of the trees were bare, and there wasn’t a soul to be seen.
Hands buried in the pockets of her parka, the woman in the headscarf strolled the paths, wondering if she was wasting her time. It was Sunday—there was a rom-com she wanted to see on HBO. If it hadn’t been for Romo’s call, she could be home in her warm apartment with a glass of wine and the remote, waiting for Mei Ting to deliver wonton soup and an order of mu shu pork.
But instead, here she was, trembling in the cold despite her thick down jacket.
In the distance, at the far end of the park, stood a line of stone chess tables, a long stone bench on the side away from her, and an individual metal chair facing each table on her side. A solitary figure occupied one of the benches, huddled within a tan overcoat.
The overcoat was camel hair, she saw as she drew closer, and the man wearing it was old, probably in his late seventies. No chess pieces were set out on the table’s stone squares. Instead, there was an odd wooden board studded with hundreds of tiny holes that snaked across it in the shape of the number “29.” From four holes at the top-left end of the “2,” four plastic pegs—two red and two blue—protruded. The old man hunched over the board, shuffling a deck of worn playing cards with strong hands chapped red by the cold.
“Is that a cribbage board?” the woman said as she approached, by way of greeting.
A smile blossomed on the old man’s face. “It is, indeed. You play?”
“My father tried to teach me, when I was a little girl.”
“Navy man?”
“Why do you ask?”
“It’s a Navy game. At least it used to be.”
“Well, actually, he was in the Navy.”
“He see any action?”
“He was at Leyte Gulf, on the Princeton. He must have told me the story a thousand times.” She shook off the memory and changed the subject. “Why’s the board shaped like that?”
“Twenty-nine points,” he said, “is what you call a perfect hand, the most you can score. If you’re holding three fives and the jack of the other suit, and then the up card is the fourth five, you got sixteen points worth of fifteens, twelve for the four-of-a-kind fives, and one point for the matching jack. Sixteen plus twelve plus one is twenty-nine, a perfect hand.”
“Up card,” she repeated. “Fifteens. The matching jack.”
“I thought you said your dad taught you to play?”
She grinned. “He tried to teach me. I must have been nine or ten, and I couldn’t keep all the rules straight. He finally gave up, and we switched to Go Fish.”
“You got older, though,” the man said, laying down his pack of cards and indicating the metal chair across from him. “How about we see if it makes more sense now?”
She considered the invitation. “I’m still not much of a game player,” she said at last. “I don’t think I’d be worth your while.”
“Sit down. It’s not like I got a line of people waiting their turn.”
The woman shrugged and settled onto the chair. The metal seat was frigid, and the chill burned through the fabric of her jeans, making her shiver.
“Arturo,” the old man said, holding out a hand.
The woman took her own right hand from her pocket. She wasn’t wearing a glove. “Christine,” she said.
They shook.
Arturo scooped up the deck of cards and gave it a quick shuffle, then set it face down between them.
“I remember this,” Christine said. “We cut for deal.” She lifted half the pack and turned it over, revealing the ace of clubs. “Rats.” She frowned. “Aces are low in cribbage, right?”
“Low in the play,” Arturo said, cutting the remaining cards in half and showing the seven of diamonds, “but high in the cut. Your deal.”
“Six cards each?”
“Your dad taught you more than you think,” the old man confirmed. “We each keep four and throw two, face down, into the crib.”
“And the dealer counts the crib after we play out the hand,” Christine said.
“Look at you,” the old man said, “you’re practically an expert.”
She shuffled the cards and dealt them out, picked up her six and studied them. “An expert with no idea what to do now,” she said.
For the next few minutes, Arturo reminded her of the game’s arcane rules: pairs and combinations of cards adding up to fifteen worth two points each, runs and double runs and triple runs and flushes, a lopsided win is a skunk, and an embarrassingly lopsided win is a double skunk.
“You ready to give it a shot?” he asked at last.
She dropped two of her cards face down on the stone table, and he added two of his own six to the crib.
“You dealt,” he told her, “so I play first. Twos through tens are worth their face value, aces are ones, jacks and queens and kings are tens, and we can’t go higher than thirty-one.” He placed one of his four remaining cards face up on the table. Seven of hearts. “Seven,” he said.
She immediately laid down the eight of spades. “That’s fifteen for two, right?” she said.
“You draw first blood.” He nodded and waited for her to peg her two points before dropping a nine beside his seven. “Fifteen and nine is twenty-four,” he said, “and seven-eight-nine is a run of three.” He pegged the points.
“Gotcha,” she said, slapping down a six. “That’s a run of four for four points, and we’re at thirty.”
“Go,” he said, and she dropped her next-to-last card, an ace. “Thirty-one for another two!”
“You’re hustlin’ me,” Arturo said solemnly, but the twinkle in his eyes told her he wasn’t serious. “I’m glad we’re not playin’ for money.”
The game went on: shuffling, dealing, laying down cards one by one, counting their hands and cribs, pegging their points, advancing their pegs around the curves of the board, passing the double-skunk indicator where the tail of the “2” met the tail of the “9.”
“My father taught me the basics,” Christine said. “But I remember thinking it was all about the luck of the draw. I didn’t have enough patience to learn the strategy.”
“It’s a thinking man’s game,” Arturo murmured. Then, realizing his mistake, he added, “Or woman’s. You’re, what, fifty-eight, fifty-nine?”
“I wish,” Christine said. “I’m sixty-four.”
“Retired?”
She rearranged her cards, debating which to throw into the old man’s crib, finally made her decision, and set her two on top of the two he’d already discarded. “Not yet. Getting ready, though. Counting the days.”
“What line are you in?”
“I guess you could call me a troubleshooter. Somebody has a problem, they contract me to solve it for them.” The count was at twenty-six, and she laid down a five and pegged two points for the thirty-one. “I remember when they wanted style, finesse. Now it’s all about a quick resolution and on to the next one.”
Arturo played his final card and pegged one for last. “That’s some hand,” he said, admiring her trip fives and jack of spades. “Goes real nice with the queen of spades up.”
“I was praying for the five of spades.” She sighed. “I’d have had a perfect hand. How many times would you say you’ve had one?”
“Never,” he said. “I been playing sixty years, and I never even seen a perfect hand, not once.”
“Sixty years,” Christine said. “So you’re about seventy, right? Retired?”
“You trying to butter me up? I’m seventy-six. I play cribbage on the weekends I can find a game, but I still go into the office three, four days a week.”
“Let me see,” Christine said, examining her cards. “Each of my fives makes fifteen matched with my jack and another fifteen with the queen. So that’s fifteen-two, fifteen-four, fifteen-six with the jack, and fifteen-eight, fifteen-ten, fifteen-twelve with the queen, and then two, four, six more for the three-of-a-kind fives. Total of eighteen.” She raised her back peg from the board and moved it eighteen holes forward, passing Arturo’s front peg by two. “I’m ahead!”
“Muggins,” the old man said.
“Excuse me?”
“Muggins,” he repeated. “It means you missed some points.”
“I did? Where?”
“The three fives,” he said, nodding at her cards.
“I counted them.”
“You counted each of them individually with your jack and each of them individually with the queen, and you counted the three of them together as trip fives, but—”
“Oh, how silly,” she cried. “Five and five and five is another fifteen! That’s two more points.”
“Plus one for the matching jack.”
“The—”
“You have the jack of spades,” he reminded her patiently. “And the up card is the queen of spades. You get a point when your jack matches the suit of the up card.”
“So that’s three I missed,” she pouted. “And, since I missed them, I don’t get to peg them, do I?”
“Well, technically, I get to peg them, since you missed them and I called muggins. Which would put me back in the lead. But you’re just learning, so go ahead and take them.”
“You’re sweet,” she said, and pegged the three extra points. “Thank you.”
He reached to gather up the cards, but she put out a hand and stopped him. “Sweet but just a little bit of a con man,” she said. “I haven’t pegged my crib yet.”
He grinned sheepishly and waited while she flipped over the four crib cards and pegged two more points for a pair of queens.
As he squared the deck and shuffled, she asked, “What do you do?”
“My three, four days in the office?” Arturo said. “I’m in commodities. We figure out what the market wants, and we provide it. But I’m getting tired of it. The competition’s gotten younger, more cut throat. Used to be there were standards, rules, a code of ethics, you know what I mean? Now it’s all about the bottom line.”
The two of them traded pleasantries as the game continued for several more hands. Christine was still two points ahead as they approached the finish line. But it was her deal, her crib, which meant Arturo got to count first, and his double run of three gave him exactly what he needed to peg out and win the game.
“I told you,” Christine said, shoving her hands back in her pockets, scowling at the board. “I’m no good.”
Arturo pursed his lips. “Not good enough,” he said. “Not yet. But you could be. You got good card sense. I think you could learn.”
“At my age?” Christine shook off the suggestion. “No chance. You know what they say about old dogs.”
“I know what they say,” Arturo told her, “but I disagree. You can teach an old dog new tricks. It just takes longer, and the old dog’s gotta be patient. Anyway, you’re not so old. You want to try again?”
Christine looked up at the sky, considering the question. “Maybe another time,” she said at last. “I want to get indoors before the snow starts.”
“I’m here pretty much every Saturday and Sunday. You should come back sometime.”
“I might just do that,” Christine said. “I expect there’s a lot you could teach me.”
“About cribbage,” Arturo said.
“What else are we talking about?”
The two of them eyed each other carefully.
Arturo smiled. “You got the patience, young lady, I got nothin’ but time.”
* * * *
Christine pulled a phone bill and a couple of advertising circulars from the metal mailbox in the lobby and took the elevator up to the fourth floor. She unlocked the door to her apartment and went in, relocked the door behind her and engaged the security chain.
It was a small place, the apartment—a studio, with a minifridge meant for a college dorm room, and a hot plate, a bed, a kitchen table and chair, an old armchair she’d rescued from the curb, a TV perched on a chest of drawers, a bathroom with a stall shower, one narrow closet—but it was home.
She eased the Glock from the right-hand pocket of her parka and unloaded it, stored the 9mm FMJ shells in their box in the top dresser drawer, poured herself a glass of merlot, and settled into her armchair.
The wine took off some of the chill.
The decision she’d made back there at the park—the decision not to take the old man out, like Romo had sent her to do—was crazy. She wasn’t sure why—for the first time in more years than she could remember—she’d failed to carry out an assignment.
She liked the old man. That was the only answer she could think of.
And maybe, she thought, maybe her dad would be pleased at the idea of her learning how to play cribbage after all these years.
Arturo seemed honestly willing to teach her.
Except she doubted either one of them would have the time. Once Romo heard what she’d done—what she’d failed to do—he’d send someone else after the both of them.
Someone younger, stronger, quicker.
But maybe there was one advantage to getting older. Christine had been around long enough, she knew what cards to play and when and how to play them. And while Arturo was teaching her cribbage, maybe there were a few things she could teach the old don in return.
She retrieved the bullets from the dresser drawer and reloaded the Glock.
Could be they’d get skunked.
Probably, she figured, they would.
But it would be interesting to see how many points they could put on the board before they reached the end of the game.
Josh Pachter is an author, editor, and translator: his short stories appear regularly in Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine and other magazines and anthologies, he edited The Misadventures of Nero Wolfe (Mysterious Press, 2020) and co-edited The Further Misadventures of Ellery Queen (Wildside Press, 2020), and he has translated stories by Dutch, Flemish, Afrikaans, Spanish, Italian, Romanian, and Chinese authors for EQMM’s “Passport to Crime” department. Josh also teaches at Northern Virginia Community College and hosts the quarterly Northern Virginia Noir at the Bar reading series. www.joshpachter.com