Read Story: SEASON 1 EPISODE 13

Day One began to unfold.

Day One, as Jack mentally titled the first day of the five-day caper, began with a casual stroll through the Green Wheel at two in the afternoon. He and Sally had had to wait a long, tense week before putting the operation into action, long enough for the new cards to hit the tables.

And, he saw with vicious satisfaction, they’d hit.

Sally wouldn’t show up ’til four and they wouldn’t be seen together for the next five crucial days. The stake totaled three thousand dollars, fifteen hundred apiece. It had been amassed by Sally through pure sweat — arduous fucking at fifty dollars a crack. But it was enough, because they had an edge over the casino to put it mildly.

They knew every card coming off the deck, plus the dealer’s hole card.

After five long years, Jack had the casino people he hated so deeply by their rich balls, and he wouldn’t let go until they screamed.

But one way or the other, they had to get out fast after five days, because his cunning instincts told him this was the maximum they could push their luck before the casino got too suspicious. And so he’d calculated that they could take a maximum of around twenty thousand a day between he and Sally, ten grand apiece. His biggest problem was greed. Once you set up a gold mine like the Green Wheel, it was tough to walk away from it. He had a living dream, a professional gambler’s mortal lock on a vast amount of ready cash, and the temptation to suck the casino dry was hot and furious in his blood. But then he reminded himself of that ride into the desert.

His heart raced and his palms itched as he watched the action at one table. He started reading the cards mentally as the dealer spewed them off the deck. Jack, seven, nine, three, king, four — the dealer had a fucking four in the hole! God, he was going to shove it up their ass, so far their ears wiggled in agony.

The marks were very, very difficult to detect. He and Sally had spent hour after hour, day after day, week after week, marking these cards laboriously and perfectly. Any card that had the slightest chance of being detected was thrown out along with the whole deck. They’d made a lot of mistakes at first, and it was the grueling shits to throw all that hard work away, but his motto was Safety First.

And in the grinding process of marking they’d learned to read the subtle, microscopic marks in a flash, a mere glance.

Now Jack glanced at his watch — three minutes to two. He could start right now, but he had a timetable beginning at two sharp and he was going to keep it. He watched the action, his muscles keening with tension, his blood singing, his gambler’s heart on fire.

Ah, Jesus, he’d waited a long time for this juicy hot vengeance, this fabulous ripoff. He’d dreamed of it night after night when he was in the hospital with his battered ribs and face, still tasting blood in his mouth. Now it was his turn to make these bastards bleed, and oh, would these cold-hearted sons of bitches bleed. Not red but green, lovely green. His eyes narrowed as he searched the throne at the center of the pit. It was empty. Lane sometimes didn’t come on ’til three or four, depending on the action.

It was two o’clock.

He sat in a vacant seat and took out two hundred, getting twenty-dollar chips. He feverishly waited to start in with fifty or hundred dollar chips, but slow and easy does it, nothing flashy, a gradual buildup. That was the mark of the consistently lucky winner — gradual.

On the first hand he had sixteen, the dealer twenty. He read the top card — a bust. He shrugged. He won the next four in a row, purposely losing the fifth so as not to push it. That’s how he’d do it, by degrees. Win some, lose some — win the big ones, lose the small ones, suck them in. He drank scotch on the rocks as he played, to steady his nerves. No gulping, just a constant sipping. By four o’clock he’d moved up to fifty-dollar chips and was three thousand ahead. Glancing around, he spotted Sally at a far table. She met his eyes very briefly and looked away. He wasn’t the slightest bit worried about her part in it. She had nerves of ice, better than his by far. There was only one hot streak in Sally’s cold blood and that was for him and him alone.

At five, Lane loomed up behind the dealer. Jack lit a cigarette, the scotch steadying his fingers. The sonofabitch looked exactly as he did five years ago, cold-eyed, grim, forbidding. The manager watched the play for a few minutes, but Jack wasn’t bothered. It was standard routine to move around the tables and to linger at the ones where someone was winning big.

Then he became aware it wasn’t the action Lane was watching. It was him. The wild urge to get up and leave hammered in his heart but he knew that was the dumbest thing he could do. Shit, he couldn’t recognize him after all these years, not after the plastic surgery, not after the hundreds of dealers he’d hired and fired. No way.

Then why was he staring at him?

Jack snapped his fingers and a cocktail waitress appeared. He ordered a double. He had an easy win on the next round and deliberately dropped two hundred. He dropped another two hundred, and he could sense the relief in Lane. That was the trouble with these pricks, they acted as though every cent they lost came out of their own pockets instead of the big boys’.

But still Lane watched him.

Jack lit another cigarette and his fingers trembled ever so slightly. Fear was beginning to creep up his stomach, like an icy mountain climber scaling a wall. Fuck that grim-eyed bastard, he was going to take this one before his eyes, for four hundred.

And he did.

His confidence began to sweep back along with the scotch glowing in his nerves. What the fuck was he anyway, a man or a rabbit? Let the cocksucker stare at him all night, he didn’t care. So he was a heavy winner, so what? So he looked familiar, so what? Up his chilling ass, that’s what.

And still Lane watched him.

And ten Jack did what he should have done. Ten minutes seemed like ten nerve-racking million years ago.

He looked Lane squarely back in the eye. Five seconds. Ten seconds. Twelve seconds.

And Lane turned away.