Bea’s face crinkled with unshed tears and the stoicism of a woman who’d made hard choices and had to live with them.
“I just wish you’d had a chance to say good-bye to your grandmother before she died.”
“Well, I didn’t.” Poppy’s words were harsher than she meant, but she had to get out of there. She was going to be late for the poker game—and she was going to ruin her make-up.
“Are you at least going to do something with her ashes?” Bea asked. “It’s weird, Poppy, leaving them up there like some kind of shrine. What are you waiting for?”
“I have one little thing I need to do first,” Poppy promised. She forced herself to smile brightly as she grabbed her gym bag, once again resorting to half-truths. “Grandma Jean invested some money before she died—did I tell you that? I’m working with the financial broker right now to get the returns she’s owed. Then I can give her a proper sendoff.”
Bea lifted a brow, but she busied herself scooping up Jenny and clearing away Poppy’s make-up. “No. You never mentioned it. How much did she invest?”
“About eighty thousand dollars.” Poppy slipped on a pair of tennis shoes and ignored the way Bea’s eyes grew wide.
“Holy crap, Poppy. You’re serious?”
“She was a wily one, Grandma Jean,” Poppy agreed. “I’m guessing most of it came from all those bridge games she played down at the senior’s center. She went there for, what? Twenty years? And she almost never lost. That’ll add up after a while.”
“You know she cheated, right?” Bea asked.
Poppy laughed. “Everyone knew she cheated. But no one cared because it was worth it to have the privilege of playing with her.”
“’It’s not right to steal, but if you do, make sure no one can fault you for your technique’,” Bea said, quoting Poppy’s maternal grandparent.
“‘And you give it back if it turns out they need it more than you’,” Poppy added. Even if it meant losing two years of your life.
“Growing up with that woman was a trial.”
“Maybe. But it was also never dull.” Poppy waggled her fingers at Jenny. “You listen to your mommy, okay? Go to bed without a fight for once. And don’t wait up, Bea. It’ll be a late night.”
“Buh-bye, Pop,” Jenny said, waving good-bye by opening and closing her fist as quickly as she could. It was all the sendoff Poppy needed. She would see this job through to the end, and then she was out of it for good. Just like Bea wanted.
Yeah right.
Poppy had been to one or two strip clubs in her lifetime.
It wasn’t a fact that filled her with pride, and she would have been thrilled to say she never gave in to the catcalls of a raucous crowd and hopped up on stage for her turn at the pole. But her life was nothing if not a warning to all the wayward youth of the world.
Finish high school. Get a real job. And for God’s sake, leave your pants on.
“Bouncing Booty.” Todd craned his neck to read the marquee, which boasted not just one but two neon signs flashing the surprisingly mobile rear-end of a woman bent at the waist. “This place seems nice.”
She wished he were kidding. “It does the trick,” she offered, moving out of the way so he didn’t get any funny ideas about the bounciness of the booty nearest him at the moment. Thank goodness for chasteberries—if they didn’t finish this soon, she’d have to suggest an increase in his wheatgrass regimen. “But we have to go in the back door. They run the game out of one of the storerooms. You know, to keep things quiet.”
It didn’t really make sense to her—if
she
was going to run an illegal poker game, she’d do it somewhere no one suspected, like a bingo hall or a roller-skating rink or somewhere else with windows and clearly marked exits. But Asprey had insisted this was the most authentic place. Also, he claimed to know a guy who could get them in for cheap.
She rapped the secret knock, Morse code for booty, on the back door, another of Asprey’s many ideas for making the night feel more authentic. A rough-looking cook with a greasy apron and even greasier face opened the door. As she stepped through, his gaze wandered over every inch of her like she was a rack of lamb he was about to hack into tiny pieces and roast.
The cook thumbed over his shoulder to a door near the far end of the kitchen. It was shut, but there was a hole punched at about face level. “It’s through there. You sure you ain’t here to take a turn on the stage, honey?”
Poppy smiled sweetly and tugged on Todd, moving in the direction of the poker game. “Isn’t that nice, doll? He thinks I could be a dancer.”
They picked their way carefully past fallen, slimy pieces of lettuce. While the cleaning left a little to be desired, the total effect worked. In fact, the closer they got to the door, the less interested in her Todd got. He was like a kid dragging an unwilling parent to see Santa Claus or the Easter Bunny—eager and excited and clueless that none of it was real.
This time, he took the reins, tapping on the door in the same ridiculously long and drawn out booty beat from before.
“Enter.”
They did.
The space they’d rented for the evening was little more than a pantry off the kitchen. Windowless and small, it had been cleared of the metal shelves and food, but the unmistakable scent of rotting produce still filled the air. If they were going for authentic backroom gaming according to every bad movie ever made, which seemed about right, they’d definitely hit their mark.
The room swirled with a smoky haze that made it difficult to draw a deep breath and obscured the already dim lighting from a single overhead bulb. A banged-up poker table stood in one corner; the other held an old meat counter covered with a broken television set, a handful of gold jewelry, and various dusty knickknacks that might have come from either a 1960s kitchen or a modern-day torture chamber.
About ten bottles of alcohol sat in a red crate near the door, and there were also a few cardboard boxes clearly labeled with a biohazard sign. Overall, the effect was one of absolute depravity—the kind of place only the bravest soul would take a black light to. Poppy almost felt home again.
“Rufio!” she cried warmly, offering Asprey her arms. He rose smoothly, taking her hands and planting a kiss on either cheek. She saw his eyes flick quickly over her—she wore a tiny silver dress this time—before settling on her face.
Good boy.
“Thank you for squeezing us into your game. It means a lot to us.”
“There is always a place for you.” Asprey ignored the us part of the comment and zeroed in entirely on her. She’d have been lying if she said the words didn’t make her feel surprisingly buoyant and tingly.
She forced herself to look away and examine the room’s inhabitants. The mobster persona wasn’t that much of a stretch for Graff, who pretty much played his normal surly self, though with a slightly more sinister air.
There were two other men there, and Poppy instantly approved. Asprey had promised he had a few friends from college who would unquestioningly follow him through the pits of hell and into any illicit activity in which breaking the law played a primary part. If Poppy had her doubts, she released them now. The two men he’d recruited were youngish, average guys who looked like they lived off trust funds, the kind of guys sinister gangsters might invite to a friendly game of poker in order to fleece the wool from off their backs.
She met Asprey’s eye, nodding just once to note her approval. This might actually work.
Then she saw Todd, and doubt settled firmly in the pit of her stomach.
She knew quite a bit about this man—much more than she cared to, really. He seemed to lack the basic understanding of how lips could be put together to share a kiss that curled a woman’s toes. He rarely talked about work but loved to mention money—especially how much he had of it and what famous people he’d encountered along the path to riches. His huge house reeked of ecologically destructive hardwoods, and mirrors seemed to appear on every other wall, but there were no indications that his house was anything approaching a home. And unless you knew what he’d done to people like her grandmother, he seemed like every other bland, middle aged man who knew finance but lacked intelligence or skills of any other kind.
But Todd at a poker table with two supposedly notorious mobsters? He looked like he knew more about this than the rest of them combined.
“Thank you,” he said coolly, taking Asprey’s hand and giving it a firm shake. “As Natalie says, it was generous of you to allow me in. I take it you men are regulars here?”
“It’s no problem,” Asprey returned, not the least bit ruffled. “We love new faces, don’t we, Drago? Please, let’s make the introductions.”
“I’d rather we didn’t, if you don’t mind.” Todd took the seat offered to him—to the right of Graff, a spot that had been prearranged so Graff could keep an eye on the older man’s movements. “I believe the less we know about one another, the better. Am I right, gentlemen?”
Asprey’s two friends nodded and murmured noncommittal responses, both of them looking a little wide-eyed at the way Todd appraised the pair of them. Poppy strove to make up for his rudeness, smiling warmly and offering her hand.
“Are you playing, Natalie, or are you just going to stand there and get in the way?” Todd interrupted.
Startled, she looked to Graff. Since he was the one rigging the deck to make sure Todd won, it was up to him whether or not she needed to add to the numbers at the table. He shook his head briefly.
“Little old me?” she asked, adding a throaty laugh and tossing her hair. “You men are far too much for me to handle on my own. I’ll be the good luck charm—and you let me know if one of you gets thirsty.”
“Why don’t you sit by me, gorgeous,” one of the extra players said, patting the folding chair next to him. The way he waggled his eyebrows at her indicated he meant no harm. “I always appreciate a chance to get lucky.”
She peeked through lowered eyelashes to see if Todd cared whether or not she abandoned him to the game, but she might as well have ceased to exist, for all he noticed. He’d even pulled out a pair of dark sunglasses and was testing the light.
“Thanks,” Poppy said gratefully. She took the seat, her back to the wall so she could at least
see
the door, as Graff gruffly called out the stakes.
“We’ll keep this simple, yes?” Graff asked, looking to Todd. The latter man was busy arranging the enormous pile of colorful chips that Asprey placed in front of him in exchange for a fat roll of bills. A fat roll of bills that probably equaled a
real
pearl-and-diamond necklace, thank you very much.
“Buy-in is ten thousand, minimum bet is set at a hundred. The game is five card stud—no exceptions.”
The men murmured their consent.
“This is my game, and we play by my rules. You want to stake against Drago, you keep your mouth shut and your hands up. Got it?”
Even Poppy found herself nodding in agreement. The only sounds beyond the distant shouts of drunken revelry inside the bar were the clack of the clay chips and the soft rustle of the worn felt-top table. She wasn’t sure where Asprey and Graff had gotten all the props, but now that it was night and the poker chips fell, the room really looked and felt like the kind of place where men lost fortunes and possibly their lives. Goose bumps—the kind that sprang of a spooky awareness that she was nearer her goals than ever before—made an appearance on her arms.
Graff laughed then, a rough bark that made all five of them jump. “And relax! This is a game for family and friends. Have fun.”
Asprey moved to sit next to him, clearly flashing his piece as he went. Poppy prayed it was yet another prop. She seriously didn’t trust those men around guns. They’d probably shoot their feet off if given half a chance.
The message was pretty clear, though—she would at least give them that. Have fun…but not too much. And keep your hands where they could see them.
Poppy might not have been there, for all she played a role in the proceedings over the next few hours. She watched for a while, but there was only so much a person could take of men swelling up in their own egos. Because that was what they did—all of them. Asprey and Graff barked out orders and insults, while the other two men tried to one-up each other with their bluffs.
Todd, at least, played it cool. He’d started winning almost from the start, growing quieter and more intent with each chip added to his stack.
If she hadn’t known Graff was signaling with Asprey through the placement of their chips on the table, there would have been no way to tell the game was rigged. When Graff dealt, his hands moved swift and sure, not once faltering over the cards he pulled from the bottom. From the looks of things, he and Asprey also fell back on soft play every now and then, betting heavy and then letting Todd take the pot.
She got up a few times to pour drinks and check the exits, and once even got up the courage to explore the main bar area of the club, ironically, for some air. The dank aura of decades of piss and sweat was better than that back room, but once the stripper, who looked to be all of eighteen years old, started flossing with her thong, Poppy gave up. Some things couldn’t be unseen.
Asprey’s friends drank too much and slipped out of their sleaze-bag characters a few times, but the real winning moment of the night occurred when Asprey’s mustache fell into his glass. It was his own stupid fault—one second, he was fondling it like some sort of old-time villain, and the next, it had plunked into a glass of the watered-down scotch she was serving, bobbing there like a drowned caterpillar.