Epic Game

  EPIC

  GAME

  EPIC

  GAME

  WILLIAM

  KOWALSKI

  Copyright © 2016 William Kowalski

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system now known or to be invented, without permission in writing from the publisher.

  Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

  Kowalski, William, 1970–, author

  Epic game / William Kowalski.

  (Rapid reads)

  Issued also in print and electronic formats.

  ISBN 978-1-4598-1049-5 (pbk.).—ISBN 978-1-4598-1050-1 (pdf ).—

  ISBN 978-1-4598-1051-8 (epub)

  I. Title. II. Series: Rapid reads

  PS8571.O985E65 2016 C813'.54 C2015-904496-0

  C2015-904497-9

  First published in the United States, 2016

  Library of Congress Control Number: 2015946324

  Summary: Kat is a tough, independent woman who makes her living as a professional poker player in this work of fiction. (RL 2.2)

  Orca Book Publishers gratefully acknowledges the support for its publishing programs provided by the following agencies: the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund and the Canada Council for the Arts, and the Province of British Columbia through the BC Arts Council and the Book Publishing Tax Credit.

  Cover design by Jenn Playford

  Cover photography by iStock.com

  ORCA BOOK PUBLISHERS

  www.orcabook.com

  19 18 17 16 • 4 3 2 1

  In memory of my grandfather, Harold Siepel

  CONTENTS

  ONE

  TWO

  THREE

  FOUR

  FIVE

  SIX

  SEVEN

  EIGHT

  NINE

  TEN

  ELEVEN

  TWELVE

  THIRTEEN

  GLOSSARY

  ALSO BY WILLIAM KOWALSKI

  Novels

  Eddie’s Bastard

  Somewhere South of Here

  The Adventures of Flash Jackson

  The Good Neighbor

  The Hundred Hearts

  Rapid Reads

  The Barrio Kings

  The Way It Works

  Something Noble

  Just Gone

  The Innocence Device

  ONE

  When I was a kid, one of the first things I noticed was that the people who make the rules tend to make them in their favor. So I don’t feel too bad about breaking them. I don’t always do whatever I want, but I do whatever I need.

  And I don’t apologize to anybody. If you’re going to stack the deck against me, then I don’t have to listen to you. The only rules I really like are the ones I make for myself. And I have very few of those.

  One of them is, if you’re holding a pair of bullets and you’re under the gun on the first round, you go all in. Don’t be a wuss. Just do it. The turn and the river are too late.

  Of course, the river is always too late. If you don’t already know who’s won the game by the time the river gets turned over, then you’re a fish.

  Oh, and that’s the other rule. If you can’t spot the fish at the table…then you’re it.

  Those are two rules that never change.

  I have lots of other rules, but I break those whenever I want.

  That’s what it means to be free.

  My dad was a poker player too. He’s the one who taught me. He was old school, the kind they don’t make anymore. He always carried cards with him, and he would play anywhere. He played in the back rooms of bars, in office buildings after hours, in motels, in run-down apartments, in luxury condos. Once, he told me, he played in a three-day game in a county sheriff ’s office down south. They couldn’t let the public see them, and they didn’t have any prisoners, so they just played in the cell block, sitting at the guard’s post. Another time he played at a zoo. He came home looking depressed and smelling terrible. Monkeys, he told me, and that was all he would say.

  Dad would play anytime too. No hour was sacred. He would play through weddings, funerals, birthdays, parent-teacher conferences, marriage-counseling appointments, anything. He was the most reliable guy I knew. If he was supposed to be somewhere, you could count on him being at a poker game instead.

  Now they have poker on TV, just like football or basketball. If my dad were alive to see that, he would laugh his ass off. Who would want to watch a bunch of guys sitting around a table? he would say. That would be the most boring thing ever.

  He’d be right, of course. They have to sex it up for TV. But regular poker is boring to watch. I should know. I saw enough of it as a kid to qualify as an expert by the time I was sixteen.

  I grew up with my dad, mostly. Sometimes my mom tried to take me back, and I would go along with her for a while. But life at my mom’s was even more boring. It was so mind-numbing I could hardly stand it. It was all princess telephones and frilly duvets. Hairdos and lipstick. After-school activities, church youth groups, volunteer committees, horseback riding lessons. Maybe other girls would like that kind of life. There are plenty of kids who would love to have a nice house and normal parents. But it made me want to puke.

  I much preferred life with my dad. I was allowed to do whatever I wanted. Half the time, he would forget to send me to school. Not that I missed much. I know quite a bit, but I learned all of it from reading books and watching science programs. He would slip me twenty bucks and tell me to go get whatever I wanted to eat. I could watch anything I wanted on TV. I didn’t have to do homework or listen to stupid teachers. There was no such thing as bedtime. It was a miracle I graduated high school. I grew up making forts with the empty pizza boxes that the guys would toss aside as they headed into the second day of an epic game. They were all old men to me, my dad’s age—forty, maybe, sometimes much older. I knew most of them by their nicknames. Also by their deep voices that muttered curses. The air full of dirty shirts and dirtier jokes. I would go through the pockets of the coats piled on the couch to see what I could steal. Of course, the guys knew, but they pretended they didn’t. I got away with murder because I was a kid, and probably because I was a girl. I was in heaven.

  Oh, and I did graduate high school. With honors.

  Those old guys liked having me around. A little girl in the joint kept them honest, they said. I don’t know how true that was. Some of those guys couldn’t play it straight if their lives depended on it. They felt naked without an ace up their sleeve.

  I loved listening as the chips shot back and forth across the table and the cards rippled and rattled in their hands. The bullshit flowing around the room in a never-ending river. Music from the sixties and seventies pounding out of the stereo. And that sound the chips made as they were stacked on the table. The sound of money.

  Needless to say, my parents were divorced.

  That happened early, when I was still a baby. It’s a total mystery to me how they even got together in the first place. My mother used to have a thing for bad boys. A lot of girls do, I guess. I find them sort of attractive myself.

  But then Mom got religion, dumped my dad, took up with this new guy named Ted and started living with her nose in the air. Whatever. To each their own. I wasn’t going that way.

  Don’t get me wrong. I
don’t blame my mom. It couldn’t have been easy living with a guy who never had a regular job. Moneywise, my dad was a disaster. Up one day, down the next. Well, mostly down, to be honest. Most women wouldn’t consider that much of a husband.

  Me, I don’t care about a husband. I don’t care about men at all. I have one when I want, but I don’t keep them around for long. I’m a card player. That’s all I really care about. It’s in my genes.

  I rely on no one but myself.

  That’s the way my dad raised me.

  TWO

  I guess I’ve been thinking about my dad a lot lately. That’s probably because of the tournament coming up. I always call on him when I need luck. I know he’s still around, helping me as much as he can from the other side.

  This tournament is a big one. The biggest I’ve ever played in. It’s not the World Series of Poker. I’m not quite there yet. But there will be a couple thousand other people playing. Only one of them gets to win. I’m determined that’s going to be me.

  The main purse is one million dollars. That’s what the first-place winner gets.

  The second-place player gets a hundred. Not a hundred thousand. One hundred dollars. That’s just to rub it in—second place might as well be last.

  That should heat things up a little.

  Imagine what a million bucks in cash would look like, all piled up in the center of the table. I think about it a lot. I’m not even embarrassed to say it. I love money. And it’s not hard to understand why.

  When I was growing up, I never knew what was coming next. Sometimes Dad seemed to be rich. He would suddenly have these pockets full of cash, and he would blow it all on crazy things. He would take us out to dinner and get us the nicest hotel rooms in town. He’d buy me new dresses, and I would put them on—even though I hated wearing dresses. It always bothered me that he didn’t seem to know that about me.

  But when he was flush, we were both so happy that I didn’t care. If he had a girlfriend, he would buy her jewelry. But normally, he had no girlfriend. He could never understand why. He was a good-looking guy, and he treated them well. He never knew I kept running them off. I let them know they weren’t wanted, in the way that only daughters can. Usually that was all it took for those girlfriends to realize he wasn’t worth the misery I would cause for them.

  After a few days or weeks of this, just as suddenly the money would be gone. I would wake up in our latest fancy hotel, and Dad would already be packing his bags, a guilty look on his face. I didn’t even need to ask what was going on. We had to sneak out the service entrance because he didn’t have enough to pay the bill.

  Then we’d have to go find a new place to stay. Usually this was with one of his poker-playing buddies. These guys all lived in crappy apartments with lousy furniture. I would get the couch, and Dad would sleep on the floor. Sometimes we’d have to return the things he’d bought on his spending sprees. That was always embarrassing. A few times, we even applied for food stamps.

  Just until I get back on my feet, he always said.

  And he always did get back on his feet—for a while. Then the whole cycle would begin all over again.

  This went on for years. My dad didn’t drink much, and he didn’t use drugs. But money was his Kryptonite. It turned him into an idiot.

  I never told my mom about any of this. But then again, I didn’t have to. She already knew. That was why they divorced.

  So it makes sense I turned out the way I did, I guess.

  I have only one goal in life. To make as much money as possible. Screw everything else. I don’t want a husband, a house or a family. I don’t even want a job. Jobs are for suckers. You work a job to make someone else rich. I want to live by my wits, eat what I kill and keep everything I can get my hands on.

  This is why I love the Internet. I can do all of this without even leaving my house.

  I play poker online. That’s how I plan on qualifying for this tournament. If you make it through the early games, you get a seat at the real-life main event. You still have to pay for your airfare and hotel room. The buy-in is a thousand bucks, but that’s covered if you qualify.

  It sounds easy, but it’s not. You have to beat a lot of good players. I hate to say it, but you have to get a little bit lucky too. People today know a lot more about poker than they used to. There are a lot more decent players and a lot fewer fish. Sometimes it comes down to knowing the odds better than the other players do. And sometimes you just have to pray that you flip the card you need.

  I spend a lot of time at my computer every day. I’m not happy about all those hours on my ass, but that’s life. I’m usually playing three or four poker games at once. I’ve got my email open. Facebook too. A YouTube video is usually playing music, often from my favorite group, which happens to have been my dad’s favorite group also: Yes.

  Remember Yes? I know—it’s pretty weird for a chick who’s not even thirty to be into a group that old. What can I say? They remind me of him. That’s the same reason I have a tattoo of Dad’s face on my left shoulder blade, hidden, where no one can see it unless I let them.

  So I’m sitting at my computer as usual, playing a few games and thinking about the tournament that’s coming up, when I get an email from my best friend, Josie. We’ve been as close as sisters ever since high school. We’re so close we don’t even need to talk all the time. Our friendship goes in cycles. There are times when Josie and I email each other ten or twenty times a day. But in the past few months, I hadn’t heard much from her. Just the odd text here or there. That’s not unusual either. She’s pretty busy with her son. I haven’t actually seen much of her in the past five years, not since I moved away from Morganville. After what happened to my dad, I don’t like going back there.

  But when you’re as close as Josie and I are, you don’t get upset over letting time pass. You just pick up where you left off every time you see each other. That’s how friends are supposed to be.

  When I left Morganville, Josie was married to a guy named Charlie and had a five-year-old kid. Her marriage didn’t last too long. Josie was a bit of a wild girl. Always had been. She didn’t like to be tied down. I guess Charlie couldn’t handle that.

  Charlie was a pretty nice guy. Maybe a little too nice. He’s remarried now, I hope to a woman who doesn’t run around on him. Nobody deserves that. He’s living in Europe with his second wife. Josie has custody of their son, David.

  I look more closely at this email.

  It isn’t from Josie. It’s about her. Her name is in the subject line.

  It’s from a lawyer’s office: Molton Hudson and Winkel.

  Dear Katherine Thomas,

  Please call our office as soon as possible regarding your friend Josie Epstein.

  Sincerely,

  Andrew Molton, Attorney-at-law

  I swallow hard. Lawyers are never good news. There’s a pit in my stomach suddenly. Too bad. It was shaping up to be a pretty nice day.

  There’s a phone number under the lawyer’s name. I would like to ignore this email, but there’s no way I can. Not if it’s about my friend.

  I dial the number and get Andrew Molton on the line. But he doesn’t want to talk to me on the phone. He insists that I come to his office. It can’t wait, he says. Right away.

  “Where is your office?” I ask.

  He names the town I grew up in. The town where Josie still lives. The town I left five years ago, swearing never to go back. Morganville.

  “This is all very strange,” I say. “How do I know you’re even a lawyer? How do I know you’re not just some con artist?”

  “Ms. Epstein said you would say something like that,” sa
id Molton. “So she provided me with a code word to give you.”

  “What is it?”

  There’s a long pause on the other end.

  “Puff Puff Girls,” he says. “That mean anything to you?”

  It sure did. The Puff Puff Girls was the name of our gang, back when we were eight years old. No one else could have possibly known about that. This guy was on the level.

  “I’ll be there this afternoon,” I said.

  THREE

  Morganville is about three hours away by car. Far enough from where I live now that I don’t often run into people I know from the old days. It’s not that I have anything to hide. It’s just that I hate the questions they are likely to ask. How have you been? What are you doing with yourself now? How are you…after everything that happened?

  Bad memories are like dog crap. They’re better off buried.

  Andrew Molton turns out to be a short, plump man who looks to have spent far too many years sitting behind a desk. I hope a life as a poker player isn’t going to leave me looking like a female version of him. He blinks at me through thick lenses that make his eyes seem far away. The fluorescent lights shine on his mostly bald head. A harmless enough guy. But a lawyer. Which means he bears watching.

  I’m sitting across from him, nervous as hell, trying not to show it. I have no doubt I’m succeeding. I have an excellent poker face.

  “Ms. Thomas,” he says, “I have two rather large pieces of news to deliver to you. And I’m afraid one of them is very bad.”

  “Just get it over with,” I say. I’m the kind of person who rips off bandages fast.

  He nods. “All right. The first piece of news is that your friend Josie has died.”

  I can’t say anything to that. I just stare. The world begins to swim around me. This is how it always feels when my life takes what feels like the wrong turn down some terrible side street. Suddenly I’m no longer in control. I hate that feeling.