Lexicon

you’ve got the eye for it.”
    The woman hesitated. Only one game in her. Sometimes Emily would let a mark win the first game so they’d want to play again, and again, and again. But that only worked on a certain type of person. Still, two dollars. Two dollars was fine.
    “I’ll play.”
    The speaker was a young man with long hair in a cheap, not-quite-black suit and a pale yellow tie. A plastic ID hung from his shirt pocket. There were four of them, two more boys and a girl, all with that look, like college students on summer jobs. Salespeople, maybe, of something cheap and devious. Not cops. She could tell that. Cops were a constant hazard on the pier. She grinned. The woman in the sweater was moving away, but that didn’t matter. Cheap-suit guy was better. A lot better. “All right, sir. Step on up. You did me a favor, I think. That lady may have cleaned me out.”
    “I may clean you out,” said the guy.
    “Ho, ho. A big talker. That’s fine, sir. Talk as much as you like. No price tag on talking. The game, though, that’s two dollars.”
    He dropped two bills onto Emily’s card table. She found him irritating, although wasn’t sure why: Guys like this, arrogant, an audience watching, they were gold. They would lose and double up forever. You had to throw them a win here and there, so they wouldn’t blow up, accuse you of cheating. But if you were smart, they would play all day. They would do it because once they were in the hole, their pride wouldn’t let them out. She’d taken $180 from a guy like this not two months ago, most of it on the last game. His neck had bulged and his eyes had watered and she saw how much he wanted to hit her. But there was a crowd. She had eaten that night.
    She slung the queen and two aces onto the table. “Catch her if you can.” She flipped them, began to switch them around. “Loves her exercise, does the queen. Always takes her morning constitutional. Problem is, where does she go?” The guy wasn’t even looking at the cards. “Hard to win if you don’t watch, sir. Very tricky.” His ID tag said: HI! I’M LEE! Below that: AUTHORIZED QUESTIONNAIRE ADMINISTRATION AGENT. “Lee, is it? You must be good if you can follow the queen without looking at her, Lee. Very good.”
    “I am,” he said, smiling. He hadn’t taken his eyes off her.
    She decided to take Lee’s two dollars. If he ponied up again, she would take that. She would ask if he wanted to double up and she would take that and she would be merciless, not give him a single game, because Lee was a dick.
    The crowd murmured. She was flicking the cards too fast, holding nothing back. She stopped. Pulled away her hands. There was a collective titter and some applause. She was breathing fast.
    “Well,” she said. “Let’s see how good you are, Lee.”
    He still hadn’t looked at the cards. The guy behind and to his right, one of the market researchers, smiled at her brilliantly, as if he’d only just noticed her. The other boy muttered to the girl, “Good thing is I’m right where I wanna be, right in the best possible place,” and the girl nodded and said, “Yeah, you’re so right.”
    “On the right,” Lee said.
    Wrong.
“You sure about that? Want a moment to think?” But her hands were already moving, eager to claim victory. “Last chance to—”
    “Queen on the right,” he said, and as Emily touched the cards, she felt her fingers slide under and to the right. Her left hand went out in a flashy extension that did nothing but draw the eye, and her right slipped one card below the other.
    There was scattered applause. Emily stared. The queen of hearts was on the right. She had switched them. At the last moment, she had switched them. Why had she done that?
    “Well done, sir.” She noticed Benny shifting his feet, glancing around for cops, no doubt wondering what the hell she was doing. “Congratulations.” She reached into her money pouch. Two bucks. A difference of four, between winning and losing. That was a meal. It was a down payment on a night of chemical joy. She held out the bills, and when Lee took them, it hurt. He tucked them into his wallet. The girl glanced at her watch, something plastic and shiny. One of the boys yawned. “Play again? Double up, perhaps? A man like you likes to play for real money, am I right?” She was pushing, could hear the strain in her own voice, because she knew she’d lost him.
    “No. Thank you.” He looked bored. “There’s nothing