More Twisted

yourselves men—letting a boy whip your asses at poker.”
    “I’m not a boy.”
    “Yeah, yeah, yeah.” The detective turned back to the boxes one more time. He walked over to the officers. They held a brief, whispered conference then they nodded and stepped out of the room.
    “My boys need to check on a few things,” Fanelli said. “They’ve got to go corroborate some testimony or something. That’s a great word, isn’t it? ‘Corroborate.’ ” He laughed. “I love to say that.” He paced through the room, stopped at the coffee pot and poured himself a cup. “Why the hell doesn’t anybody ever drink booze at high-stakes games? Afraid you’ll get a queen mixed up with a jack?”
    “As a matter of fact,” Keller said, “yeah.”
    The cop sipped the coffee and said in a low voice, “Listen up, assholes. You especially, junior.” He pointed a finger at Tony and continued to pace. “This happened at a . . . let’s say a difficult time for me. We’re concerned about some serious crimes that happen to be going down in another part of town.”
    Serious crimes, Keller was thinking. Cops don’t talk that way. What the hell’s he getting at?
    A smile. “So here’s the deal. I don’t want to spend time booking you right now. It’d take me away from those other cases, you know. Now, you’ve lost the money one way or the other. If I take you in and book you the cash goes into evidence and when you’re convicted, which you will be, every penny goes to the state. But if . . . let’s just say if there was no evidence, well, I’d have to let you off with a warning. But that’d work out okay for me because I could get on to the other cases. The important cases.”
    “That’re being corroborated right now?” Tony asked.
    “Shut up, punk,” the detective muttered, echoing Keller’s thought.
    “So what do you say?”
    The men looked at each other.
    “Up to you,” the cop said. “Now what’s it going to be?”
    Keller surveyed the faces of the others around him. He glanced at Tony, who grimaced and nodded in disgust. Keller said to the detective, “We’d be happy to help you out here, Fanelli. Do our part to help you clean up some—what’d you call it? Serious crimes?”
    Stanton muttered, “We have to keep Ellridge the showplace that it is.”
    “And the citizens thank you for your efforts,” Detective Fanelli said, stuffing the money into his suit pockets.
    The detective unhooked the handcuffs, stuffed them in his pockets too and walked back out into the alley without another word.
    The players exchanged looks of relief—all except Tony, of course, on whose face the expression was one of pure dismay. After all, he was the big loser in all this.
    Keller shook his hand. “You played good tonight, kid. Sorry about that.”
    The boy nodded and, with an anemic wave to everyone, wandered out the back door.
    The Chicago players chattered nervously for a few minutes then nodded farewells and left the smoky room. Stanton asked Keller if he wanted another beer but the gambler shook his head and the old man walked into the bar. Keller sat down at the table, absently picked up a deck of cards, shuffled them and began to play solitaire. The shock of the bust was virtually gone now; what bothered him was losing to the boy, an okay player but not a great one.
    But after a few minutes of playing, his spirits improved and he reminded himself of another one of the Rules According to Keller: Smart always beats out luck in the end.
    Well, the kid’d been lucky this once. But there’d be other games, other chances to make the odds work and to relieve Tony, or others like him, of their bankrolls.
    There was an endless supply of cocky youngster to bleed dry, Keller reckoned, and placed the black ten on the red jack.

    Standing on the overpass, watching a train disappear into the night, Tony Stigler tried not to think about the money he’d just won—and then had stolen away from him.
    Nearly a half million.
    Papers and dust swirled along the roadbed behind the train. Tony watched it absently and replayed something that Keller had said to him.
    It’s knowing everything about the game—even the little shit—that separates the men from the boys in poker.
    But that wasn’t right, Tony reflected. You only had to know one thing. That no matter how good you are, poker’s always a game of chance.
    And that’s not as good as a sure thing.
    He looked around, making sure he was alone, then reached