Previously – Chapter 5: Clean Squares in the Dust
The envelope held eleven thousand four hundred dollars and he counted it three times in the rental car, a Kia Soul the color of a tennis ball because the tennis-ball ones were twelve dollars a day cheaper.
His phone buzzed. Marisol, third time since noon. He played five seconds of the voicemail (the Golden State credit guy, in her bar at five in the afternoon, asking when Jake would be reachable) and put the phone face-down on the legal pad.
He’d made the list Tuesday at five in the morning with the office door shut, the first time in two years all of it had been in one place. Delia, one thirty-seven four. The forty-seven he had carried out of her kitchen in a laundry bag had gone to payroll at all three bars, a beer invoice, and a quarter’s rent on Vestry. Five weeks. Nothing it bought was still standing. The advance against the card receivables, sixty-one. The line and the two cards, thirty-four. Rent, the beer guy, the linen guy, the payroll float he’d taken in March and never put back, seventeen. Two hundred and forty-nine thousand four hundred dollars, and under it, underlined twice: THIS IS THE NUMBER.
For two years the debt had been weather: everywhere, unmeasurable, a pressure behind the eyes. Now it was a case with a number at the end of it.
The eleven four went to Delia tonight, in her kitchen, in front of her. It would not move the needle. He was going to do it anyway, because a man who puts cash on a woman’s kitchen island is a man doing something, and she’d write it in the book, and off that line they’d build the schedule.
That was the trip, and what he’d told Lila at seven that morning in a kitchen with no dining table in it, and it had been true when he said it. I’m going to sit in her kitchen and make a plan and come back and tell you exactly what it is. I promise.
But the game ran Thursdays. And Danny Voss played Thursdays.
Jake had thought about this constantly, which is what you do with a thing you have decided not to do. Voss owned twelve car washes between Henderson and Bullhead City and was the worst player Jake had ever seen with real money. He called four-bets with suited jacks. He did not fold two pair, ever, and against a man who cannot fold two pair you do not need luck, you need a chair.
And Jake was good. He heard how that sounded and thought it anyway, then checked it against the record. Eleven sessions in that house, and in every one he had at some point been ahead. Eleven for eleven. Men played that game for a living and could not say that.
So: one buy-in. Thirty thousand, written on the pad and circled. Out at two hundred if he got there, out at zero if it went the other way, in the car by three-fifteen either way. He wrote 3:00 AM and drew a box around it.
He wasn’t going to say this part to Lila. He had tried the sentence in the car: sixty months, first of the month, no interest. True, and the wrong one. A payment plan was five years of a man at a kitchen table on the first of the month, and her watching him be careful. She’d grown up watching a charming man be eight weeks away from everything, and she’d told him about it in a cabin in Tahoe with her feet on his leg.
One night and the number would be a story he told at a table years from now, and she’d shake her head at him.
He was going to tell her. That had never been in question. What was in question was what she’d have to do about it once he had, and there was exactly one room in the state where that could still be changed.
He got out of the car at 10:11 into the cold that comes off a desert driveway once the day is finished with it.
* * *
The house was off Rampart on a cul-de-sac with a keypad gate, backing onto the ninth green of a course that closed in 2017, so that behind the pool there was a great dark field of dead grass.
Rosalba let him in.
Delia was at the island with tea, the Times folded to the crossword, and a green cloth ledger closed by her elbow. Fifties, gray linen, reading glasses on a chain.
“Jacob. You look tired.”
“I drove.”
“Nobody drives.” She poured him a coffee without asking and put in a splash of milk, and the amount was correct, and had been for three years.
He put the envelope on the island. Delia looked at it and left it there a moment, the only strange thing in the whole exchange, and he clocked it and let it go.
“Eleven four,” Jake said. “It’s the safe, the espresso machine, and my dad’s watch. I want to talk about a schedule. Sixty months. Whatever you charge on it. I’ll sign anything you put in front of me.”
“All right,” said Delia.
She opened the ledger, counted the money quickly, thumb and forefinger, thirty years of it in her hands, wrote a line with a fountain pen and turned the book so he could see it. Nov 9. 11,400, recd, 10:19p. Beneath it, 137,400 to 126,000, and a small ruled line.
“Monday I’ll have Charles put something together. He’ll want a lien on the Echo Park lease, and you’ll hate it, and you’ll sign it, and then you’ll feel better than you have in a year.”
“I’ll sign it Monday.”
“Big Mike took eight years off me once. Ninety-six months. Never missed one, and never once came in this house without telling me about Atlantic City.” She filled in a word. “Twenty-six across. I always think it’s going to be aeon. It never is.”
Jake laughed, and it came out of him without permission, and the coffee was correct and the book was balanced and there was a plan for Monday.
“Game’s full,” she said. “Two on the list. Danny’s here.”
“Is he.”
“Since six. He’s very unhappy.”
* * *
The card room had been a formal dining room. Ten-foot oval, speed cloth in a fawn-gray Delia called oyster. On the sideboard a wicker bowl where everyone put their phones, and nobody had ever once had to be told to. Jake put his in at 10:38, among six others face-down like something being buried.
A hundred and two hundred, with a two-hundred big-blind ante and a mandatory four-hundred straddle, so folding around cost nine hundred dollars every ten minutes. Every thirty minutes the dealer changed: Chessa, then Rudy, then a soft-voiced enormous man everyone called Pastor because he had been one.
Black hundreds, purple five-hundreds, yellow thousands. A rack of yellows was a hundred thousand dollars and sat on the rail like a brick.
The table, in the order he would have to get through it: Danny Voss, sixty-two, three racks down and talking, because Voss talked when he lost. Jake had once heard twenty consecutive minutes on the specific gravity of carnauba wax. Oz Ostrowski, scrap metal out of Tulsa, tight and clever, with one flaw Jake had cataloged years ago: holding a hand, Oz bet it; bluffing, he counted his own chips first, carefully, where everyone could see, because he wanted somebody to ask how much he had. Bea Nakamura, five foot nothing, in a cardigan, who said raise and said thank you and had never in Jake’s hearing said a third word. Whit Ridd, good in 2016, a rocks glass at his elbow now. Tuan Ngo, who owned two dry cleaners in Henderson, played four hands an hour and apologized when he won. And Brayden, twenty-three, in a hoodie, who studied charts of colored squares between hands, called everyone sir, and was the best player in the room by a distance only two people could see.
“Sir,” Brayden said, when Jake took the seven seat. “Do you mind if I ask what your calling range is out of the straddle against a small open?”
“Anything that looks pretty.”
Brayden considered this for three full seconds, did not like where he arrived, and Voss laughed so hard he had to put his cards down.
Delia came to the doorway with her tea. “Jacob. How much?”
“Thirty.”
She brought the ledger in herself, set it on the rail, held out the pen. He wrote his initials and the figure in the two ruled columns and she wrote the time beside it in her own hand. 11:14p. She recorded the exact minute of each of a man’s decisions and kept them in a book, in order, in a house.
“Fourteen days,” she said, “and after that we talk about it.”
“You’ll have it in ten. I promise.”
“All right,” said Delia, and went back to her crossword.
* * *
He lost for an hour and ten minutes and none of it meant anything. Nothing hit. Three-bet ace-king and got eight-eight-four. Flopped top pair and folded to a raise from Bea, who showed nothing.
At 12:26 he had nine thousand four hundred in front of him and called Delia in for forty more. 12:26a. Seventy thousand of her money on the felt now, and the pad in the car said one buy-in, and the pad had been written in another century.
Then at 12:55 the deck turned over without announcement.
Brayden opened to fourteen hundred. Oz three-bet to five thousand from the cutoff. Jake looked down at ace-eight of hearts on the button, not a hand, not near a hand, and called anyway, because he had watched Oz put that raise in with his shoulders a half inch forward of where they lived.
Flop: queen-seven-three, two hearts. Oz bet six. Jake called. Turn, the nine of hearts: three hearts out there and the ace of hearts in his hand. Oz checked. Jake checked behind, because a man with a hand does not check there, and he wanted Oz to feel safe.
River, deuce of clubs. No flush. Ace-high, worth nothing.
And Oz Ostrowski, before he bet, squared up his chips and counted them into two neat stacks where everybody could see, and said, “Thirty-one two.”
It went through Jake like cold water going down.
“Thirty-one two,” he said, and put it in.
Oz turned over jack-ten of spades. Jake tabled ace-eight and did not smile, because you do not smile, and Pastor pushed him eighty-six thousand seven hundred dollars.
It went like that for an hour. He took thirty thousand off Whit Ridd without a showdown and gave the table a joke, so losing to him felt like being included in something. He asked Voss two sincere questions about his ex-wife’s dog and thought, without discomfort, this man is going to give me his money and enjoy doing it.
Chessa dealt him queen-four and he folded it without looking twice, and in the two seconds that took, Lila arrived. The inside of her wrist, where she wore no watch, where he had put his mouth in a parking lot in Tahoe while she told him he was ridiculous. There was nowhere in a poker game to put it.
At 2:05 it happened.
Brayden opened fourteen hundred. Jake called on the button with two black jacks. Voss called in the straddle.
Flop: jack of hearts, nine of spades, four of clubs.
Voss checked. Brayden bet thirty-five hundred. Jake flat-called, sleepy, in position, with the best hand available on that board.
Danny Voss check-raised to eighteen thousand.
Brayden folded his colored squares away and put his cards in the muck like a man setting down a glass.
Jake made it fifty-two.
Voss did not think. Voss said, “All of it,” pushed a hundred and four thousand dollars forward with his forearm and turned the two black nines face-up while the dealer was still counting, because Danny Voss had never in his life been able to wait.
Jake showed the jacks. Turn, deuce. River, queen of spades.
Two hundred and sixteen thousand two hundred dollars. He tipped Pastor six hundred and stacked the rest, and stacking it took a while, and the room made the sound rooms make, and Bea Nakamura said “thank you” to nobody in particular.
Two hundred and fifty thousand dollars in yellow, of which seventy was Delia’s.
A hundred and eighty thousand of it was his.
* * *
He stood up. He actually stood up, got two words into the question and could not produce the third, and pointed, and Rosalba said, “Second door,” and he walked out with his key in his front left pocket, touching it.
In the bathroom he ran the water and did it on the calculator app, to see the digits.
Two fifty. Take seventy off the top, hand it straight back, marker torn up: Delia’s own money going home. One eighty left. Give her the hundred and twenty-six thousand in the green book, and the green book was closed. She would write a line and turn it around and there would be a zero at the end of it.
Fifty-four thousand dollars in his pocket.
Against the outside: sixty-one, thirty-four, seventeen. One hundred and twelve. Minus fifty-four.
Fifty-eight thousand dollars.
Jake stood in a stranger’s guest bathroom at ten past two in the morning and looked at fifty-eight and felt his chest come open. Fifty-eight was what a decent bar cleared in a summer. Fifty-eight was a number you said out loud at a kitchen table on a Tuesday and the other person said okay and reached for a pen. Sell Mabel’s, clean by March. Keep the Bantam. Pay Marisol what he owed her, so she could go back to not knowing what a credit guy looked like.
He washed his hands and dried them on a towel with a C embroidered on it.
He was going to rack up and go.
He came back in and Danny Voss had reloaded, a fresh hundred in chocolates sliding across the felt out of Rosalba’s hands, and Voss said, “There he is. There’s the man. Sit down, you owe me a shot at that.”
Jake said, “Yeah,” and sat.
That was all it took, and afterward, in a car, in the light, he would go looking for the decision and not find one. There is a thing in a private game nobody writes down: you do not take a man’s whole stack and stand up while he is still counting his rebuy. There is a word for it and the word follows you.
One orbit, he told himself, eight hands, out on the button before the next dealer change, because a man who leaves on a dealer change leaves clean.
He was there another three hours and forty-one minutes.
* * *
At 2:34 Delia came in for the time and stood at his shoulder.
“That’s a lot of yellow, Jacob.”
“It’s been a good night.”
“It has.” She was looking at the rack, not at him. “Do you want me to settle you tonight, or Monday when Charles is here? Either’s fine. If it’s tonight I’d want to do it in the kitchen. I don’t like doing money at the table.”
There it was, held out flat on her palm like a sugar cube for a horse. All he had to do was stand up and follow a fifty-something woman into her kitchen and watch her draw a line under his life.
The answer was tonight, and it was already in his mouth. He put something else in front of it.
“Let’s see where we are in a bit.”
“Of course,” said Delia.
Ten minutes later she put a fresh coffee at his elbow and took the cold one away, and he did not notice either of those things until he was in a parking structure at dawn.
At 2:48 the front door opened and a man came in behind Rosalba carrying a canvas tote from a bank.
“This is Gil,” Delia said. “Gil, this is Bea, Danny, Whit, Oz, Brayden, Tuan. And that’s Jacob Dalton, whose father you’d have liked.”
Gil Maddox was about sixty, pink, enormously cheerful, and had made his money, inside three minutes and unprompted, on the plastic dividers they put between your groceries at the checkout. He had come from a wedding at Red Rock with the boutonnière still in his lapel, and put two hundred thousand dollars on the table in banded fifties and said, “How do we do this? Do I just hand it over?”
He played the first ten hands. All of them. He asked Brayden what the colored squares were, and Brayden explained, and Gil said, “Well, isn’t that something,” and folded a hand he should have raised.
* * *
At 3:05 Jake went out to the pool deck with his phone.
The pool was lit blue and had a leaf on it and nobody in it. Past the dead course the mountains had the first gray in them, which was a lie at three in the morning.
Two texts from Lila. 11:40 Chicago time, which meant she’d been up.
I found your gray shirt in the dryer. It’s mine now. This is not a negotiation.
And at 11:52: Text me when you’re back at the hotel. Not checking. Just text me.
Two hundred and fifty thousand dollars sat in racks on a rail thirty feet behind him. There was a rental car in the driveway and a legal pad on the seat with a box drawn around 3:00 AM. He was one conversation in a kitchen away from being a man who called his girlfriend at three in the morning, said a small manageable number, and drove home.
He typed: Heading back soon. Big news, good news, tell you tomorrow.
He looked at it. He deleted big news, good news and typed instead: Heading back soon. I promise.
He sent it. She was asleep. The little gray checkmark sat there on its own.
He put the phone in the wicker bowl on his way back in.
* * *
Here is what he thought. It took about ten seconds and it was the most reasonable he had felt all night.
A hundred and eighty thousand dollars did not fix it.
That was the thing. He’d been so pleased with fifty-eight in the bathroom that he hadn’t followed it to the end. Fifty-eight thousand dollars still had to be said. Fifty-eight thousand dollars meant sitting down across from her and admitting that ninety, the number he’d given her in the apartment, with the clean squares in the dust where the sofa had been, the number she had taken with a face he still could not look at directly, hadn’t been the number either. Every version of tomorrow that started with him standing up right now was a version where he had to tell Lila Brenner he’d lied about the size of it and then ask her to believe a second figure.
She’d stay. He knew she’d stay. That was the worst of it. She would stay and she would be competent about it. She’d get a legal pad of her own. And he would spend five years watching a woman he loved manage him.
Unless the number was zero.
If the number was zero there was nothing to say. If the number was zero he’d had a hard year and it was over and it had been handled, and that wasn’t even a lie, it was a completed thing that didn’t need narrating. Three hundred and eight thousand dollars. The whole shape of it, everything, all of it, and it was in that room tonight, in a canvas bag, in front of a pink man in a boutonnière who could not fold.
He had never seen a game like the one about to happen. He was never going to see one again. And he had a hundred and eighty thousand dollars in front of him to play it with.
He sat down and said, “Gil, what are we playing for?” and Gil said, “Oh, I don’t know, I’m just having a lovely time,” and the table laughed, and Jake laughed too, and meant it, and was so happy he could have wept.
* * *
3:26. He bet three streets into Gil on a board that never got scary, and Gil called all three with bottom pair and rivered a six.
Sixty-five thousand dollars, and it was almost pleasant, because it was proof: this man will call you with anything. A hundred and eighty-five thousand in front of him, a hundred and fifteen of it his, in the softest game of his life, and a man does not leave that.
3:44.
Gil opened for two thousand under the gun. Jake called on the button with the ace and jack of diamonds. Bea called in the big blind.
Flop: queen of diamonds, eight of diamonds, three of spades.
Bea checked. Gil bet six. Jake raised to twenty-two, because that was correct: nut flush draw, an overcard, position, and a man who could not fold. Bea went away. Gil called. Fifty-two thousand in the middle.
Turn: deuce of clubs. Gil checked. Jake bet thirty-eight.
And Gil Maddox said, “You know what? I think you’re at it,” and pushed everything forward, a hundred and twenty-six thousand dollars, and the boutonnière came off his lapel onto the felt, and Rudy picked it up and handed it back, and Gil said, “Thank you. Sorry.”
Eighty-eight thousand more to call. Two hundred and sixteen in the pot.
Jake ran it, in order, and it took under a second, and there was nothing wrong with any of it.
Nine diamonds. Forty-four unseen cards. Twenty and a half percent. He was being laid two and a half to one, which needed twenty-nine. The ace was not an out; if Gil had two pair, and everything about the way the boutonnière fell off said two pair, an ace made Jake a pair of aces and a bill.
It was a fold. It was not a close fold. It was a fold Brayden would have made in a quarter of a second, and Jake had known it before Gil’s hands left the chips.
He said, “Call.”
“Oh, hell,” said Gil, pleased, and turned over queen of spades, eight of hearts. “I’ve got the two pair. Is that good? That’s good, right?”
Rudy pulled the pot in and reached for the deck.
“Run it twice?” Gil said. “Do people do that? I don’t mind. Whatever’s normal.”
One card to come. Deal two rivers, half the pot on each: split the twenty percent over two chances, cut the variance in half, walk out of the worst call of the year down eighty instead of a hundred and fifty. Every man at that table would have said yes. Bea Nakamura would have said yes, and it would have been her fourth word of the decade.
“No,” Jake said. “One card.”
Rudy looked at Gil. Gil shrugged happily. Rudy burned one and turned the five of clubs.
And for about a half-second before it landed, while the card was still face-down under the dealer’s fingers and the whole thing was still open, still possible, still undecided, Jake Dalton was as calm and as whole and as free as he had been at any point in his thirty-three years on earth.
Then it was the five of clubs and it was over and he had thirty-five thousand in front of him.
* * *
4:02. He got the thirty-five in with ace-queen against Oz’s ace-king and did not improve. He called Delia in.
“Twenty-five.”
“All right.” 4:04a.
4:31. “Another twenty-five.”
“All right, Jacob.” 4:31a. She did not look at his face. He was grateful for it at the time and found it unbearable later.
5:02. He asked for thirty and she wrote thirty. Each of the earlier ones had had an argument in front of it. This one just had a number.
The thirty got him to seventy-one thousand at twenty to six, and for maybe half a minute the room tilted back and the whole thing was turning around. Then Gil called him down on three streets with ace-four.
Somewhere in that hand Lila arrived again, asleep on her side with the laptop still lit on the pillow beside her head. Then the turn came and she was gone.
5:41.
“Delia.”
She came in with the tea and the book.
“Fifty.”
Delia opened the ledger and looked at it a moment, not for information, because she did not need information.
“I can do twenty-four,” she said.
“Delia.”
“Twenty-four.” Pleasantly. She uncapped the pen and wrote it and turned the book so he could initial it, and said, without any change in her voice at all, “That’s the last one tonight, Jake.”
He initialed it. 5:41a.
He lost the twenty-four thousand in twelve minutes, and he lost it so ordinarily that he would be able to describe it for the rest of his life without the description ever getting any better. King-jack of hearts in the cutoff, all of it in, Gil called with ace-ten offsuit, a ten came, and Gil said, “Aw, tough one,” and reached for the pot with both arms.
“Nice hand,” Jake said.
He stood up and shook Gil’s hand and it was warm and dry, and Gil said, “Come back tomorrow, this has been marvelous.” He shook Voss’s hand and Oz’s. Brayden said, “Sir,” and looked genuinely stricken, which was the worst thing that happened in that room.
Bea Nakamura said, “Thank you.”
* * *
In the kitchen the light had changed. It was 5:58, gray in the window over the sink, the coffee machine off, the counters wiped.
Delia opened the book on the island, turned it to face him, ran the pen down the column, and did the addition out loud, softly, the way you read to a child.
“One twenty-six. Thirty, forty, twenty-five, twenty-five, thirty, twenty-four. That’s a hundred and seventy-four tonight.” The pen made a small dot. “Three hundred thousand even.”
Even. It came out even. Jake stood in a kitchen in Summerlin and looked at the roundest number he had ever seen and thought that if there were anything behind any of this, anything watching at all, it would not have let it come out even.
“Charles will call you Monday. I’d like you to be somewhere you can talk. Not a car.”
“Okay.”
“Fourteen days on tonight’s, and then we talk about it.”
“Okay.”
She took a bottle of water out of the refrigerator and held it out, cold, beaded, and he took it because there was nothing else to do with a hand.
“Drive carefully,” Delia said. “It’s going to be a bright one.”
She did not say anything else. She stood in the doorway with the ledger under her arm until he had backed the tennis-ball-colored car out of the driveway, and raised one hand, and went inside.
* * *
He got on the 215 because it was the direction the on-ramp faced, came off ten minutes later because he had nowhere to go, and pulled into a parking structure behind a medical plaza on West Charleston because it had a ramp and the ramp went up.
Fourth level, open air. He parked nose-out facing the desert side, in that flat white color Las Vegas has in the first hour, before the light hardens and starts taking the day off you.
He turned the engine off, picked up the legal pad, turned it over and wrote on the back.
Delia, three hundred thousand.
The advance against the card receivables, sixty-one.
The line and the two cards, thirty-four.
Rent, the beer guy, the linen guy, payroll, seventeen.
He added it twice, because the first time he got it wrong.
Four hundred and twelve thousand dollars.
He looked at what he had against it. A lease he was behind on. A liquor license with a lien coming. A 2016 Tacoma he owed nine on. Eleven hundred dollars in a checking account, and the phone in his hand.
* * *
The laptop was in the back seat in a canvas bag, because there was a credit guy standing in his office at the Bantam and this was where he worked now.
He opened it on the wheel. Eight percent. He plugged it into the twelve-volt and turned on the hotspot.
He typed the address of her bank. The whole thing autofilled after three letters, so he had typed it before.
Username. Her email, which he could have typed in the dark.
Password.
She’d said it out loud on a Wednesday afternoon in August, from the desk at the Warrick, with a fraud alert on her phone and a man from Osaka in the lobby. Do me a favor. Log in and tell me if there’s a charge for two hundred and six dollars from something called Sundries LLC.
He’d said, Give me the password, and she’d made a noise and said, Don’t say anything, and then said it, in a service corridor, a laundry cart going past behind her.
Norwood, capital N. Two-oh-one-six. Exclamation point.
The Norwood. Thirty rooms in Rockford, I worked the desk there at nineteen, the ice machine was out in the parking lot and I loved it. The exclamation point is because the site made me.
There had been no charge. He’d told her so and she’d said thank you, you’re the best, half turned away from the phone, and hung up mid-word.
He typed it. N-o-r-w-o-o-d-2-0-1-6-!
The screen went white and then the page built itself from the top down.
CHECKING: $2,214.80.
SAVINGS: $77,240.00.
He clicked on the savings and loaded more, and then again.
DEPOSIT: $400.00.
DEPOSIT: $400.00.
DEPOSIT: $400.00.
Every other Friday, going back and back. It became six hundred somewhere around three years ago and stayed six hundred. Every two weeks, every year, no gaps. In November of one year there was a single withdrawal of $2,000.00, and then four deposits of eight hundred instead of six, until it was back, and then it went to six again.
He scrolled to the bottom of what the site would give him and looked at the balance in the corner of the screen, where it stayed no matter how far down you went.
The fan in the laptop came on.
Two cars down a woman in scrubs started a Corolla and pulled out, and the sound of her going down took a long time to finish.
Jake sat with his hands in his lap.
Then he closed the laptop.
He put it on the passenger seat on top of the legal pad and wound the cable around his hand.
He did not need the password. That was the fact that arrived last and sat down with the others. He could have the seventy-seven thousand two hundred and forty by noon without touching a keyboard, because he knew the sentence he would use, and he built it there in the car the way he built everything, in order, testing it against her: what he would lead with, where he would stop talking, which of the two of them would say the number out loud first. He looked at it for a while and then he stopped looking at it. It was a good sentence. Nothing about him felt different afterward.
He got out and walked to the end of the row and was sick into a drain in the concrete, twice, and a third time when there was nothing, and stayed down on one knee with his hand flat on the ground, because the concrete was cold through his palm and it was something to hold.
Then he stood up and rinsed his mouth with Delia’s water and set the bottle on the parapet wall, and took out his phone.
6:58 in Las Vegas, 8:58 in Chicago, so she’d been standing behind that desk for an hour already in the shoes she kept under it.
She picked up on the second ring.
“Hi. I have three minutes. There’s a bride’s mother in the lobby and she’s not wrong, which is the problem.”
“Yeah.”
“Did you sleep? You sound like you didn’t sleep.” Something moved behind her, a bag cart, the double thud of the brass doors. “How did it go with her? Did you get a plan?”
The valley went out white in front of him, and somewhere below a sprinkler was going on a strip of grass in front of the medical plaza, hissing and turning.
“It’s not ninety,” he said.
There was a pause on the line with a hotel lobby in it.
“What?”
“It’s not ninety thousand dollars. It was never ninety thousand dollars. I told you ninety because it was the biggest number I thought you’d stay for.”
“Jake,” she said.
“Delia has three hundred thousand,” he said. “There’s sixty-one on an advance against the card machines at all three bars. Thirty-four on the line of credit and the two cards. Seventeen in rent and vendors and the payroll I took out in March. A hundred and seventy-four of it is from last night.”
He heard her stop walking.
“Four hundred and twelve thousand dollars,” Jake said.
She didn’t say anything. Behind her a bell rang, and a man’s voice said, close, excuse me, are you the concierge? And Lila said, “One moment, sir,” in the voice, the smooth warm one that could put a hand on your shoulder from six feet away.
Then the sound changed. A door. The particular deadness of a back corridor, and further off a laundry cart.
“Say it again,” she said.
And he did.
One thought on “Against All Odds – Chapter 6: One Card”