LITMIR.BIZ

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gambler who’d died in jail, and a hardworking but fatally codependent dreamer like Ayanna, making a clean-slate beginning was a luxury you couldn’t afford.

       Ordinary people had to settle for survival.

      NURLEEN GENTRY SHUFFLED and dealt the flop—a pair of sevens and a queen. Once the cards were down, lying helter-skelter on the scruffy green-felt tabletop, she folded her hands, glittering with fake diamonds ordered from the shopping channel, and waited.

       Jesse leaned back in his customary chair in the card room behind Lucky’s Main Street Bar and Grill and pretended to consider his options. He felt the eyes of the other poker players on him, through the stale and shifting haze of blue-gray cigarette smoke, and gave nothing away.

       “Bet or fold, McKettrick,” Wade Parker grumbled from the other side of the table. Jesse allowed one corner of his mouth to crook up, ever so slightly, in the go-to-hell grin he’d been perfecting since he was eleven. Wade wore a bad rug and a windbreaker emblazoned with the logo of the beer company he worked for, and his full lips twitched with impatience. The tobacco smudge rose from the cheap cigar smoldering in the ashtray beside him.

       Next to Wade was Don Rogers, who owned the Laundromat. Don squirmed on the patched vinyl seat of his chair, but Jesse knew it wasn’t the wait that bothered the other man. Don was a neat freak and wanted to tidy the flop so badly that a muscle under his right eye jerked. Touching anybody’s cards but his own could get a man shot in some parts, though the retribution would be neither swift nor terrible in the old hometown.

       Could be Don had pocket queens, Jesse thought, but that didn’t seem likely. When it came to tells, Don was easier to read than the twelve-foot limestone letters set into the slope east of town, spelling out INDIAN ROCK.

       Everything about Don said, WINGING IT.

       Jesse made a show of pondering myriad possibilities, then accordioned four fifty-dollar chips into the pot.

       “Shit,” Don muttered, and put down his cards without revealing them, one precisely on top of the other.

       Wade leaned forward, his bushy eyebrows raised. Nurleen, an old hand at dealing poker and a better-than-fair player herself, though her specialty was Omaha, not Texas Hold ’Em, said nothing, but simply looked on with intense disinterest.

       “I think you’re bluffing, McKettrick,” Wade said. He rifled his chips, which had been growing steadily for the last half hour.

       “Think what you like,” Jesse countered, without inflection. He’d already thrown in a couple of winning hands, just to support Wade’s delusion that the poker gods were lined up solidly behind him, armed for battle. Jesse had time, and he had money—a deadly combination, in poker or just about any other endeavor.

       Wade plucked a pair of sunglasses from the pocket of his windbreaker and shoved them onto his face.

      A little late, Jesse thought, but this time, he kept his grin on the inside, where nobody knew about it but him.

       Nurleen dealt the fourth card, known in Hold ’Em parlance as the turn.

       Jesse ruminated. Even if Wade had twin aces to go with the one on the table, three of a kind wouldn’t take the pot, which meant the beer salesman was screwed. Unless the fifth card, or the river, turned out to be another ace, of course.

       Bad beats happened—in the back rooms of small-town bars and the championship tournaments in Vegas and everywhere in between. Jesse’s gut said Risk it, but then, it rarely said anything else.

       Out of the corner of one eye, Jesse saw someone slip through the doorway from the bar. Coins clinked into the jukebox.

       After a brief intro, Kenny Rogers proclaimed the wisdom of knowing when to hold ’em, and when to fold ’em. When to walk away, and when to run.

       Jesse knew all about holding and folding, but walking away was anathema to him, never mind running.

       Wade matched Jesse’s bet and raised him three hundred.

       Jesse responded in kind.

       Nurleen turned the river card.

       A deuce of hearts.

       Jesse let his grin show again.

       “Call,” Wade said. He pushed his wager to the middle of the table, showed his cards. King of hearts, queen of spades. He’d been counting on the lady in his hand and the one on the table to make a hand.

       Nurleen sighed almost imperceptibly and shook her head.

       Jesse felt a twinge of guilt as he tossed out two sevens.

       Four of a kind.

       Wade swore. “Damn your dumb-ass luck, Jesse,” he growled.

       Nurleen gathered the cards, shuffled for a new game. “You still in, Wade? Don?”

      Know when to walk away, Kenny advised. Know when to run.

       Jesse spared a sidelong glance and saw his cousin Keegan leaning against the jukebox with his arms folded. He looked like a city lawyer, or even a banker, in his tailored slacks, vest and crisply pressed shirt.

       Jesse cracked another grin, mostly because he knew what he was about to say would piss Keegan off. “I’m in,” he said.

       “I’d like a word with you,” Keegan said, keeping his distance but looking downright implacable at the same time. “Maybe you could skip a hand.”

       Wade and Don looked so hopeful that Jesse exchanged glances with Nurleen and pushed back his chair to stand and cross the floor, which was littered, in true Old West style, with peanut shells and sawdust. There might have been tobacco juice, too, if the health department hadn’t been sure to kick up a fuss. Around Indian Rock, folks took their history seriously.

       “What’s so important that it can’t wait?” he asked, in a low voice that slid in under Kenny’s famous vibrato.

       Keegan was the same height as Jesse, but the resemblance ended there. Keegan had reddish-brown hair, always neatly trimmed, while Jesse’s was dark blond and shaggy. Keegan had the navy-blue eyes that ran in Kade McKettrick’s lineage, and Jesse’s were the light azure common to Jeb’s descendents.

       “We had a meeting, remember?” Keegan snapped.

       Kenny wrapped up the song, and a silence fell. The jukebox whirred and Patsy Cline launched into “Crazy.”

       Jesse grinned. First, a musical treatise on gambling. Then, a comment on mental health. “That’s real Freudian, Keeg,” he drawled. “And I didn’t know you cared.”

       Keegan’s square jaw tightened as he set his back molars. By now, they must have been worn down to nubs, Jesse reckoned, but he kept that observation to himself.

       “Goddamn it,” Keegan rasped, “you’ve got as big a share in the Company as I do. How about showing a little responsibility?” Keegan always capitalized any reference to McKettrickCo, the family conglomerate, verbally or in writing. The man worked twelve-hour days, pored over spreadsheets and pulled down a seven-figure salary.

       By contrast, Jesse rode horses, entered the occasional rodeo, chased women, played poker and banked his dividend checks. He considered himself one lucky son of a gun, and in his more charitable moments he felt sorry for Keegan. Now, he straightened his cousin’s tasteful pin-striped tie, which had probably cost more than the newest front-loader over at Don’s Laundromat.

       “You think poker isn’t work?” he asked and waited for the steam to shoot out of Keegan’s ears. They’d grown up together on the Triple M, fishing and camping out in warm weather, snowshoeing and cross-country skiing in winter, with Rance, a third cousin, completing the unholy trio. They’d all gone to college at Northern Arizona University in Flagstaff, where Keegan had majored in business, Rance had studied high finance and Jesse had attended class between rodeo competitions and card games. Despite their differences, they’d gotten along well enough—until Rance and Keegan had both married.

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