‘I just heard about the Saab at John Wayne.’

‘Yeah?’

This had been a stupid thing to do, Tom knew, but he couldn’t back down now. He had to bulldoze his way through. ‘Can I get in on it?’

‘Jan’s there.’

‘Jan! Christ, she’s only been on the job two years!’

‘Seems the pilot ran out of runway. Human error. Couple of minor injuries, no deaths. I thought it would be good for her to cut her teeth on it.’

Tom heard Ann mumble, beside Pete, ‘What time is it?’

The sound of Pete clicking on a lamp. ‘Shit, Tom, it’s two in the goddamned morning!’

‘I know. I’m sorry.’

‘If you were, it’d be a first.’

‘Seriously, Pete. I know I shouldn’t have called. It’s just … It’s driving me nuts, seeing other people picking up the slack, working jobs that should’ve been mine.’

‘And you figure waking me up at two a.m. to whine about it is going to get you back in my good books?’ Pete banged the phone down.

It felt shitty to be hung up on and Tom kind of wished now that he hadn’t done it to Halo. The night that had started so well had ended with a sour feeling in the pit of his stomach.

He shoved aside his bargain bucket. A ragged man who was gnawing on a wing at the next table looked at it, and Tom pushed it towards him.

‘Thanks.’

Tom nodded at him and got up, feeling empty.

He couldn’t face the drive back to Long Beach, so checked into the Motel 6 he’d stayed at before. On a whim he asked the clerk for the same room, and used the memory of him and Lucia in that very bed to make himself come, so that he could finally drift off into a fitful sleep.

At five a.m., Pete called and sent him to Boise, Idaho, where an oil pipe was leaking into a stream.

Tom didn’t actually apologize, but he didn’t bitch either, and did his penance like a man.

9

THE HONOLULU COULD not have been less aptly named. The club north of Long Beach was little more than a vast marquee in the middle of an even vaster parking lot, cleared between strip malls and ugly prefabricated buildings housing hardware stores and plumbing-supply merchants.

Tom didn’t like the Honolulu. He preferred the Bicycle Club or the Normandie, which both possessed an olde-worlde charm of LA sorts – made of bricks and mortar and the baize had had time to get scuffed. But the Honolulu was his closest casino and Sunday was jackpot day at the church of the damned.

Two giant plastic palm trees made a feeble nod at a theme. Poker players didn’t need themes, though: all they needed was cards, a dealer and someone to lose to. They wouldn’t have cared if two giant plastic turds had been displayed either side of the entrance, thought Tom.

Inside the marquee, thick, garish carpet was laid on the asphalt, and cool oxygen pumped gently through the air.

He couldn’t see anyone he recognized, which was unusual. He’d seen the Pinball Kid here plenty on a Sunday, and occasionally Corey Clump. Sometimes he and Corey would even grab a bite after they were knocked out. They didn’t know each other – all they ever talked was poker: pots they’d won; pots they’d lost; pots they’d seen others win or lose. Never tactics: that was way too revealing. That was the difference between nodding politely at the guy you were pissing next to, and comparing dick sizes.

Tom dropped a hundred dollars on a cash table, and was dealt in. The first few hands were nondescript, but after that he started to get a good feeling about his game. He took a two-hundred-and-twenty-dollar pot with a five-high straight, beating out jacks and nines held by a wizened Latino man in a Raiders vest, who kept holding up play to fiddle with his food. Tom wondered whether it was a tactic, but once he’d beaten him, he didn’t let it bother him.

Soon his hundred-dollar investment had grown to over a thousand. And this was real money, not tournament chips. He looked around for a chip jockey so he could change it up and avoid the temptation of blowing the lot. There was none near by and it was his turn to play. He glanced at the cards he’d just been dealt: nine of clubs, ten of clubs. Because he was on the dealer button, he played them.

The hand unfolded in an almost scripted manner. The flop showed the seven of clubs, the queen of hearts and the queen of spades, and a ripple ran round the table at the pair showing. Boosted by his winnings, Tom raised recklessly, then called the re-raise on the back of the seven, hoping for a straight or – even better – a back-door flush of five clubs.

The six of clubs came on the turn. Tom was outwardly relaxed but inside he felt the familiar build of tension and excitement that started just above his balls and spread into his belly. Six, seven, nine, ten of clubs were his. The only thing missing was the eight. The straight flush was on but was disguised by the pair of queens. The queens were the obvious threat to all at the table, and it was easy to overlook the seven and six. Sure, they were both clubs, and possible straight-flush candidates too, but it was the queens that were the dazzlers, blinding the hasty or the unskilled to other options. And this was not a high-rollers game: it was a run-of-the-mill Sunday-afternoon cash table where some players were only a step up from buying a scratchcard to satisfy their need to lose money. There were two young friends in Long Beach State jackets who hadn’t even had the sense to play at different tables so they weren’t winning each other’s cash; a crumpled brunette, who had earlier failed to raise when she’d held the nuts – which she’d then stupidly shown to everyone; a smooth-faced Asian boy, who’d thrown in virtually every hand he’d been dealt; then the Raiders fan. Next to him was an angry-looking, pockmarked man, whose compulsive leg-shaking made the whole table tremble. He’d won a couple of small pots – once on what Tom was sure had been a bluff. A very fat woman dressed in what appeared to be a counterpane made up the rest of the table. She was a tutter – someone who couldn’t let any play or card go untutted. In Tom’s experience, tutting was the most negative thing you could do at a poker table and he discounted her ever winning through anything other than dumb luck.

The Raiders fan, the college kids, the crumpled brunette and the Asian had all folded at the sight of the queens. Their pre-flop money had swelled the pot nicely, though.

The tutter tutted, then checked, but the leg-shaker threw in his bet, staring straight at Tom as he did so. Tom ignored him and raised. The tutter grumbled and matched Tom, and the leg-shaker glared angrily at Tom before re-raising. Tom grinned inside at the man’s pointless anger and raised again.

The tutter tutted loudly. Then get the hell out, thought Tom, and after a few moments of lip-biting and chip-counting, she spun her cards back to the dealer.

Tom could feel the animosity of the leg-shaker coming at him in waves as he called Tom’s bet.

It was all on this last card. If it was the eight or any club, Tom was probably home free. Anything else was a disaster.

The painfully thin Chinese girl dealer with translucent skin flipped over the five of diamonds. Tom didn’t have the straight or the flush or anything else. His heart banged in his chest. The dealer directed a tiny finger at the leg-shaker, indicating it was his bet.

Tom’s forearms had rested on the fake-leather padding around the edge of the table throughout. It was through this that he’d felt the small vibrations of the leg-shaker ever since he’d sat down two hours before. Now his forearms told him that – just for a second – the man had stopped shaking his leg. He started again almost instantly, but it was a clue that Tom seized on. Something had made him stop. The cessation of leg-shaking indicated that he’d had to think for a moment, and thinking was all about reassessment. And reassessment meant compromises and a lowering of expectations.

It was a small chink of hope but Tom went with it and decided to go with the bluff: make the guy think he had a pocket pair that matched one of the lower cards on the table, and was therefore sure to beat trip queens with a full house. When the leg-shaker pushed his bet into the centre of the table, Tom shoved in the rest of his chips. The man looked uncertainly at his cards again and Tom knew he had him.

With the pot at more than fourteen hundred dollars, and a small knot of people forming to watch the action, the leg-shaker lost confidence, stood up and folded, angrily flicking his cards at the dealer. As the last man folded, he turned his cards face up. Pocket tens!

Tom met the man’s eyes and grinned. He couldn’t help it. He knew he’d bluffed well, but bluffing three-of-a-kind clear out of the game was an almost sexual thrill.

‘Get your fucking hands out the way!’

The dealer ignored the pockmarked man – used to the abuse of losers.

‘Waving your hands about, you fucking amateur.’

‘It’s over. Leave her alone,’ said Tom, casually, without looking at him.

‘Fuck you. Let’s see what you got.’ The leg-shaker stared at him with angry eyes.

Tom never showed his cards unless someone paid to see them. He peered at the pot innocently. ‘I got about fourteen hundred dollars.’

People round the table chuckled.

‘You gonna show me, dick?’

Tom shrugged. ‘Yeah, I’ll show you dick.’ He pushed his cards carefully back at the dealer. She quickly absorbed them into the pack, hoping to dissipate any trouble once the evidence was gone for ever.

‘Fuck!’

Tom said nothing, just started stacking the chips into neat piles in the little plastic trays the club provided. A thousand dollars per tray for the ten-dollar chips. He needed more trays and looked around for a chip jockey.