‘Yes.’
She nodded, remembering, her face giving nothing away: ‘Did you ask him about your job?’
‘I didn’t get a chance,’ he said. ‘Someone killed him.’
She stared at him, searching his eyes for a lie – as he was doing with hers. ‘Why would someone kill him?’
She didn’t look like a liar: she looked genuinely puzzled.
He never took his eyes off hers. Just shrugged.
She bit her lip and frowned some more, her eyes focusing on something he couldn’t see, off in the distance. She was still beautiful, he thought. It was hard to believe anyone so beautiful could do ugly things. He didn’t want to believe it.
‘Where’s the bolt now?’
Her words stabbed him, like a knife in the heart. The hope he realized he’d been clinging to was ripped from him and he was set adrift on a sea of angry sadness. He’d been going to work up to asking her about Stanley. Stanley and the Weasel. How much she knew about them, their connection with the Pride of Maine, her connection …
He didn’t need to.
He’d just told her Lenny Munro had been killed.
And all she wanted to know was where the bolt was.
‘I don’t know,’ he lied softly.
*
Tom was still in a kind of hurt shock when he sat down at the No Limit table with Ness’s twenty thousand dollars. He barely registered the other players, although Ness had run an eye over them before approving the table, and told him to watch out for a skinny Japanese girl with a Minnie Mouse tattoo on the back of her wrist. She was new on the scene.
His mind churned through options and possibilities, all of which twisted back on themselves to become traps and pitfalls in his thumping, free-floating thoughts.
Ness had betrayed him. He’d trusted her, and she’d betrayed him. They’d made love until she’d cried and she’d still betrayed him. He didn’t know how far back that betrayal went, but a bullet in Lenny Munro’s chest was far enough.
He thought again of South Africa. Of the way she’d tried to distract him – hell, the way she had distracted him – with sex. Her hand on him in Lettie Marais’s big, lumpy bed; her thighs pressing him close to her heat as he yanked desperately at that stupid button-fly in the middle of a hot Karoo night; him waking to find her holding the bolt after they’d fucked for the first time in the Table Bay Hotel.
Finally he could see the angles.
The phone in her hand in De Rust. Not for a call to Richard, but to somebody else – to let them know about the fan disc. Its importance and its vulnerability.
The car that had knocked them into the Karoo and hadn’t stopped. If he’d gone after it, instead of fumbling to get inside Ness, maybe he’d have been able to stop them taking the fan disc. Ness had delayed him long enough with the promise of sex, then taken the opportunity of the sudden headlights supposedly to come to her senses, and get back in the car.
If he hadn’t woken when he had in Cape Town, would she have walked out with the bolt and left him asleep in a post-coital haze? Flown home alone? Or just thrown the bolt in the harbour and returned to their warm bed to give him one for the road?
He could see it all now.
Tom was dealt in but barely registered his cards.
The only angle he couldn’t see was the hospital. He couldn’t see how events at the hospital had helped her cause. The fan disc was gone; the bolt not yet discovered; the paperwork stolen; the investigators dead. He was no longer a threat. As far as Ness was concerned, it was mission accomplished.
Then why sit and read to him? Why smooth things over with the doctors and nurses he’d rubbed up the wrong way? Why take him in her mouth? The selflessness jarred. He couldn’t reconcile it with his new image of her: of a chrysalis splitting open to reveal not a butterfly but a smooth, dead-eyed deceiver.
In less than an hour, the first ten thousand was gone. Most of Tom’s chips now sat in front of the Minnie Mouse girl, the huge piles making her look even smaller. With grim satisfaction, he changed up the second roll and Ness leaned down to put her lips against his ear. ‘Get your mind on the job.’ She sounded tense.
Fuck you, he thought, and bet recklessly on pocket fours in the face of a possible straight flush that kept three other players in to swell the pot.
A four came up on the river and Tom scooped three and a half thousand dollars.
It turned the tide. Playing stupidly, he started to win steadily. He played every hand, whether it was any good or not. Two hours later he had thirty-three thousand more than he’d started with. He picked up his cards – a two and a seven off-suit – and bluffed with gusto. Ness first put her hand on his neck, then dug in her nails to stop him. He winced, but didn’t throw in the hand. Hating her, he raised and re-raised until even Minnie Mouse caved in under pressure and he stole more than fifteen thousand dollars from the table.
Ness gripped his neck and hissed angrily in his ear, ‘I’ll see you in the car.’
He didn’t watch her go, just grinned, picked up six-jack off-suit and took another flyer.
Players started to leave the table as they watched Tom’s luck spiral outrageously. Minnie Mouse and a quiet young man wearing a Raiders cap stuck in there. Both were good players. Both made the percentage calls – calls that would have won them pots if they’d been playing someone wholly rational.
Right now, that wasn’t Tom.
He took the table for another big pot, bluffing crazily on the promise of a flush, which never came through. The Raiders fan was wiped out and Tom won six and a half grand.
Tom was not himself. Otherwise he would never have flipped over his cards to show that he’d beaten them all with what had finally amounted to a pair of threes on the turn.
‘You cheat!’ Minnie Mouse said vehemently. A ripple of unease went through the players: there was no question of Tom having cheated, but it was not an accusation that was ever made or taken lightly at a poker table.
Everyone looked nervously at Tom, who snapped, ‘You loser.’
‘Fuck you. You cheater!’
The dealer, a pretty, round-faced Vietnamese girl, signalled to a floor man and two security staff hovered closer than before.
