The Player, The Thief and The Broken Heart - Chapter Seventy-Six - Down to the Last Two

Steve did his damnedest not to look while the cops hauled Rebecca and Jimmy out. He kept his eyes on the cards on the dealer flop, fighting the urge to steal so much as a glance in their direction until the noise and the footsteps had died down. He caught only a blur of faces and uniforms reflected in the window beyond. His anxiety rocketed into the stratosphere. One cop resembled Robbie. He wasn't a hundred percent sure; the man was pretty generic-looking. Then again, why should he care. He had this game to get through. His four of a kind had kicked the old French biddy's ass right out of the game, his highlight of the night so far. One pedigreed leech down, one to go. More to the point, the dealer had just turned over the last card and it was another club. With a flush in his hand, Steve pushed all of his chips into the kitty. Bet big or go home. He'd had enough. All he wanted to do now was get the hell out of here.

The round of betting finished. Looking around at the amounts Benson, Lachlan and Yushenko had pushed into the center of the table, odds were high they had good cards too. Lachlan was first to lay down the cards in his hand. He had three of kind made from a pair of jacks in his hand along with the jack of clubs in the flop. Yushenko smirked. He'd staked his fortune on a similar hand, only with a higher pair – Kings were his lucky cards this round.

"Blast!" Lachlan mouthed, pounding his fist on the table. An instant later his expression settled and he might as well be at a riverside picnic gazing out at the willow trees.

The Englishman took umbrage at having been skipped over as he flicked a ten and queen of spades onto the pile of chips. "Sorry, old chap. A straight beats both of you."

"That's what you think," Steve said, chuckling. Then he looked at his cards again; how the hell had he missed it? It wasn't the two of clubs in his hand, but a spade. Fuck, fuck, fuck. He'd gone all in and now he was out. He stared off at his reflection floating in the glass some twenty feet away, stunned. How could I have been so stupid? This was a screw-up a five-year-old would know better than to make. He kept staring at the two of spades as if it would morph back into clubs. His brain had completely misfired.

"Go home," Yushenko said, "We catch up tomorrow."

Exactly the words he'd been waiting to hear all night, the one thing sweetening the bitterness of defeat. If only he'd lost simply because he'd been bettered, not because of a humiliatingly idiotic blunder. Anyone looking at his cards might assume he'd been trying to bluff. There was that. His legs nearly gave out from under him as he rose out of his seat. He staggered up the steps toward the bar, looking around for Rebecca even though he knew she'd already been taken away.

He passed between the heavy red velvet drapes. No doorman blocking his way. In the corridor, the security guard barely looked up from his bank of computer monitors. Just like that, he was out. A second earlier and he'd been positive he'd had the hand that could win him the entire game. He leaned his head against the mirrored wall of the elevator all the way down. That was it. In seconds he'd gone from sharing a table with some of the richest, most powerful people on the planet, to being alone and a total nobody once again.

He took his phone out and looked up Jeannie's number. His brain was so numb he couldn't remember whether he was in her bad books, or her good. With no idea what to do with himself, he began wandering towards the exit.