Devour by Kurt Anderson Page A

been kicking Prower’s ass all over the card table for the past four hours. Prower had made a strong run to begin with, but had lost a big hand to Latham forty-five minutes in and he had never recovered. Now Prower was on the defensive, and Frankie could see him taking inventory of his shrinking pile of chips after every losing hand.
    Frankie’s mind kept trying to do the math. If the game was over tonight, or even early tomorrow evening, he could be in Akron by Tuesday. Tuesday was good, a working day, and he would have the cash to get things moving. It wouldn’t take more than a day or two to finish up business, and then he would shake Ohio dust from his clothes once and for all. Leave enough cash to get them set up for a while, not enough for them to act like Powerball hillbillies, but enough to take care of the big-ticket items, move out of that ratty little trailer. He’d go take a nice long break with a clear conscience, come back and get them set up with something like an annuity, regular as a paycheck. He was more and more convinced that was the way to do it.
    Concentrate, he thought. You got plenty to do right here.
    He pushed himself off the bar and walked behind Latham. He had a three of hearts, followed by a six, seven, and eight of mixed suits, and a suicide king on the end.
    “Your bet,” Latham said.
    “Two hundred,” Prower said, tossing half of his remaining chips into the center of the table. A tumbler of Glenmorangie was at Prower’s elbow, the ice cubes catching the mellow light of the room. Against the wall, an iced tray filled with platters of shrimp, beluga caviar, and assorted salami and cheeses remained untouched. Adrian was standing on one side of the cart, stealing furtive glances at the food.
    Prower’s cheeks were bright red, the veins a darker purple, not nearly as sweaty as Latham’s. Strange for a fleshy man like Prower to be so obviously nervous and still dry, Frankie thought. It reminded him of a boy he’d known in junior high, a butt plug of a kid who had weighed two hundred pounds at fourteen and was unable to perspire. The gym teacher made the entire class run until the kid, who would be gasping for air by then, either passed out or puked on his shoes. It had been a lot of fun, junior high in northern Ohio.
    “Price of poker just went up,” Latham said mildly.
    Prower spun his cane in his hands. It was the same motion he’d performed early in the game, when he had bet the equivalent of eighty thousand on a pair of sixes. Latham had folded, and Prower had shown off his two sixes proudly, although he wasn’t obliged to.
    Frankie leaned forward, feeling his own pulse quicken. He’d been at tables where men had tens, even hundreds of thousands of dollars, had seen their expression twist and expand as fortunes were won and lost. He had never been party to stakes like this, and he was acutely conscious of his own self in that moment, could feel the air sliding in and out of his chest, the dizzying rush of adrenaline. There was nothing like a good game to get the juices flowing.
    Latham wiped the sweat from his forehead. Then he slowly counted out his own stacks of chip next to Prower’s bet, which was spread out across the center of the table in an uneven spray.
    “See it,” Latham said, then pushed out another column of chips. “And raise you another two hundred.”
    All right , Frankie thought. Here we go.
    * * *
    Captain Donald Moore was ready for bed.
    He stood out on the deck of the Nokomis , the same location where he had met Frankie earlier that afternoon. The running lights of the Nokomis cast a yellow veil in the thick fog. Below him, the waves rode up along the sides of his ship and broke in a steady roar. The air was thick and cold, December air, heavy with the briny, minerally smell. The unmistakable odor of the North Atlantic, but with a twist, a hard, clean smell like cold metal. From the Kaala, no doubt, which was turning out to be a major bitch of a