Hooper, Kay - [Hagen 09] by It Takes A Thief (V1.0)[Htm]

doing, pal."
    "I know. I'll be in touch within a few days,
Raven."
    "All right. Good luck."
    "Thanks."
    He cradled the receiver and stood gazing at nothing. He
knew what he was doing. He was keeping a promise. No matter what
happened or what it cost him, Jennifer would have her Belle Retour
back when it was over.
     

Six
     
    The clock on the mantel ticked steadily on in the quiet
of the room. The only light came from a lamp suspended low over
a round table near the window. Cigarette and cigar smoke rose
upward to disappear Into darkness, each tendril following the eddies
and currents always present in even the most still room and
caused now by air-conditioning and the breathing of the five men
seated in comfortable chairs, cards in their hands or stacked neatly
or flung down haphazardly on the green baize of the game table.
    For serious gamblers such as these, poker chips
remained in a caddy and out of the way: the rule was cash on the
table. Stack of bills, arranged according to individual habit, lay
before each man, and in the center of the table was a careless
heap of money, all hundred-dollar bills.
    The current pot was somewhere in the neighborhood of
fifty thousand dollars.
    Three men had folded, and they sat back, smoking or
sipping their drinks, watching silently as the remaining two
played the hand out. It was a game of bluff now, and had been for
more than an hour, each man steadily raising the stakes in an effort
to make the other lose his nerve and fold. Neither of them had
requested a new card since it had become a duel. In fact, Dane's
cards were stacked facedown near his relaxed hands, and he
hadn't so much as looked at them in almost half an hour. Each time
Garrett Kelly tossed a stack of bills into the pot, Dane simply
matched, then raised the bet.
    And it became increasingly difficult for Kelly to
duplicate Dane's relaxed, almost indifferent air. He toyed with
his cards, putting them down and picking them up a dozen times. He
lit cigarette after cigarette. His peculiarly colorless eyes probed
sharply across the table as he sought to find a hint of strain
in that tranquil, handsome face, some sign of hesitation or
uncertainty in the vivid eyes.
    He found no crack in Dane's composure, and by this
fourth night of playing against him, no man at the table was
surprised by it. At least two of the men had gulped silently upon
discovering that Dane never raised the bet in increments of less than
five hundred dollars, but they were wealthy men and experienced
gamblers, and had adjusted. What they continued to find incredible
was Dane's utter stillness.
    He appeared boneless in his chair, requiring neither
cigarette nor drink as a prop, and having no apparent need to change
position to ease the strain of sitting for so long. At the beginning
of the hand, when there was much more activity around the table, his
deep, charming voice had been heard as often as the other men's,
but once the play had come down to only two, he had fallen silent.
And as Kelly's tension increased, Dane seemed to become even more
unruffled. His brilliant eyes appeared as serene as twin violet
lakes, his lips remained curved in a crooked half smile; and his
graceful hands moved only to flick more money into the pot.
    It was just after midnight, and they had been playing
since eight.
    Kelly, still with a respectable pile of money before
him, matched Dane's last bid of four thousand dollars, and was about
to raise by another thousand when his opponent's lifted hand stopped
him.
    "Before you decide to raise," Dane said
lazily, "maybe you'd better look at this." With his right
hand only, he turned his top card faceup on the table. It was the ace
of diamonds. Slowly, he turned the next three cards up. In a neat row
before him lay a very possible royal flush in diamonds, ace, king,
queen, jack. The fifth card remained facedown, and Dane tapped it
lightly with an index finger.
    "If this is a ten of diamonds," he said, still
lazy, "you can't possibly