Poker News

Poker Cop: A Poker Player Murder Mystery

I’ve gone to see The Dealer, “If anyone,” I tell Jenny as she drives there in her old wreck, “knows about this ‘House Of Cards,’ it’ll be him.” And I’m right. He does know, and that I’ve even asked terrifies him. The Dealer grabs me and yells, “Have you been . . . invited?”

“What? . . . Invited where?

. . . Let go! . . .”

“Don’t accept!” he yells,

shaking me, “Whatever you do, don’t . . .”

I try to pull him off me, ask, “What is the House Of Cards?”

He takes a deep breath, begins, “The House Of Cards is . . .”

The close range gunshot is deafening. A perfectly round o suddenly appears between The Dealer’s eyes. He slumps to the floor. From behind me the Small Man says, “Turn around.”

I never play poker without an edge. Even if I suspect I’m drawing dead, if I still have an edge, I play the end. You just never know what the last card will bring. I say to the gunman, “You said, ‘No one cheats the House Of Cards?’”

The Small Man answers with one word, “So?”

“So, if you’re going to kill me, at least answer the question.”

This time I geta two-word reply, “What question?”

“Who cheated the House Of Cards out of the money you stole?”

I look over the gunman’s shoulder and, out the window, I can see Jenny’s car. She guns the engine. Her tires smoke. The car jumps forward.

“Money?” says the Small Man, “I didn’t steal any money! I only collected a debt to the House of Cards.”

I play for more time, “What is the House Of Cards?”

The Small Man smiles, “The House Of Cards? It’s where good poker players go to die.” He pulls the back the hammer of his revolver - Click! - raising the gun to my face. “I guess you were never good enough to get invited.”

I watch the onrushing car lights as they get closer, closer, closer as the Small Man, pulls the trigger back, back, back.

The gun goes off just as Jenny’s car explodes through the store’s front window. The gunman flinches as he fires and the bullet plows a shallow ditch across my cheek. He dives for cover. I run for my life. The door says “Employees Only - It’s The Law.” Under the circumstances, I take the chance that I’ll live to pay the fine, and run into the back of the store. Stairs. I go them two at time. Below I hear the Small Man pounding after me. Four flights of stairs lead to the roof exit door which I slam shut after me. There’s another building across an alleyway. I run up to the edge and then back off. The other roof is a good ten foot jump. I stop, look down into the dark-ness, four floors below.

The roof door behind me bursts open. I turn. The Small Man raises his gun.

In 1737 in Oxford, England, Cambridge University Philosophy Professor Dr. James Hobson’s house caught fire. The Professor, an elderly man, caught between the flames and a three-story jump, jumped. As he later explained from his wheelchair, “Sometimes an apparently free choice offers no choice at all.” Facing my own “Hobson’s Choice,” I look away from the gunman and run as fast as I can

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