Poker News

Poker Cop: A Poker Murder Mystery

I ask, “Where’s the Don’s $250,000 poke?”

Wheels should have worn sunglasses. His eyes go involuntarily towards a closet door on the far wall. “I don’t keep it here.”

Igo to the closet, where the stench is overpowering, and I open it. A huge dog, its jaws opened wide, leaps for my throat.

In Dante’s Inferno, Cerberus, the savage, flesheating dog that guards the Gates of Hell, is described as “a hideous monster fierce and strange.” The Rottweiler that has gone for my throat is Cerberus’ ugly cousin.

I fall backwards and the dog is on top of me. I throw my plaster-casted left arm up to protect my throat. His jaws chomp down on the cast.

Jake fires a shotgun round into the ceiling to scare the beast off. No effect.

The plaster cast starts to crack. “Shoot the dog!”

Jake raises his shotgun.

“No!” shouts Wheels, crashing his wheelchair into Jake. The shotgun blast misses.

Jake knocks Wheels to the floor. Raises his shotgun. “I can’t get a clear shot!” “Shoot the dog or shoot me, I don’t care which!”

Jake fires. The shotgun blast tears flesh off the dog’s back. He drops my arm and leaps at Jake who shoots him in the chest, steps over his twitching body and shoots him in the head.

Wheels lies on the floor yelling, “The Puppy! You’ve killed The Queens’s Puppy!”

I think, “Puppy?”

At that moment The Queen appears in the closet’s doorway. The monstrous female Rottwieler sees her puppy dead and howls.

The basement has two doors. One, up an inclined ramp, leads to the poker room.

This is how Wheels entered the basement. The other, set into the far wall, leads to the alleyway. This is how Jake entered the basement.

Between us and those doors is the Queen of Hell who bears her massive yellow fangs and moves towards us. Jake and I edge backwards. Wheels lays helpless between us and the dog. She growls an-grily and closes in on Wheels. “Help me! For the love of. . . .”

“Get ready,” says Jake.

“When she attacks him, run for the alleyway door.”

“No! Wait!” screams Wheels, “TheHouse of Cards! I’ll tell you about the House of Cards!”

“I need him alive,” I tell Jake. “Kill the dog.”

“With what? My bare hands? My gun’s empty.”

We are now drawing dead. If I were at a poker table I’d do what I always do in this situation - I’d cheat. Right now not even cheating will help.

The upstairs trapdoor at “Wheels’s Table” (this was the way I entered the basement) suddenly opens in the ceiling above us and a body crashes down on top of The Queen. She’s knocked senseless.

Wheels screams, “Help! Help! Help!” through the open trapdoor.

Jake silences Wheels with the butt of his shotgun but it’s too late. Someone yells, “Wheels is in trouble!”

Jake says to me, “Let’s get out of here now!”

“Wait!” I run to the closet and find the Old Don’s metal briefcase. Hugging it to my chest, I run for the alley door.

The man who has fallen through the trap door is on all fours trying to stand. I stop to give him a hand up. Our eyes meet. I stumble backwards trying to get away.

The Small Man pulls a sawed-off shotgun from under his coat and fires at me pointblank.

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