Dead Low Winter
by
T.K. O’Neill
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places
and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are
used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or
persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Dead Low Winter copyright © 2015 by Bluestone Press.
All rights reserved.
ISBN-13: 978-0-9672-0061-3
Originally published in somewhat different form as “Social Climbing,” one of four stories published under the pseudonym Thomas Sparrow in his 1999 debut Northwoods Pulp: Four Tales of Crime and Weirdness and later translated into Japanese and published by Fushosha.
No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any
manner whatsoever without written permission except in the
case of brief quotations or reviews.
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Cover design by Joe Gunderson
Dead Low Winter
In an age that is utterly corrupt, the best policy is to do as others do.
— Marquis de Sade, 1788
ONE
Social Climbing
The high rollers had me surrounded. They were all staring at me, waiting.
“Three, please,” said the Mayor of Bay City. He was polite, as usual.
I thumbed the cards off the top of the deck and slid them across the smooth brown surface of the round wooden table. Mayor John McKay took them and settled back against his straight-backed chair, spreading his cards out like a fan as he always did. Then he took a white-tipped filter cigarette from the pocket of his tailored white shirt and lit it with a silver Zippo and a flourish of his long-fingered almost feminine hands, blowing out the smoke in a slow, upward moving cloud.
I figured he must have hit on his pair.
“I’ll take two,” said large-headed and balding Nicholas Cross on McKay’s immediate left. Cross squinted and tugged on the bridge of his previously-broken-but-nicely-set nose as if a fly was up there. “Make it two of the same kind, if you please.” He grinned strangely at the rest of the players, pulling at the loose skin around his Adam’s apple like the fly had found its way down there. After seeing his cards he made a quick swipe across his forehead with a hairy forearm and sat back.
I looked over to my left at the ever-grinning mug of Sam Cross, Nick’s younger brother. His index finger was jammed in his ear, the rest of his stubby hand wiggling with gusto, his other hand resting comfortably against his slight paunch. A good-sized pile of chips and several empty beer bottles formed a barrier around his neatly stacked cards. He’d opened right off the get-go and drawn two.
The Cross brothers were cheating and I knew it. But it only seemed to be working for Sam. Nick had been losing big all night long and was down to writing IOUs. And the jing wasn’t only going to his sibling; he was spreading it around.
Tom Geno, the slick-haired mayor of Zenith City, had a few of those IOUs and also a gigantic collection of chips stacked up in odd-sized piles like rice cakes at a vegetarian picnic. And him the compulsive degenerate gambler that everyone loved to play against. The big fish from the bright side of the bay where the streets are a little cleaner and the sun shines a little brighter. The boys from Bay City always enjoyed cleaning this fish, but tonight the finner was having the last laugh. Yes sir, the Mayor of Zenith City was showing the Bay City boys a thing or two about poker, letting them know he wasn’t the sucker they thought he was.
Geno took one card and slid it in his hand and mixed them up slowly, one at a time, without looking. Having the last laugh on these assholes would definitely be frosting on the Mayor’s cake.
Myself, I was laughing on the inside, where it counts. Imagine—me hanging with the rich and influential. Just a punk nobody finally old enough to grow a decent mustache and here I was, in on the “fleecing of the elite,” as Sam Cross called it.
But the brothers were fucking up their scam right in front of me.
The show was going to be better than I thought.
On the night before the game, I told Sam Cross I wouldn’t be dealing seconds or off the bottom of the deck like the old days. The cheating always gave me a queer feeling, even back then. The old days were three or four years ago when I ran a card game for Nick Cross out of a little shack in the north end of Bay City near the warehouses. Nick would give me the cash every month and I’d pay the rent on the house, using a false name, and keep the fridge stocked with beer. I provided fresh decks of cards when needed and dealt with the delivery people if somebody had food sent in during a game. I took the house’s ten percent rake out of every pot and was also the bouncer but we never had much trouble. At six-foot-one and two hundred pounds, most guys thought twice but every now and then you’d have to put the hand on someone. But I never liked it much and I could usually talk my way out of tight situations. And people—even drunken losers—usually liked me.
Worst I ever got hit was by a three hundred pound woman. Big, mean, fat thing smacked me hard in the mouth one night and chipped a tooth, all because I had to escort her skinny little wimp of a husband out of the place for being drunk and obnoxious. What the hell you going to do, hit a woman? Broad like that—next time I might.
Occasionally we’d get a bunch of drunks that the Cross brothers felt like ripping off. Then I’d get to practice my little games of deception with the pasteboards—the tricks I’d learned in my senior year of high school during the several months I was laid up with a broken hip after crashing into a goalpost during a high school hockey play-off game. Early March, I think it was. The goalposts didn’t move in those days, driving the net took guts. Always a shitty month, March. I mean, just the word March, think about it. It’s what they say when they want you to go someplace you don’t want to go. March upstairs to bed, young man. March up there and take that machine gun nest, boys. But I put the downtime to good use, learning to handle a deck of Bicycle Brands like Bret Maverick at a sucker’s convention.
And so it was that the Cross boys began to exploit my talents like the bloodsuckers they were. Every so often the boys would throw a big “Las Vegas party.” And part of the hype was “professional dealers.” That would invariably be me and some other douchebag, dressed up in fancy shirts and green plastic visors. I guess people don’t mind getting ripped off if the rippers seem up-scale enough.
Boy, could I do some things. Only once did anyone complain and he was a lawyer so what do you expect? Nick gave the guy his money back and told him if he ever came around again he’d be sorry. That was the last we ever heard from the lawyer.
It was good fun and decent money for awhile and you got free beer and met some interesting characters that helped keep your mind off what you were doing. Then one night the cops busted the place while I was outside in the backseat of my car trying to get some kind of a job—be it blow or hand or whatever—from this tart I’d met in a bar that very afternoon. Nick lost everything in the house that night—around two grand—and blamed me for a while, so we became estranged. A year later he realized he would have lost it all anyway—no matter