“I like the plan,” Ryan said, “but Vinny has got to understand: nobody gets hurt. No shooting, no blows to the head. This is an illegal game, so nobody is calling the cops—unless somebody gets hurt, then we’re in the shit.”

“Got it,” Vinny said. It was the first time he had spoken.

—

Ryan went back to his apartment, got a duffel off the top shelf of his closet, and dumped the shotgun onto the bed. It was an old-fashioned, open-hammer scattergun with the barrel sawed off to about four inches. Vinny had fired it into a target: from ten feet it had a pattern the size of a basketball.

He cleaned the weapon, dropped a couple of double-ought shells into it, and closed it. It couldn’t fire until he pulled back the hammers.

—

Al dropped off Vinny at his mother’s house. “You okay with Gene?” he asked the young man.

“No problem, I guess.”

“You guess? What does that mean?”

“Nothin’.”

“You do understand why nobody gets hurt?”

“Yeah, nobody gets hurt, nobody calls the cops. But, Al . . .”

“Yeah?”

“What if somebody’s packin’?”

“Don’t worry about it. Nobody in this crowd packs.”

“If you say so,” Vinny replied. “But if somebody draws, we’re in a whole new poker game.”

Chapter 39

Al sat at the poker table and glanced at his hand again. He raised. The dealer dealt another card, and Al watched his face instead of his hands. He had already learned that the guy was too good a mechanic to make a move you could see. His face was something else, though. As he dealt Al’s next card there was a tiny smile.

Al forced himself not to look at his watch, on being completely caught up in the game. He wanted to be as surprised as everyone else at the table. When the two doors were simultaneously kicked in, he flinched with the best of them and looked around. Two men in masks and black clothes came into the room, one with a semiautomatic pistol held out in front of him and the other with a mean-looking sawed-off shotgun.

“Hands on the table, everybody!” Ryan shouted, and for emphasis, he cocked both hammers of the shotgun.

Al went back to looking at the dealer, and as he placed his hands on the table, the butt of a pistol revealed itself under his jacket. Oh, no, Al thought.

Vinny was methodically emptying the pockets of the players, while Ryan moved the shotgun back and forth, as if spraying the men at the table.

Al saw a flicker of a move of the dealer’s right hand, and he caught the man’s eye and slowly shook his head. That stopped the man long enough for Vinny to discover the pistol. It was a snub-nosed .38, and he thumbed open the cylinder and shook the cartridges out onto the table. Al heard somebody say, “Shit!” but he wasn’t sure who.