The Baby Gamble (Texas Hold'em)

And while he wasn’t fool enough to pretend that his recent encounter with Annie didn’t have something to do with that, he was driven by more than just this impossible need to be close to his ex-wife. The acceptance he’d received from the Wild Bunch had been a far better cure for him than all the medications he’d been offered by his doctors.And there was still one member of the Wild Bunch—in some ways the pivotal member—who didn’t even know Blake Smith existed.

He couldn’t do anything about that. Couldn’t get to know a man who’d disappeared into thin air.

Yet, after last night, after breathing life back into the man who’d helped raise Jake Chandler, he’d felt an odd kind of connection with the rebel who’d ridden out of town, never to be heard from again.

Verne hadn’t moved at all during the half hour Blake had sat there with him. Likely hadn’t known anyone was in the room. Blake was glad he’d come, all the same. Something had been served by the visit.

“Blake!” A surprised voice greeted him as the elevator door slid open on the first floor of the small county hospital.

“Luke, good to see you.”

He shook the younger man’s hand, appreciating the firmness of Luke Chisum’s grasp. He identified with the young fighter, as he’d done since their first introduction the month before.

“How is he?” Luke asked, nodding toward the elevator, his cowboy hat in one hand, resting against a denim-covered leg.

“No change.”

“He hasn’t regained consciousness?”

Blake loosened his tie. “Not even for a minute.”

“Not much reason for me to go up then, huh?”

“Probably not. They say he’s not aware of anything at the moment.”

Falling into step beside Blake as he headed back out to the parking lot, Luke said, “Wonder how they can tell that.”

“Brain waves, I imagine.”

He turned to say good-night as the cool October air hit him outside the hospital’s revolving door. And stopped when he noticed an unusual show of emotion on the cowboy’s face.

“You got a minute?” Luke asked.

“Sure. What’s up?”

“Want a beer?”

Blake hadn’t had dinner yet. But a beer would suffice. He followed Luke across the street to a bar he’d visited more times than he liked to remember, when he’d first come home and had had to be near Annie, even though she’d thrown him over.

She’d been all there was to connect him to reality, to life after his long captivity, to hope and positive feelings. And the booze had helped him escape the rest of what he knew.

“I just got word this afternoon that a buddy of mine, my copilot, actually, was killed this morning in a raid outside Baghdad. He wasn’t even on duty. Was in town trying to get a box of chocolates shipped to his mother, of all things.”

Blake took a long swig of beer, blocking out the vision he had of the Middle Eastern desert and the towns that sprang up within it.

“There’s no way to understand the harshness of life over there if you haven’t seen it for yourself,” Blake said.

“The people, so many of them, they live each day like they’re running on batteries,” Luke added. “You notice it right off when you first get there, and then, pretty soon, you look at yourself and you’re doing the same thing, and you don’t even know how you got that way.” Luke nodded. “That’s what happens after a while. It’s a way of life and becomes commonplace, and you get so tired of being afraid that you just start accepting it all.”

“Until you get home and the people around here have no idea about what any of that is like. And you want to be like them, but you aren’t.”

“You, too, huh?” Luke’s grin was crooked.

“It gets better.” Blake told him what he could. “The whole thing works in reverse, too,” he continued, thinking of the parts of his life that had settled into a relatively comfortable routine. “After a while, surrounded by people who are more or less unaware of the darkest side of life on a daily basis, you start to adopt that as the norm.”

CHAPTER NINE

THE ROADSIDE PLACE WAS quickly filling up, the evening’s merrymakers occupying many of the tables and booths. And the more people that filtered in, the more Blake watched the door, keeping a line clear between him and it.