“Dave?” she said.
“Can you run a dude by the name of Bobby Mack Rydel? I need it right now.”
“What’s going on?”
“Come on, Betsy, help me out. I think I’ve got a house fire here.”
I don’t know how she did it but she did. My suspicion was she or a colleague dipped into an intelligence file. By my watch, it took less than four minutes for her to call back.
“You’ve got a live one,” she said. “Rydel was in Force Recon in the Marine Corps, attended jump school at Benning, and was kicked out with a dishonorable discharge after he was charged with rape in Japan.”
Clete had walked over to the slot machines, not far from the card tables, and had positioned himself where he could look directly into Rydel’s face. Each time Rydel looked up, Clete was grinning at him, smacking his gum, his big arms folded on his chest.
“He ran a training school for mercenaries in the Florida Panhandle and was probably mixed up with mercs in Mozambique in the eighties,” Betsy said. “He has a seventh-degree belt in karate. He beat a man to death in Miami and got off because the victim was armed and Rydel was not. Are you getting this?”
“Yeah, I’m right here,” I said.
Rydel had just bet heavily into a large pot, trying to ignore Clete and keep his eyes focused on the game, waiting for the final cards to be turned up by the dealer.
“Rydel is on a watch list in France. Interpol thinks he may be involved with arms smuggling. He may have been with the Contras briefly, but for sure he’s worked all over Africa,” Betsy said.
Rydel raised the bet, pushing three stacks of chips into the center of the felt. A black man in a purple suit with rings on all his fingers called and raised. Rydel called and raised again, pushing out the last of his chips. The black man shrugged and called the raise, yawning either out of confidence or perhaps acceptance that he had gotten in over his head.
“Here’s the last of it,” Betsy said. “He’s been a contract security employee for several companies operating in the Mideast. His specialty is thought to be interrogation. Don’t ask me to do this again.”
The communal cards the dealer had dealt faceup in the center of the felt included an ace of spades and an ace, king, and jack of hearts. Rydel turned over his hole cards, an ace of diamonds and an ace of clubs. The two aces from the flop gave him four of a kind, an almost guaranteed winner.
The black man grimaced as though he had just bitten down on an abscessed tooth.
“I catch a hand like that about once every six months,” Rydel said.
“Yeah, I know what you mean. Me, too,” the black man said.
He turned over his hole cards, a ten and queen of hearts. With the ace, jack, and king from the communal cards, he was holding a royal flush, the best hand in poker.
Clete began wheezing with laughter, his folded arms bouncing up and down on his chest. He passed by Rydel’s chair, slapping him hard on the back. “Tough luck,” he said. “If you need a credit line, forget it. This is a class joint. They don’t take food stamps.”
You could hear him laughing all the way to the men’s room.
Rydel sat for about thirty seconds staring into space, his hands splayed on his thighs, perhaps counting up the number of instances his attention had been distracted from the game by Clete’s ridicule.
He said something in the ear of the woman with the white-gold hair. She wore a white knit dress full of eyelets and her breasts hung as heavy as cantaloupes in her bra. Her eyes were lifted toward the ceiling, fluttering as Rydel spoke. I had a feeling this was not the kind of evening she had bargained for. I also realized I had seen her before.
Rydel got up from the table and followed Clete into the men’s room.
“Hello? Are you still there?” Bet
sy said.
“I’m here,” I said.
“Where?” she asked.
“In deep shit,” I replied.
CLETE WAS READY for Bobby Mack Rydel when he came through the door. Or thought he was.
“What’s your name, Gordo?” Rydel asked.