Free Drawing Dead by Grant McCrea Page B

fragility that attracted them. The picture of manhood with a shattered heart. I could see how acertain kind of guy would want to take him under his wing, assuage his pain with costly baubles.
    I ordered the corned beef and cabbage. Brendan got the house salad, no dressing please.
    I gave him the under-the-eyebrows look.
    Body fat percentage up a tenth of a point? I said.
    I noticed your gut’s starting to hang over your belt. Anybody ever tell you that’s a little disgusting?
    No, I said. I think it makes me kind of cuddly.
    Jesus. I think I just lost my appetite. When was the last time you went to the gym?
    Um, I don’t know, I said. I’ll have to get back to you on that.
    This was the pact we’d reached. Without ever saying it, we’d agreed to keep it light. We weren’t going to excavate any bodies, agonize over the shared ugly past. What would it accomplish? Well, maybe a lot. But neither of us was equipped to deal with it. I’d keep an eye on him, older-brother-like. But he did his thing, I did mine. And we tried to survive.
    The corned beef was great. Wet and juicy from the cabbage. I wolfed it down. Brendan’s salad looked like mulch. He didn’t touch it. I picked up the check. We went across the street.
    The All In was a scungy kind of place. They’d rented out the fourth floor of a walk-up, knocked out all the interior walls and blacked out the windows. Tried to cheer it up with peach-colored walls. The walls just got dirty and made it more depressing, but that didn’t matter. We didn’t go there for the décor. We went to go fishing. And the fishing was good.
    We’re sitting down and the dealer’s saying, I’m in Vegas last week. Guy gave a hooker a five-hundred-dollar chip. She gave him three hundred bucks cash back, and performed services, too.
    Everybody laughs.
    Eddie the Butcher next to me says, I’ll take those odds any day.
    Eddie the Butcher was a friendly guy with a red face and a huge mustache. He didn’t murder people for a living. Not that kind of butcher. He chopped up pigs and cows. You could smell it on him. He was a good poker player. Mixed it up. Wouldn’t get pushed around. But the rest of them were wimps. Mice and fish. Fish and mice. Worse than mice. Don’t mice learn from experience? Every hand I played, I opened with a raise. One or two of them would call, every time. Sometimesthree or four. If Eddie called or raised, I’d play my usual game. If he didn’t, I could already put the money in my pocket. The flop would come. If they checked to me, I’d bet. If I went first, I’d bet. If they bet in front of me, I’d raise. If they called, I’d raise on the turn. If it went to the river, I’d raise big. And almost every time, at some point they’d fold. Didn’t matter what cards I had. Or they had. Oh, sure, if one of them flopped a monster, I’d lose some back. But you just can’t give somebody the kind of advantage they were handing out. At some point you have to play back. Re-re-raise. Show you mean business. Eddie knew that. The rest of them never picked it up.
    Made you wonder. But not for long. Mostly, you just took their money.
    Two thousand bucks in three hours. A good chunk to invest in Brighton Beach.

16.
    B RIGHTON B EACH WAS N EW Y ORK C ITY THE WAY IT USED TO BE . Rows and rows of narrow houses. Life on the stoop. People in the street, doing nothing. A family-owned store on every corner, boxes outside overflowing with odd fruit. Pomegranates, maybe. Sausages, the fruit of Eastern Europe. Languages not English. Russian, Polish, Yiddish, Ukrainian. A hint of German. But maybe that was the Yiddish.
    The game was in a basement. The door was heavy, painted black, windowless. A large brass handle. The old-fashioned kind, with a thumb-push to unlatch it. An old surveillance camera jutted out above it, big and clunky and smiling at us. A surveillance gargoyle. The small painted sign on the door said
Milan Football Club
. On the door frame was a tarnished brass