Table Stakes

By Hal Williams

Grady Nash's life becomes extremely complicated when he finds himself caught between two women in competition for his affection.
Brunette Lisa Terrell, a coworker, has had her eye on Grady for quite some time, but her subtle flirtations seem to go unnoticed. Her roommate urges her to go after him, but it’s not in her nature.
Blonde, blue-eyed Cindy is much more direct in her approach. Only two problems may afflict their relationship. First, she is eight years older than Grady. Second, she’s a Reno cop.
Grady and Lisa become linked by facing mutual peril. She gets caught in the line of fire, then becomes a target herself.
Cindy, charged with trying to keep Grady alive, falls for him for reasons neither of them can understand.
Between dodging the police and Las Vegas hit men, and dealing with conflicting emotions arising from his dual relationships, Grady faces one life-changing crisis after another.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Hal Williams
• Release date: Aug 4, 2016
• ISBN: 9781370354207

Hal Williams

Native Texan and Vietnam veteran Hal Williams is the author of twenty four novels including foureen books of the "Persephone of the ATF" series. His writing style reflects his wealth of experiences ranging from rock-n-roll musician and racecar driver to working journalist and book manuscript editor. In addition to writing and still working around racecars, Hal enjoys playing bridge, target shooting, and collecting vintage revolvers. He lives in the Dallas area.

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TABLE STAKES

A novel by Hal Williams

Copyright © 2016 by Hal Williams

Cover illustration copyright © 2016 by Jones C. McConnell, Jr.

ISBN 9781370354207

Smashwords Edition

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This is a work of fiction. The characters and situations—other than public figures identified by their real names and documented historical events—are products of the author's imagination and are not intended to portray actual persons or events.

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Dedicated to the memory of Judy Claire Williams

April 8, 1943-March 29, 2016

I miss you every day, Angel.

CHAPTER 1

ARE YOU on break?

Grady Nash turned and spotted Kenny Davis. Just started, he told the Arcadia Casino blackjack dealer.

Cool. I’ve got a joint I’ll share with you.

Nash was not a regular pot user, but he figured that a few tokes now and then would not make him an addict. They walked outside and into an alleyway between the casino building and the motel next door where they were sheltered from a biting north wind and prying eyes. Grady could hardly afford to let casino security catch him smoking marijuana. A twenty-two-year-old non-scholarship senior at UNR, he needed the buffet attendant’s job to pay for tuition, books, and living expenses, which it just barely did. He did not have the kind of income necessary to support a marijuana indulgence, but Davis apparently did.

Heavy gray clouds had started rolling in from the northwest, enveloping the crest of Peavine Peak and obscuring the afternoon sun. Nash figured that snow would begin falling on Reno within the next hour. Foul weather caused problems for homeward bound nine-to-fivers looking forward to a four-day weekend, but it had its good points, too. Skiers at Mount Rose and Diamond Peak would be leaving the slopes earlier than usual. Non-skiers might postpone or cancel evening activities. In each case, more Thanksgiving tourists would be on the casino floor feeding their quarters into the slot machines and leaving their dollars at the gaming tables. Anything good for the casino was good for its employees.

Davis lit the hand-rolled cigarette, took a deep drag that he held in, then handed the joint to Nash. Grady reached to take it but hesitated when he saw three men enter the opposite end of the driveway. One wore a classic trench coat over his business suit, making him look like a heftier version of the Nick Charles character in the Thin Man movies. The other two also wore ties but had on more contemporary topcoats. After a few seconds, Grady decided the newcomers either were unaware of others standing in the alley or did not care about them. He raised the joint to his lips and inhaled some of the sweet, fragrant smoke.

Two muffled pops caused Davis to spin around. Holy shit! he yelled.

Grady looked past him and coughed out smoke. One man lay supine on the pavement. The two still standing turned and spotted them, apparently for the first time.

Nash thought he saw a gun in the hand of the Nick Charles look-alike, but then a wild-eyed Davis turned and slammed into him. "Oh, shit, man! Run!"

Grady heard more shots as he rounded the corner and dodged between cars at the South Virginia Street porte-cochere. Two armed casino security guards sprinted past him, headed in the opposite direction. He glanced back to look for Kenny, but he did not see his friend behind him and assumed that Davis had ducked in a side door somewhere.

What the hell just happened? Was that guy dead?

He was still trying to answer those questions for himself when a Washoe County Sheriff’s Chevy Tahoe lurched into the drive. A Reno Police cruiser followed seconds later. Startled pedestrians jostled one another as they scrambled out of the way.

Grady leaned against a column, gasping for air, his breath creating diaphanous frost clouds in the cold afternoon air. He could not decide whether to tell the cops what he had just seen or simply join the casino crowd. If they smelled pot smoke on his breath, they would be unlikely to believe what he told them, and they might even arrest him to boot. Mind made up, he quickly ducked through the main entry doors and returned to his work station at the buffet counters.

Now if I can just make my hands quit shaking.

Jimmy Stillwater struggled to control his churning stomach as he stepped around a congealing pool of dark blood. Stillwater had begun his law enforcement career with the Fallon Paiute-Shoshone Tribal Police. In five years of service he had seen carcasses of coyotes and deer struck by cars or trucks, and he had subdued bleeding, belligerent Indians who had cut each other in drunken knife fights. Yet despite the occasional drownings in Pyramid Lake, Stillwater had never seen a human corpse resulting from gunshot homicide. Now a rookie Reno PD officer at the age of twenty-seven, he found himself confronted with two of them.

Both dead, said the Washoe County Sheriff’s deputy who had reached the scene ahead of Stillwater. The guy down at the end may have known whoever shot him. He took two through the chest, and I saw powder burns on his jacket. Coroner will have to confirm that, of course.

This one was an employee here, a casino security guard said, indicating Kenny Davis’s inert form. He must have been running away.

Well, yeah, that would explain how he got shot in the back, wouldn’t it? the Washoe deputy said. You know his name?

It’ll be on his casino badge. The guard made a move to roll over the face-down body.

Don’t, Stillwater said, finally regaining his composure and addressing assembled casino security guards. Don’t disturb anything. One of you go down to the other end of the driveway and keep the scene secure. Look for spent brass, but don’t touch anything.

Looks like your cavalry’s here, the Washoe deputy said as two more Reno cars entered the alley. I was a block away when I heard the call go out, so I stopped, but it’s you guys’ deal.

Yeah. Thanks.

As the deputy departed, a Reno sergeant named Jerry Wilson approached Stillwater. Where’s he going?

Stillwater repeated the deputy’s statement.

He just happened to get here after all the shooting was over?

That’s what he said.

Okay. So he didn’t see anything we’re not seeing. We’ll need witness statements from everybody we can find. I’ve got Peters and Kaufman on that, but you could give them a hand. Probably won’t get anything useful, but we have to try. Detectives are on the way. What’s the story with that rent-a-cop down there?

I told him to secure the scene.

Okay. Tell you what. You take care of that and send him back inside, but tell him we’ll want a statement first. Tell him to see one of our officers out front. As Stillwater turned to follow his instructions, Wilson added, You may want to make yourself some notes, Stillwater. You were the first Reno officer here, so you’ll have to do a report.

As with just about any job, some aspects of police work were tedious, none more so than paperwork. Jimmy took out his pocket notebook and began writing. Date, time, location, body positions—details that would be required in an incident report. He noted presence of four empty shell casings on the pavement, but following his own admonition to the casino guard, he left them alone. Detectives would photograph them in situ, then examine them. They would have fancy cameras, surgical gloves, and haughty attitudes, and Jimmy could do without all that just now.

A swirling gust of wind coursed through the alley and brought a cloud of tiny snowflakes with it.

Small flakes mean lots of snow, Stillwater told himself and drew the zipper of his dark blue winter jacket up to his chin.

You get a good look at the other one?

Just his back, Cecil Conroe told Sol Rosser as the two men sat in a black Cadillac Escalade and watched powdery snow begin to cover the windshield. Young guy, tall, thin, dark hair. He had on casino clothes, so I’d say he probably works there.

Brilliant observation, Rosser snarled. Of course he works there. We’ve gotta find him. We can’t let him talk to the cops.

He probably didn’t even see us, Conroe said.

You want to count on that? No, he saw us. Him and his buddy both, and now we have to find the one who got away and silence him.

Well, I see three problems with that, Conroe said. One, you don’t really know what he looks like. Two, he probably already talked to the cops, and three, are you going to pop him in there with five hundred people watching or are you going to let those five hundred people watch you drag him outside to kill him?

Rosser glared at Conroe. "Don’t start with that you crap. It’s we, and we are gonna go in there and bring him out quietly. He won’t make a lot of noise if I have a gun at his back."

Why not? I’d yell like hell.

He won’t yell because he believes we’ll kill him if he does. He’ll figure that once he gets outside, he might have a chance to make a break for it. He won’t, but he’ll think so. That’s why he won’t try anything inside. Trust me.

They left the SUV, walked through the accumulating snow to a side entrance, and subjected themselves to the neon and noise of the casino floor.

At six-foot-four, Jerry Wilson would stand out in almost any crowd except the NBA. He had what some might call a perpetually bemused look on his freckled face. That was totally misleading, but once in a while it worked in his favor. People sometimes wrote him off as being distracted or absent-minded. Suspects and witnesses occasionally changed their stories, offering what they may have thought he wanted to hear. What neither realized was that he had an exceptional ability to remember seemingly disparate scraps of information and fit them together like a jigsaw puzzle with pieces missing. He had exposed inconsistencies and contradictions in sworn declarations on many occasions, always to the chagrin of the declarer.

It had not taken Cindy Kaufman long to learn that about her watch sergeant. Consequently, she did her work thoroughly and thoughtfully. When she saw Wilson approach, she took out her small spiral notebook to be ready.

He joined her in the porte-cochere. You saw me coming.

I did. You want what we know or what we don’t?

"Let’s start on