SS The One That Got Away (v5.0) Read online

  I have no idea what happened inside the poker room, but at the tournament table, we counted our chips. The pit bosses put the game on hold as they made sure the money was fine.

  It soon became clear the only thing missing from the casino were the cards.

  All of them.

  Including the decks stored in the back rooms, and the discards waiting to be trucked off the place, and even the little souvenir cards in the gift shop.

  Gone.

  All gone.

  The pit boss who had called 911 was off the phone, saying the police were going to arrive soon, but I suspected it would take them some time. If, as people were saying, things were a mess all over town, it would take the police a while to get anywhere.

  “We still have money on the table,” Smoky said.

  “And a game to finish,” Tigo said.

  “How do you propose we do that with no cards?” Rosco asked.

  “We know what was dealt,” the woman said

  “But we don’t know the order in the rest of the shue,” I said.

  “We’re going to shuffle a new shue and start over,” Rosco said, “just as soon as we get cards.”

  “We need the other three players,” Tigo said. I glanced around me. Joe was standing behind me as he usually did after he got knocked out of a tournament, but the others were nowhere to be seen.

  “We’re going to have to put this game on hold until the cops arrive anyway,” the pit boss said.

  “Until we get cards,” Rosco added.

  “Besides, everyone’ll have to report what they saw,” Smoky said.

  At that point, the woman and I both stood up. “I think my luck has just run out,” the woman said.

  “Mine, too,” I said.

  We left the table and headed toward the door.

  “Hey!” Tigo said behind us. “We can’t replay the game without you guys!”

  “I think the game is forfeit,” the woman said.

  “Yeah, have the casino put the pot in for next week,” I said, knowing they never would.

  Then she and I walked through the casino, side by side. The conversations were strangely muted, only a few people discussing what they saw. As we stepped outside, we ran into chaos, cars cramming the parking lot, attendants staring at the sky, a warm bath of light all over the town.

  A familiar bath of light.

  I had missed it more than I realized.

  I turned to her. “There’s a nice coffee place about a block from here. Care for a walk?”

  “I’d love it,” she said.

  And we had a nice cup of coffee, and a nice evening, and a nice night, and an even better morning. I never learned her name and she never learned mine, but we both knew that we had left the casino for the exact same reason.

  We didn’t need to see the police.

  Or the media.

  Or anyone else, for that matter.

  “What do you think they wanted with the cards?” she asked long around midnight.

  “I don’t know,” I said. “Maybe they use bigger shues than we do.”

  And a little later, I said, “That, by far, has to be the strangest thing I ever saw in a casino.”

  “Really?” she responded. “I’ve seen stranger.”

  But she never elaborated and I didn’t ask her to.

  Some stories are better kept close to the vest.

  You see, that isn’t the strangest thing I’d ever seen in a casino either.

  But it’s the only one I’ll admit too.

  And I only do that because I’m a regular and it’s a shared group experience. A bit of local legend — the one game that never finished, the pot that got away.

  Well away. The casino had to shut down both the poker and blackjack tables for two days while it ordered cards from all over the country. During that time, regulars gave interviews on every show from CNN to Inside Edition. Except for me.

  I laid low for a while even after my lady left. Laid low and watched the skies.

  And wondered —

  What would have happened on the thirteenth hand if we had all blackjacked on the twelfth?

  What would have happened then?

  “The One That Got Away” by Kristine Kathryn Rusch first published in The UFO Files, edited by Martin H. Greenberg and Ed Gorman, Daw Books, 1998.