Page 31 of Phantom
But they didn’t.
I watched in shock as Nick walked over to his table, sat down, and brandished a pack of playing cards from under it. Did he seriously just want to play cards?
Nick motioned to a chair a couple down from him at the table. “Come on, sit.” My legs carried me forward despite the alarm bells going off in my head. Nick started dealing out a game while I pulled out the chair he’d indicated and sunk into it. “You know Gin Rummy?”
“No.” There was a nervous, gravelly quality to my voice that had me wincing as the word fell out. I cleared my throat and tried again. “Sorry. No, I don’t.”
We didn’t play cards a whole lot back in Rumble. Darts were Luther’s bar game of choice, and no one ever liked playing with him because he was a shitty loser, so we mostly just hung around and watched him.
Nick chuckled. “Relax, CJ. Jeez, you’re jumpier than a bullfrog around me.”
“Force of habit,” I replied.
“I know what you mean. Taylor and Tess’ mom, Kelly, her dad was like a dad right out of a movie or something. Like full blown. I showed up for our first date, and he met me at the door with a shotgun. Opened the door, cocked it, pointed it at me, and told me to come in. I couldn’t move. Damn near shit my pants. Every time I was around him after that, he could click a pen, and I would jump like he was cocking that shotgun.” I forced out a laugh, thinking back on the rock and garbage can incident. “All right, here’s how you play. It’s real easy.”
Over the next twenty or so minutes, Nick carefully explained the game, and when he was confident that I understood the rules, he shuffled the deck of cards and dealt out fresh hands. We played the entire first round in total silence. Every now and again, I would see Nick glance up over his hand and watch me with eyes that didn’t only seem to attempt to discern if I had a good hand, but when our eyes would lock, he’d take his attention back to his hand. The lack of conversation was almost worse than whatever I thought he was going to say when he got me back here. There was the faint droll of music and intermingling voices coming from the bar, but that aside, the only sound in the warehouse was that of cards shuffling as Nick and I played out our game.
“I’m out,” Nick said finally, setting down the last of his cards and ending his round. He counted his points and then looked up at me. “I got one-fifteen. What’d you get?”
I surveyed the cards still left in my hands and deducted the point totals from those I managed to get out on the table. “Sixty.”
Nick let out a hollow whistle. “That’s not a bad first round, considering I went out first.” Nick scribbled the points down on a piece of paper and then gathered all of the cards and began to shuffle them. “You’re still nervous.”
I wasn’t the type of person to admit to fear, but honesty was probably the best policy in the situation I’d found myself in. “I’m not entirely sure what we’re doing.”
Nick snickered. “We’re playing cards and talking.”
“We haven’t done much talking.”
Cards slid across the table as Nick dealt new hands. “True indeed, true indeed.” He lifted his cards into his hands and started to move them around. “You’re from Hoppa, right?”
Men like Nick didn’t ask questions without intention. Thanks to my past with the Unchained Dogs, I knew better than to trust his questions for what they were, but I was also in no position to refuse to answer. “I am, but I didn’t meet Tess until high school.”
Nick nodded as he took in the answer. “So, are you two the same age, then?”
I furrowed my brow. “I’m a year older,” I lied. “We met at one of the football games.”
A snicker skipped across Nick’s lips. “She alwayswasa bit of a tomboy. Here I thought she was going to the games for the boys, so I decided to go with her one time, and she wasn’t even paying attention to the guys. They all wanted her attention, but she was just there to scream plays at the players.”
For the first time, I smiled in Nick’s presence. “That sounds like Tess.”
“So, you two were close?”
“Quite.” I swallowed, opting for a moment of vulnerability, hopefully, in exchange for some trust. “I was pretty smitten.”
“Well, she’s got her mother’s charm. Really, I can’t take much credit for Tess. She got her mama’s beauty and her mama’s brain. She got my eyes, I suppose.”
“And your love of bikes.”
Nick slammed his hand down on the table with a wide smile. “That’s for damn sure!” He laid down a spread of aces. “So, if you’re a year older, that makes you twenty-six, or have you not had your birthday yet? When’s your birthday?”
I swallowed hard, quickly trying to do math in my head. “I’m twenty-six. My birthday is March twelfth.”
In truth, I was a touch younger than Tess. Her early summer birthday was in June, whereas mine would be coming up in just a few weeks on August fourth. The hope was that if Nick was going to try and use the information I was giving him to run some sort of check on me, that he wouldn’t be able to unearth my true identity, but even as I sat there listening to him, I couldn’t shake the feeling that he was up to something else altogether.
“Ah, we missed it. Well, we’ll have to have a big celebration next year!” Nick waited while I took my turn in our card game before asking, “You got any siblings? Where are your folks?”
Tess and her dad were close, and even though I knew she was protecting the integrity of the story I’d started, that my name was CJ and that we were friends from high school, not elementary school, I didn’t know if she would have mentioned that I had a brother. “I had a brother. He died a few years ago due to complications from an illness he had all his life.” My throat clenched as I said the words. All too often had I stared down that reality. Compared to saying those words and having them be true, I gladly took on fifty grand worth of Luther’s wrath. “Never knew my dad, and I haven’t talked to my drunk of a mom since the day my brother died.”
