An Offer He Cant Refuse - By Christie Ridgway Page 0,3
in 1782. ' La vengeance est un plat qui se mange fmid.'Mange froid. Eaten cold."
No doubt Cal's French accent was Parisian perfect, but it sounded damn fishy - and swishy - to Johnny. "I could have sworn it was Shakespeare," he murmured. And served cold.
"Is that why we're changing bases?" Cal looked up, and the sun streaming through the fortieth-floor windows caught in the lenses of his thick-framed glasses.
Johnny blinked against the glare. Until this moment he hadn't been sure the other man actually grasped the fact that they were relocating the brains of the business from Nevada to Palm Springs, California. "Is what why we're changing bases?"
"Revenge."
Out of Cal's mouth, the word sounded harmless enough. But Johnny avoided answering by reaching for the stack of sports pages on his desk. He didn't have time for this conversation because he was a busy man. Of course, they'd already invested the organization's money on the Monday night game playing later that evening, but there were dozens of college and NFL events to consider for the upcoming weekend.
He could feel Cal's four eyes aimed his way, but Johnny ignored them to focus on the Los Angeles Times. It led with a weekend roundup of college football injuries. Stanford's defensive tackle had sprained a knee and would sit out the next two games. During the fourth quarter on Saturday, the Bruins freshman cornerback was carted off the field with a possible concussion. On the next page, Phil Campbell's gossipy column hinted at major marriage trouble between the Raiders QB and his very pregnant wife.
Mentally filing the details away, Johnny set the Times aside and pulled another sports section forward. Other gambling syndicate managers didn't bother with the papers, relying solely on computers to analyze past performances and then crystal-ball future results, but not him. His full-time crew of handicappers and tech-heads punched up daily statistical reports, hell yes, but it was his job to handicap the handicappers - which meant knowing how and when the public would bet a particular game. And the public read the papers.
From the 42-inch plasma TV on the wall across the room came the familiar trumpeting fanfare of KVBC, the local NBC affiliate. Then LaDonna Carew's high cheekbones and hooker mouth blazed on the screen, bigger than life. In Vegas, even the midday news anchor looked like she was noon-lighting from a midnight floor show at the MGM Grand.
Johnny used the remote to mute the sound, but when her mouth moved he could still hear LaDonna's voice. Not relating the latest story of alleged City Hall corruption, though; instead it was a replay of the last words she'd spoken to him eight months before. "The problem is, Johnny, you're too good at this. You've got style and you burn me up in bed, but for such a sophisticated guy you obviously only want shallow relationships."
As he'd watched her fine figure stalk out his door for the very last time that day, he'd merely felt relief - and a little twinge of guilt for never before noticing that she was smarter than she looked.
He turned the TV off completely. Then, aware that Cal was still studying him from his seat three desks away, Johnny made a big play of opening the Kansas City Star. But he found he couldn't concentrate on the vertical columns of black and white, damn it. The other man's continued silence was blaring louder than the combined hum of the room's desert-duty air-conditioning vents and the cooling fans of seventeen CPUs.
Johnny swallowed an irritated sigh. On the rare occasion when The Calculator swam up to breathe the air of the real world, he had an annoying tendency to remain at the surface for far too long.
The heavy quiet continued for another few moments, until Johnny gave up. "Fine," he said, wishing he could slap the paper shut, but settling for a controlled fold instead. "You want to know why we're leaving? It's because we've attracted too much attention lately."
"We didn't win a bracelet two years running. You did."
The championship bracelets weren't the problem. It was ESPN and the other cable channels that had made Texas Hold 'Em and the World Series of Poker hot.
After the first victory Johnny had felt hot too, juiced-up, invincible. But following the second win last May, he'd fielded one too many reporters' questions about his background and his day job. And started to worry. He owed discretion to the dozen other investors in the syndicate.