Authors: Peter Rabe
County Kill (22 page)
I dragged sixty bucks. I said, “Shoot twenty.”
Brown-Eyes covered, saying something under his breath. I came out on a nine and fell off two rolls later.
I covered the man to my right, and he came out with snake-eyes. He'd shot ten, and I reached in to get my money.
“Leave it,” he said. “I'm shooting twenty.”
I hesitated. I don't like to be told what to do with my money. But I couldn't make enemies all around me. I said, “Shoot. You're loaded.”
A pair of sixes came to rest against the opposite wall. It wasn't the best time in the world to chuckle, but I couldn't help it. It had been his idea.
I reached out, and he said, “Leave it. I'm shooting forty.”
He was squat and the blue-black of his beard showed under his tanned cheeks. There was a silence all around while I looked at him.
Chris said, “He couldn't make a point with a pencil, Mr. Worden. Ride him to death.”
“Shoot,” I said.
He put two twenties into the middle, and breathed on the dice in his clenched hand. “Now,” he said, and sent them bouncing into the wall.
A two came into view, and then a one. Three craps in a row he'd shot, and I had eighty dollars in the middle of the table.
He stared at the dice for seconds, and then expelled his breath. “That's enough for me,” he said, and turned and walked out.
The next man took the dice, and now I was the man to the left of him, and he was shooting fifty, and I took it all.
And won it, and could do no wrong from there in. It was one of those times when you can almost call them as they roll, when you know what you can do and how to do it.
The lad to my left started playing it cagey on the fade, and they began to divide me up. And they began to drift off, to leave the garage.
Until there was just the lad to my left, Brown-Eyes. And I started to sort out my money.
“You quitting?” he said. “I've still got dough.”
“I don't play a two-man game,” I told him. “What the hell kind of sucker do you think I am?”
He told me what kind, a deletion kind, and I grabbed him by one shoulder, and his left hand went sliding in under his coat.
I don't know if he had a gun in there or not. I know his chin was tilted a little to one side and I brought the right away around from left field.
I caught him very clean and he went back and down, his head hitting the concrete of the garage floor with a horrible thump.
Only Chris was there, and he stood next to me as we both stared at him.
“Who is he, Chris?” I asked. “Is he a good friend of your dad's?”
“I don't know. Is he â is he dead, Mr. Worden?”
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Copyright © 1962 by William Campbell Gault, Registration Renewed 1990
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This is a work of fiction.
Names, characters, corporations, institutions, organizations, events, or locales in this novel are either the product of the author’s imagination or, if real, used fictitiously. The resemblance of any character to actual persons (living or dead) is entirely coincidental.
eISBN 10: 1-4405-3986-3
eISBN 13: 978-1-4405-3986-2