Wild Card

“That’s right,”Higgins said, “so, here’s what I’ve come up with. I got a company to manufacture a special discard tray for our blackjack tables. The tray is made of a luminous-detecting plastic. By looking through the plastic, you can spot a card that’s been daubed. That will let a pit boss stand beside the dealer, and stare through the discard tray. If a card lights up, they stop the game.”

“How many trays are you sending?” Valentine asked.

“One,” Higgins said. “And the phone number of the guy who made it for me.”

Valentine drove home that night thinking about the tape of the blackjack cheats Bill had sent him. He had enough problems in his life right now, but this one seemed solvable. The two players had somehow rigged the game so they wouldn’t lose a hand. They’d done it without anything suspicious taking place, which meant collusion was involved, possibly by the dealer, or possibly another player. It was the only logical explanation.

Pulling into the driveway, he spied Gerry’s bike with the banana seat lying in the grass. Ever since he’d had gotten in trouble at school, his son had started doing little things to annoy his parents, like leaving his belongings around the house, and riding his bike around the neighborhood at odd hours. Lois said it was just part of growing up. Slamming the car door, Valentine got the mail, and went inside.

The house was unusually quiet. Lois always put music on when she came home. She liked to play big band or Sinatra and sometimes Peggy Lee. The good stuff.

“Anybody home?” he called out.

Someone was crying in the kitchen. As a cop, it was the worst sound you could hear. It always meant you were too late. He dropped the mail on the dining room table and hurried through the house. Gerry’s school books were scattered all over the floor, his son having dropped everything as he’d come inside. It made Valentine’s blood boil to see his boy act so disrespectfully. Pushing open the kitchen door, he was ready to say something scolding, when he saw Gerry standing with Lois by the sink, his head buried in his mother’s bosom. He was sobbing, and the sound stopped Valentine dead in his tracks.

“What’s wrong?” he said.

Lois looked up, her face awash with tears.

“Something terrible happened at school today,” she said.

Chapter 42

Every class at Atlantic City High School has a sacrifice. Valentine had learned this from a pimply kid named Horace Gold his first day in the seventh grade, and it had scared the living daylights out of him. They’d been standing on the worn parquet floor in the gymnasium with three hundred other seventh graders, awaiting orientation.

“My older brother told me,” Gold had whispered fearfully. “Look around the gym. One of these kids won’t make it out.”

“You mean one’s going to die?” Valentine whispered back.

“Yeah,” Gold said emphatically. “Sometime during the school year a kid will die. It happens to every class.”

“But why?”

“Beats me. It just does.”

Gold had been right. Several months later, a seventh-grader named Wayne Horchuck had gotten run over by a milk truck while riding his bicycle home during a bad thunder storm. And kids from every other class had died as well. Some in cars that got into bad accidents, others from cancer or strange, childhood diseases. Every class lost at least one. There was no getting around it.

From Gerry’s class, the sacrifice was Marcus Mink, the son of the black detective who’d survived the shootout at the Rainbow Arms.

Marcus’s funeral was held at St. Michael’s church, and brought out of most of his high school class, and every cop in town. He was a young man that everyone admired; star football player, strikingly handsome, a straight-A student, and as the hearse carrying his coffin turned the corner onto Mississippi Avenue, the motorcycle cops stationed in front of the church had to push back the sea of mourners standing along the sidewalk.

St. Michael’s had filled up fast, with the overflow standing behind the organ, where the choir normally stood. It was a mixture of street-wise cops and pubescent kids, of those who had loved Marcus and those who hardly knew him, all sharing in his loss.

Valentine sat with Lois and Gerry in the back of the church. It was a long service, and many of Marcus’s classmates had openly cried while giving their eulogies. Then Father Riley had taken the pulpit. It was hard to make sense of a death so young, the priest said, but God worked in ways that no human being could ever comprehend. Marcus’s death was a loss to us all, but a welcome addition in heaven.

The service ended with Father Riley reading a prayer by St. Francis. It was the same prayer he’d used at Valentine’s mother’s funeral, and Valentine shut his eyes, and silently recited the last lines along with him.

O Divine Master, grant that I may not so much seek

To be consoled… as to console