Chapter One
Lady Luck had deserted me.
We had been best friends since the first time I beat ol’ Frank at Texas Hold’em and won all the pennies, nickels, and dimes in the middle of a tiny table in a cheap hotel room. Poor loser that he was, he never played poker with me again. But to give him a little credit for being my mentor when it came to the game, at least he kept enough seed money in his pocket to buy each of us a burger and fries.
Lady Luck had sat on my shoulder and told me not to go to that poker game, but I had gotten so high and mighty in my success that I didn’t listen to her. Tucson was a nice little stopover on my way to a high-stakes game in Vegas, and I could use a few more bucks to stuff into my lockbox. A big, big mistake that I will never make again.
My name is Carla Wilson, and I am thirty years old. Ol’ Frank always said that I was his wild card ... his good luck charm. Frank wouldn’t think that if he was with me today. Not after last night. He would probably say I was the joker. I have been a professional gambler for more than a decade. I don’t need a house, an apartment, or even a travel trailer. Everything I own is in the back of my SUV, and I live in whatever hotel I can find that is close to where my next game—legal or otherwise—is being held.
The punishment for not obeying what the Lady had laid on my heart was that I lost all my money for the high-stakes Vegas game. And to add insult to injury, I lost it all in a seedy little room in the back ofan auto repair shop in a ratty part of town. My cash was always hidden in a lockbox, but after the game that night it was totally empty.
So now I had a full tank of gas, a package of stale peanut butter crackers, and almost ten dollars in change that I had thrown into the console of my SUV. Well, that, and the quitclaim deed to a café in some godforsaken place east of El Paso that a tall, skinny guy with a horse-shaped face had thrown on the table as part of a bet. His unkempt goatee made his face look even longer, so I’d named him the Goat while we were playing cards. When I’d gotten a whiff of his cheap cologne, bad breath, and body odor, the name seemed to fit even better.
In all the years I had been playing, I’d never walked away from a game flat broke. The only choice I had now was to drive to the café and live in it until I could sell the place for enough money to start all over again. Traveling and playing cards was all I knew.
I cussed everything from the potholes in the road to the empty lockbox in the back of my SUV as I drove the few blocks to the motel on the same side of town as the auto shop. Just as I stepped out of my vehicle, a rat the size of a possum ran across the toe of my high-heeled shoe.
Luckily no one was awake that hour, because I was sure I looked like I’d had one drink too many. But the very idea of a rat touching even my shoe gave me a case of the heebie-jeebies. I stomped the gravel parking lot so hard that the spiked heel of my shoe popped off, and I kicked the tainted shoe to the side. No way would I ever wear that pair again. I kept one eye on the ground for any more varmints and hobbled on tiptoe to my room with one bare foot. I opened the door with a key instead of a card, switched on the overhead light, and a roach crawled up the toe of my other shoe. I did a dance right there on the brown tile floor that would rival any breakdancing contest, but the bug hung on and kept going right up my bare leg.
Instinct took over, and I brushed the pest away with the back of my hand. It landed on the edge of the bedspread and disappeared under apillow. I removed my good shoe and set it on the pillow. “There! You can have it.”
I went straight to the bathroom, stripped out of my clothes, and hung them on the towel rack, then started to step into the shower to get the feel of rat and roach off my skin. A spider looked up at me with evil eyes from inside the tub. Lady Luck had deserted me in more ways than just the poker game.
“That does it!” I screamed, and grabbed a washcloth from the hook.
“I have to wash the creepy feeling off,” I muttered as I kept an eye on the spider, who was slowly making its way out of the tub. I imagined it humming the theme song to a horror movie. I didn’t even take time to wring the washcloth out, but let water drip across the floor to where my suitcase sat on the dresser. After thoroughly scrubbing my feet, legs, and hands, I got dressed in a pair of jeans and a T-shirt. Then I tucked what I had worn to the poker game in a plastic bag and tied the top shut with two knots. I zipped up my suitcase and pulled it outside.
With self-pity draped around my shoulders, I jogged across the lot and dropped my key in an outside slot beside a barred office window. Maybe that was why the Lady had waved goodbye to me—she had grown accustomed to fine hotels with a minibar, soft sheets, and room service. I was sure she didn’t like rats, roaches, and spiders any better than I did.
“I’m sorry,” I apologized, but the feeling in my heart said that she was gone. Quite possibly for good.
Since I had to have someone to blame for the predicament, it all landed on my friend who had suggested I make a stop in Tucson. Maybe I should have said he was myformerfriend, because as of that night, he topped the list of people I would never speak to again.
“You can clean all those guys out,” he had promised with a broad wink during the game in Amarillo. “I’ve got a sister in Hobbs, New Mexico, that I’m going to stay with a couple of days. But I’ll see you in Vegas. Be prepared to lose.”
Had he known at that time that the stars were lined up against me to lose—not in Vegas, but in Tucson? Had he promised Lady Luck fine hotel rooms with no ugly critters if she would desert me and be his BFF?
As I pulled out of that parking lot, I envisioned strangling my ex-friend and watching his pretty blue eyes pop out and roll around on the floor like marbles. Until my temper cooled down, that man would do well to keep several hundred miles between the two of us. Poker players, like most of the guys who played football, were a superstitious lot. They clipped their toenails at a certain time of the morning, touched their ear seven times, or did something else that would bring them luck. As for me, I shuffled the same deck of cards we used the night I beat Frank. I had even shuffled my lucky deck of cards twice that night and had gone into that game full of confidence that I would walk away with all the money.
I hoped the Arizona Highway Patrol officers were cuddled up with their wives in the early-morning hours, because my foot, right along with my eyelids, got heavier with every passing mile. Glaring at the deck of well-worn cards sitting on the passenger seat fired up the anger and kept me awake for a while longer.
Other than a brief two-hour nap I’d managed to squeeze in before I went to the poker game, I hadn’t slept since Tuesday night, when Lady Luck and I had cashed out at a casino in Amarillo and gone to a nice hotel to sleep in a soft king-size bed.
Now it was Thursday morning, New Year’s Day, and Frank had a superstition that said whatever we did on the first day of the year, we would be doing all year. So we usually traveled from one casino to another, but we never hit the poker tables until after the clock ticked off 12:01 a.m. on January 2. If we lost, that meant we would be losers all year. I had lost everything and won a diner in a place called Tumbleweed three minutes past midnight on New Year’s Day—point proven, thank you very much, Frank.
Hey, don’t blame me. You should have left that game before midnight.His voice was loud and clear in my head.
The first hint of morning light appeared at the same time I passed a sign that said the First Baptist Church welcomed me to Picacho Hills, and a few hundred yards on, another sign told me it was fifty miles to El Paso, Texas. I pulled into one of those open-all-night truck stops, got out, and went to the bathroom, where I washed my face and did fifty jumping jacks to wake myself up. According to the address on the deed and the GPS on my phone, I still had 140 miles to go.
“Then I’m going to lay down and sleep for twenty hours, even if it’s on the floor with my duffel bag for a pillow,” I promised myself as I filled my empty water bottle at the sink.
The chemistry teacher I’d had in public school once told us to each bring water from our homes, and we looked at it under the microscopes. Every one of them had stuff in it that was downright disgusting. I forced myself not to think about all the microscopic germs coming out of the faucet that were invisible to the naked eye.
The pretzels and beer I’d had at the poker game from hell had long since vanished, and my stomach growled as I made my way back through the store. The aroma of breakfasttaquitosand sausage biscuits floating through the room smelled oh-so good. But for the first time in my life, I didn’t even have the money to buy one candy bar or a small bag of chips from the racks I walked past on the way outside.
When I got back to my vehicle and started the engine, the low-fuel light flashed. I pulled up to a gas pump, counted all the loose coins in the console, and put $9.43 worth into the tank. The lady at the cash register frowned when I handed her all that change—but hey, pennies are money, right? According to the gauge, I could go 150 miles on what fuel I had. That meant I would slide into the parking lot of an empty café building on fumes and prayers.
By rationing my stale peanut butter crackers to one every ten minutes, I made it all the way through El Paso. My eyes got heavier and heavier with each passing mile—until a norther hit. That’s what Southern folks call a hard north wind that drops the temperature by several degrees and tries to blow the hair right off a person’s head. Ihad to concentrate just to keep the SUV on the road, because the wind seemed hell-bent on pushing me south all the way to Corpus Christi.
