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Digital
Amusement
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Game's On |
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Chapter I. The Car Crash Hari awakens thoughtful and alert. He looks into a box of papers and records, some very old, pulls out a handwritten sucker list containing the names of losing poker players -- pigeons, and writes the name 'Mohammed' on top in the same neat cursive writing he has used for thirty years. Hari has a magnetism based on unreserved kindness for everyone and, so, has many friends and buddies, some desperate, some ill, and some insane. He is in all of them and they in him. He has rented his guest house on the condition that some masonry work be completed. This should be no problem. Hari has his friend doing the heavy work, moving rocks and laboring in ways that Hari cannot because of the triple spinal fusion rod bolted in his back. They have been working on the project for a week and are almost done. Hari picks up his friend in a black Infiniti that he purchased just the day before. The no-limit poker game has just started at the Shamrock Club. Hari could win if he got there in time to get a seat, but laying in the rock is more important. Things are going well. Hari lives in a beautiful and peaceful place in a peaceful time. The guest house rent will cover most of Hari's mortgage payment and child support. He will be free to catch or at least meet chicks while playing pool at Stiix, to play golf with his long time buddies so close he thinks of them as brothers, to drink iced coffee on State Street with other even longer standing friends, and to drive to the cardrooms of Los Angeles. I'll win enough at the high limit games to put in a waterfall and sauna and to tear out these rocks and put in sandstone, he thinks. Sandstone is better. This place will be worth over 600K when I'm done. Owner, distractedly driving a new Ford Excursion with Barber Ford license plate holders speaks sharply into her cell phone to the manger of the Shamrock Club: Don't let anyone accept a call from him again. Owner, as a young woman, inherited the Shamrock, among other things, from her first husband a professional gambler who died at the age of 88. Owner gave too much of her largess to a restaurant owner who would not give it back. She remarried, and her second husband recruited two young men to abduct him. Mohammed went with the would be kidnappers and when the stun-gun they brought had little effect on the restaurateur, Mohammed shot him dead. Mohammed fled the scene, but not Ventura. He played no-limit poker at the Shamrock the next day. The authorities did not discover that Mohammed was the killer but they did convict Owner's second husband for felony murder. He has been calling the Shamrock from prison and Owner doesn't want anyone to speak to him. Owner's vehicle speeds to 70-80-90 maybe 100 miles per hour or more. Hari sees it out of the rearview mirror when it is a few hundred feet behind him. He knows it is going too fast and so waits in the right lane for it to pass, planning to turn left to his house after it goes by. He changes the radio station and glances in the rearview mirror again. The car is much too close. Only a couple of seconds pass and the car is almost at them. It heads right for them. Hari's friend sees it too. They brace for impact. Owner finishes her call. She tries to slam on the breaks and hits the gas instead. KABLAM! 
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