Person Of Interest - Excerpt
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It’s been said that the Chinese take gambling so seriously that a man would bet his life’s earnings on the number of seeds in an unpeeled navel orange. Craig McHugh can’t remember where he heard that, but after playing Pai Gow with Mr. Moy and company for a month and a half, he’s pretty sure it’s true.

.Moy shuffles the cards, fifty-two plus a joker. This is nothing like a friendly game with the boys, where the cards give you something to think about between sips of Heineken. Where you’d rather win an argument over the Cubs’ pitching staff, or beat a guy to the punch line of a joke you already read in Playboy. Craig stretches his neck to relieve his tension headache, and also to get a subtle look around the room.

Only three men pressing their luck tonight: Craig, Fish Eye, and Dandelion. Craig hoped for some bigger players, some guys with better connections, but Dandelion said Moy wiped out a whole table that morning with a string of flushes. The fact that Dandelion turned up again, resilient against his own loss, is an obvious indication as to where he acquired the nickname, notwithstanding his round yellow face. Fish Eye traps a Viceroy between stained incisors and lights up, the only other thing to do here aside from setting cards. He takes a long drag; his right eye swims around in its socket. Craig’s never sure where the guy is really looking. Maybe nowhere particular. Or maybe everywhere at once.

The den sits at the back of Chu’s China Delight, behind the kitchen. From the outside, it’s dressed up like a walk-in meat locker: a heavy steel door guards the small, smoky room, its rickety card tables, its precious dice. Plenty of meat in this place, Craig thinks. Fresh, stupid meat.

The locker’s cooling system serves to circulate air since there are no windows in the room. No decoration, either; only cards, players, and endless minutes between hands. Minutes when someone might get tired of losing. Or of the house rules. Or of being quiet. Craig’s spent enough time and money here to know there are plenty of bones to pick with Moy; it can’t be much longer before the seams of this carefully-set scene spread and fray and he gets a glimpse back stage— back to where Chinatown does its real business with the Fuxi gang. That is the reason Craig is here, waiting on Moy to deal another hand. Moy pauses like he’s listening to the cards. Apparently they tell him to reshuffle.

Outside the Pai Gow den, boxes of wooden chopsticks, soy sauce packets and almond cookies sit stacked against the unpainted wall adjacent the service door, waiting to be sorted and shelved after the three p.m. delivery. The service door leads to the alley that runs parallel to Argyle Street. The only white men who use this door besides Craig wear uniforms with logos like Halsted Packing House or Chicago Meat and Produce Market, Inc. Craig doesn’t wear a uniform, but he’d say he does business just the same.

Moy is still shuffling. Craig hears the business of the kitchen in the next room: the chopping of bok choy, the sizzle of Egg Foo Young dropped in hot peanut oil. Craig would never get take out from this place. He’s seen the cooks at work: their eyes on the televised horse races; cigarettes hanging from their drying lips, ashes fluttering into the wok as they stir fry pork for Kung Pao. If it is really pork, soaking in plastic buckets of purple-red marinade beneath fluorescent lights softened by the kitchen’s general layer of grime. The customers don’t seem concerned with quality as they come in, hurried, to order by number from inaccurately glamorized photographs of combination plates. The front of the place is a well- designed stage. “Number sixteen, no MSG,” they may say, and they’ll receive an obedient bow, though the latter request won’t make it back to the kitchen. The customers won’t know any better; they’ll love the sticky white rice packed into wire-handled cartons stamped with the Chinese character that represents wealth, fortune and luck, though it could just as easily signify rat piss. They’ll rave about the chow mien noodles, unaware they came pre-packaged, as ethnic as a Ritz cracker. And they’ll actually believe the cooks are Chinese. Knowing all this doesn’t make Craig feel any better. He’s just glad the only thing on his plate at this place is the game and, if he’s lucky, another name, another link in the Fuxi chain. In the den’s stagnant air, Fish Eye’s cigarette smoke mingles with the oily smell that sticks to Craig’s clothes, his hair, his skin— like he’s been glazed with it. It stays with him long after he’s lost his allowance for the night, another unappetizing reminder of the job. He’ll probably never eat another eggroll.

Finally, Moy deals the cards, seven hands for four players, four cards to the dungeon, as are the rules. He places every card on the table like it’s deciding a fate. Then he rattles three dice in the cup and tips them out onto the table to determine the order of play.

Craig thinks the whole ritual is time suckage, as if it makes a difference as to who gets what cards, but he can’t complain. Not to these men. The odds have to tip in his favor eventually, don’t they? Craig’s dealt his cards last: a pair of aces, the joker, a jack; the rest slop. He could set three of a kind with the aces, or split them. It’s a toss up; worst case, he’ll wind up with a push, which means he doesn’t win or lose, save for the house’s ten percent. He takes an impatient breath.

Mr. Moy’s thin lips stretch horizontally across his face, his smile all lines like a stick figure. “It(‘s a) good thing (there’s) no bluff (ing) in Pai Gow,” he says, Craig mentally fixing Moy’s broken English as he speaks. “You(‘re a) terrible bluff(er), Mickey.” “Yeah,” Craig says, unnecessarily rearranging his hand, playing the role of the malleable white-face, the unlucky Irishman known as “Mickey.” That his badge and his gun are in the glove compartment of the unmarked, GIS-monitored car down the street is concealed quite well, he thinks. And that he’s here, running his own game on the Kuang Tian tong, Moy’s upfront ‘community’ organization that will be his link to the Fuxi Spiders gang, is the real bluff. When he nails the Fuxis for handing the bad China White—the heroin cut with fentanyl —that’s been killing junkies from here to 187th Street, Moy won’t be so certain about his bets. Craig splits his aces.

Mr. Moy shows his cards: low hand is an ace-jack; the high hand, three deuces. The house wins. Again. And now Craig has to wait some more while Moy goes counterclockwise around the table, comparing his hand to Dandelion’s, then to Fish Eye’s, and finally to Craig’s, all as precisely as he calculates how much more each man owes. Gives Craig plenty of time to figure out he’s down a little over two grand.

Moy snatches Craig’s cards and begins the whole ritual over again, his face listless, despite the fact that he just raked in another couple hundred bucks.

Craig pushes back from the table, his irritation an inevitable tell. He can’t help it; he feels like he forked over some sensibility with that last twenty dollars. “Mr. Moy,” he says, “I want to know something: how come the house always gets lucky?”

Moy’s expression doesn’t change. Like he isn’t even listening.

Craig catches the back of the chair as he stands up to keep it from tipping back and clattering to the floor. “I’m just saying, maybe it’s fate. But tonight? The cards are playing like your command of English. Convenient.”

Moy looks up at him, through him. A dare. Craig didn’t plan to be the one to pick a fight; he promised he’d keep cool, let the others’ losses get the best of them. But damn this game: there’s no strategy. No skill. It isn’t fate, and it isn’t fair. And it doesn’t matter. It’s work.

Craig sits. Moy has no idea what they’ve both got to lose. Moy shuffles, and eventually deals. When he gets to Craig he pauses, a card pressed between his fingers like he’s second-guessing Mickey’s seat at the table; Craig thinks this is the start of something, a tell on Moy’s part. And he’s right, but it’s not because of Craig; the next thing he knows, three men dressed in black from hair to heel bust in on the den like a SWAT team.

Maybe he should’ve, but Craig didn’t order the SWAT team. “Mr. Moy,” Craig says, “what’s happening?”

Moy says nothing; he meets the intrusion like a man sentenced to death, his face long ago through with emotion.

Craig doesn’t know Mandarin or Cantonese or whatever the hell language one of them yells at Moy but the gun the man wields speaks to Craig pretty clearly: he could die here if he doesn’t do something.

More men in black, who knows how many, crowd into the room like insects teeming toward the dark. The leader repeats his demand, to Craig something like: “Ayy doww, Su naaan…” Craig pushes his chair aside and crouches: he’s got his backup Walther .380 tucked into his boot and fuck this undercover simple-guy act; if he’s going down, he’s doing it shooting as Detective Craig McHugh in the Twentieth’s Gang Unit, twenty-three years serving, Chicago PD. Or maybe not. Because before he can get to the gun, one of the men grabs Craig by his thin hair and yanks him to the floor. Another’s knife, a threat at Craig’s throat, is a reason to cooperate. When he looks up, he meets a pair of eyes so empty he knows there’ll be no negotiation. He shies away from the serrated blade, shielding his face with his hands, and someone else steps on his fingers; his eyes begin to tear and he loses sight of the blade as he tries to jerk his hand away.

He hears Dandelion cry out; he isn’t sure he makes any noise himself when someone kicks him in the stomach, stealing his breath. There are black feet all around and it is futile to think he can go for his gun but he tries anyway, reaches until he is stopped by the blow of a heavy boot to his back and then he is kicked again, and again, and again.

I’m going to die in this shitty place, he thinks. Die nameless and disappear, without knowing why, accepting this fate on behalf of some crooked Chinamen. Pain is diluted by confusion and as he slips from clear consciousness, he tries to hold on for the auto-replay of his life, the frames slowing to lingering photographs and finally stopping on an image of his wife. It’s when she was a girl, about their daughter’s age—the way he’ll always remember her: long black hair tangled by the lake water; olive skin kissed a shade darker, cheeks flushed by the summer heat and her eyes, smiling at him like they used to, when things were so good.

And that awful yellow bikini, the one that tied in white strings at the sides, covering just a little of everything he always wanted to protect.

Fate, Craig decides, is a bitch.