Shark of Spades

Prologue/He Is A Card Shark

Prologue

Three individuals all building separate card houses only to have them collapse one by one. As the cards hit the table, each person responds differently. One reaches to help the other, whose house is still in the  process of crumbling; one swipes the fallen cards aside and brings out a  new deck while ignoring the past; the last watches silently, wanting to  reach out a hand but unable to.
Life and death, living and  surviving. It's all a game. Who wins - and who loses - is all determined  by each player's hand. Love, hatred, power, influence, money - none of  these factor into the final outcome.

Only skill will prevail, seemingly in the form of luck once created and twice reaped.
Only one can win, and that is the card shark.

He is a Card Shark

When he smiled, it wasn't a smile. It was a barbaric, fanged grin, his lips barely concealing his pointed teeth. His teeth, in turn, reminded me of the pikes humans heads came to be impaled on.

He dealt out the last hand with another full grin, eyeing me specifically with eyes lusting for violence. "Last hand." We were playing a game called Yukun, where each player was dealt seven cards. The objective was to gather seven cards that another player was holding. They could be held in separate hands, but you needed to be able to match each card to its pair. To make it more difficult, you also had to match to the same colored suit. Each turn, you either selected from the discard pile or drew from the deck. If you drew from the deck, you held the element of privacy, but if you drew from the discard, it was almost certain that you knew someone else's match. After you picked up, you chose a card to discard, but before thus ending your turn, you had to read off the numbers of your cards. On your first turn, you read one. On your second turn, you revealed a second. The game continued on until it came to a player's turn when they laid down their hand instead of drawing a card. Each person who had matched the number and color had to lay down that individual card. If all cards were accounted for, the winner collected all of the bets that had built up in the middle. If they were wrong, they paid a penalty and game play went on, all of their cards now known to the other players.

Jack Flash shuffled the remaining deck with confident, spindly fingers made for caressing piano keys rather than dealing brand-spanking-new decks of cards. Why he'd ever gotten a job here should have been a mystery, but given his natural talent with cards and his sharp, pointed looks...he fit in perfectly. Even with my sunglasses on and the smoke from my cigarette obscuring the already hazy row, I could make out the apex of each individual tooth.

His hands blurred as he bridged and shuffled and finally let the player to his right, Johnny Napalm, cut the deck. Then he set the deck in the middle of the table and drew the top card for the beginning of the discard pile. "Commence gameplay," he announced in a dramatic voice made for the stage, but then again, the whole world was Jack's stage.

Johnny drew from the top of the deck and discarded the six of diamonds, announcing that he held a four. Nobody was stupid enough to draw from the discard pile on a first turn. That was typically only for desperate players at the end who held confidence in their cards and only needed that final card for the winning hand.
I didn't concern myself with that just yet, only focused on every movement and every card, color, and suit drawn and discarded, noting tells and twitches, sneezes, coughs, and eyebrows. There was a reason they called me what they called me.

After Johnny came Warren Crime, a well known criminal hiding under the streets with the rest of us. I knew everything about him. I knew everything about all of them, with the exception of Johnny. He was a mystery. Everyone else, though, was stored in my thorough files. I could tell everyone that Crime had only turned to crime because his mother had left and his father had taken to abusing him. He'd run away from home and started his new life here, building up a cult following with some low-lifes that proliferated on the streets and generally just making a mess for all of us professionals. He liked to act tough, though, and I didn't care, as long as he brought good money. He always did.