King of a small world [antikvár]

ONE I look in the mirror and scare myself. My hair is stringy, my eyes are mapped by red lines, and my skin is the color of newspaper. But I just piss out my ninth or tenth or whatever cup of coffee it is, wash my hands, wash my face, comb my hair, and step back out to the smoke and chip-clicking drone of an all-night card game. The dealer looks up at me. She's a wrinkle-eyed old Chinese woman wearing a ball cap. She doesn't need to voice the question — do I want a hand? I nod. She knows. Cards come my way as I flip an ante into the pot. The other players are on auto-pilot. We started at seven in the evening, it's now two in the morning, and they have the intense look of people well settled into a long night. Not rookies, my opponents, but not pros, either. Only a few completely track the exposed cards to know which ones are no longer available. Only I could tell you the odds of hitting a flush draw with two cards coming and three of your suit dead in other hands. We're in the rec room of a big house in northern Virginia owned by a criminal defense attorney, Bobby "Lotto" Johnson. He got that nickname because whenever you ask what he's doing these days, he'll