Bad Beat

The man's skilled fingers shuffled the casino chips like a spider mummifying its prey and the playing cards slid across the felt as if on ice while rapid-fire arithmetic blasted through his cranium. "Plus seventeen," he thought, taking a hit and busting.

He shoved half a grand of plastic forward and doubled up with a pair of ladies. "Nice hand," the dealer announced while shooting a glance at a pear in a rumpled suit. 

There was a tap on the man's shoulder. "Sir," grumbled the pit boss with a pit bull snarl. "Could you please come with me?"

The pit boss unbuttoned his shirt cuffs in the stale fluorescence of a concrete space. One goon cradled the man while another clasped his mouth shut with a meaty mitt. The ghost-blue flames of a blowtorch screamed with oxygen. "Here's a little memento to remember your heater, you fuck-stick."

Anguish reverberated off the goon's palm, sweat-muffled gibberish that did little to deter the pit boss from roasting the man's fingers like sausages over a campfire. 

The goons dragged the man into an alley and literally beat the piss out of him. They each hawked a brown loogie on the retching body and left him in a puddle of his own fluids, unsure whether or not he would live.

The man wrestled free from the darkness, reached into his hip pocket with the good hand. He located the next-nearest casino on his phone and rolled his broken bones toward the parked vehicle.