The Perfect Setup

With the help of an old con artist-card sharp, a young husband creates the perfect setup to con his bitch of a wife into a divorce on his terms. But there is always a joker in the deck and things don't turn out exactly as he had planned.

This story goes into a LOT of detail about a game of five-card stud, jokers wild. If you aren't into card games, it might be confusing– or boring– for you. If so, you might want to skip this one.

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WARNING! All of my writing is intended for adults over the age of 18 ONLY. Stories may contain strong or even extreme sexual content. All people and events depicted are fictional and any resemblance to persons living or dead is purely coincidental. Actions, situations, and responses are fictional ONLY and should not be attempted in real life.

If you are under the age or 18 or do not understand the difference between fantasy and reality or if you reside in any state, province, nation, or tribal territory that prohibits the reading of acts depicted in these stories, please stop reading immediately and move to somewhere that exists in the twenty-first century.

Archiving and reposting of this story is permitted, but only if acknowledgment of copyright and statement of limitation of use is included with the article. This story is copyright (c) 2014 by The Technician.

Individual readers may archive and/or print single copies of this story for personal, non-commercial use. Production of multiple copies of this story on paper, disk, or other fixed format is expressly forbidden.

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CHAPTER ONE

I didn't do it because she had been a perfect 10 bitch for the past two years. I didn't do it because she refused to have sex with me after I lost my job as a stock broker. It wasn't even because I found out that she had filed divorce papers. Ultimately, it was because of that damned "Christmas Club."

I met Charlie a year after I graduated from college. I was a brand new stock broker on my way up and she was a junior lawyer with a big law firm downtown. I'm not sure what brought us together. Looking back on it, I think for both of us it was a career decision. She needed a husband to fit in at her office and I needed a wife to take with me to the various company events and functions. I mean, the sex was good– No! The sex was great. But I'm not sure that either Charlie or I could ever really say that we loved each other.

I know that's not the best basis for a marriage, but there are a lot of couples out there who married for even worse reasons. And the first four or five years that Charlie and I were married were pretty good.

Her name is actually Charlotte, but everyone calls her "Charlie"– everyone that is except for the poor bastards she grinds to powder in the courtroom. They just call her "That Bitch."

Did I mention that her specialty is divorce and that she has the reputation of taking everything but a man's balls in almost every case? Having seen what is left of some of the men whose ex-wives had her for a divorce attorney, I'm not sure she didn't get the balls, too, as part the settlement.

Charlie told me about the "Christmas Club" the first year we were dating. She and three of her sorority sisters always spent the week after Christmas at some resort or spa together. She told me that they had been doing that since they were pledges together and that it was "sacrosanct."

Unlike a lot of the strange legal words Charlie often used, I didn't have to look that up. It was pretty clear that sacrosanct meant "don't fuck with this." So every year on the day after Christmas, she and Donna and Barbara and Doctor Sapperstein would go off somewhere for their "Christmas Club" getaway. I never knew where they went or whether it was the same place each year. I also never knew who Donna and Barb were or what they did for a living. I knew who Doctor Lari Sapperstein was, however, because she was a local plastic surgeon and I saw her name and face on billboards throughout the area.

Charlie would never tell me where they were going or what they did while they were there. Her only comment when I once asked was, "We definitely are not chasing men for the week, so you don't have to worry."

I think the Christmas Club was the only real down side to our relationship until Wall Street fell apart. When the market tanked unexpectedly, our firm took some really big losses. Several of our major clients were virtually wiped out. Business fell off dramatically and the brokers like me with only a few years of seniority were the first to go. Actually, when the manure hit the ventilator in our office, there were many others with less seniority than me, but I was the one who got the axe.

One day my boss called me into his office and said, "There have been some papers filed that cast doubt on some of our firms decisions– decisions you were responsible for. I know you didn't do anything illegal, but we might have to defend ourselves in court and it would be better for the firm if this could be handled without your presence."

I knew that I couldn't have been the primary decision maker on any of those things, whatever they were, because I didn't have the seniority or power to make that sort of decision. Regardless, I was going to be the scapegoat, taking the hit for the team. I possibly could have proven my innocence... if they would have told me who had filed complaints or exactly what legal actions had been taken. But they wouldn't talk to me.

They evidently talked to all their buddies, though, and told them I was responsible for whatever it was that had happened, because even after things began to improve, no one would so much as give me an interview. I asked Charlie to look into it for me. She used some of her contacts, but all she reported back to me was, "You must have really screwed up badly with somebody big." That is all she ever told me. Then she kicked me out of bed.

I tried to find other work, but stock brokers are not the best liked people in good times. When people have lost their shirts recently, they don't want to hire or work with one those "greedy bastards" who caused all their problems. Soon, my only friends were Dave the bartender and Maury, a local barfly who for some reason decided to befriend me.

Actually it was Maury who gave me the idea. He was a card sharp and was always doing bar bet card tricks. I think he made his living running a couple of poker games here and there, but you don't ask that kind of thing at the bar. One day he got my attention when he began talking about what he called "the perfect setup."

"The problem with most people," Maury began, "is that they think that the perfect setup in a card game is to have the perfect hand."

He sipped his beer and continued, "That won't get you squat! What good is the perfect hand if everybody folds against you? The perfect setup is when you have the perfect hand and the other person also thinks that they have the perfect hand. That's when you take their gazuubahs."

I had no idea what the hell a "gazuubah" was, but I got the idea. Maury also showed me how to win "pin money" with a little low-level cheating. "You don't have to win all the time to win at poker," he would say. "You only have to win more than the other guy, and to do that you only have to control two of the cards."

Maury's big game was 5-card-stud with jokers wild. "That's the game to play," he said. "Everybody thinks it's almost impossible to cheat at, but it's one of the easiest to fix. And here is all you need."

He held up a small spray can and said. "This spray makes a card extra slick. You can't tell it by feel, but even in a new deck, if you tap the deck sideways just a little as you pick it up, it will almost always split at that card."

He set the spray on the bar and said, "Fifty bucks." He took another sip of his beer as I got out my billfold. Then he added, "The other thing you'll need to make it work on a regular basis is a sealing machine. You can get those at most places that sell to retail stores."

He smiled. "Most people trust a new deck. There's nothing that pulls a sucker in like pealing the cellophane off what they think is a factory deck. Even more so if it's a box of decks. Two wrappers are no more difficult to seal than one."

"Here's what you do," he continued, handing me the can of slick spray. "You slick the jokers on their face side. Then when you tap the deck there's always a joker on the bottom of the portion you are holding as you deal. A simple bottom deal and you have a joker in the hole. That's enough of an edge to win a couple of big hands each night."

"But what if you want to really clean someone out?" I asked.

"Then you're talking about doing a setup," he answered. "For that, you prepackage your winning hands and use a false shuffle and reverse cut."

It must have been obvious from my facial expression that he had totally lost me because he took another sip of beer and explained, "They are both pretty easy to learn and hard to catch. Basically you shuffle the cards together, but then pull them back apart each time. It looks like you are shuffling the hell out of them, but nothing moves. Then when you let someone cut, you flip the cut back over as you pick up the deck, or you use a joker slicker that you had put on the bottom to pop the deck back to original. Either way, it's just a little slight of hand and you have the top portion rather than the bottom when you deal."

"What if you want to go for the perfect setup?" I asked. "The one where you

really

clean someone out?"

"Ah, the perfect setup," he said between sips of beer. "That takes a lot of time and even more planning."

He turned to me and was suddenly very serious. "You have to have everything in place weeks– months– or even years– in advance while you wait for the perfect time to strike. Everything has to be in place just like you want it before you make your move."

He chuckled slightly, "The icing on the cake when you make your move is to set it up so that they are absolutely sure you can't possibly be cheating."

"How can I do that?"

"It's really simple to do," he said taking a deck of cards out of his pocket and shuffling them. "When everything is set and ready to go, I will take the deck back after the cut but then rather than dealing, I hand it back... or I cut the deck again - at the slick - and then hand it back. I say something like, 'I'm feeling really lucky. You deal so we all know that I'm not pulling something.' The sucker never thinks about the fact that it doesn't make any difference who deals the cards if I have them all set up." He downed the rest of his beer, smiled and continued, "Works every time."

He sighed and finished with, "Ah, there's nothing I like better than really fucking over a sucker. You know, really giving it to them right in the ass."

Suddenly, I could see myself really giving it to Charlie "right in the ass." A plan began to form in my head. If I could somehow get her into a card game, her highly competitive nature would lead her into my trap. Somehow I would get her to bet everything, and I mean everything, and then I would have her right where I wanted her. Her hyper-legal mind wouldn't let her go back on her bet. I could walk away from this sham of a marriage with some assets and maybe even a final revenge on her ass. The problem was how to set it up.

END CHAPTER ONE

CHAPTER TWO

Good plans take preparation. Great plans take preparation and luck. My luck came only a few weeks later in the form of a Christmas blizzard. In order to explain the poker chips, cards, and poker paraphernalia that arrived at the house, I had told Charlie that I was going to be hosting a big poker game at the club for some friends while she was gone. She immediately told me, "You'll just lose your ass, like always."

I said, "I'm the host. The house always wins, didn't you know?"

Her response was to roll her eyes at me as she left the room.

Christmas Day she made some phone calls and then said to me, "Looks like you're going to be late for your poker game tomorrow. With this weather, I'm going to need you to take me up to the cabin in your four-wheel drive."

I started to protest, but she cut me off and said, "Just tell you friends that things will start late."

Since I didn't really have a poker game set up, it didn't make any difference, but it sort of pissed me off... until I realized that this might be the opportunity for the perfect setup. I wasn't sure where this cabin was, but I knew that the weather was going to get worse and if I could get "trapped at the cabin," I might convince the girls to play some poker and then I would have three witnesses to my victory over Charlie. I might even get some revenge on the Christmas girls while I was at it.

I told Charlie I would have to make some phone calls and then I would be in the basement getting everything ready since I wouldn't have time otherwise. What I actually did was prepare about a dozen or so slicker decks and three different setup decks. I only planned to need one deck, but just in case I had backups.

After I re-wrapped the decks with commercial shrink wrap packaging, I marked them with price tags using a pricing gun I had purchased just for that purpose. Nobody pays any attention to a price sticker, but the numbers above the price on the sticker told me exactly which deck was which. The setup decks were for 3, 4, or 5 players and there were four in each set.

Actually, I planned to sit with Charlie to my left so it didn't matter how many were playing as long as I used the right deck. It was the perfect setup. When the time came, I would have her or one of the other girls deal. I would get the perfect hand, she would get the almost perfect hand, and everyone else would get good hands that were actually squat compared to Charlie's and mine. And when it was all over, I would come out the big winner with at least a divorce on

my

terms.

We left for the cabin about noon on the day after Christmas. I made sure to grumble a little every so often about how I was going to miss my poker game with the guys and that she wasn't the only one who needed a little away time. After a couple of hours, she told me to shut up and drive.

We drove more or less in silence after that. Eventually, we started to get into some mountain roads and she consulted a map and some written directions until we finally pulled onto a narrow, snow-covered, dirt road that wound its way up the back side of one really large hill. The GPS just showed us going out across wilderness with no roads indicated.

"Are you sure this is the right road?" I asked. "I would hate to get stuck out here in this weather and it's starting to get dark."

She assured me it was alright and we continued on a couple of miles until she told me to pull over into a parking area at the base of some wooden steps. "Get the bags," she ordered as she stepped out of the car. Since she only had one bag, I assumed she meant for me to also get my bag and I grabbed her suitcase and my duffle. The steps took us up the hillside to a small, but very nice, mountain cabin.

"Hopefully the girls won't have any problem getting in," she said as she began to remove covers from furniture and turn up lights and heat. "Go out to the shed and get some wood for the fire," she ordered, pointing toward a door on the side of the cabin. Then she added, "There's an outside door to the wood bin next to the chimney. Make sure it's full before you come back in."

Normally I would have been really pissed about the way she was ordering me around, but now was not the time to start a big argument, so I went outside to the small woodshed. I found it was stacked nearly full of firewood. It took four or five trips back and forth to fill the bin next to the fireplace. When I came back into the cabin, the girls were just coming in the door.

"Donna, Barb, Lari," Charlie began, "this is my husband, Steve. He drove me up here and is just leaving now that he has brought us in enough wood."

"But they've closed the road," replied Lari. "We had to drive around the barricade to get up here. I wouldn't have done it if I didn't have chains on the Jeep. They won't plow that road until the storm is over. I am afraid Steve is stuck here with us until then."

"Shit, now I will have to cancel my poker game," I grumbled and walked into the kitchen with my cell phone in my hand. After a few moments, I yelled back into the other room, "There's no cell phone service out here, is there?"

Lari responded rather icily, "No, Steve, it's just us girls and you alone in the wilderness."

I was glad I was alone in the kitchen. They couldn't see the big smile that I couldn't keep from spreading across my face. After I composed myself, I came back into the main room and said, "I guess I will just have to try to stay out of your way as much as possible. Is there a lower area on this cabin?"

Charlie answered me, "The lower area is mostly unfinished, and what is finished is for special use, so you will be staying up here with us for the time being. There are three bedrooms. You'll have one of them. Barb and I will have one and Lari and Donna will have the third."

It suddenly struck me that she had pronounced "Lari" as Larry. Although I had seen the name in writing, I had never heard the name pronounced and assumed that it was "Lah-ree" - sort of like "Lori." The thought flashed through my mind that Charlie and Barb and Lari and Donna sounded like a two married couples away for the weekend with a mutual single friend, Steve.

That rest of that evening and night was chick heaven and man hell. They were sitting around the kitchen table gossiping and catching up on each other's lives. There was no TV signal because of the heavy snow, and the only DVDs were strictly chick-flick movies which I knew that we were going to watch before the night was up. We did– two of them.

The girls were sitting around in flimsy nighties that didn't do much to hide their bodies. They evidently also didn't do much to help them keep warm either, because they kept asking me to put another log on the fire. Barb said, "We didn't know we were going to be having male guests or we would have brought something a little more... flannel." I went to bed very frustrated, but full of hope that I could put my plan into effect soon.

The next day it snowed all day and the girls decided to stay inside. Charlie said something about wasting all that good ski time, but Lari said that they would just have to find something to pass the time until the weather cleared. I had my opening. "Well, ladies I do have all my stuff for a poker party down in the car. If you pretty ladies want to learn a thing or two about a real game of chance, we could play some five card stud."

I expected Charlie to object or tell me that I was being stupid, but instead she looked over at Lari and said, "Why not? We could teach Steve here a thing or two about how to play."

I had her... I had them. All I had to do was to keep my excitement contained and carefully work the plan. Too much enthusiasm and I would scare them off. I had to keep to the plan exactly. I needed to make them– especially Charlie– want to win and think that they could win. I forced myself to casually walk down the steps to the car and not run the whole distance there and back.

When I returned carrying a big, plastic tub, Donna had set up a six-sided card table and some chairs. "These were in the closet," she said. When I commented that they looked almost new, she added, "Must be. They weren't there last year when we used the cabin."

I set down the tub and said, "A poker party in a box," as I took out cards, chips, several bottles of bourbon, and some bags of snacks. "Do you girls know how to play five card stud?" I asked, as I arranged things on a small table near the fireplace.