Both of them stopped and stared at their phone screens. Below the creepy message was a link, presumably to download an app. Sofia went to flick it open.

‘Wait, is that safe?’

‘Dad, this is hardly the time to worry about Malware.’

Sofia clicked the app and a spinning wheel of doom loomed into view, quickly downloading a page and showing a six-handed poker table. One of the seats filled, and a stack of 1,000 chips appeared in front of a seat on the bottom right of the screen. An avatar of Sofia appeared on the seat and her screenname: ‘Capitalgurl’.

‘Who’s doing this?’ she asked.

‘Well, it can hardly be Silvana, can it? She’s in the back of a police car!’ Ivan said.

‘Did they take her phone off her?’

Neither of them knew the answer to that for sure, and a quick scan of the hallway did not locate it. Sofia told her Dad to accept the link and take his own seat. He did so and appeared to Sofia’s immediate left in the bottom left of the screen as ‘DaddyCool’. A humorless smirk flashed across his features.

‘So, we’re supposed to sit here on our phones and play a game of poker until we’re murdered by the same person who killed Georgi?’ he asked. ‘Not me.’

‘Wait, what did you say?’

‘What?’

‘Well, you just said it. They’d be coming to find us, based on where our mobile phones are. They give off a location. I just had a thought. Did you get Georgi’s possessions back?’

‘Yes, they gave them to me in a box. To be honest, Sofia, I can’t bear to look inside it.’

‘I think we need to,’ she said as she logged into the app on her phone that could locate Georgi’s cell phone.

The box was filled with the items you would expect to find in the pockets of someone who died unexpectedly. Georgi’s wallet held his driver’s license, photo ID and a handful of notes, but there wasn’t the sum of money they hoped would be there.

‘If he was running away, he wouldn’t have got far with this.’ Sofia said. Ivan nodded.

Next to the wallet were two passports. They opened one each. Sofia held open Georgi’s photo page with the same picture that was on his Photo ID. She teared up at seeing his face in duplicate.

Her father turned the other passport page with a photo on to face his daughter.

‘Elena.’ She said. ‘They must have been going away.’

‘Someone prevented them from doing so.’

There was a bleep from Sofia’s cell phone. The same noise emanated from Ivan’s.

‘Four more players have joined the table,’ Sofia said. She brought the screen up and showed her father. Four more players had indeed filled seats. Their names were ‘TrimTra1l’, ‘L3atherOne’, ‘SerferDude’ and ‘Georg1’.

‘Well, Serf has to be one of them,’ Ivan said.

Sofia looked at her cell phone. Georgi’s cell popped up on the phone locator app.

‘It says that Georgi is to the East of the city,’ Sofia said. ‘Past the monastery, the football ground. It’s the river. It’s where his body was found.’

He ushered Sofia out of the house, and they got into the car. He locked the house and they drove off.

‘Leather. That’s got to be Dimitar. But it was Georgi that always wore the leather.’

‘Someone knows that Dimitar was wearing his jacket at the poker night.’

‘Someone like Peter Serf?’

‘Maybe.’

Ivan Angelov had looked certain of both his wife’s innocence and that nothing bad could come of the situation when he and Sofia had arrived home. That façade was falling away like a busted flush draw.

*                *                *

They drove fast to the location of Georgi’s phone. The Iskar River was a torrent of activity as it flowed beneath the base of what looked like a mountain from the valley floor.

‘I can see someone up there,’ Sofia said, pointing up at the summit as Ivan screeched the car to a stop in the parking space. The Iskar Gorge loomed above them, soaring up into the sky.

‘It must be a thousand feet high,’ Sofia said, craning her neck. She was short anyway, but it felt like the cloud-swathed peak was a world away from where she stood.

‘980 feet, actually,’ Ivan said. He slipped his car keys into his pocket. The gorge itself stretched for miles, further than either of them could rationally approximate.

‘We’ve not been here for years, Dad.’

‘Not since you were children.’ Ivan said, his voice faltering in the mist of twilight. ‘It links the country, like a spider’s web. It connects the capital with all the other cities in the country.’ They gazed up at the limestone walls of the West-facing wall of rock that shot up almost in a sheer drop. To the right, a much less steep path wound its way north up the peak. They had approached by the only road, but in the distance, a railway could be seen, leading a steel path through the Iskar Gorge.

The canyon itself was terrifying. Georgi had died at the base of it, but he couldn’t possibly have plummeted to his death, as his body was unmarked. Neither of them thought he had drowned, though. How had he died?

They climbed the path carefully and soon spied the figure at the top. He was easy to make out as they got closer. The dark clothes, the slick hair, the sullen, sunken expression of a man who was angry and no longer had any reason to hide it.

Dimitar welcomed them both as they reached him, at least 300 feet from the base of the peak. They all looked down at the canyon walls, whose limestone crags seemed etched in lightning by the metallic glow of early evening.

‘What are you doing here, Dimitar?’ Sofia asked. Dimitar was wearing a leather jacket. From a distance, he could easily have been mistaken for Georgi.

‘I was sent an invitation,’ he said. ‘A poker game. By Georgi. I thought maybe you sent it, Ivan.’

‘Me? Why would I send it?’ asked Ivan, livid at the suggestion. His cheeks flushed and he balled his fists.

‘To summon me here. I thought maybe you and your wife,’ he spat the word, ‘were going to get rid of me and Elena.’

‘You know about Elena?’ asked Sofia.

‘I went to the nightclub. Elena was being loaded into an ambulance. I’d taken a call from the catering company suggesting a way to change the order to save money.  I went over to their warehouse, but they said they never called. I returned and saw her being taken away. Then I got this message.’

The app, as if summoned by Dimitar, sprang into life. The first hand was being dealt. Sofia grabbed the phone and saw that Dimitar wasn’t touching the screen. The three of them watched as the hands were fanned around the table by the digital dealer. Dimitar had pocket aces. Each of them had 1,000 starting chips and the blinds were 50/100. It was a crapshoot. Sofia and Ivan both got their phones out.

‘The app said if we want to find out who Georgi is, then we need to win?’ Dimitar said.

‘No, who killed Georgi,’ said Sofia.

‘Well I have queen-nine suited,” said Ivan. ‘I fold.’

‘Wait,’ Sofia said. ‘I have pocket kings. If we know its not Dimitar, then we can lose our chips to him. That’ll give him the best chance of beating whoever is behind this. Look at the blinds. With three times his chips, he’s got to have the best chance of any of us.’

‘I suppose you’re right. But what if he’s behind it? It could be a computer program. Maybe you gave yourself aces.’

‘Wouldn’t I have brought a weapon if I wanted to kill you?’ asked Dimitar. ‘What Sofia says is right. With three times anyone’s chips, I should win. Then we can find out who killed your son. My best friend.’

They agreed, and before the timer ran out, Sofia raised and Ivan shoved. Both Dimitar and Sofia called it off and the hands were revealed. An eight-high flop almost killed off Ivan’s chances of winning and he was practically drawing dead after the flop. A king on the turn changed all that.

‘I’m sorry,’ Sofia said, but the others shook their heads.

Then an ace landed on the river.

‘L3atherOne’, a.k.a. Dimitar, had the chips. The pot of 3,000 was moved to Dimitar’s seat and both Sofia and Ivan were eliminated.

Sofia looked away from the phone with relief and saw a car pull up at the base of the mountain. Out of the driver’s side climbed Peter Serf. He looked up the mountain and held his cell phone out in front of him. He leaned back into the car and pointed back up at the three of them. Suddenly, he seemed to lose something in the car, and lunged in to get it.

A minute passed, and when he came out of the car, he had a cell phone in one hand and a gun in the other.

He gestured to the person in the backseat and opened the door for them. Saskia, her wrists bound behind her back, practically tumbled out of the car and Serf held her hair. He half-dragged, half-pulled her up to meet the others at the staggered summit of the great rock face. He threw Saskia towards Sofia. She landed in a heap, her handbag clattering into her chest. She held it tight as if it were a shield.

‘Don’t take her gag off,’ he barked at Sofia, pointing the gun in the direction of the group, ‘Nobody move.’

The four of them cowered in his shadow, the light seeming to die in the sky with the presence of Peter Serf. His whole body was contorted in anger, the veins on his neck standing out and his face flushed.

His cell phone bleeped, but he ignored it.

‘I went for a haircut. Found her playing a game of poker on her phone… and you were all present,’ he snapped. ‘Thought about playing myself, got an invite. But then I figured I could try to find where you all are.’

Peter Serf paused, the wind howling around them all. Then he spoke again.

“You see, I’ve been looking for you… Georgi.’

Dead by the River – Chapter 11

Peter Serf looked directly at Dimitar, who shuffled on his feet. He looked like he was holding onto a secret that was too hot to remain in his grasp.

‘You want to tell them, or shall I!?’ said Peter, his gun pointing at Dimitar’s chest. Both Ivan and Sofia looked utterly perplexed.

‘Your friend here, Elena’s boyfriend… has been playing a very different part, haven’t you?’

Dimitar bowed his head and, in barely a whisper, said, ‘I’m sorry.’

‘All your poker smarts, Sofia, all your observational skills, and you still haven’t worked it out, have you? Dimitar told my wife that he was Georgi. She wasn’t fooling around with your brother; she was doing it with him!’

Peter’s finger tensed on the trigger.

‘I’m going to kill you for what you’ve done to my marriage. You never loved my wife. You played with her so that the news of the affair would get back to Elena, and she’d see what Georgi was like. You wanted her to see that you were the man for her.’

‘It is true.’

‘You beat Georgi out of his money, you scared Elena off him when you told her what he’d done… and then you killed him.’

Ivan Angelov seemed to glow red. He went to grab Dimitar, who backed off, his hands up, palms toward the other men.

‘I didn’t kill him. It’s true that I loved Elena, and I… was with your wife as Georgi. But I didn’t mean for it to happen.’

All the fight seemed to drain from Dimitar. He visibly shrank in front of them.

‘The club was dark. She arrived to check it out, for her job… and assumed I was Georgi. For a moment, I wanted to be him. To imagine Elena on my arm. He didn’t love her. He wanted her, but only for the next week. He would have discarded her. I had loved her from the moment I saw her. I saw a way we could be together. But I didn’t kill Georgi.’

He turned to face Sofia.

‘I didn’t kill your brother.’

‘You’re lying. Saskia found where your phone was, and then she searched for Sofia’s… and Ivan’s. You were all together here. Was that your plan, get everyone together, throw them off the summit one by one? Like you did Georgi?’

‘But I didn’t do anything to Georgi. He didn’t have a scratch on him.’

‘Don’t lie to me,’ Peter said, checking the gun was loaded and leveling it at Dimitar’s forehead.

A moaning came from Saskia on the floor. Sofia hauled her up into her lap and her eyes pleaded at her friend.

‘Can’t you just leave everyone else out of this?’ Sofia asked Peter.

‘Come on, Peter,’ Ivan said. ‘This has gone far enough. If you kill Dimitar, they’ll throw away the key. We’re all witnesses.’

‘Don’t you see that I don’t care any more?’ said Peter as he turned to the car. Dimitar didn’t wait for an invitation, diving through the air, wrestling Peter to the ground. Dimitar knocked the gun out of his hand, and it clattered on the rocks. As the two men grappled, Saskia fell on top of the pistol, covering it with her body. Dimitar held Peter still, then pulled him to his feet.

Sofia pulled the gag from Saskia’s mouth and removed the rope from the wrists of the young hairdresser, who rubbed feeling back into them. There were raw burn marks just below her hands and they looked sore.

‘Thank you, Dimitar,’ said Saskia as she beamed at him. With the same practiced, artistic flair Saskia used with her scissors, she flicked the gun around in her hand, aiming it at Peter Serf.

‘For a second, I thought you were going to prevent me doing this,’ Saskia said as she shot Peter in the stomach. He fell to his knees in agony and Saskia stepped forward.

‘I think we’ve all had enough of your silly little game, Peter.’

‘Saskia, what’s going on with you?’ said Sofia. Her face was a picture of horror.

‘With me? Don’t make me laugh. Peter came in for a haircut to make sure I was in on your stupid little poker game. You thought you’d find out the truth, but when you did, and your wife pointed at ‘Georgi’ here, you couldn’t handle it.’

Saskia laughed. It was higher pitched than usual, and Sofia didn’t like the sound of it at all. Saskia stepped forward and with Peter still doubled over in agony, gave him a hard kick to the ribs. He groaned, stumbling on his knees, before tumbling down the mountain path. He traveled a few hundred feet before he came to a stop, his limp body falling still on a bed of small stones, a trail of dust settling in his wake.

‘Now that he won’t be bothering us anymore, perhaps we can all have a civilized conversation,’ Saskia snapped. ‘Or do I have to kill someone else?’

She told them all to move towards the edge of the peak. There was a thousand feet between them and the ground. A sheer drop would certainly kill anyone who went over it, and below them, the wind whipped around rocks that looked like fists that had punched up through the earth before turning to stone.

‘Saskia, please, don’t do this. None of us have to die. What do you want?’

‘That’s a good question. One that none of you cared about until a second ago. Suddenly, it’s a bit more important, right?’

Silence indicated she was right about that. Dimitar glanced down at the screen in his hand.  Both ‘TrimTra1l’ and ‘SerferDude’ had busted. The player who called themselves ‘Georg1’ was letting their time bank run down. This made sense. They all knew that player was Peter Serf now.

‘All I wanted was to be important to all of you. Sofia, I wanted a friend, but you had to travel all the time. You were never happy with what you had here. I was always the listener, and you talked, talked, talked. Sam, Georgi, your father. All you cared about was yourself. Dimitar was even worse. You only had eyes for Elena, but you couldn’t see what was on your doorstep. I’d always liked you, but at the club the other day, you looked right past me. So did Peter; all he wanted was to chat Sofia up.’

‘What about my brother?’ Sofia asked, tears in her eyes.

‘He was the worst of you all. He came here with Elena. But he poured his heart to to me in the chair while I cut his hair. She was just the latest in a long line.’

‘A line you were never in?’

‘Shut up! I would have been if he hadn’t wanted Elena so badly. I couldn’t stand it any more. I made sure his drink at the hairdressers had something extra in.’

‘You drugged my brother?’ Sofia asked. She remembered how quickly Saskia had found the sleeping pills, how happy she was to give them away.

‘It was so easy. I had loads of those pills. I used to get terrible anxiety. Used to worry about money, love, all that stuff. But they really helped. And they allowed me to put Georgi to sleep. I lay him in the river while he was out of it and watched him go still.’

Tears ran down Sofia’s face. All the color had drained from Ivan Angelov’s face. His expression hinted that the cliff face no longer harbored any terrors to him.

‘If it’s money, you can have it,’ he said eventually.

‘You want to buy your way out of this? I don’t want money. I want stature, a place in this city. But you can help me have it. It was me who fired the rifle at the poker night. I wanted to stop you both getting on with Dimitar, I wanted you to see what he was really like. But it was Silvana’s nail varnish on the gun. Guilty as charged for the first bullet, right. I made sure that I stabbed Elena with a knife from your kitchen, just to make sure.’

‘You’re a monster,’ said Ivan, thinking of his wife and son.

‘A monster you can marry. You’ve done it before, traded up. You like a younger model, don’t you? Sofia, we can be like sisters. But you, Dimi…’

Saskia smiled, but there was no joy there at all. The smile never got close to reaching her eyes. She raised the gun and marched Dimitar right to the edge of the cliff. He could feel the roar of the wind in his ears, and all he could see when he closed his eyes was Elena’s face.

‘I want you to walk off, Dimitar,’ Saskia said. ‘You’re going to be the murderer. You were jealous of Georgi, you slept with Peter’s wife. Don’t you see, it’s perfect. Now move!’

Dimitar walked to the edge of the cliff. His feet hung inches from the frayed grass at the threshold of oblivion.

‘Walk!’

‘I… I can’t do it,’ he said.

‘Then I’ll shoot you. Three, two…’

Dimitar closed his eyes, heard the number one spoken then heard the ear-splitting roar of a gun being fired so close that he felt his eardrums might burst. Then he opened his eyes.

Saskia staggered on her feet, the blood pouring from her arm. The gun she’d been holding fell to the ground, and Sofia lunged for it, tossing it over the cliff. Behind her stood Silvana, rifle leveled at Saskia from five feet away. She smiled at her stepdaughter and her husband.

‘Released without charge,’ she grunted. ‘Now walk, yourself.’

She shot Saskia again, this time in the chest, and the hairdresser staggered towards the precipice. She took one last look at Sofia and smiled a horrible smile, blood emerging from behind her sharp teeth. Then the wind took her and she fell. It was one thousand feet down, onto black rocks.

The four of them stepped back from the edge and huddled together.

Silvana discarded the weapon and the police arrived only a few seconds later.

Silvana told them that she only shot Saskia in self-defense. The only witnesses, Ivan, Dimitar, and Sofia backed Silvana’s every word. They went with the authorities down the hill and when they reached the bottom, they saw that a police cordon was being set up at Peter Serf’s car.

‘So it was true, then?’ Ivan asked the police officer who was accompanying them down the hill. ‘He really did kill his wife?’

‘It would appear so. The woman in this car died at the scene.’

‘I can’t believe he really killed her,’ said Sofia. She thought about how attracted she’d been to him at first and it sent a chill down her spine.

‘Did you take him to the morgue?’

‘We’ve not located Peter Serf at this time,’ said the officer.

‘He’s alive?’ Sofia asked. Silvana, Ivan, Sofia, and Dimitar exchanged a glance. Peter Serf had managed to escape. But how long could a wounded man run?

At the station, police took statements from everyone involved. Once they’d finished, night had fallen, an ink-black sky without stars overhead.

Ivan held Silvana’s hand on the way out, Sofia along with them both. She had made up with Silvana over Styrofoam cups of tea and the three of them were looking towards a future when they’d be a real family again. Sofia had asked to move back in with her father and Silvana, just until they caught Peter. They’d been more than happy to accept. They all wanted to mourn Georgi.

As the Angelovs went home, Dimitar was left on the steps of the police station. He hailed a taxi and told the driver to head to the hospital.

When he arrived at the hospital, he asked to see Elena and was told she was in the recovery ward having successfully made it through surgery on a ruptured abdomen.

‘She was lucky,’ the Sister on the ward said when Dimitar arrived. ‘Many people don’t survive. She is strong. We’ll be keeping her in for a couple of days, just to make sure, of course, but we’d expect her to make a full recovery.’

He had arrived at Elena’s ward, and the nurse drew back the curtain.

The bed was empty.

‘Where is she?’ asked Dimitar. The whitewashed walls seemed to creep a couple of inches closer to him.

‘I’ll check with the… ah, here she is. Nurse, where is this patient?’

‘She checked out with her father,’ said the nurse, hurrying past to the sound of an alarm being pressed at another patient’s bedside.

A short, balding man arrived at their side and interrupted them.

‘Excuse me, but could you tell me where my daughter is recuperating?’

‘Sorry sir, but right now, I’m just trying to help this man…’

‘But her name is Elena…’

‘Who are you?’ Dimitar said.

‘I’m her father. You’re the man from the nightclub, aren’t you? I’ve seen you when I’ve picked her up.’

It was at that moment that Dimitar’s phone sprang into life. A bleep showed him that the poker game he’d been in when halfway up the Iskar Gorge had ended. ‘Georg1’ had ended up with all the chips. He almost looked away, but a message popped up in the app.

You lost the game, so I took the prize with me.
If you want to play again, you’ll need to find the buy-in.

$1 million in one month… or Elena dies.

Dimitar felt like the room was spinning.

Peter Serf had won. He’d escaped with Elena. Dimitar made his excuses and left. He had to find Elena. He’d need to raise a million dollars to get her back and he only knew of one way he could do that.

He’d have to play poker…. and win.

Dimitar Will Return in…

Dead Beat.

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About the Author: Paul Seaton has written about poker for over 10 years, interviewing some of the best players ever to play the game such as Daniel Negreanu, Johnny Chan and Phil Hellmuth. Over the years, Paul has reported live from tournaments such as the World Series of Poker in Las Vegas and the European Poker Tour. He has also written for other poker brands where he was Head of Media, as well as BLUFF magazine, where he was Editor.

This is a work of fiction. Any similarity to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events, is purely coincidental.

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Edited by Maury Orton and Shawn A.