Every Denver forecast is a bet: two inches or fourteen, all of it by dawn or none of it at all. Pocket Aces Services plays the hand either way, plowing, shoveling, clearing drives, walks and lots, and salting the ice that turns up whether the storm did or not. The trucks get loaded the night before, because the storm that gets called off is the one that lands at midnight. There is a strange calm to a city at four in the morning under new snow, everything muffled, one plow moving down an empty street. Then the sun clears the plains and the pavement is where it belongs, which is visible.