The Scam

by Janet Evanovich

  A new performance had begun, this one pure improvisation, unless Nick and Kate started giving him direction in his ear, which Boyd hoped they wouldn’t. He wanted to let his character guide his artistic choices, to live in the moment, to be a trapeze artist walking on a razor’s edge.

  Trace went to the bar, opened the bottle, and poured out two glasses. “It’s a cheap whiskey, only about twenty bucks a bottle, but it’s my favorite. Straight out of Louisville, Kentucky. I won’t drink any whiskey that doesn’t come from the bluegrass state.”

  He handed Boyd a glass. Boyd took a sip and smacked his lips with pleasure. “Goes down nice and smooth, like caramel with a kick. But you didn’t come here to talk whiskey with a bootlegger.”

  “You’re a bootlegger, too?” Trace said. “I didn’t know that about you.”

  Boyd didn’t know that about Shane Blackmore, either, until that moment. It was exciting, making it up as he went along.

  “I’m sure you know everything about me, right down to the brand of deodorant I use.” Boyd sat down on the couch and put one arm up on the backrest, owning the space and showing how relaxed he was. Body language was an important part of his performance.

  Trace took the armchair across from him, set his whiskey on the armrest, and ran a fingertip contemplatively around the rim of the glass.

  It was bad acting, Boyd thought. Trace wasn’t contemplating anything. It was for dramatic effect and it was amateurish, straight out of community theater.

  “I have a business proposition for you,” Trace said. “I’d like to invite you to come back to Côte d’Argent in a week or two and lose millions of dollars gambling. A colossal loss of ten to fifteen million dollars would be nice.”

  Boyd laughed. “I can see how that might be good business for you, but how does that benefit me?”

  “Because your losses will actually be an off-the-books investment in the Monde d’Argent project that I’m building on the Cotai Strip,” Trace said. “Over the next ten years, I guarantee that you’ll reap ten times or more whatever amount you invest with me.”

  “So I get to launder my cash as gambling losses,” Boyd said. “And right into a secret moneymaking ownership stake in a Macau casino.”

  Trace smiled. “Sweet, isn’t it?”

  —

  Nick stood ramrod straight and absolutely still, as he listened to the conversation over his earbud. Kate thought he looked like a man in a minefield. And from what she was hearing, he’d already stepped on one and was obliterated.

  “We’re finished,” she said. “Our whole con was built on our gamblers losing all of their money and Alika going after Trace for it. Now he’s asking them to lose everything as an investment in his new casino.”

  “It’s a brilliant scam,” Nick said.

  “He’s just destroyed our entire operation! This is no time to be impressed.”

  “Let’s not overreact. I want to know more about Trace’s scam,” Nick said and used his key fob to activate the transmitter in his earbud. “Boyd, get us the details.”

  —

  “If the profit potential is so great, why share the pie with a Canadian mobster?” Boyd asked. “Why do you need my measly investment?”

  Trace shifted in his seat. He was in the difficult position of admitting weakness while trying to demonstrate strength. It was an acting challenge, and Boyd was curious to see how Trace would overcome it.

  “I’m a small casino operator and my pockets aren’t nearly as deep as my competitors’,” Trace said. “Opening Monde d’Argent is my biggest gamble yet but also a necessary risk if I’m going to succeed. The new Chinese president has launched an anticorruption campaign as a publicity stunt. It won’t last, but for now, it has made mainland China’s high rollers, the titans of industry and leaders of government, reluctant to gamble and draw attention to their wealth. It has hit the bottom line of all the casinos in Macau very hard.”

  “How much has Macau’s gambling revenue dropped?”

  “Forty-nine percent from the same month last year,” Trace said. Before that bad news had a chance to sink in, he leaned forward and rested his arms on his knees, with an excited smile on his face. “But you have to look at it from a global perspective, Mr. Blackmore. Macau’s gambling revenue last month was three billion dollars, and while that’s a big drop, that’s still half of what all the casinos in Las Vegas combined generate in an entire year. We’re sitting on a gold mine. I can’t let a temporary slowdown in my cash flow stop me from building Monde d’Argent and reaping decades of enormous profits.”

  Boyd admired the way Trace used his own enthusiasm and body language to mask the dire position he was actually in. Perhaps Trace wasn’t as much of an amateur at acting as he thought.

  “So because of these temporary, troubled times, you’re willing to explore alternative funding options,” Boyd said.

  Trace grinned, leaned back in his seat, and took a sip of his bourbon. “I like the way you said that.”

  “It does take the stink off of it,” Boyd said, twirling his mustache. “It makes what you’re proposing almost sound legitimate.”

  “I’m going to Billy Dee’s room,” Kate whispered to Nick. “If Trace is making this offer to one of our players, he’s going to make it to all of them. I want to record his conversation with Billy Dee.”

  “What good is recording the offer going to do us?”

  “It’s a crime,” Kate said. “He’s asking them to participate in an illegal conspiracy.”

  “What we’re doing is an illegal conspiracy. Whatever you record is worthless as evidence.”

  Kate was already at the door. “Don’t care.”

  “We need you to buy us some time,” Nick said to Boyd. “String him along.”

  “I’m intrigued,” Boyd said to Trace. “It’s an ingenious and yet simple scheme.”

  “Thank you,” Trace said.

  “But I have some questions.”

  Trace opened his arms in a welcoming gesture. “Ask whatever you like.”

  “How would I lose?” Boyd asked. “Are you going to rig the games?”

  “I would never do that. I believe in an honest game because the odds are tipped in our favor anyway. Play long enough and you’re bound to lose.”

  “And if I don’t?”

  Trace shrugged. “You’ll come back and lose it tomorrow. When you go home with some of our money, we know you’re only taking a high-interest loan because you’ll eventually return with what you’ve won and more. Our biggest profits are from winners, not from losers.”

  “Where do Nick and Kate fit into all of this?”

  “The same way they do now. I don’t want to lose their business or their access to potential under-the-table investors like you,” Trace said. “Come here next time without them just to gamble…and lose big.”

  “If I make this investment, what’s to stop you from reneging on the deal?”

  “You’ll kill me,” Trace said.

  “You do know me.”

  —

  Billy Dee answered his door on the second knock.

  “Trace is coming over any minute now to make you an offer,” Kate said, “and I want to get a video.”

  The suite consisted of a living room, a small kitchen, a large bedroom, and an opulent bathroom. She stood for a moment, looking around for a place to put her phone that would provide a good angle for filming the discussion, but not draw Trace’s attention.

  She spotted Billy Dee’s phone charging on the kitchen counter. Go with the obvious, she thought, swapping out Billy Dee’s phone for her own, tipping her phone in such a way that it faced the living room.

  “After you invite Trace in, I want you to sit in one of the easy chairs,” Kate said. “Trace will want to sit across from you, not beside you. If you take a chair, that will force him to take the couch. If he does, he’ll be facing the kitchen.”

  Kate didn’t have the slightest idea yet how they would be able to use the recordings. The recording wou
ld be worthless as evidence in a court, but it might give them an upper hand in other ways.

  Nick spoke up in both of their ears. “Trace just left Boyd. You can’t leave now, Kate. If he’s heading to see Billy Dee or Alika, he’ll spot you in the hall.”

  There was a knock on Billy Dee’s door.

  “I’ll hide in the bedroom closet,” Kate whispered.

  Billy Dee waited a couple beats before opening his front door to Trace.

  “Sorry to bother you at this late hour,” Trace said. “But I’d really appreciate a word with you.”

  “It’s your hotel,” Billy Dee said. “So make yourself at home.”

  —

  Trace made the same pitch to Billy Dee that he had made to Boyd, almost word for word. Kate heard it clearly in the closet, thanks to the earbud.

  “I like the idea of having a stake in Monde d’Argent,” Billy Dee said. “I’m getting too old to hijack ships, and I want to protect what I’ve earned. But I’m a pirate by nature. I take things. I measure my wealth by what I’ve got in my hands. What are you going to give me so I know I’ve got a piece of your casino?”

  “For obvious reasons, I can’t give you any paper that shows you’ve invested in Monde d’Argent. No offense, but you’re a known criminal and that could cost me my gambling license in the United States,” Trace said. “What I can do is sign over deeds to you for condos in the new tower, equal to the value of whatever funds you give me.”

  “A couple of condos are not going to be as valuable as a percentage of your business.”

  “No, they’re not,” Trace said. “But until you see a return, and are assured that you can trust me, having those deeds in your pocket will reassure you that you’ve actually left Macau with something to show for your money.”

  “Have you talked to Blackmore? What did that loudmouth Canadian want in return for his money?” Billy Dee asked.

  “He took me at my word,” Trace said.

  “He’s a bigger gambler than I thought. Are my hosts in on this, too?”

  “No, and I’d appreciate it if you’d keep this between us.”

  “And Alika, too, I suppose,” Billy Dee said.

  “I’ll be talking to him next. I’m seeking investors with a certain profile, and Nick Sweet doesn’t match it. Mr. Alika does.”

  “So you’re using Nick to find guys like me. He thinks he’s playing you, but you’re playing him.”

  “Nick is making money out of this, so everybody wins,” Trace said. “When does that ever happen in a casino?”

  “Never,” Billy Dee said.

  Nick and Kate’s flight back to Los Angeles the next morning on their private jet was a somber affair. Alika had taken a commercial flight back to Hawaii, so at least they’d been spared the prospect of spending a dozen hours trapped in the air with a three-hundred-plus-pound reminder of their failure.

  “It’s so incredibly frustrating,” Kate said. “Here Trace is, on video, admitting to a crime. If Billy Dee and Boyd were really big-time crooks, and if this was recorded as part of a legitimate FBI sting operation, then Trace would be finished.”

  Nick selected a tea sandwich from the buffet that had been set out for them on the plane’s credenza. “There was no way to know that Trace would turn this into an opportunity to run a scam of his own.”

  “We underestimated him.”

  “True.”

  “You don’t seem very upset by this. We were supposed to take Trace down. Instead, we spent weeks and over a million dollars bringing Trace, Alika, and the Yakuza together so they could all get richer and more powerful while we got nothing. This looks to me like a disaster. And the worst part is that the next time al-Qaeda pulls off some horrific terrorist attack on foreign soil that kills scores of people, we’ll have to live with the possibility that it was financed with money laundered through Trace’s casino and that we blew our chance to stop it.”

  “We didn’t blow our chance. We just hit a speed bump. We need to come up with an even bigger and better con than the original.”

  “Okay, I like that thinking. At the very least we have incriminating evidence that he’s using gambling losses from criminals to secretly finance the construction of his new Macau resort casino. If this video got out, it might not put Trace in jail, but it would certainly cost him his gambling license in Nevada, and that would shut him down in Macau, too.”

  “The recording is inadmissible in court,” Nick said. “Even if it wasn’t, you’d have to admit that you were running a con with the international fugitive that you’re supposed to be chasing, a retired Somali pirate who did covert ops with your dad, and an actor whose last role was in a talking-potato version of Great Expectations. We’d end up in prison, and Trace would still be free.”

  “As an FBI agent I should be able to do something with that video. Organize some sort of sting.”

  Nick grinned. “I’ve got it. You’re absolutely right. We use the video. The way to save the con is by revealing that it is one.”

  “We’re going to reveal to Trace that our junket operation is a scam run by an FBI agent and a con man?”

  “Of course not,” Nick said. “We’re going to reveal it to Lono Alika. We’re also going to tell him that Trace is in on it, too. The video is the proof. Why else would there be an incriminating video?”

  “But that’s a death sentence. Alika will go crying to the Yakuza and they’ll come gunning for all of us.”

  “Exactly, which basically puts us right back where we would have been in our previous scam, if Trace hadn’t screwed things up.”

  “It’s insane,” Kate said. “But it might work.”

  They spent the rest of the flight honing the details of the con and by the time they landed at LAX Kate was sold on the scheme. To pull it off, they’d need to work very fast, recruit some old friends, commit grand theft, blow up an $80,000 car, and stage a violent shootout with automatic weapons.

  “Those are all the ingredients of a great con,” Nick said as they got off the plane.

  “Or a disaster that ends with us all in prison or graves.”

  “At least then you wouldn’t have to worry about adding the car to your expense account.”

  —

  The next morning Kate found her father on the hillside between Megan’s backyard and the golf course below. Jake was in the bushes, digging holes in the dirt with a hand shovel. Beside him was an open rucksack full of soda cans that had batteries, electrical wires, and what looked like dabs of clay stuck to them.

  She stepped off the patio and noticed a row of freshly dug, and refilled, holes in the slope. “You aren’t planting land mines, are you?”

  “Of course not,” Jake said.

  “Then what are you doing?”

  “I’m burying small, pressure-activated explosives in the dirt.”

  “That’s a land mine.”

  “These hardly count. They are no more dangerous than a cap pistol. When weight is put on them, they make a loud pop that will startle the coyotes but won’t injure them.”

  “I still don’t think the humane society would approve.”

  “I’ve got no choice. Our pee isn’t working as a deterrent.”

  “This is where you and Roger have been peeing?”

  “And some of my golfing buddies, too. It’s been a great excuse to sit outside and drink a case of beer,” Jake said. “There’s a severe drought going on but you wouldn’t know it by how moist this hillside is.”

  Kate stepped back up onto the patio and scraped the dirt off her shoe on the rough edge. “I’ve got something better for you to do. We’re ready to make our move on Trace and we could use your help.”

  “Would the humane society approve?”

  “Probably. There are no animals involved in what we’re doing.”

  “I once ran a stampede of cattle through a South American village to free CIA agents being held hostage by rebels,” Jake said. “The cattle came out of it fine. Can’t say the same for the rebel
s.”

  “Our con doesn’t involve a stampede. But there are explosives.”

  “Count me in.” Jake put his things back in the rucksack, slung it over his shoulder, and stood up. “The kids can finish up this project.”

  “You’ve taught them how to make land mines?”

  “I wouldn’t be much of a grandfather if I didn’t.”

  —

  “Suspiria was a classic,” Ainsley Booker said. She was the rail-thin, stringy-haired, flat-chested, braless, twenty-something publicist for the horror flick The Last Town on Earth. She was admiring Nick’s faded Suspiria T-shirt that featured a naked woman hanging over a pool of blood. “Dario Argento is the man.”

  Nick was posing as a writer for Fangoria magazine. To play the part, he wore the Suspiria movie poster T-shirt, hadn’t washed his hair in the two days since he’d returned to L.A., and drove up to the movie’s Closter City location in a 2006 Chevy Cobalt. Closter City was a small central California town that was abandoned in the mid-1980s after it was feared some of the population had developed cancer from pesticide-contaminated groundwater.

  “We worship Argento at Fangoria,” Nick said. “They should carve his face on the Mount Rushmore of horror.”

  Ainsley gestured to Christian McVeety, the rotund eighty-two-year-old director who was standing in a jacket and tie behind the cameras in Closter City’s weed-choked town square. McVeety watched intently as a gang of decomposing zombies with huge fangs chased two buxom screaming girls in halter tops and short-shorts past the cameras.

  The movie took place after the human race had been decimated by a virus that turned most of the population into vampires. Now a handful of survivors were battling the last starving vampires, who wanted to breed humans like cattle. The humans were eager to breed, especially with buxom girls in halter tops and short-shorts. They just didn’t want to be eaten, hence the conflict.

  A production assistant stood directly behind McVeety with his hands palm out in a halting gesture. Nick was about to ask Ainsley what the PA was doing, but it became obvious when McVeety began to tip backward and the PA gently pushed him upright again.