Mind Scrambler

by Chris Grabenstein

  I looked like I belonged.

  “Katie can get us tickets to the show,” I said.

  “Awesome. I wish I had brought Rita along.”

  “You want to call her?” Sea Haven was only about an hour north of Atlantic City.

  Ceepak shook his head. “Negative. School night.”

  Right. His adopted son, T. J. Lapscynski-Ceepak (poor kid, his last name sounded like a disease), is a senior at Sea Haven High this fall. Tomorrow’s Tuesday. Mom and Dad can’t both be down in Atlantic City gambling away his college fund—not when there’s trigonometry homework to be done.

  Ceepak checked his wristwatch.

  “What time is the next performance?”

  “Twenty-hundred hours.” I used the military-clock lingo to make it easier on Ceepak.

  He kept staring at his wrist, doing the math. “That’ll work. We’re scheduled to meet with Mr. Burdick in the Starbucks downstairs at fifteen-thirty.”

  I nodded because, finally, after all this time with Ceepak, I could do the military-to-real-world clock conversions in my head: We were meeting Burdick at 3:30 PM.

  “The stenographer will arrive at sixteen-hundred hours.”

  Four.

  “We should have ample time to take his deposition and rendezvous with Miss Landry.”

  “I told Katie I’d do breakfast with her tomorrow at nine.”

  “That should not pose a problem. I have the court reporter on deck for eleven, should we or the prosecuting attorney have follow-up questions.”

  “Burdick’s cool with sticking around town till we’re all done?”

  “Roger that. Apparently, Mr. Burdick is not very fond of my father.”

  I could relate. I met the guy once. Joe “Six-pack” Ceepak has that effect on people.

  “Perhaps,” said Ceepak, “Mr. Burdick would enjoy seeing the show with us.”

  “He might. There’s a two-drink minimum.”

  “One can always order orange juice or seltzer, Danny.”

  Yeah. Seven bucks for bubble water. Viva Las Vegas.

  “It’s fifteen-ten now. Official check-in time was posted as three PM.” Ceepak always knows all the rules. “Shall we take our bags up to the room?” he suggested.

  “Sure.”

  We both packed pretty light for our overnight trip. I tossed together a gym bag with clean underwear, socks, and a shaving kit. I had planned on buying a fresh T-shirt for the bus ride home. Something like I Got Lucky in AC.

  “What floor are we on?” Ceepak asked.

  “Ten,” I said. “The elevators are way over there.”

  To get to our elevator bank, we needed to hike five miles across a minefield of slot machines.

  By the way—you don’t have to yank down on a handle to send the cherries spinning anymore. You just sit on a stool and bop a button. The new-style machines don’t pay out coins, either. They issue “credits” on a slip of paper. It’s a lot like getting a gift receipt at Wal-Mart. If you miss the sound of tumbling quarters when you hit the jackpot, not to worry—hidden speakers simulate the plink and clink of cascading coins in full stereo surround sound.

  “Danny?” Ceepak head-gestured up a lane between two rows of nickel-slot machines sporting a Cleopatra theme. These bad girls had five spinning reels, instead of the more traditional three, and about twenty different lines zigging and zagging across the pictograms of pythons and sphinxes and alligators and Nile river fruit that must’ve meant something to the cranky Italian grandmothers feeding the machines their debit cards.

  “Third machine on the left,” Ceepak muttered. He saw something. Something besides flashing lights and twirling hieroglyphics. He gave me a slight head bob so I’d see it, too.

  Young dude. Pretending to pick up something off the floor very close to a stool where a white-haired lady—who looked a lot like George Washington on a day when his wooden teeth were giving him splinters—sat, eyes fixated on her spinning blurs and flashing lines.

  “Purse,” Ceepak whispered.

  I nodded.

  “Accomplice.” He tilted his head slightly to the right.

  Across from the guy rummaging around on the floor, another guy was opening up a gym bag. I figured the guy working the “oops, I dropped my nickel” scam on the carpet was supposed to snag the handbag, then toss it off to his accomplice, who’d stash it in his Adidas tote and hightail it out of the casino.

  “Cover me,” Ceepak said as he stepped forward.

  Unfortunately, we didn’t bring our sidearms with us on the bus so I knew any covering I did would have to involve fisticuffs, wrestling, or martial arts—three things I really should spend some time learning about some day.

  Ceepak waited. Until the doofus on the floor made his move and grabbed hold of the shoulder straps to the lady’s handbag.

  “Freeze!” he shouted—almost loud enough to be heard over Georgette Washington’s whoo-hoo-hooing when her lines hit a magical configuration and Cleopatra made with the clink-plink-clink sound effects.

  “Let it go!” Ceepak demanded. Usually, when he demands like that, people listen: Ceepak’s six-two, a mountain of muscle. And the military-issue haircut makes him look even stronger.

  The guy on the floor, however, did not listen.

  “Yo, Tony!” he yelled.

  His buddy with the gym bag went for an empty stool, grabbed hold of two legs, and swung it sideways at Ceepak’s head.

  “Ceepak!” I shouted—half a second after Ceepak had already sensed the incoming furniture and ducked. Stool man missed by a mile. Looked like one of the Mets chasing after a clever curveball.

  Now the guy on the floor popped up, ready to make a run for it.

  A run right through me.

  “Don’t even think about it!” I yelled at him, assuming this kung fu pose I remembered seeing in The Karate Kid.

  He didn’t listen.

  He thought.

  He ran.

  I closed my eyes, lunged forward, and crashed headfirst into his rib cage. We hit the deck and rolled around on the rug, which smelled a lot like spilled beer mixed with crushed popcorn and old shoes.

  “Hey! Watch it!” yelled one of the blue-haired ladies perched on a stool above us trying to gamble in peace.

  “Sorry,” I said right before I flipped my guy off, rolled him over, and pinned him facedown to the floor so he could contemplate the carpet while I slapped on the cuffs—which, I remembered, I also did not pack for this trip.

  In one final attempt to arch me off his back, my prisoner grunted, rocked up, and kicked out both legs. One of those legs collided with a cocktail waitress who had picked the absolutely wrong time to swing around the corner with a trayful of cocktails and beers. We got a booze bath. He finally stopped struggling.

  The ladies of Cleopatra Lane were furious. I was soaked in chardonnay, Coors Light, and cosmopolitans. They, on the other hand, were thirsty.

  “Police,” I said so they’d stop staring at me like I was the idiot grandson they knew they should’ve kept locked up down in the cellar.

  “Well done, Danny,” I heard Ceepak say.

  I had my knee in the small of the purse snatcher’s back, both my hands pinning down his shoulders. I glanced over at Ceepak, who had his guy on the carpet, too. He only needed one hand to keep his suspect subdued. He was using the other one to help the cocktail waitress collect stray maraschino cherries.

  “All right,” boomed a big voice behind us. “We’ll take it from here.”

  I looked up. Six security guards. A couple had Glocks strapped to their hips. One guy, a big black dude in gray slacks and a blue blazer, looked familiar, but I couldn’t see his face, just a head silhouette, because he was standing right in front of a glowing purple panel at the top of a slot machine.

  “These individuals were attempting to perpetrate a theft,” said Ceepak.

  “We know,” said the big guy, who had an even bigger voice. “The eyes in the sky caught the whole show. It’s all good, Ceepak.”


  Ceepak squinted. “Cyrus?”

  “Roger that,” said the big man. And then he started rumbling up a laugh. “Man, Ceepak. You and Boyle. You two always make a mess, don’t you?”

  3

  “So what brings you boys down to sin city?” Cyrus asked as we strolled through the crowded casino.

  “Deposition,” said Ceepak. “Case up in Ohio.”

  “Your old man?”

  “Roger that.”

  “You gonna lock him up and throw away the key?”

  “Such is the plan.”

  “Sounds like a good one.”

  Cyrus is Cyrus Parker, a former Green Beret and fellow adherent to Ceepak’s West Point honor code, who helped us “extricate” our way out of a hell hole back in Sea Haven last summer. Parker had served with the 101st Airborne, Ceepak’s old unit, and then found a civilian job working as a bodyguard for a big shot—a job he lost when he turned against the Dark Side of the Force, to put it in Star Wars–ian terms, something I do on a daily basis.

  “Thanks for detaining those two deadbeats,” Parker said as we passed felt-topped tables surrounded by a bunch of chain-smoking Asians, tattooed bikers, and even more Italian grandmothers who, I guess, no longer stay home to bake pignoli nut cookies.

  “You have that sort of trouble often?” Ceepak asked.

  “Purse snatchers are the least of my worries.” Parker gestured toward a dealer using a plastic wedge to shove a thick bundle of twenty-dollar bills down into a table slot. “You flash this much cash, you attract all sorts of undesirable individuals.”

  “How did you know we were in the process of apprehending suspects?” I asked, trying to sound like the cop I actually was.

  “Saw you on TV, Boyle. Looked just like one of those Wrestle-Mania SmackDowns they run on pay-per-view. Especially that kung fu move you made.” He stopped walking just long enough to re-create my Karate Kid pose. Not the swan. I’m not that lame. However, it did involve elbows bent at perpendicular angles.

  Ceepak tried not to grin. Hey, I couldn’t blame the guy. I laugh at me on a regular basis.

  “Always remember, Officer Boyle,” said Parker, “wherever you may roam in Xanadu, Big Brother Cyrus is watching.” He pointed up at what looked like half a Plexiglas beach ball mounted in the ceiling. “This casino and hotel currently employ forty-five hundred security cameras. We can pan, tilt, and zoom underneath that opaque dome and you’d never even know we were tracking you. Got miniature cameras that can pick up the serial number on a dollar bill.”

  “Fascinating,” said Ceepak.

  “See this number here?” He pointed to a laminated plate on the edge of a blackjack table. “Tells us exactly what and where we’re looking at. You boys were in slots, row forty-two.”

  And I had thought it was Cleopatra Lane.

  “Got about fifty screens up at all times in the surveillance room, but you two were the best entertainment so far today. We figured you earned a reward.” He fished into his navy blazer, pulled out a card key. “High-roller suite on the twenty-second floor in the tower. Compliments of the house.”

  Parker, of course, handed the card to Ceepak.

  “Let Danny have it,” said Ceepak. “Our original room will be fine for me.”

  Parker gave me a look. “Don’t drink the champagne in the minibar, Boyle. Champagne isn’t included.” Then he winked and handed me the plastic pass to High Rollerville. “Enjoy, Grasshopper.”

  All of a sudden, I felt swanky. At the time, I thought I might lure Katie up to my suite after we hit the breakfast buffet. Make her forget all about Jake the “hottie.” Did Jake have a ritzy room with designer shampoo in the shower stall and two terry-cloth bathrobes as I imagined I would? Doubtful.

  Parker put his hands on his hips, surveying the action all around us.

  So I did, too. Saw dealers raking in stacks of chips, which, being imaginary money, are much easier to part with than actual cash. They’re just colorful plastic disks that resemble POGs, these juice bottle cap cardboard things I used to collect (I forget why), but are worth ten, twenty, or a thousand bucks.

  Personally, I think the thousand-dollar chips should be the size of manhole covers so you really have to think about it before hoisting one onto the table in hopes of hitting twenty-one on the next flip of the cards.

  “Gotta keep an eye on the players,” said Parker. “Good card shark can up his bet when he has a hot hand by sliding a chip or two between his cards after the pot’s good. Gotta watch the dealers, too. A bad apple might slip his accomplice an ace from the bottom of the deck ’cause he figures splitting one big score might pay better than his union wages for the year.”

  “That’s why you can’t hand chips or money directly to the dealer, Danny,” said Ceepak who, I guess, studies casino security as well as Las Vegas magic acts in his spare time. “You have to place any form of remuneration on the felt to initiate a transaction.”

  “You’re good, Ceepak,” said Parker. “Need a job?”

  “No thanks. I prefer Ocean Avenue in Sea Haven to Boardwalk and Park Place.”

  That was Ceepak making a joke. Sometimes it’s hard to tell. He works in too much trivia, like the fact that all the streets in Monopoly are named after ones here in Atlantic City. If you have to hand out Cliff’s Notes, the yuks are usually few and far between.

  “Follow me, gentlemen,” said Parker. “Mr. Boyle’s suite is in the new Crystal Palace Tower back on the other side of the building.”

  We once again navigated the ocean of patterned carpet that was the casino floor.

  “So,” I asked Parker, “are you still like a trainee or whatever?”

  “Negative, Officer Boyle. I am currently head of security for the Xanadu Hotel and Casino.”

  “Awesome,” said Ceepak.

  Parker shrugged. “Hey, that Green Beret thing on my résumé never hurts. Besides, I had this one absolutely incredible letter of recommendation.”

  “Really?” I said. “Who wrote it?”

  “Who else?” said Parker, tilting his head toward Ceepak.

  “I have a friend at the Casino Gaming Bureau,” he said. “Another former soldier who is always on the lookout for a few honest men.”

  “You got that right,” said Parker. “Honest men are damn few down here.”

  We continued our trek across the carpeted tundra, walking past this really loud lounge singer destroying some old Motown tune in a tight gown. She was lifting her knees so high while stomping to the beat she looked like a drum major who had lost her marching band.

  Finally, we once again reached the registration desks and followed the signs for the Crystal Palace Tower.

  “How long you guys in town?” Parker asked.

  “Just tonight,” said Ceepak. “We need to do Mr. Burdick’s deposition this afternoon and keep tomorrow open for anything further from the prosecuting attorney’s office up in Ohio.”

  Parker nodded. “Sounds like a plan.”

  We passed the poster for “Rock ’n Wow!”

  “We might catch his act tonight,” I said.

  “You should,” said Parker. “Great guy. Had a beer with him the other night. We provided technical assistance for one illusion he does.”

  “Cool,” I said. “What’d you do?”

  “If I told you, Officer Boyle, you’d have to shoot me. I signed papers. Confidentiality agreements. These magicians guard their secrets better than Dick Cheney. But you’ll see. It’s a nifty illusion. Lucky Numbers he calls it—like in the fortune cookies, you know? Anyhow, it’s his big finish. Brings down the house.”

  “I understand he’s quite a family man,” said Ceepak.

  “That he is,” said Parker. “Cute kids. Britney and Richie. Met them in the Pagoda restaurant the other night. Very well-behaved young lady and gentleman.”

  And that, I figured, was Richard Rock’s grandest illusion—fooling Cyrus Parker into thinking his daughter Britney qualified as a “cute kid.”

 
We passed the box office and the entrance to the Shalimar Theater. According to the digital reader board zipping around underneath the chaser-light marquee, this evening’s performance was Sold Out!

  “Don’t worry,” said Parker. “I can get you guys in.”

  “So can Katie,” I said.

  “Who’s she?”

  “Friend from back home.”

  “Showgirl?”

  I almost giggled. Katie? In some sort of nude-and-sparkles body stocking, wearing a feathered headdress? Sure, she has great curves, which we caught a glimpse of on Oak Beach on those days when she favored us with her lower-cut one-piece. But, like I said, Katie was too sweet, too much of a “good girl” to get up onstage and shake her groove thing.

  “Katie takes care of the kids while Mom and Pop are onstage.”

  “Babysitter?”

  “Nanny and tutor.”

  Parker nodded.

  “Cyrus?” someone called out.

  I turned around. The poster boy was alive! Richard Rock had magically appeared and I could tell exactly how he did it, too, because the glass doors to the theater lobby were still gliding shut behind him.

  “Good afternoon, Mr. Rock,” said Parker.

  Rock gave Parker a head bob “howdy” like I remember President Reagan doing whenever I watched him chop wood on TV from behind the bars of my crib. Then Rock narrowed his eyes suspiciously at Ceepak and me, like a cowboy looking for Injuns up on a ridge.

  “These gentlemen are friends of mine, Mr. Rock,” Parker explained. “Police officers from a shore town called Sea Haven.”

  Rock head-bobbed some more. “Cops, hunh? That’s good. Real good. Interested in moonlighting?” Rock gave us a chugging heh-heh-heh of a laugh. “We’re gonna need us a whole mess of extra security tonight.”

  “Is there some problem, sir?” asked Parker.

  “You betcha. She’s coming!”

  4

  We followed Rock into the lobby of the Shalimar Theater. It was done up in Chinese-take-out-joint red, lacquered black, and gilded gold. A chandelier made out of ball-shaped paper shades with spindly ribs and stringy tassels hung in the center of the ceiling. The floor, where it wasn’t covered with more of the casino’s geometrically challenging carpet, was made out of marble or, you know, whatever tile they sell at Home Depot that shines like a polished slab of stone.