by Sean May
I walk into my bedroom and lay down to go to sleep, and to my surprise I drift off pretty quickly. I wish I hadn’t.
In my sleep, I see the fight played back for me, only this time I’m fighting Rodriguez’s corpse. His pale skin, his blue lips mouthing the words “You killed me” as he dances around and peppers me with blows, punches that feel like they go straight through my skin and rattle my bones, rattle my soul. I try to fight back in the nightmare, but my arms won’t move, and I just have to take what Rodriguez is dishing out. He keeps his eyes locked with mine, a trickle of blood pouring from his eyebrow, splashing the blood onto me with every blow he lands. He reels back and delivers a massive hook to my left eyebrow, just like I did to him. Then he does it again, and I can feel the pain of the punch much more realistically. I wake up, covered in cold sweat, remembering every single moment of the fight with Rodriguez.
Laying in bed, the only thing that gives me some kind of solace is the glittering crucifix that lays in the middle of my heaving chest. My mom, rest her soul, gave it to me when I was fourteen, right after I’d gotten into a fight with some neighborhood kids coming back from school. I came home, bloody and bruised with a couple of cracked ribs, and she did her best to patch me up, saying things like “Calvin, you know better not to get in fights like that.” And “My baby boy, you can’t get hurt, you’re all I have.” At the time, I shrugged those comments off because I was a stupid teenager, but now as I look back at them I can’t help but to get a little emotional about it. The day after I had the fight, she made me go back to school, broken ribs and all. Before I headed out the door, she took something out of a dark wooden box: a glittering, diamond and white gold crucifix. It had to have cost her at least a thousand dollars, money I knew she’d been saving up for a new car.
“Here, Calvin. Put this on, let the Good Lord protect you and you won’t have any more problems in your life.”
Considering the situation in front of me, I wasn’t so sure about how true that all was, but the necklace was still the most important thing I owned. When mom died three years ago, the cancer sucking the life out of her, I vowed to never take it off my body for the rest of my life. I couldn’t wear it on my neck when I was boxing, so I wrapped it up in my wrist wraps during matches. It’s served me well, kept me out of real trouble up until...well, up until right now.
The next morning, I wake up, get dressed and walk down the steps, greeting my neighbors like nothing has happened. I get down to the lobby of the building and start to head to the door.
“Ms. Watkins, if we could just get Mr. Riggs’ apartment number and maybe a spare key, it would help our investigation greatly.”
I see them standing there in front of Rosa’s desk. A couple of detectives, one young, lean and ready to tear someone’s eyeballs out to keep them as evidence, and the other one older, softer, the good cop in the equation, the face man that uses sweetness before the hard man threatens violence and warrants. They had two uniformed cops with them, the NYPD obviously concerned with the power I was able to muster in the ring, thinking that maybe the detectives would have a hard time with me if I put up a fight.
They're here about Victor’s death, that's the only explanation. I stop in my tracks at the bottom step, watching Rosa talk with the officers. For a second, Rosa looks up at me, our eyes locking. The detectives don’t notice it, but in that second of connection, I realize she’s going to let me go. She knows it’s possible I’ve done something horrible, but she’s seen too many guys carted out of this building on bogus charges to just cooperate with the police when they came knocking. Her head tilts slightly toward the back door to the complex, a door tenants aren’t supposed to use, but I figure she’s giving me a pass on this one. Thank you, Rosa. You have no idea how much it means to me.
I sneak out of the back of the building and walk around to the front. I know I can’t go back to the apartment or stay in this city, so I turn right to go to the subway station. I take it out to LaGuardia, a long trip that gives me time to clear my head. I hop on the first flight to Florida, hoping the sunshine and ocean breeze will let me escape the visions of Rodriguez, dead on the mat, but I doubt it.
The Short Con
Another night had settled on Atlantic City, and it was another chance for me to finally make some real cash. Running cons is something that usually comes easy for me, but ever since I'd gotten here I hadn't pocketed more than $200 in one night. Tonight I was looking to double, maybe triple that. The streets on either side of me were full of people milling about blowing their paychecks or their retirement funds, and the casinos of Atlantic City were more than willing to take that money from them. And what the casinos didn't take, I was looking to pick up for myself.
I stood in front of the Tropicana in my most conspicuous looking outfit. My goal was to resemble an airheaded, innocent girl who just happened to fall into a large sum of chips, chips that she couldn't cash out. I had on a bright orange satin dress that would caused most men to at least take a second look, some even took a third. The problem was, none of those men checking me out were the right ones. After an hour of walking around, I thought the dress may have been a bad idea when I had to keep turning down solicitations from men who wanted a good time. I was desperate, but not that desperate.
I tossed the handbag full of fake chips around between my hands, measuring their weight and making sure they seemed just right. It took me a lot of time to print off a couple hundred tiny Tropicana stickers, using the logo from their website, and put them on all one hundred and fifty of the chips. But the effect was believable enough for what I needed to do. The con was simple, really, brutal when you get down to it. I act like I'm some big winner who got kicked out of the casino on suspicion of cheating but was still able to keep the chips I already had. Most casino pros would know that wouldn't fly, but new people to the area might not. So I have this pile of chips I can't do anything with, and here's where the mark comes in. I need someone to cash them out for me because I'm not allowed into the casino. This isn't going to work, but the mark doesn't know that. I tell him I'll give him thirty percent of my take if he'll just go in there and cash out for me. It's easy money, the closest thing to a sure bet you could come by in Atlantic City. So I give him the chips, but as he's parting I start to get suspicious of him, tell him I think he's going to just take the chips and run.
That moment, where suspicion shifts from one person to the other is where cons really begin to work their magic. You make the mark think that they're the one that's pulling the con, and they'll scramble to make it up to you, to make you trust them that they're not some con artist looking to make a quick buck. God forbid someone would be that, right? So after I arise the suspicion that he's going to cut me out of the deal, I ask for some insurance. Usually I ask for their wallet, since on top of the cash they're likely to be carrying, there's also a treasure trove of goodies buried in it. Credit cards that I can draw thousands from before they get shut down, IDs I can sell, Social Security numbers, always good for fast cash, and even sometimes the key to their hotel room, which I could try to plunder if I was quick enough. With the insurance in my hands, they go into the casino looking to cash out the chips. At this point, there are two ways this can go. The first way is that they look at his chips, tell him they're fake and they let him go. He plans on coming back to me, a ball of rage because he's just been duped, but the thing is I'm already gone, using his cash to buy a cab out of there as quick as possible. The second scenario, and the one I prefer more, is that the casino takes a look at the chips, sees the guy as a cheat and calls the cops. He tells some insane story about this pretty girl who gave him the chips and took his wallet, but they don't believe him. They never do. Either outcome, though, I'm gone before anything can be done, far from the scene of the crime before anyone even knows a crime has been committed.
I watched people go in and out of the doors of the Tropicana, looking for the perfect mark to swoop down on. I had to pick someone stupid enough to go along with
my game, but not so stupid that he would fuck things up before I could cash out. It had to be someone with money, lots of it, and judging by the expressions worn by most of the people passing through the doors of the casino, I wasn't sure I'd ever find someone with a positive balance. Two hours I stood there, stalking prey I wasn't even sure would come around.
But then he came to me, and all of the sudden my con was back to being in business. It was about one in the morning, and because I'd been there since about nine already, I was just about ready to give up the whole thing and just try it again tomorrow. When he came close to me, I could tell he was the perfect mark. His designer suit said that he had money to spend, but his bright eyes and optimistic look about him seemed to say that he hadn't been beaten down enough by the harshness of the outside world to immediately turn away from something that was so obviously a scam.
As he looked up at the sign for the Tropicana, I made my move, sashaying over to him as seductively as possible. I feel bad for the guys that try to run cons, since it's so much easier to get a mark to go along with you if you have a solid pair of tits and you smell good. Guys have to work their charm to rope them in, I just have to exist.
"Hi, umm, excuse me" I say to him, batting my eyelashes and really laying it on thick. At first he doesn't notice me, probably due to the glittering lights that are occupying his eyes, but after a couple of beats he turns my way, and once he starts to look at me, I know I won't have a hard time keeping his attention. In this closer proximity I get a better look at him as well. He's a little rougher than what I had initially pegged him as, but not to the point where I thought he was a threat. He had short black hair that was about a tenth an inch away from being a full-on buzz cut, and his skin was dark, shiny and impeccable except for a jarring scar that went from his left temple, along his hairline, and down to below his earlobe. I didn't think much of it, as a person can get a scar from really anywhere...but in my experience, in my line of work, facial scars meant you really fucked someone over and you had been branded, made an example. Then again, I didn't take this guy as a criminal, so the scar could have come from a thousand different origins. Maybe the poor guy had just underwent brain surgery and was going to Atlantic City to celebrate, and here I was about to take him for everything he had on him.
In better times, I would have just stopped the chase. This guy was either a pity case or someone I didn't want to mess with. But I was hungry for a payoff, and I had to make this work for me or I was going to have to suffer an unimaginable fate. I'd have to go work at a real job.
"Yes?" He said, sizing me up. For what I can't really say, but as long as he was paying attention to me, I was fine with it.
I gave him a really involved story about how I was doing really great at the blackjack tables, racking up the wins all night, but when it came time to cash out they wouldn't believe me that I could have ever won all that money without cheating in some way. I told him I was able to get out of the casino before they could confiscate my chips, and so I was sitting out there, a bag full of chips that I couldn't cash out.
"I'm really sorry to hear that. Unfortunate that you've got all those useless chips..."
"Yeah, yeah. Hey!" I brightened up, seeming like a lightbulb just went off in my head, not that I hadn't been planning on this the whole night. "I have an idea."
"You do?"
"What if you took the chips in there? You could cash them out, bring them back to me..."
"What's in it for me?"
"Oh, I hadn't thought about that. What if I gave you a quarter of whatever my take is? I haven't even counted it, it could be ten thousand for all I know."
"Twenty-five percent? That's a hell of a lot of risk for such a small cut."
"Thirty?"
He pondered that, it got him to start thinking it over at least. I wouldn't go over fifty, even though there was no real money involved. If I went over fifty, he'd know something was up. "I'll do it for forty-five."
"Come on, that's way too much, I'd rather go in there on my own."
"Forty then?"
I looked down, kicked at the asphalt a bit "I guess that works."
I handed the bag of chips to him. At these moments, when the con heads past the point of no return, I always get a bit nervous. There's no way around it, no matter how long I do this, the tipping point still freaks me out. Luckily for me, he went along with it and took the bag, then turned toward the Tropicana.
"Hey! Hold on a second!" He walked a couple of extra steps, which made me think this was all going to go to hell, all of my planning, gluing all those goddamned stickers to those goddamned chips, was going to be for nothing. But then he turned back toward me, eyebrow cocked, sort of upset that I was stopping him from his payday.
"Yeah?"
"How do I know you're not going to just take the chips and go to town? You run off, with my chips and I never see you again. Not exactly a good deal for me."
He paused, ran it over in his head a few times, but then he saw that I was right. "You've got a point."
"How about some insurance? Give me your wallet, I'll give it all back to you once you bring me my payday back."
"Yeah, but then you have my money."
"And you have my chips. Forgot about that part?"
"Right..." He said with a laugh, pulling out his wallet and handing it over to me. "You have a cell phone? If something happens while I'm in there, I'll need to contact you somehow."
I patted my dress "No pockets..."
"Here, take mine." He handed me his phone, a nice one. "I'll use the house phone if I run into anything."
Well, hey, that was a bonus.
I took his wallet and his phone and watched him go to the Tropicana. As soon as he passed through the doors, I ran across the street to find a cab. I only had a couple of minutes before he knew what was up, so finding a cab was another one of those tense moments where I just wasn't sure things would work themselves out. But luck was on my side, since I saw a cab ease down the road right in front of me, no passengers in sight. I flagged him down and got in, into the safety of the cab, into my passage away from the mark.
"Win big tonight?" The cab driver said, peering into the rear view mirror. His accent was mostly Indian British, tempered with at least a few years in the States. After hearing hours upon hours of boorish New Jersey tongues, his voice was soothing to me, like a cup of tea at the end of a long night. He was a Sikh, with a bright red turban cinched tight around his head. He looked at me with kind eyes, asking a question that he asked dozens of passengers a night, always getting the same answer. If they'd truly won big, they would sure as hell not be slumming it in a cab on their way back to the hotel.
"Yeah, I guess you could say that."
"What's your game...roulette, blackjack, poker...?" He was the kind of cabbie that tried to pull a story out of every passenger, whether they wanted to tell one or not. Most cabbies were content with giving you a couple of grunts of acknowledgement as you got in, but when it came time to pay they made sure they read out that total as clear as possible. This guy, full name Sandeep Balasubramaniam according to his license hanging over the back seat, was one of a dying breed of cabbies, the ones who were actually interested in the people they were draining money from.
"I do a little bit of everything, all depends on my mood that night."
"Ahh, I see."
"You ever hit the tables, Sandeep?"
"Oh no, not at all. Sikhs, we see it as...illogical, wasteful."
"So you live in a city that's almost entirely built around something you see as...illogical?"
"It is not my place to judge people, young lady. They're my customers, not my idols. I don't admire what they do, but I know, one day, they might see the light and come to our side, so to speak. But if not, no matter, it doesn't bother me. In the end, everything will be OK."
"That's...refreshing."
Sandeep drove off into the night, back toward my hotel. I opened up the mark's wallet to see what was waiting f
or me. The guy appeared to be a little bit of a minimalist when it came to cards, with just an ID from Delaware and a debit card in the pockets, along with a few hundred in assorted bills. It wasn't much, but if I got to my computer quick enough to get online and buy some stuff on his card, shipped to an anonymous PO box in Newark, I'd probably come out ahead for the night. His ID was a commercial driver's license, which would net me a couple hundred bucks extra on the black market, way more than the fifty bucks I'd get for a standard license.
I hit a button on the cell phone to bring up the clock. It had been ten minutes since I got in the cab, plenty of time for my mark's story to run its course. At this point, he was either sitting in the security office of the Tropicana awaiting his fate as the managers and in-house guards decided what to do with him, or he was out on the street in front of the Tropicana, going up and down the block looking for me. Either way, by this time he was screwed. I really shouldn't have been thinking about it, though. Thinking about what will happen to my marks after my con is over has always been my biggest problem. I can't help feeling a little sympathetic for the poor bastards I dupe...but, hey, a girl has to make a living. Almost any person's job is about taking money away from other people and putting it in your pocket. I just do it in a much more direct way.
The cab rolled up to the curb of my hotel on the outskirts of the city. It wasn't quite a flophouse but it was a far cry from the Four Seasons. At least they kept the sheets clean most of the time. I thanked Sandeep for the drive as well as the conversation, and when I looked at the meter and saw that it came to $14.58, I just gave him a twenty and called it even. Sandeep's taillights disappeared into the bright haze of the city, and I turned and made my way into the hotel. At this hour, the only person in the lobby was the attendant, and he was a lot more interested in surfing the internet than engaging his guests, but that was alright with me, I was done talking for the night. I wanted to go upstairs, count my winnings, and take a long bath to wash everything away.
