Whenever I asked Betty about God, she always told me that God was a bright light that shined through the universe. I figured out that night, when I saw the Strip for the first time, that God lived on the Strip and lit it all up.
I also figured out something else that day. As soon as I was old enough, I knew I’d have to make something for Betty and me, otherwise we’d be migrants for the rest of our lives. I loved my mother, but as a neighbor once told me, Betty would always be hopping around on one foot, trying to keep her balance. If we were ever going to have something, I’d have to be the one to get it for us. Instead of pressing our noses against the plate glass windows separating the people with tuxes and slinky dresses from us streeters, someday we’d have the limos, the jewels, the fancy clothes.
I wanted everything for Betty and me.
TWO
ELEVEN YEARS LATER, 1977
She was a Utah Loletta, one of those wheat-blonde, blue-eyed, peachy-cream kids from St. George, the little town just across the State line. The Loletta’s came in on busy weekends: towhead’s from Utah, tacos from East Los Angeles, dreadlocks from South Central, and Valley girls with tan freckles on their tits. They hung around the casino parking lots, giving head in cars for twenty dollars a blow and using their pen money for movies, fast food and fast drugs.
The Mormons humped and grunted out the cute cookie cutter Utah kids like rabbits. This one was about fifteen, just right for chaperoned barn house dances, moonlight serenade hayrides, and of course, no lipstick on her naturally cherry-wet lips.
Right now those cherry-wet lips were locked onto Bic Haliday’s cock in the casino’s hotel elevator. Bic was the twenty-five year old loser son of the club’s owner.
“Sonofabitch.”
I stood in Halliday’s security room staring at the monitor, feeling like Captain Smith when someone told him the good ship Titanic was nosing into an iceberg the size of Rhode Island. I was the hotshot, twenty-three year-old, youngest casino security chief in Vegas. If I didn’t get that lip-lock off Bic’s cock, I would quickly prove Newton’s pet theory about gravity.
Bic wasn’t just any kind of trouble, he was born trouble. His old man, Con Halliday, owned the casino lock, stock and barrel. But Bic suffered the successful man’s son syndrome: He had shit for brains and did all of his thinking with his gonads.
Bic had slipped the cunt past the guard at the elevators and pulled the emergency button in the elevator to stop the car between floors. Right now he was doing an Elvis hip gyration as he surfed her mouth with his erect member.
The bastard knew better than to pull a stunt like this. Prostitution was tolerated in Vegas, hell, it was the State’s main industry after gambling and money laundering, but these Loletta’s were trouble. The Lucky Star Casino down the street got a black mark on its gaming license after one of the girls screamed rape in its parking lot because a john stiffed her. Con Halliday already had more black spots on his gambling license than a seven card spade flush. My job was to see to it that he didn’t lose his license because somebody—besides himself—did something stupid. He hired me because I had a natural instinct for spotting a setup between a blackjack dealer and a player or a miscount at the roulette table—not as a damn baby sitter for his twenty-five year-old loser kid.
Bic grinned up at the camera, gave me the finger and said something. There’s no sound, just a surveillance camera, but he was talking to me. He knew I would be sweating in front of the monitor. He wanted the security head job himself—yeah, like a guy with two drug busts and a statutory rape conviction is going to get by the gaming board in Carson City. This was his way of screwing me.
“You motherfucker,” I told him, wishing I could stick my hand into the monitor and goose the kid so she’d bite off his dick.
“Bic pulled the emergency stop in the elevator,” Bill, the watch commander of the security room, told me.
“Tell me something I don’t know. Get the fuckin’ engineer to drop the car directly down to the basement. You hear me, directly to the basement without stopping at Go. Have three guys, two to handle Bic and one for the girl, standing there when the doors open. You handle the kid. Put her in a cab and pay the driver to drop her off on the Strip.” I thought for a moment. “Make it the parking lot at Caesars. Tell her if she gets caught, to say she sucked off Hamel for permission to use the parking lot.”
Hamel, a security boss at Caesars, had pissed me off. When I asked him for information on a new dice switch that had been hitting the craps tables, he let me know that I was working a downtown grind shop while he worked for a Strip palace. That’s what they called the downtown clubs on the Strip, “grind shops” that slowly grind pocket change from weekenders while the big bets were made on the Strip. “You people downtown let players buy in for twenty bucks and grind them down, a buck at a time.” He was a shave-head former FBI agent who shits ice cubes. An accusation from the kid will give him diarrhea.
“Where is the guy who’s supposed to watch the elevators?” I asked Bill.
“Bic slipped her in when he went to take a leak.”
“Fire him.”
“It’s not his fau—”
“Fire him anyway. It’ll look good if this gets to the Board.”
“He might make a complaint to Carson City himself. Talk about some things Con doesn’t want the Board to know.”
He had a good point. I’d do it myself if I was in his shoes.
“Don’t fire him. Promote him. Kick him up here to do monitoring. Fire him next month. Then if he goes to the Board he’ll look stupid.”
“Fire him for what?”
“Do I have to do all the fuckin’ thinking around here?”
Bill shook his head. “I’ve always felt sorry for Bic and Morgan, growing up crawling on the casino floor. Bic got his first piece of ass when his old man took him out to the sheriff’s chicken ranch when he was fifteen. I heard things didn’t go too well. Bic’s mother killed herself, you know, walked in front of train. Con said she ‘greased the tracks.’ Hell of a way to talk about the death of your wife, isn’t it, greasing the tracks?”
Bic went slack-jawed, wide-eyed, tongue-drooping, and panted like a dog as he shot off in the girl’s mouth. He thought he was being sexy cool but he looked like silent screen star Charlie Chaplin with his dick caught in the conveyer belt that’s carrying a heroine to a rip saw.
Con claimed that if there was one pile of horse manure in the entire world, Bic would step in it. And now he was wiping his shoes on me.
I had to get away from the monitor. It was tempting me to be the guy standing in the basement when the elevator doors opened. I worked too hard to get the security chief’s job to appreciate some crackhead trying to bust my chops. It wasn’t every day a former thief got a chance at being head of security for a casino, even if it was in Glitter Gulch. I wanted Con’s gamble on me to pay off. Besides, the skimming that was considered a perk of the job paid me more than that shave-head made at Caesars.
Belle, one of my surveillance people, called me over to the screen displaying a blackjack table. Her name meant pretty in French, but we called her “Bell” because she was shaped like one. She was the best spotter we had.
“The pit boss thinks the guy’s counting cards.”
“How’s he doing?”
“He’s playing a hundred a hand, and kicking it up to a thousand when he needs a low card. Before the last shuffle, he wasn’t taking regulation hits and letting the dealer bust drawing big cards. He loses a lot of small bests, but he’s ahead $8,000 in an hour.”
There was nothing illegal about card counting, not on the law books, not as long as you counted in your head and didn’t use electronics. But no club liked it, including the palaces or the grind joints, not in Vegas, Tahoe, Reno or any place else. When you got caught, security took a mug shot of you and escorted you to the front door. Your picture got distributed to every casino in the state.
Most counters kept a running tally of the cards dealt, using a h
igh-low count system, keeping track of the ratio of high cards left in the shoe to the number of low cards. Because dealers had to take a hit on hands up to a point count of sixteen, they were more likely to bust when the deck had a greater percentage of high cards.
Card counting was no easy matter because most casinos fought back by using a six-deck shoe rather than a single deck. That left the field open only to those few who could do it mentally or with hidden electronics.
“Has his shoes been checked?”
“Regulation,” Belle said.
Counters sometimes hid electronics in their shoes, tapping with one foot to register a high card, with the other for a low card, feeding the information to a minicomputer strapped to their back or out to a van in the parking lot. Dingo cowboy boots and elevator shoes were automatically suspicious.
I was taught card counting by Paul Embers, the most notorious gambler in Nevada. Taught me a bit about cheating, too, and I picked up a lot more on my own. That gave me an advantage over shave-heads who only studied how others cheat. The biggest tip-off to an scam was a sudden change in bets. If someone played a hundred dollars a hand and suddenly kicked it up to a thousand, and consistently wins the big plays, it was a sure bet someone besides Lady Luck was setting the odds.
Belle was keeping a running tally of hands. Looking over the table play, I could see what got the pit boss suspicious. The guy was going against standard strategy at the times he was kicking up his bets—taking hits when he shouldn’t, passing when he should take a hit—and was winning. As I watched, he took a hit on seventeen when the dealer was showing an eight. A typical player would not hit a seventeen, period, though there were some who took a hit if the dealer was showing a ten or ace. But to hit when the dealer was showing an eight was unusual—unless you were counting and knew the deck was loaded with low cards.
He was dealt a three, which gave him twenty.
The guy interested me more than the cards. He was definitely not card counting. He wasn’t even looking at the cards which other players were dealt. He spent half his time looking at his own cards and the other half trying to get a look-see down the low-cut blouse of the woman setting next to him. She had big cans and he was not making any bones about wanting to stick his head between them and letting them slap his face. And she didn’t hide the fact she thought the guy was a jerk.
“So why doesn’t she move to another table?” I asked.
“Good question. She’s losing and can’t stand the guy. Two good reasons to change tables.”
Ember always told me not to focus on the obvious, so I let my eye roam around the table and the vicinity. A mousy looking guy with thick glasses who looked like a caricature of Woody Allen was seated to the winner’s left.
Belle followed my gaze. “Woody’s making $5 bets and digging a dry well.”
“Maybe not. Look at how his eyes follow every card while the winner is distracting us by sticking his nose in the woman’s blouse and the woman is letting everyone know how annoyed she is. They’re a team. Woody’s the counter, the winner’s the shill he’s signaling the count to. The winner and the woman are keeping us distracted so we can see the winner’s not making a count. Page Con. Tell him to meet me in the pit.”
I started out of the room but paused by a monitor where one of my people had directed a parabolic mike at a craps table. Most of our surveillance was done without sound, but we had long range microphones available to key in on conversations. The Board didn’t like mikes, but they looked the other way as long as we kept them strictly in the gaming area.
A big husky guy, maybe in his late fifties, with a high school football player physique turning to tapioca, was losing at a craps table and letting everyone around him get a taste of his bad mood. He was making bigger bets than the other players, but Halliday’s was the only place in town where you’d find a craps player with five dollars worth of twenty-five cent chips standing next to a Texan with five hundred dollar chips.
“Fuckin’ downtown joint, I get comp’ed at the Tropicaria and come downtown just to slum,” came over the mike.
“Keep on losing you, bastard,” the surveillant said, “when you’re through we’ll comp you a bus token back to the Strip.”
My blood turned cold as I stared at the guy. I had seen him before, years ago.
He was the guy who killed my mother.
This is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed in this book are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.
NEVER ENOUGH
Copyright © 2001 by Harold Robbins
All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book, or portions thereof, in any form.
A Forge Book
Published by Tom Doherty Associates, LLC
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eISBN 9781429923576
First eBook Edition : May 2011
First edition: October 2001
First mass market edition: August 2002
Never Enough Page 33
