Mr. Lucky

by James Swain

  “Like the chip scams you showed us,” Boomer said.

  “Exactly. Chip scams are considered the lowest form of stealing, yet they cost casinos millions a year.”

  The three men stopped glaring at him. A short silence followed.

  “So what are we missing?” Lamar said.

  Gerry didn’t have a clue. Only, it was too late in the game to admit that and not get run out of town. Then he had an idea. He’d call his old man. “I need to look at these tapes in privacy for a little while. Would you mind if I used your office?”

  “Gonna go consult your crystal ball?” Lamar said.

  “Something like that.”

  “Be my guest.” Lamar led him to his corner office. It was dark and about as inviting as a cave, and contained a desk with a computer and a phone. Lamar turned the computer on and told Kent to send the feeds from the video monitors they were watching to his computer. Seconds later, a matrix appeared on the computer screen, with the different feeds showing in each of the matrix’s boxes.

  “There you go, sport,” Lamar said, showing himself out.

  Gerry shut the door behind him. Getting behind the desk, he took his cell phone out and powered it up. As he punched in his father’s number, he was suddenly seized by a sense of panic. His father had promised a dozen times that he’d start leaving his cell phone on, but so far, it hadn’t happened. His old man was a dinosaur when it came to technology. Come on, Pop, surprise me, he thought as the call went through.

  “When the hell are you going to stop lying to these people?” his father said after Gerry told him what was going on. His father rarely swore. And Gerry couldn’t remember the last time he’d sworn at him. Not that he didn’t deserve it. But his father had somehow always shown restraint.

  “Is something wrong, Pop?”

  “I just had a blind librarian tell me what a bum I was for avoiding Lucy Price,” his father said. “Do you think I’m a bum for avoiding her?”

  Gerry stopped staring at the matrix on Lamar’s computer screen and shifted his eyes to the wall. His father sounded upset. Lucy Price was bad news. Gerry had discussed her with Mabel, and they’d both decided that the best thing his father could do was get Lucy out of his life. She was drowning and was only going to pull down his father with her.

  “You bailed her out already, Pop. You gave her a chance to redeem herself. That’s all you can do with someone like that. The rest was up to her, and she blew it.”

  “You really think so?”

  “Yes. So don’t go flogging yourself over it.”

  “Is that what I’m doing?”

  “It sure sounds like it.”

  His father took a deep breath. “Okay. Thanks for listening. Now, tell me what you’re seeing on these video monitors.”

  Gerry shifted his gaze to the computer screen. He couldn’t remember ever giving his father advice before. “Where do you want me to start?” he said.

  “Start with the procedures they’re using at each of the games,” his father said. “That’s usually how table games get scammed.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Crooked dealers and croupiers will change a procedure. The change usually doesn’t look like much, but it’s enough to help them hide how they’re stealing money. They’ll use the new procedure for a while to see if it creates any suspicion. If no one says anything, they start the scam. Hustlers call this putting the eye to sleep.”

  “Huh,” Gerry said.

  “You know, I already told you this once before.”

  “You did?”

  “Yeah, about three weeks ago. I guess you weren’t listening.”

  Gerry swallowed hard, then described to his father what he was seeing on the screen.

  Ten minutes later Gerry walked out of Lamar’s office with his chest puffed out and a shit-eating grin on his face. He’d been able to nail each scam just by listening to his father and staring at the matrix on Lamar’s computer. His old man could be a bear sometimes, but he never let you down.

  Kent and Boomer separated their chairs and gave him space to sit. Gerry took the seat and pointed at the monitors. “Where do you want to begin?”

  Lamar was standing in the corner. “You figured out all three of them?”

  “Sure did.”

  “Well, paint me blue and call me Quincy. Okay, start with the roulette scam.”

  A monitor in the center of the table showed roulette. Kent hit some strokes on his keyboard, and every monitor in the trailer switched to show the same thing.

  The roulette table was crowded with people. Gerry pointed at the croupier, a guy with a pasty complexion and an ill-fitting tux. It was his job to control the game, spin the wheel and throw the ball, and collect bets at his end of the table. Gerry said, “The croupier is part of the gang. He’s changed a procedure at the table, which is letting his partners past-post.”

  “You mean they’re betting after the ball drops,” Lamar said.

  “That’s right. Before the wheel slows down and the ball starts to drop, the croupier is supposed to wave his hand over the layout and say ‘No more bets.’ That way the people watching through the eye in the sky know the betting is over.

  “Well, this croupier isn’t waving his hand over the table. If you watch the tape, you’ll see that he’s saying it, which is why it hasn’t caught the attention of the security people on the floor. But the people manning the eye in the sky can’t hear him because there isn’t any audio on their tapes. The croupier is giving his partners a chance to see where the ball is going to fall, and place a late bet.”

  Kent and Boomer stared at the monitors. After a minute Kent spotted the past-poster. It was a man sitting in a wheelchair at the table’s end. He was hugging the table and slipping late bets onto the layout.

  “Right in front of our noses,” Kent said.

  “How’s the craps scam working?” Lamar asked.

  Gerry glanced at him. “Let me guess. You’ve got a bet with Kent and Boomer that I won’t figure them all out.”

  Lamar bit his lip and didn’t reply. Kent and Boomer burst out laughing.

  “How much?” Gerry said.

  “Twenty bucks,” Kent said.

  Gerry looked at him. “Twenty between the two of you, or twenty each?”

  “Twenty each,” Boomer said. “Lamar is a gambling man.”

  “What’s my cut?” Gerry said.

  The two ex-football players stopped laughing.

  “What do you mean, your cut?” Kent said.

  “If I win, you win. Comprende?”

  Kent shrugged. “How about ten bucks?”

  “Each?”

  Now it was Lamar’s turn to laugh. “Man strikes a hard bargain.”

  Kent and Boomer looked at each other. “Okay,” Kent said.

  Gerry turned back to the monitors. Kent typed in a command, and the screens showed the craps table where the stealing was taking place.

  “The craps scam is similar to the roulette scam, in that it exploits the fact that there’s no audio being captured on the casino floor. The craps dealer and a partner are pulling off verbal scams. They’re pretty basic, but very effective.

  “The craps table is crowded with players, and they’re making lots of noise. The partner comes over to the table and throws his money down. He tells the craps dealer what his bet is. Only, no one at the table hears him. There’s so much noise, no one can. The craps dealer says, ‘Money plays,’ indicating the bet has been accepted. The dice are thrown. Whatever the outcome is, the craps dealer pays the player off as if that was his bet.”

  Gerry pointed at the craps dealer on the video monitor. They watched in silence as he paid a player off for a bet that was never made. The payoff was several thousand dollars, and Lamar let out a groan.

  “You owe us twenty bucks, each,” Boomer told him.

  “He still hasn’t explained the blackjack scam,” Lamar reminded him.

  The blackjack scam was Gerry’s favorite of the bunch. It e
mployed an ordinary box of Kleenex and a dealer with a head cold. His father had called it the Runny Nose Scam. He glanced over his shoulder at Lamar. “Want to make another bet?”

  “No thanks,” Lamar said.

  Above the door was a monitor that showed the outside of the trailer. Standing outside was a fat guy in bib overalls, holding an automatic rifle. The fat guy raised the rifle to his shoulder and took dead aim at the trailer.

  “Duck!”

  A fusillade of bullets ripped through the aluminum walls. It happened so fast that no one moved. Lamar, Kent, and Boomer let out moans and fell to the floor. Gerry touched himself. He had an angel sitting on his shoulder and was unhurt.

  In the monitor he saw the fat guy reloading. Lamar saw it, too. He was lying on the floor, holding his bleeding arm. He drew the gun from behind his belt buckle, then offered it to Gerry.

  “You’ve got to stop him,” Lamar said.

  31

  Someone had once told Mabel that the month of May was beautiful wherever you went. Not just in the United States, but all over the world.

  It was certainly true in Florida. The air was warm but not too humid, the grass and vegetation blooming everywhere you looked, the days longer and more fulfilling. She sat on a rocker on her front porch, taking it all in. The trip to Gibsonton had been fun, but now she was exhausted. She put in long hours working for Tony. Usually she enjoyed it, but sometimes it also wore her out.

  A FedEx truck came down the street and stopped in front of Tony’s house. FedEx delivered on Sundays, but you had to pay them through the nose. It was probably a videotape from a casino that had lost a bundle of cash. It seemed to be happening more and more, despite the breakthroughs in technology that were available, like facial-recognition databases and digital cameras that could photograph a pimple on an elephant’s behind. Because casinos generated so much cash, they attracted the worst that society had to offer. Like Tony was fond of saying, it wasn’t a matter of if a casino was going to have problems, it was a matter of when.

  She signed for the package, then watched the truck pull away from the curb. Moments later, she saw Yolanda come out of her house with the baby in her arms. Yolanda looked harried, and Mabel saw that she had on mismatched slippers. Mabel pushed herself out of her rocker and walked down the path to the sidewalk in front of her house.

  “Is everything all right?” she called across the street.

  Yolanda shook her head. “No.”

  “Is this about Gerry?”

  “Yes.”

  “Give me a minute.”

  Mabel went inside, made sure the teakettle wasn’t boiling on the stove, then grabbed her keys and hurried out the door. It had bothered her that Gerry hadn’t come home right away from his trip to Gulfport. Something about his reason for staying had sounded fabricated. Reaching Yolanda’s house, she let herself in.

  She heard Yolanda in the kitchen, talking in Spanish on the phone. As she walked down the hallway, Mabel glanced into the different rooms. Each was spotless, with not a single child’s toy or piece of child’s clothing lying on the floor. Mabel was convinced that Yolanda would one day surrender to motherhood, but so far it hadn’t happened.

  In the kitchen she found Yolanda sitting at the table, the baby struggling in her lap. Mabel took the baby from her and felt its heavy diaper. She went into the master bedroom and changed her.

  “It’s my mother in San Juan,” Yolanda called out. “She’s had a premonition about Gerry.”

  “Is he in trouble?”

  “Yes.”

  Yolanda’s mother had this uncanny ability to see into the future and predict when bad things were about to happen. By having a son-in-law like Gerry, she was going to be busy for a long time. Mabel finished changing Lois’s diaper and returned to the kitchen. “What did he do?” she asked.

  Yolanda was saying good-bye to her mother, which could take anywhere from ten seconds to a full minute. Finally she hung up. “My mother had a dream while she was taking a siesta this afternoon,” Yolanda said, taking the baby from her. “In it, she saw Gerry being pursued by a man who looked like a bear. My mother said Gerry took something from him.”

  Yolanda’s lips were trembling. Mabel didn’t believe in psychics, or the frauds on TV who claimed to communicate with the dead; only, Yolanda’s mother’s premonitions somehow always came true.

  “This isn’t good,” Mabel said. “Have you called Gerry and asked him to come clean?”

  “No,” Yolanda said.

  Mabel glanced at the cell phone sitting on the table. So did Yolanda. Her mother had spooked her, and Mabel watched her bring the baby to her chest and rock her.

  “Would you like me to call him?” Mabel asked.

  Yolanda kissed the top of Lois’s head with her eyes closed.

  “Would you please?” she asked.

  Gerry stared at the monitor above the door of the trailer. In his hand was Lamar’s gun. The fat guy—who he guessed was Huck Dubb—was having a problem loading his automatic rifle. Gerry wanted him to lower the rifle’s barrel a little bit more. Just another foot, and Gerry was going to open the door and blow his head off.

  “He’s got an AK-47,” Lamar said, lying on the floor. His right arm was spurting blood, and he was holding his other hand over the wound. “Their barrels heat up if you fire too many rounds at once.”

  Gerry glanced at Kent and Boomer. They had dragged themselves over to the corner and were tending to each other’s wounds.

  “You need to take him out,” Lamar said.

  “I know,” Gerry said.

  “Better turn the safety off.”

  Gerry found the safety and flipped it off. In the monitor, Huck Dubb was cursing and banging his rifle with the palm of his hand. Gerry heard his cell phone ring, and jerked it out of his pocket. It was Yolanda, calling from the house. He hit talk.

  “I love you,” he said. “Call you right back.”

  He killed the power and put the phone away. Then he jerked the door open and stepped outside the trailer. There was a small platform, then three steps to the pavement. Huck stood twenty feet away, not seeing him. He aimed at Huck’s chest and squeezed the trigger. The gun barked, and Huck spun like a top, the rifle flying out of his hands. Gerry watched it slide beneath a parked car and felt the weight of the world lift from his shoulders.

  Huck fell against a car and brought his hand up to his head. Blood was spurting from his ear, and Gerry realized he’d winged him. He went down the steps and saw Huck start to back away. Gerry motioned for him to stop. Huck kept backing up.

  “I’ll shoot you,” Gerry said.

  The side of Huck’s face was sheeted in blood. Huck spit at Gerry.

  “You killed my boys,” he said.

  “You shouldn’t have sent them after me.”

  “You a cop?”

  Gerry shook his head. In the distance he could hear an approaching siren.

  “Fuck you,” Huck said.

  Huck did a one-eighty and took off at a dead run. Gerry aimed at his back. He started to squeeze the trigger, then hesitated. From the trailer he heard Lamar yelling at him to do it. He thought of the faces of the Dubb boys as he dumped the logs on them. He’d seen in their eyes the stark terror that accompanies the realization that your life is about to end. He didn’t want to see that look ever again, and lowered his arm.

  “Aw, shit,” he heard Lamar say.

  Two ambulances and half the Gulfport police force showed up a minute later. A posse of cops went to hunt down Huck, while the three wounded men were put on gurneys and taken to the hospital. Gerry rode in the ambulance with Lamar.

  “You should’ve shot him,” Lamar said.

  “You ever kill anyone before?” Gerry asked him.

  Lamar shook his head.

  “Then shut up,” he said.

  Gerry turned his eyes away as a medic treated Lamar’s wound. He felt something being pressed into his hand, and looked down to see Lamar handing him his cell phone.

>   “Call Isabelle, would you? Tell her what happened.”

  Gerry made the call for him. Isabelle had already heard the news. The employees who they suspected of cheating were being rounded up. She made Gerry put Lamar on. He put the phone next to the big man’s lips and saw him whisper something to her, then say good-bye. Gerry put the phone back to his own mouth. “Isabelle, I need you to do something for me.” To Lamar he said, “Which blackjack table was I watching before?”

  “Table seventeen.”

  “Isabelle, make sure you confiscate the trash can beneath blackjack table seventeen. It will be filled with used tissues.”

  She agreed, and the line went dead. He saw Lamar smile at him.

  “Used tissues?”

  “That’s right.”

  “Still want to win that bet, huh?”

  “Twenty bucks is twenty bucks,” Gerry said.

  32

  Valentine was still steaming over Mary Alice’s remark when Bill Higgins called him late Sunday afternoon. She’d made him feel absolutely rotten, and he’d known her exactly one day. Women were amazing that way, the power they wielded far greater than they knew.

  “You forget about me?” Bill asked.

  Just what he needed. More guilt. No, he hadn’t forgotten about Bill. He just didn’t have anything solid to tell him. He now remembered why he liked to keep his cell phone turned off. It allowed him to lead a normal life.

  “I’m on the case,” Valentine said. “Casino bosses biting at your heels?”

  “They’re calling me on the carpet tomorrow afternoon,” Bill said.

  “I thought your meeting wasn’t until Friday.”

  “So did I. The Associated Press won’t leave the story alone. They’re hounding the mayor’s office and the convention and visitors bureau for closure. Did you know that Ricky Smith hired a public relations firm in New York?”

  “With whose money?”

  “That’s what I’d like to know.”

  Valentine was sitting on the rocker on the screened porch of his house, staring at the forest. In Florida, a forest was another name for an overgrown swamp; here, it was maples and pines and vegetation that didn’t have alligators hiding behind it. “My gut tells me Ricky Smith is as crooked as a corkscrew,” he said. “Problem is, I can’t prove it.”