by James Swain
“Tony, please call me,” Mabel said. “It’s an emergency.”
He punched in his work number. His neighbor answered on the second ring.
“What’s going on?”
“You must start leaving your cell phone on,” she scolded him. “It’s Gerry.”
“Did you speak to him?”
“Yolanda did earlier. Gerry is involved with something very bad.”
What’s new, he nearly said.
“Yolanda got a call from American Express,” Mabel went on. “They saw a lot of activity on Gerry’s credit card. He bought a gun in Las Vegas.”
“He did what?”
“A three fifty-seven Smith and Wesson. Yolanda is worried, and so am I.”
He saw Bill’s place up ahead, a single-story ranch house with a terra-cotta tile roof and all-natural landscaping. The colors were earthy and seemed to bleed beneath the bright sunlight. Slowing down, he said, “I need you to do something for me. Contact every casino boss in Nevada we do business with, and see if you can get the address of Bart Calhoun’s school.”
“Certainly. May I ask what you’re going to do when you find Gerry?”
Wring his neck, he thought. “Bring him home.”
“Can I tell Yolanda that?”
“You can tell her whatever you want.”
Mabel was silent as he pulled into Bill’s driveway. Venting his frustrations on her was juvenile, and he said, “Am I starting to sound like a cranky old man?”
“Yes. I think you need to pack your bags and come home.”
“Once my bags get here and I find Gerry, I will.”
“Wonderful. Just remember one thing.”
“What’s that?”
“Start leaving your cell phone on!”
As he got out of the rental, Bill emerged from the house, walking with a metal cane. Bill was a Navajo Indian, a shade under six feet, with a stony face offset by piercing eyes and a full head of hair. The gunshot wound he’d endured in Miami two months ago had been slow to heal, and he was still working from home.
They shook hands on the lawn. Valentine asked him how his leg was holding up. Bill said okay, then asked him about his ear. The same guy who’d shot Bill had blown off Valentine’s left ear. Valentine showed him the replacement.
“Is that real skin?” his friend asked.
“Yeah. Don’t ask where they grafted it from.”
They went inside. Bill’s house was U-shaped, the rooms facing a courtyard with a meticulously landscaped Japanese garden complete with a running waterfall and a pond filled with exotic goldfish. The back of the property was walled off, hiding everything from view. Bill and his partner, Alex, liked it that way. On a coffee table in the living room sat a pitcher with lemon water, and a tray of glasses. Bill filled two, handed him one. They toasted each other’s health.
“What brings you to Las Vegas?” Bill asked.
Valentine stared at the waterfall in the garden. Telling Bill he was looking for Gerry was not a good idea. If Gerry was breaking the law, Bill would have to do something about it. He didn’t want to put his friend in that position, so instead he said, “I’m doing a consulting job. That’s not why I came to see you, though.”
Bill sipped his water, waiting for him to continue.
“A guy wearing a stocking paid me a visit earlier. Swore I’d killed his girlfriend, a stripper at the Pink Pony. We mixed it up, and he ran.”
“You call the cops?”
“That’s the bad part. I think he was a cop.”
Bill raised an eyebrow.
“I had lunch with Nick Nicocropolis,” Valentine said. “Nick told me about a call he got from the FBI regarding this same stripper. The FBI thinks she was laundering casino chips.”
“Any idea how your name got tied up in this?”
“No. Have you heard about the case?”
“Yeah,” Bill said. “But I can’t talk about it.”
“Not even to an old friend?”
It was a Navajo custom not to make eye contact during conversation. Only Bill was staring right at him. He said, “Not even to you. When the FBI contacts you—and trust me, they will—you need to play ball with them. Whatever they want to know, tell them. Otherwise, they’ll make your life a living hell.”
“But I don’t know anything.”
“Let them be the judge of that, okay?”
Valentine went back to sipping his water. Bill rarely lectured him. The FBI had him scared, just like they had Nick scared. The bureau had invaded Las Vegas right after 9/11 and, along with setting up an extensive surveillance operation, was watching the casinos’ cash flows. They were Big Brother, and making everyone’s life miserable.
Bill was still staring at him like a hawk.
“Whatever you say,” Valentine said.
“Believe it or not, I was just about to call you,” Bill said after they’d both emptied their glasses.
“You missed my cheery voice?”
“I’m reviewing a case, and I’m stumped.”
They went to Bill’s study in the back of the house. The walls were decorated with Native American artifacts and paintings from New Mexico where Bill’s parents lived on a ranch. He was a teenager when his parents learned he was gay, and they sent him away to school. Somehow they had managed to reconcile, and their pictures were scattered around the room.
Bill picked up a remote and the TV on his desk came to life. “This is a tape of a robbery that happened last week. It went down so fast, the casino is convinced it’s an inside job. They had their employees submit to polygraphs. Everyone came out clean.”
The tape showed a woman in her fifties with a Dolly Parton hairdo standing inside the cage. Her job was to change chips into money when players wanted to cash out. A bearded man appeared at the cage’s window and shoved a gun through the bars. The woman put her hands on her head as if to scream. The bearded man motioned with the gun, silencing her.
The woman opened a cash drawer and started pulling out bundles of bills, which she slipped through the bars. The man shoved the money into the pockets of his windbreaker, then sprinted away. The woman again put her hands on her head. Then she tripped an alarm, and all hell broke loose inside the casino.
Bill shut the tape off. “What do you think?”
“Did they polygraph her?” Valentine asked.
Bill broke custom again and stared at him. “The woman in the cage?”
“Yeah. My guess is, they didn’t, considering the trauma she went through.”
“You think she’s involved?”
It seemed so obvious that Valentine paused before answering him. “I counted twelve cash drawers where she was standing. She went to the one with the big bills without the robber telling her to. She’s part of it.”
Bill rewound the tape, watched it again, and laughed out loud. “Now that you mention it, it does look kind of strange, doesn’t it?”
It was nearly three o’clock, and Valentine realized he wasn’t going to find his son by hanging out with Bill. He said good-bye and started to leave, then noticed a large Federal Express box sitting on Bill’s desk. The shipper was a company in Japan, the receiver Chance Newman. The top was sliced open, and he glanced inside.
“That was intercepted yesterday by our friends at FedEx,” Bill explained. “The shipping instructions say the contents are PalmPilots, only they’re really card-counting computers. I called Chance Newman, asked him what was up. He said he’s giving them to his surveillance people to help track counters.”
Chance’s explanation to Bill made perfect sense. The easiest way to spot card-counters was by tracking their play with a computer. There were several good ones on the market. Only the devices Chance had bought from Japan weren’t computers. They were Deadlocks.
It had been a day filled with troubling questions, and now Valentine had another. Why had Chance paid him twenty-five thousand dollars to explain an illegal device that he obviously already knew about? That was a lot of money to blow,
even for someone as rich as Chance.
He waited until Bill’s back was turned. Taking a Deadlock from the box, he slipped it into his pocket and showed himself to the door.
“Talk to you later,” he said.
13
Hey Gerry, you ready to rumble?”
Gerry lifted his eyes from the men’s magazine he was reading. Pash stood in the doorway that separated their motel rooms. He wore jeans and a football jersey that was so large he was swimming in it. Gerry had told him that they made jerseys in his size, but Pash had laughed at his suggestion.
“I want to feel like a gladiator,” he said.
Rising from his chair, Gerry went to the window and shut the blinds, then flipped on the TV and blasted the volume. The hotel wasn’t responsible for theft, so he’d started taking measures.
“Yeah, I’m ready.”
He followed Pash into the adjacent bedroom. As usual, it was trashed. The maid came in the morning and made the beds. By late afternoon, it looked like a tornado had visited.
“Where’s your brother?” Gerry asked.
“Getting a soda,” Pash said. “We have a new member to our team I want you to meet. Hey Dean, you ready?”
The bathroom door swung open. Out stepped a guy with a forked beard, glasses, and a baseball cap. He wore jeans and a denim work shirt with multiple food stains. He looked like what gamblers called a scellard, or a scale. A loser.
“Meet Dean Martin,” Pash said.
Gerry stared at the disheveled stranger, then at Pash. “Dean Martin? This isn’t Dean Martin. He’s dead!”
Pash brought his hand to his mouth. “Oh, no!”
“You idiot,” the stranger said to Pash. “I told you that was a bad name to use!”
“I didn’t realize he was that popular,” Pash said.
“Everybody knows Dean Martin,” Gerry said. He got close to the stranger and said, “Amin, that you hiding in there?”
Something resembling a smile crossed Amin’s lips. He didn’t do that very often. For Amin it was no booze, no butts, and no staring at naked chicks. Real introspective, but also a real wizard with numbers. He could do basic math in his head as fast as a computer.
“I really fooled you, huh,” Amin said.
Amin had flared his nostrils with pieces of plastic tubing, lowered his forehead by combing his hair straight down, and painted a mole where none had been before. He was a master of disguise, and he had to be. His face was in a database of known card-counters called FaceScan. For a fee, a casino could e-mail a player’s picture to FaceScan and find out if the player was a counter.
“Sure did,” Gerry said. “But you need another name. No more celebrities.”
“But it has to be a name we can both remember,” Pash chimed in. He had a problem with American names, except for those he’d seen in the movies. “How about James Dean?”
Gerry nixed that with a shake of his head. “That’s going to attract attention. You want something that won’t seem out of place. How about John Dean? He was a character in All the President’s Men.”
“Ohh,” Pash said. “John Dean. Yes.”
Amin worked his mouth up and down the way he did when he was thinking. He stepped in front of the dressing mirror that hung next to the bed and appraised himself.
“John Dean,” he said. “Yeah, that will work.”
That night, they took two cars into town. Pash and Amin shared one while Gerry followed in his rental.
Amin parked across the street from Mandalay Bay, and Pash hopped out. They did not want to be seen entering the casino together, or even being in the same car near the casino. Casino surveillance cameras were extremely powerful, especially those used on the outside of buildings. A license plate could be read from a block away.
Pash strolled over to the Glass Pool Inn and stopped to stare at the kidney-shaped, aboveground swimming pool in the parking lot. The pool had seven portholes, allowing bystanders to see the limbs of underwater swimmers. It had been used in many movies, all of which Pash had seen. Amin beeped his horn and drove away.
Gerry pulled off to the side of the road to wait. Tonight they were going to hit the MGM Grand, and the surveillance there was top-notch. Better to take his time. That way, he would not be seen with Pash or Amin until he was inside the casino.
Ten minutes later, he pulled into the MGM’s valet area. It was twelve cars wide and looked like an auto show. While he waited for someone to take his car, he took out his cell phone and powered it up. There was a message in voice mail. He retrieved it.
His father, saying he was coming to Las Vegas.
“Just what I need,” Gerry muttered.
He erased the message, then turned the phone off. He’d considered calling his father the last four nights. Each time he’d gone into a casino with Pash and Amin, he’d whipped his cell phone out and considered asking his old man to bail him out.
He hadn’t made the call.
He wasn’t sure why. Maybe it was the invisible pressure of fatherhood that had gotten a stranglehold over him the past few months as Yolanda had grown bigger, and his problems had started to include those that hadn’t been born. What was his father’s expression? It was time for Gerry to stop trying and start doing.
Maybe that was why he hadn’t called his old man.
Gerry entered the lobby a few minutes later, and paused dutifully to stare at the wall of movie screens at the check-in that showed acts playing in the hotel. That was what everyone did, and he didn’t want to appear any different.
He took his time, going first to the bar and ordering coffee, then heading across the casino, stopping occasionally to watch folks lose their money. Pash had picked the casino tonight, and now Gerry realized why he’d chosen this one. The MGM was owned by a movie studio, and the casino was filled with famous black and white movie stills.
Nearing the blackjack pit in the back, he saw Amin. Amin was playing third base—the last spot at the table. The seat next to him was open.
Gerry’s seat.
“This seat open?” Gerry asked, putting his coffee down at the empty spot. The dealer nodded and so did Amin. Gerry took the seat and tossed two hundred dollars in wilted twenties onto the green felt.
“Changing two hundred,” the dealer called out.
Soon Gerry was gambling, ten bucks a hand. He played Basic Strategy and never deviated. His role in the scam was simple. Try not to lose his money too quickly. That was all he had to do.
Amin, on the other hand, was on another mission. He wasn’t supposed to win too much. He could win thousands of dollars an hour if he wanted, but then the people staffing the eye in the sky would start studying him and, if they didn’t like what they saw, place him under “Special Ops.” They would scrutinize his every move, run it through a computer, maybe even start to harass him. It was as much fun as being chased by a police car.
So Amin played it safe and won five hundred dollars an hour. It was a grind, but it rarely drew heat. The system he used was called the Hi-Lo. By assigning +1 and –1 values to the dealt cards, he could determine when the game was favorable to the player, and when it was favorable to house. He would bet accordingly, and almost always come out ahead.
Amin executed Hi-Lo flawlessly. He always knew the game’s exact count. Bart said even the best counters were only 70 percent accurate. Not Amin. The man was focused.
By ten PM, Gerry was down to fifty dollars and sweating through his clothes.
Amin was up. Way up. To hide his winnings—something gamblers called “rat-holing”—Amin had been palming his hundred-dollar chips, then dumping them in Gerry’s half-filled coffee mug. If anyone in surveillance had been paying attention, they would have noticed that Gerry’s drink was growing as the evening progressed.
Amin had also started dumping chips into Gerry’s jacket pocket. That was okay, except there were so many that Gerry could feel the chips pulling down his coat. Amin was acting so blatant that Gerry almost felt like he was being set up. Final
ly, he rose from the table, leaving his remaining chips, and said to the dealer, “Where’s the john?”
The dealer gave him instructions. Left, right, left, you can’t miss it.
Gerry marched through the casino, holding his filled coffee cup, afraid to drink the liquid and expose the chips shimmering just below the surface.
The john had photos of famous Hollywood actors hanging on the walls. He found Pash standing at the urinals and sidled up next to him. Pash was staring at a photo of Cary Grant and said, “The first movie I ever saw was with Cary Grant. It was called Gunga Din. He played a character named Archibald Cutter. Have you seen it?”
Gerry shook his head. “Look, we need to talk about Amin.”
“The theater was wonderful. You paid for a ticket, walked through a lobby, then went outside into a courtyard and watched the film beneath the stars. I was six years old. When I first saw Cary Grant, I thought to myself—This is the man I want to grow up to be!” He burst out laughing. “It was so funny. I thought that as I grew older, I could change my skin and hair color, and look like Cary Grant!”
“Your brother is fucking up,” Gerry said through clenched teeth.
Pash pulled up his fly and glanced over his shoulder. The johns were the only place in the casino where there were no surveillance cameras. It was against the law. But that didn’t stop people in security from occasionally popping their heads in and having a look around.
“How?” Pash asked.
Gerry showed him the chips in his pocket and his coffee cup.
“Is anyone else at the table winning?” Pash asked.
“No, and that’s the problem,” Gerry replied. “Everyone else is losing their shirts. But the dealer’s tray is being depleted. Someone in surveillance is going to notice, and your brother and I will be fucked.”
With one eye on the door, Pash took Gerry’s chips and stuffed them into the fanny pack he was wearing. “Pick me up at the Glass Pool Inn in twenty minutes. I’ll signal to my brother that we are leaving.”
