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DOUBLE DOWN
by
STEPHANIE CAFFREY
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Copyright © 2016 by Stephanie Caffrey
Cover design by Janet Holmes
Gemma Halliday Publishing
http://www.gemmahallidaypublishing.com
All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise) without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, brands, media, and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. The author acknowledges the trademarked status and trademark owners of various products referenced in this work of fiction, which have been used without permission. The publication/use of these trademarks is not authorized, associated with, or sponsored by the trademark owners.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
CHAPTER ONE
CHAPTER TWO
CHAPTER THREE
CHAPTER FOUR
CHAPTER FIVE
CHAPTER SIX
CHAPTER SEVEN
CHAPTER EIGHT
CHAPTER NINE
CHAPTER TEN
CHAPTER ELEVEN
CHAPTER TWELVE
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
CHAPTER NINETEEN
CHAPTER TWENTY
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
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ABOUT THE AUTHOR
BOOKS BY STEPHANIE CAFFREY
SNEAK PEEK
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CHAPTER ONE
Unlike most days, I had an appointment with a potential client. And he was late.
I didn’t do late, myself. I was the kind of girl who got to a meeting early and then drove around the neighborhood for five minutes, watching the clock the whole time, and then appeared at exactly two minutes after the appointed hour, a self-imposed mini delay designed to avoid making me appear too eager, as though I had nothing better to do than show up exactly on time. Which, of course, was the truth. But being actually late, to the tune of ten or fifteen or even twenty minutes, was a concept so foreign, so abhorrent, that I considered it a personal insult, even though I knew deep down people’s tardiness had nothing to do with little old me. They were just slackers, plain and simple.
Fifteen minutes. Of course, I had compounded the problem by obsessing about his lateness instead of actually doing anything productive in the meantime. But that’s just how I was.
A knock came at the door, and then I heard it open. I sprung up from my chair and greeted my tardy visitor in the shabby high-ceilinged room that passed for my office lobby.
“Sorry I’m late,” he huffed and puffed, a testament to the fact that my office was on the second floor, and he was overweight. “There was some kind of accident. The whole downtown is tied up.”
“No problem,” I said, lying through my teeth. “I was just finishing up a report.”
He was still out of breath. “Dan Hartman,” he breathed, holding out a sweaty palm.
I gripped it gingerly, stifling an ewwwww. “Let’s sit,” I said, leading him into my office. I was afraid the guy was going to drop dead on me.
Dan had a chubby face, bad skin, and the kind of beautiful wavy black hair you see in shampoo commercials, which made me wonder if God was playing a little joke by wasting that hair on a lardo like this. We made a little small talk, and then when his breathing had returned to its normal heavy wheeze, I got down to business.
“So you’re a professional gambler,” I said.
He winced. “I am a child of God, first. Second, a husband and father. Third, I coach my son’s baseball team. Fourth, I’m a tenor in the choir. But yes, somewhere down on that list, I am a professional card player. It’s not gambling, though,” he said decidedly.
Now it was my turn to wince. In more than a decade of living in Las Vegas, I had met my share of folks who believed the time they spent in casinos wasn’t gambling. They had a system, or had received a message from an alien, or believed in something that meant they had an edge on the house. Everyone else was gambling, but not them. It had grown tiresome long ago. My skepticism must have shown on my face.
Dan smiled. “I know that look. That’s the look most of my family gives me when I explain it to them. Yeah, right, they’re thinking. But I have evidence it works. You could check my bank account statements if you really want to.”
I shook my head. “No. I’m sorry. I don’t doubt you at all. It’s nothing more than counting cards, right?”
He nodded. “Right. Blackjack is the only game in the casino where the past matters.”
I wasn’t following. “The past?”
Dan leaned forward in his seat, warming to the topic. “Yeah, the past. What I mean is, the cards that have already been played can tell you something about the cards that haven’t been played yet. Get it?”
“Kind of,” I lied.
“Let’s say you’re sitting there with six other people at your table, and every card dealt to the players is a five. What does that tell you?”
“That they each have ten,” I said.
He chuckled. “Right. But what does it tell you about the cards that might be played next? What are the odds another five is going to come out of that shoe?”
I leaned back in my chair, which creaked under my own rapidly increasing weight. “It means it’s very unlikely another five would come out. Almost all the fives have been dealt already.”
Dan smiled. “Exactly. That’s basically what we do.”
“Except you’re not counting fives,” I said. “You’re probably more interested in aces.”
“Right. Aces and tens. Any ten or face card counts as ten. So if you keep track of how many have been played, you know the likelihood that another one will be played in the future. And that’s how you make money.”
I nodded, semi-intrigued. I had heard of card counting beforeâwho hadn’tâbut never really thought about how it worked.
“So things are going well, but then⦔ I trailed off, leading him to the topic du jour.
“Yes,” he said, “that’s why I’m here. We’ve been on a losing streak. That happens all the time because you can’t avoid the fact that there’s always some luck involved, even when the odds are in your favor.”
“But this time?” I prompted.
He sighed. “Let me put it this way. Mathematically, the chances we would be running this badly for so long are about one in five hundred. I’m not saying it’s impossible. I’m just saying it would be hard to be that unlucky.”
My mind made the logical leap. “So you’re thinking someone’s stealing from you? Someone on your team?”
Dan pursed his lips. “Unfortunately, yes, that’s what I think. Or, at least, what I want
to find out. That’s where you come in.”
I nodded, turning it over in my mind. “Let’s back up a minute, though. How come you work in teams? Why not just play by yourself, and then you won’t have to worry about this kind of thing?”
He leaned back in his chair. “Sometimes we do that. But if you have a team, you can exaggerate your advantages. If I’m sitting there all by myself betting ten bucks a hand, and then all of a sudden I start betting five hundred a hand, they’re going to kick me out of there. It doesn’t make any sense, so they will figure I’ve been running the count. They’re not idiots. So if you’re by yourself, you can only change your bets a little bit, or they’ll get wise.”
“How often does that happen?” I asked. “Are they that sensitive?”
“Hell yeah. They watch that stuff like hawks. I could tell you some stories, believe me,” he said, chuckling. “But the point is, if you have a team, you get up from the table when the table gets hot. Then your teammate, who for all the casino knows is a complete stranger, sits down and starts making the big bets. It’s much less suspicious that way.”
I nodded, beginning to appreciate the scheme. “I guess that makes sense. And you can make a living at this?”
He smiled. “A good living. At least, I could.” His face had gotten somber.
I turned it over in my mind for a few seconds. “Well, I can try to help you. What I’d start with is basic surveillance. The point would be to follow the members and see how they’re actually doing. I assume they make reports to you about their winnings and losses?”
“Exactly,” he said. “That’s the weird thing. It’s not just one of them on a losing streak. It’s three or four of them. If it were just one of them, then I’d know that one was the thief.”
I knew I was going to help Dan, but I was having trouble coming up with how I would go about it. Before I could blurt out a question, he anticipated it.
“Before you do any surveillance, though, I had a crazy idea.” His eyes were twinkling.
I tried to hide my natural recoil response, but I don’t think it worked. As an exotic dancer, I had spent half my life fending off fat men’s “crazy ideas.” “Okayâ¦?” I said hesitantly.
“Join the team,” he said matter-of-factly. “We’ll train you up. It’s not that hard. You just need to be good with numbers and be able to handle pressure. Then you’ll be on the inside.”
I laughed out loud. “You want me to be a card counter? I can barely even remember that red means stop and green means go.”
“You’re too modest, Raven. I read the stories in the paper. That’s why I’m here. You’re one of the best in the business.”
I smiled. In only a few months working as a private investigator, I had lucked into a few high-profile jobs, and the exposure from those had led to a steady stream of new business. At least until the last week, which had been unusually quiet. “What those stories don’t report is how much luck has to do with it.”
“So we have something in common,” he said, chuckling. “Worth a shot, though, no?”
I shrugged. It wasn’t like I had anything else to do. “All right. Maybe this will even be fun.”
“That’s the spirit,” he said, beaming. His legs creaked as he stood up, and he winced as he gripped the desk.
“I’m too young for this,” he muttered half apologetically.
“My knees crack every time I stand up,” I said, trying to sound sympathetic. I pulled out some paperwork and had him sign a retainer agreement, and then I showed him out.
CHAPTER TWO
Dan and I had agreed to meet up again two days later. He’d emailed me with a list of websites to visit as part of a crash course in card counting. As he’d explained, the theory was really quite simple. If you could keep track of how many tens and aces remained in the deck, you could determine whether the deck was favorable or unfavorable to the player. Most of the time, it would be unfavorable. After all, the rules were made by the casinos themselves. But occasionally the deck had a lot of tens in it, which they called a positive count, and those were considered “bust cards” for the dealer. That’s when you bet big and tried to beat the house.
It turned out that there were a number of methods to keep track of the card count. In the old days, when casinos used a single deck of cards at each table, it was easy. But most casinos now used six or eight decks, and some of the high-end places even used a card shuffling machine to create a kind of endless deck. Because each deal of the cards came from a “new” deck, it didn’t make sense to count cards at those places, so we would have to stick to the more traditional casinos on and off the Strip. But when they used eight decks, the methods for keeping track of so many cards were more complicated than anything I’d ever done.
Dan arrived at my office just before seven on Wednesday night.
“What’s that?” I asked, directing my question at the plastic contraption he carried under his arm.
“It’s a shoe. I’m sure you’ve seen one before but never out of context like this.”
He placed it on the coffee table in the lobby. The device was about the size of a small shoe box, with a hollow back and an opening on the front. Dan took out a small bag filled with decks of playing cards and began shuffling them on top of the table. Then he arranged them into a neat pile and placed them, facing backwards, into the back of the shoe.
“I’ll be the dealer,” he said, his face looking mischievous.
I knelt down next to the coffee table and began to concentrate. He dealt out five dummy hands of two cards each, all face up, and then dealt the dealer’s hand, which was one up and one down.
I scanned the cards as quickly as possible and added up the total. “Plus two?” I asked hopefully.
He shrugged. “Three. Try again.” He whisked up all the cards and then dealt another spread of hands. My mind whirred, trying to keep up.
“It’s going to be this fast in the casino,” he said not very reassuringly.
“Plus one,” I whispered.
“Right! Very good.”
We continued this exercise for a solid half hour. Usually, I was right or within one, but I whiffed a few completely. I couldn’t tell if he was impressed or frustrated.
“Okay,” he said. “Now we’ll add real play to the mix. You’re going to play your hand and keep track of the count. You memorized basic strategy?”
Basic strategy was the well-established method of playing blackjack to get the highest advantage against the house. Most tourists played something close to it with leaks here and there which gave the house an even greater edge.
“I think I’ve got it,” I said. “Except, I sometimes forget when to split and double down.”
He smiled knowingly and then gave me a little rhyme to help remember. It was lame, but it was the kind of thing I’d always relied on in school to memorize things.
“Let’s go,” he said, dealing the cards out of the shoe in a practiced blur. I had gotten a fifteen against the dealer’s eight.
“Hit,” I muttered.
“Good,” he said, dealing out a bust card for me and dummy cards for all the others. I had to remember to keep watch of all their hands to keep the running count. He wound up with a twenty and seemed to take some kind of bizarre pleasure in beating the other invisible players.
An hour flew by. I was making a few mistakes here and there, but on the whole, I was getting into the groove of it.
“So what’s the count?” he asked, again. We were on at least our twentieth deal using eight decks.
“Minus eleven.” It came out a little more confidently than I actually felt.
“Very good, Raven.” He straightened up in his chair and began rubbing his lower back. “I think you’re going to do just fine.”
I sighed, mentally exhausted. I couldn’t remember the last time my mind had been whirring like that for a full hour. It had required calling on parts of brain matter that had long since been abandoned, but I was enjoying a strange sense of acc
omplishment.
“Does it get any easier?” I asked.
“You bet it does. Once you get good at it, it’s impossible not to count the cards, even if you’re just playing for fun. Second nature.” He was pushing all the cards together on the table and arranging them in the shoe.
I chuckled, recalling an ancient memory. “My plastic surgeon said the same thing. Well, kind of.”
Dan stopped arranging the cards and flashed me a puzzled look.
I stood up. “He said once you start rearranging people’s body parts, you can never appreciate beauty again. You’re always evaluating people. Do they need a smaller nose, bigger boobs, fuller lips, a rounder ass? He said it’s exhausting.”
I looked down to see Dan giving me the once-over, no doubt trying to guess what kinds of work I’d had done. Dr. Ruiz had given me the best rack money could buy, but apart from that, I was 100% Raven.
“I’m all natural,” I said, “except for theâ¦obvious.” He was staring at my chest.
Dan stood up, his chubby cheeks flushed with pink. “Of course,” he said, coughing nervously. “None of my business.”
“So when do I start?” I asked. My phone had been unusually slow all week, so I was eager to get cracking.
“First, we’ll try you out in a real casino under battle conditions,” he said, happy to change the subject away from plastic surgery.
“Battle conditions?” I asked.
He smiled. “We’re a little melodramatic, I admit. But when you’re being spied on by a dozen cameras and security guards, it feels a little like battle.”
“Got it,” I said.
“I’ve got to get home tonight, or my wife will think I’ve got a girlfriend. I’m already kind of nervous about that, actually.” He coughed again.
Double Down (Raven McShane Mysteries Book 4) Page 1
