“We are going to kick some butt tomorrow. I can feel it!” His enthusiasm was contagious.
Tyler chuckled. “Dinesh is our resident optimist. He’s also the big better. Usually, he plays the part of a rich foreigner. Who are you going to be tomorrow, Dinesh? Prince Akbar? Mr. Salaam? Who’s that guy who doesn’t talk, only uses hand gestures?”
Dinesh grinned broadly, his eyes sparkling. “Dr. Gupta,” he said. Clearly, Dinesh enjoyed the game of playing the casinos for fools. “We will wait and see, Mr. Tyler,” he said, using a deliberately thick singsongy Indian accent.
The man known as O joined us. He wasn’t as smiley as the rest, didn’t share in their unbridled optimism. “Three grand, man. Where am I gonna get three grand?”
Dinesh pooh-poohed him. “We’ll spot you, O. Just like last time.”
O grimaced, the memory a painful one. “Yeah, yeah, I know. Maybe tomorrow’s the day. You have good luck, Raven?”
I shrugged. “I’m part Irish, if that helps.”
He snorted. “I’m one hundred percent, baby, and look where it got me. I’m forty-one, flat broke, and counting cards for a living.”
Tyler chimed in. “But you are in a community,” he said. “Don’t forget about your friends, and Jesus.”
O nodded, serious now. “You’re right, of course.” He turned to me. “Before this, my life was even worse, so I guess I shouldn’t complain.”
Dinesh was still all smiles, bursting with energy. “This is so exciting,” he bubbled. “A new member. I can feel it,” he bubbled. “This is our time!”
“Down boy,” O said, clapping Dinesh on the back. He turned to me. “Raven, we usually work based on when the shift change is. We want to hit them for a few hours and then get a whole new set of fresh dealers to hit. Make sense?”
I nodded. “Yeah. Probably makes it less likely that anyone would notice what you’re up to.”
“Exactly. So the shift change at Canyon Creek is at eight p.m. Want to start at six?”
“Sounds good,” I said.
“Just remember,” O said. “You don’t know us, and we don’t know you. You just play your game, change up your bets a little bit, and use the signal if the table gets hot. Dinesh will know what to do.”
“Got it.”
CHAPTER FIVE
Saturday had me pacing around my condo, a ball of nervous energy. It brought me back to my first night as a stripper, which felt like a lifetime ago. I had done it almost on a dare, talked into it by my college roommate, and when the day finally arrived, I couldn’t keep anything in my stomach. All I remember about my first lap dance was that I got a five-dollar tip and that I was so hungry I almost fainted right on top of the customer.
I wasn’t sure how to explain the butterflies this time. It was just cards, after all, and I’d already shown I could keep up during my session at Bally’s. But now that I was part of a team, the others were depending on me not to choke and botch the count. And then there was the cloak-and-dagger aspect to it as well. Our team was trying to pull a fast one on the casino, but what the other guys didn’t know was that I was trying to put one over on them, too. I was on their team, and I hoped we’d win, but my mission was much different than theirs. In short, I was a spy. It was a lot of lies to keep straight.
Since I was finding it impossible to relax at home, I decided to head over to the casino early to have some dinner there. I figured that if I could get comfortable with the layout of the place, it would calm my nerves enough to allow my brain to function.
It was a decent enough theory, but it didn’t work. Given my nervous stomach, it probably wasn’t a good idea to have ordered the extra spicy wings, which were a last-minute impulse brought on by the fact that the guy next to me at the bar had ordered some, and they looked fantastic. Plus, they were half price! It wasn’t like I had a choice.
I managed to distract myself by playing the slot machine built into the bar, which was a twenty-five center with a number of games, all of which offered terrible odds. People liked the idea of getting “free” drinks at the bar, but the math never quite worked out in the player’s favor. But for me, it must have been my lucky night because I hit two small jackpots in the space of twenty minutes. By six, I was up a hundred and nine bucks, and more importantly, my nerves had improved to the point where I felt at least halfway comfortable about what I was about to do.
On the casino floor, there was no sign of Dinesh, Tyler, or O’Scannlain. But that wasn’t surprising. Being card-counting veterans on multiple watch lists, they’d be wearing some kind of outfit designed to draw attention away from their facial features. Since I was a newbie, I didn’t need to play that game, at least not yet.
The Canyon Creek Resort was five miles off-Strip and appealed to tourists and locals alikeâample parking, decent slot odds, and none of the crowds of nineteen-year-olds who plagued most of the Strip properties. On the casino floor, I found a pre-dinner crowd with some boisterous local types enjoying the fact that it was the weekend. An unusually large contingent of Wisconsin Badgers football fans was milling around, taking in the game on the TVs that were perched above each blackjack table.
The buoyant, festive atmosphere gave me some hope as I did a walk around. With all the buzz on the floor, I figured a dealer would have less reason to focus on me and the way I was betting. Based on Dan’s advice, I zeroed in on a sixtysomething woman with too much makeup who was dealing to a half empty ten-dollar table. I smiled, plunked down three hundred bucks, and slid myself onto a stool, a young Hispanic couple on my right and a geeky middle-aged guy on my left. No one at the table was smoking.
I played out the rest of the shoe, trying to get myself relaxed before I began counting. I should have just waited it out. A string of six losses in a row had me doubting my prospects for the night, but I was only betting ten bucks a hand, so the bad streak didn’t put me too far in the hole. The dealer’s strong run apparently wiped out the guy on my left, who sighed audibly and muttered something as he stood up and left. Now it was just me and the couple on my right. They had a small mountain of chips in front of them, a promising sign, and were slurping away at some kind of clear beverage on the rocks. They had been tipping the dealer generously, even when she was killing us, so I sensed they were in for the long haul.
The next shoe wasn’t much better. Ups, downs, but no consistent pattern in the card count. I varied my bets anyway, as Dan had suggested, so that when the count was good, it wouldn’t seem strange if I upped my bets. Thirty minutes in and my three hundred was almost wiped out. I was down to forty bucks’ worth of chips, which felt like scared money, so I plunked down another two Benjamins on the table and got a pile of red and green chips. Reinforcements.
An hour in and still nothing. The couple on my right were killing the dealer despite their obvious ignorance of blackjack strategy. They were playing on feel, pretty much the same way most people played. That must be fun, I thought, jealous. I knew that Dan was right, that once I had begun counting cards, I would never be able to “play” blackjack just for fun. It had become work, and it wasn’t as interesting as I thought it would be.
Still plodding along, I began giving up on my own prospects and staked my hopes on my partners, who must have been having more success than I was. But things changed for the better during the dealer’s twenty-minute break. A fill-in named Bennie, a smiley phone booth-shaped Filipino, seemed to enjoy parceling out the casino’s money to the table. We couldn’t lose. The count got higher and higher, and so did my heart rate. After an unlikely spread of little cards was played, the count was good enough that I awkwardly made the prearranged signal behind my backâa clenched fist which I held for three or four seconds, and then I took a long swig of my Diet Coke. I just didn’t know if Dinesh was watching.
He was. With surprising speed, a thin dark-skinned man in a purple tracksuit appeared and sat down on my left. It was clearly Dinesh, but he had parted his hair differently and was sporting a thin moustache, whic
h might or might not have been real. With practiced nonchalance, he lit up a cigarette and placed a five-hundred-dollar chip in the betting circle. The dealer did a double take but remained silent and smiley as he pulled the cards out of the shoe and placed them in front of us. Even at off-Strip properties, dealers in Vegas were accustomed to big bets from the most unlikely of sources. Giant bets could come from guys dressed like tycoons, but more often, they came from guys in track suits or T-shirts. Dinesh’s getup was spot-on.
The dealer dished out ace, ten, ten, and a seven for Dinesh. Bad news. The dealer had a ten showing, which meant Dinesh had a good chance of losing by drawing a ten to get seventeen. But then he got luckyâvery luckyâand caught one of the few small cards remaining in the deck, a three. He took a hit and drew another ten, giving him twenty. Nice.
I figured Dinesh would push with the dealer, but the dealer ended up with only eighteen, so Dinesh won outright. He pressed his bet and won again, now up fifteen hundred. I was so nervous that I had almost lost track of the count, more focused on Dinesh’s play than my own measly fifty-dollar hands. Dinesh added to his bet, making it fifteen hundred dollars on the felt. And then the cards began spewing out exactly in the way we hoped. The couple next to me drew twenties, I had an eighteen, and Dinesh had hit a 21, giving him a $2250 profit from the single hand. He smiled, raking in the chips. But then, as the dealer was completing his own hand, he drew out the yellow plastic card which signaled the end of the shoe.
Dinesh’s eyes had gotten big, and not in a good way. The shoe was done, and so was he. He flipped a green chip to the dealer as a tip and politely declined the dealer’s offer to “color him up” by exchanging all Dinesh’s smaller chips for larger denominations. Dinesh had made almost four grand in just a few minutes, but he hadn’t seemed happy.
A lingering sense of unease crept into my consciousness, the cards passing in front of me in a blur. The next three shoes were uneventful, but I managed to make about five hundred bucks in a short little run around nine o’clock. By the time I got up to leave, I figured I was up about nine hundred. I’d started out slow and then down, but during the short burst when Dinesh was at our table, I’d made it all back and then some.
By prearranged rule, our group was not to meet up on casino property, where cameras were everywhere. Instead, we met up at a Burger King a half mile up the highway. I was the last one there.
The expressions on the others’ faces confirmed my vague sense that I had screwed something up.
“Hi, Raven.” Dinesh, sans moustache, flashed a forced smile.
“Okay, I think I get it,” I said, trying to preempt their criticism.
O’Scannlain was unwrapping what looked like a Double Whopper. “Get what?”
I couldn’t take my eyes off the Whopper. “The shoe was almost done when I gave the signal. Right?”
Tyler smiled at me, seeming relieved. “You did fine, Raven. I lost a little, but Dinesh made about four grand. But yeah, the timing was a little off there.”
Dinesh was dipping about a half dozen fries into a pool of ketchup. “The thing is, we only get one chance. Maybe two. I guarantee you that right now security is reviewing the tapes of the weirdo in the track suit who made off with four thousand bucks in about five minutes.”
I nodded. They had a point. “So if you’re going to hit them, hit them big. If I had called you in sooner, you might have hit them for twenty grand. Is that it?”
The three of them were looking at each other. Tyler spoke up. “Rookie mistake. Don’t worry about it. He reached into his pocket and pulled a ten-dollar bill from a thick envelope. Go grab some food, Raven. You’re skin and bones!”
I chuckled, appreciative of the compliment. It was hard to resist the smell of hot fries and grilled beef, but I was on my way to the club later and didn’t want to be gyrating around with a stomach full of fast food.
“Thanks,” I said, “but I kind of want to look like I’m just skin and bones. Unfortunately, that seems to be what men are looking for. No Whoppers for me.”
Tyler shrugged. “It’s your loss. It comes out of the winnings. At least eat something, eh?” He slid the ten-dollar bill across the table at me.
“Fine,” I said, taking it.
I was surprised to find a grilled chicken salad on the menu, and apparently, it also came as a surprise to the cashier, who didn’t know which button to push. With help from a manager, she finally figured it out.
“It figures,” O’Scannlain said when I returned. He was eyeing my plastic box of salad skeptically. “We get a dame on board, and she goes straight for the greens and sprouts.”
“I’m guessing you’re a single man. Is that right?” I asked him, giving him my best phony smile.
The other two chuckled.
O’Scannlain leaned back in his seat and rubbed his belly. “I had a girl once,” he said wistfully. “But she didn’t appreciate me.”
“Um hmm,” I muttered, digging into my salad. “Her loss,” I muttered, chewing my food.
We traded barbs for another five minutes, with Tyler and Dinesh enjoying the show, usually taking my side.
“Don’t forget to have her sign,” Dinesh said.
Tyler nodded and pulled out the thick envelope. “Count it then sign on the back.”
“But be a little discreet,” Dinesh whispered. “We don’t want to look like drug dealers!”
I chuckled and began thumbing through the money. Four thousand two hundred five dollars, exactly the amount written on the back. The other three had signed underneath that figure.
“Plus mine,” I said.
Dinesh nodded. “Right. You count yours out, and then one of us will sign again.”
I carefully counted out the $795 I’d cashed in. It was a little less than I’d figured, probably due to the brain’s natural tendency to exaggerate the good and minimize the bad. I placed it in the manila envelope, added the total to the others’ winnings, and signed next to it. Then Dinesh licked it, sealed it, and signed across the seal.
“This is how they like us to do it,” he said, almost apologetically. “We all trust each other, and we’re good Christians. But by being anal about it, it means we don’t ever have to worry about anything.”
I nodded. “Makes sense to me,” I lied. They were ignoring the obvious fact that I could have stashed away half my winnings before I handed it over. I supposed the idea was that we all trusted each other, and by signing the envelope, we were vouching for each other. It made it impossible for whoever turned in the money to take a little off the top after we turned our winnings over, which was something, at least. We parted on good terms and agreed we’d go over the details of our winning run at the next full-group meeting where all of our moves would be analyzed by everyone else.
I had packed an outfit for Cougar’s, so I was able to go straight to the club and get there by ten when it would just be hitting its busiest rush. I wound up being about ten minutes late, thoughâthe line at the McDonald’s drive-thru was brutal.
CHAPTER SIX
I spent the weekend doing my normal routine. Out of bed by eleven, putter around the apartment, work out, shop, obsess about where my life had gone wrong, eat too much. Saturday night I decided to dance an extra hour at the club, hoping to burn away a few extra calories, but instead, I spent most of the time walking around begging drunk guys to buy lap dances. I used to look at other girls doing the same thing and think how pathetic they were, and I wondered if any of the younger girls were thinking the same thing about me. Was it that I was getting older? Or just fatter? Did they notice the extra weight, or was it just an unlucky night? I need to stop doing this, I kept telling myself.
Sunday meant church at St. Christopher’s, a place that never shied away from taking up two collections during the same service. I never minded contributing to the parish expensesâthe air conditioning bill alone must have been a million a year, and I was not about to sit there and roast like a ham hockâbut the second coll
ection offended my skinflint sensibilities. The collection that morning sounded legit (something about medical treatment for poor people in Ecuador), so I threw a ten in the bowl and prayed that it might make up for a few of my sins. Whom was I kidding? Given my history, washing away my sins was going to take a hell of a lot more than ten bucks.
With no plans the rest of Sunday, I called up my friend Cody and convinced him that a hike at Red Rock Canyon would be a good idea. The ninety-seven-degree afternoon had other ideas, though, and after only a half hour, we both looked like we’d been swimming in Lake Meadâwhen it still had water. Even dripping with sweat, Cody still managed to look beautiful, like the guy on the cover of a steamy romance novel, only less cheesy. Damn him. Five years earlier, he had been the star of a male revue show, and now he was living the life of a wealthy divorcee, thanks to the fact that I had proved his wife was a murderer.
We were standing on an outcropping four-hundred feet in the air, admiring the expansive view of desert, wildlife, and shimmering colorful rock formations. I wasn’t usually a mushy romantic when it came to that kind of thing, but the rocks were truly awe-inspiring.
Cody cleared his throat. “You putting on weight, Raven?”
My face got hot. “You want me to push you off this rock?” I asked.
“Sorry,” he said. “Just thought you’d like to know.”
I stared at him, incredulous. “You thought I’d like to know? Why?”
He shrugged. “I was a dancer, remember? We had to be seven-percent body fat or less, and so if one of us was getting a little chunky, the others would point it out. Better than having the boss pull you aside, right? Professional courtesy. That’s all.”
I shook my head in disgust, even angrier because he was partly right. “You men can be soâ¦robotic. Of course it makes sense, if you look at it rationally. But⦔
“If I look at it like a woman?” Cody was smiling.
I put my hands on my hips. “Yes. For a damned minute, look at it like a woman. Like a human being. I know I’m plumping up, thank you. I do not want to be reminded of it. Got it?”
Double Down (Raven McShane Mysteries Book 4) Page 4
