Burke's Gamble

by William F. Brown

“Jimmy, everybody loses,” Ace corrected them. “That’s how the casinos stay in business.”

  “Not us. We never lose, not unless we want to. Ronald and I are card counters,” Jimmy looked around at the group and announced proudly. “It’s how we paid for graduate school.”

  Bob stared at him. “I thought the casinos all went to a six-deck system, with mechanical shuffling, intelligent shoes, and all that stuff, just to stop those systems.”

  “They did,” Jimmy replied, “but it doesn’t matter.”

  “You mean you can keep six decks of cards in your head?” Linda asked, skeptical.

  “Well, I can, but most counters use a plus and minus system to keep track of the values that are played. It’s not nearly as good, but it does improve the odds somewhat. Unfortunately, if the casino has implemented the security systems you mentioned, it becomes more difficult.”

  “Then, how do you do it?” Bob asked.

  “Me? Well…” Jimmy sounded embarrassed, “I can actually remember all the cards that are played — four decks, six decks, eight decks, it really doesn’t matter. It’s a little 'gift' I have, and none of the casino countermeasures can stop that. But we did get caught a couple of times,” Jimmy admitted, shrugging it off.

  “Yeah, like at the Sun Casino in Connecticut,” Ronald added.

  “That Indian joint?” Ace asked.

  “And out in Vegas, at the Venetian, the Bellagio, and Harrah’s. We kind of got a little… carried away, and we weren’t too careful. We won too much, but those were the first times we tried it.”

  “You guys have expensive tastes,” Bob laughed. “You like to get beat up by the best.”

  “It was a long time ago, when we were freshmen out at Berkeley,” Jimmy said.

  “Young and dumb, who’d ’a guessed?” Ace smiled.

  “But you’re right, in Vegas, we thought they were going to beat the crap out of us, and the Indians almost did. They said they could do anything they wanted with us, since we were on the Res, and it’s a foreign country. They even had some hanks of hair hanging on the wall in their security office and they threatened us with some big hunting knives. They said they could scalp us, and nobody could do anything about it.”

  “But we knew they were just trying to scare us… and I guess they did,” Ronald said.

  “With the Indians, we weren’t really sure,” Jimmy added. “They kept all of our money, which is the same thing they did out in Vegas, but in the end they all just tossed us into the parking lot.”

  “That isn’t all they did. I’ll bet they also took your pictures,” Bob warned them. “The casinos have a national database on cheaters, and I’m pretty sure you guys are in it now.”

  “That was in our long-haired, geeky days, Mister B.,” Jimmy smiled. “We don’t look anything like that anymore.”

  “Great! That makes me feel a whole lot better,” Bob said, trying to keep a straight face.

  “Don’t worry, that’s when we learned we’ve got to intentionally lose a lot of hands," Ronald added. "That way, they don’t notice all the big ones we're winning. But tonight we’ll only break even. Promise.”

  Bob stared up at them and tried not to smile. “Okay, but I’m sending The Batman and Bulldog with you. Ace and Dorothy will catch up when we’re done here,” Bob told them. “I don’t want you getting grabbed by Carbonari’s security people. So no winning, you got that!”

  “Telling a gambler not to win?” Linda chirped. “Oh, lots of luck with that.”

  “Can I go too?” Patsy pleaded.

  “Absolutely not!” Bob told her. “After our last trip, your pretty face is all over their security cameras and computers — Linda’s and mine, too — so you stay here with us. But Jimmy, make sure you’re back by 12:30. Chester and Lonzo should be here by then.”

  The Geeks couldn’t wait to get off the boat. Batman and Bulldog followed closely behind, glancing back long enough to give Bob and Ace an amused look. As they disappeared down the pier, Bob saw Patsy going forward toward her cabin and called out to her, “Hey, girl, can you come here for a minute.”

  She turned around and gave him a frown, still pouting, but she slowly walked back. “You aren’t going to lecture me about Jimmy again, are you? Because…”

  “Nope, no lecture, not this time. Unlike my wife, I pick my battles.” That put a big smile on her face, until Bob told her the rest of the news. “I got a call from North Carolina when we were on the way up here. It seems somebody broke into your house in Fayetteville again and really tore the place apart. The police and the Army CID people think it wasn’t just vandalism. The burglars were looking for something. Do you have any idea what that might be?”

  “Me? No,” she answered. “Maybe they just saw an empty house. I’m not sure if I left any lights on, and we barely got to meet any of the neighbors.”

  “Okay, but if you think of anything, let me know. There were questions after Vinnie’s last tour in Afghanistan, and the CID’s going to want to talk to you when we get back.”

  “The CID? What did I do?” she asked, sounding afraid.

  “Nobody’s saying you did anything; but you own the house with Vinnie, and he’s the one they would have really liked to talk to.”

  “All he left me is that big mortgage he took out a week ago to pay off the casino, but you said they tore the place apart?”

  “Yes, and if you think of anything, have any questions, just want to talk, or want me to get you a lawyer, let me know, okay?”

  “Yeah, sure,” she said as she turned and walked away, suddenly looking shaken.

  Ace shook his head. “Double-down Vinnie strikes again.”

  “God, I hope not. Did you get anywhere with the video feeds?” Bob asked him.

  “Oh, yeah,” Ace smiled. “Operation Bootleg is up and running; and as it turns out, it wasn’t all that hard. Dorothy and I played electrical contractors again, complete with the hard hats we stole from the conference wing. Jimmy told me what to look for at the store, what to get, and how to install it. He’s smart, real smart. Too bad the Army can’t figure out how to get kids like that and keep them,” Ace said as he shook his head. “Ah, hell, I guess it wouldn’t be practical, anyway, would it? Two different worlds.”

  “More like two different universes.”

  “Point taken. Anyway, we hit the hotel around 7:00 when all the regular staff was gone. The junction boxes were tucked behind some bushes, but easy to get at. That let us work out of sight and hide our modem behind their boxes. We were in and out in five minutes. We put the booster in my rental car and powered it off one of the car batteries I bought.”

  “And it works?”

  “Five-by-five, but come up to the bridge for a moment. I have something you need to see.” Ace said. “You too, Ernie. I think we could use your expertise.”

  “This should be good,” Bob said as the three men and Dorothy walked the two flights of narrow stairs up to the dark flying bridge, where Koz sat in the captain’s chair with an M110 sniper rifle with night vision scope lying across his thighs. In his hands were a pair of Zeiss 8x56 binoculars, which Bob had found in the master suite and they were using to scan the Bimini Bay and its boat marina.

  “How’s it going?” Bob asked. “See anything?”

  “No, just your normal gambling and stuff-yourself-at-the-buffet crowd, plus the new gunmen Ace spotted.”

  “The new gunmen?” Bob’s head snapped around.

  “Here, I’ll show you,” Ace answered as he opened the notebook computer and hit replay. “I have the video feeds from both cameras going to DVD. One camera covers the door into the casino from the parking garage, while the other covers the big front door under the portico. Wait one. Let me find the time marker on the disk.”

  Dorothy stepped in and continued, “Right after we finished hooking it all up and turned on the modem, we drove down the parking ramp and stopped at the garage exit. Two dark-blue Mercedes limos zipped past us heading for the main hotel entrance.” />
  “We followed them. I’m not sure why,” Ace went on. “Sure enough, they pulled under the portico and seven guys got out. They stretched, as if they’d been in the cars for a while, which was when your friend Carbonari came out and greeted them. All smiles and hugs. I watched them, and they reminded me of the clowns we ran into in those woods outside Chicago — same cars, same ugly sports coats and gold chains, and the same beer guts.”

  “Reinforcements,” Bob quickly concluded.

  “You got it. Here, watch the video, I’ll slow it down.”

  Bob and Ernie leaned in closer and saw four Gumbahs get out of the lead car. As they did, it was easy to make out the shoulder and waist holsters they were wearing. The drivers popped open the car trunks and flipped their keys to the valets. At first, Carbonari was smiling, but as the Don saw three more men pile out of the second car, Bob thought he appeared much less enthusiastic. Still, they all exchanged handshakes and back slaps as they headed for the front doors.

  “The license plates on the cars are from New York. If you can zoom in on the numbers, I can run a trace on them,” Ernie said.

  “I figured you’d say that, already done,” Ace said as he handed him a slip of paper.

  “I’ll do it now,” Ernie said as he pulled out his cell phone and pressed a speed-dial number. “Gladys, this is Captain Travis over in Organized Crime. Can you run two plates for me…? Great. They’re New York State, numbers BSW-7522 and BSW-7523… Yes, I’ll wait,” he told her. “It shouldn’t take too long,” he said to the others as they watched the video recording again, carefully examining the faces. “Yes, what was that…?” Ernie said as Gladys came back on the line. “Okay, thanks.” Ernie hung up and turned toward the others and told them, “They are both registered to ‘Brooklyn Solid Waste,’ probably another mob front, but there are no warrants or warrants out on them.”

  Bob leaned in and watched the video a second time, and a third. “Yep, reinforcements, but that raises an interesting question. Who don’t you see?”

  The others leaned in, but they all shook their heads, not getting it.

  “Shaka Corliss and the two Hulks. Think about it — reinforcements arrive from Brooklyn, Carbonari comes out to greet them, and his head of security and two muscle men are nowhere to be seen?”

  “Another sign that we’ll never see them again,” Ernie agreed.

  It was almost 1:00 a.m. when the Geeks and their entourage managed to find their way back to the marina from the casino. Jimmy and Ronald were giggly and amped-up as they came aboard the big boat, still dressed in their “incognito casino outfits,” as Jimmy called them. He wore a black porkpie hat with dark sunglasses and a loud flower-print Hawaiian shirt, while Ronald opted for a flat-brim New York Yankees baseball hat, dark sunglasses, and a black turtleneck. Patsy met them like a new puppy who had been locked up alone all evening, which was pretty much the case, as she jumped up and down and giggled right along with them. Ace, Dorothy, the Batman, and Bulldog took up the rear, and headed for the refrigerator for beers.

  The two Geeks bounced over to the couch where Bob, Linda, Ernie, and Koz sat. They pulled several large wads of crumpled-up cash from their pockets, and dropped it on the coffee table. “Almost $5,300,” Ronald said. “I can’t believe how hot we were.”

  “I thought you weren’t going to win, only break even,” Bob glared at him.

  “We tried!” Jimmy pleaded. “We only played maybe ten or fifteen hands of blackjack, just a taste, and I’m not even sure we won there. Most of that’s from craps, Caribbean stud, some slots, and even the roulette table. We kept moving around, but we just kept winning.”

  Bob stared at him. “Well, I’m glad you had fun.”

  “And I’m glad you didn’t get your legs broken,” Ace said.

  “Or get scalped,” Linda added.

  That was when Lonzo and Chester came aboard, still wearing their blue work pants and shirt with a large “Boardwalk Services” embroidered patch across the back. They paused in the middle of the stairs and saw the others laughing and drinking beer. “I don’t know, about you Lonzo,” Chester said, “but I think we got the short end of this deal.”

  “Somebody get those guys a beer too,” Bob laughed. “It looks like they earned one.”

  “It really wasn’t all that bad, just boring,” Lonzo said as Ace handed them both a cold Bud. “And I wouldn’t want to do it for a living. The Army’s bad enough.”

  “Did you have any luck finding passwords?” Bob asked.

  “Jimmy was right; it wasn’t hard at all. Somebody spends all that money on complicated systems and passwords with all sorts of random letters and numbers, and then the worker bees leave them out in plain sight.”

  “And nobody saw you?”

  “I don’t think so,” Chester answered. “There are a couple of cameras in each office, mostly in the corners. They cover the room, but from a high angle; and they can’t see below the desktops. As we went around sweeping, dusting, and picking up trash, it was pretty easy to bend over and look around the computers, and grab the pieces of paper they wrote the passwords on. When we found one, we wrote the name down, too.”

  “Okay, give all those to Jimmy and Ronald. And Jimmy,” Bob turned and told him, “Get on these first thing in the morning. Now let’s get some sleep.”

  “Before we all disappear,” Ernie turned to Bob and asked, “Ace said you need a key card to get up to the roof and into the basement?”

  “We hoped Jimmy and Ronald might be able to work with the ones they gave the janitors, but those might not cover the really secure areas.”

  “Their security guards would have those, wouldn’t they?” Ernie asked.

  “Corliss and Van Gries certainly would,” Bob answered. “And maybe the supervisors and the Gumbahs, but probably not the ordinary, blue-coat rent-a-cops.”

  “Then why don’t we steal one?” Ernie asked. Bob stared at him and began to ask something, but Ernie continued. “Those same guys, wouldn’t their cell phones also be useful?”

  “Uh, yeah, they’d have all sorts of stuff on them — calls, numbers, and probably e-mail access, server information, and a lot of other things… but steal one? Who, you?”

  “No, no,” Ernie smiled and shook his head. “I mean a professional pickpocket. Look, there’s this guy named Dimitri Karides, whom I arrested at O’Hare just before your escapade up there. If I hadn’t been checking some other stuff on video, and started watching him for four or five days, I’d have never caught him. Even using slow motion, only rarely could I figure out what he was doing. The guy’s that good. Turns out there’s an international pickpocket school in Columbia. He said they wanted him to stay and teach, but they couldn’t afford him.”

  “Can we?” Bob asked.

  “Oh, he’s cheap now,” Ernie laughed. “He’s sitting in Cook County Jail.”

  “And you think you can get him out to come here to steal something for us?”

  “Are you kidding? Oh, I can come up with one reason or another to ‘badge him out;’ and if I promise him a good steak, he’d do anything to get out of that place for a few days. The odd thing is, he’s really a nice guy. Short, fat, thick glasses, with a big smile: he looks like a middle-aged bookkeeper. If Dorothy can fly me up there tomorrow in that Gulfstream, I can have him back here by mid-afternoon. Getting Dimi to steal something is the easy part; getting him to stop will be the problem.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  At 8:30 the next morning, Bob was on the flying bridge with Ace, trying to stay awake as he stared at the video feeds from the casino entrances on his notebook computer, when his cell phone rang.

  “Burke,” he answered.

  “Bobbie, Arnold Stansky here,” he heard and immediately sat up at attention.

  “Yes, sir, what can I…” he started to ask, but Stansky didn’t wait.

  “No time for that. Look, normally, I’d have O’Connor call you but I wanted you to hear this from me, direct. It’s about those fingerprints a
nd the blood.”

  “Yes, sir. What did you learn?”

  “Too damned much. For starters, any time you scratch a problem around here, you find the goddamn CIA underneath. They kept pulling that national security crap with me, if you can believe it! As if they thought that was gonna fly. I had to raise hell with the Deputy DCI himself out at Langley to get a straight story. And I only got that after I threatened to take the whole thing to the Chief of Staff and the Sec-Def, if they didn’t come clean.”

  “How could they argue with prints and a dead body, sir?”

  “You think? Anyway, the stiff is an ex-Navy SEAL named Peter Kowalski.”

  “A SEAL? What the hell was he…”

  “I bypassed the CIA. I went to the DoD database, which chained the prints to the Navy; and then I personally called the CNO. No one likes to air their dirty linen to another service, but when they learned the CIA was behind this, they were as pissed as I was. After seven years on active duty, Kowalski was court martialed and given a General Discharge ‘for the good of the service.’ Seems like there were a number of allegations regarding brutality and mistreatment of prisoners, which are notoriously hard to prove, a similar rape charge, and then one against a female Marine, eighteen months ago. Guess where he popped back up?”

  “Oh, don’t tell me,” Bob said in disgust. “Not that same rogue Ops group in Mosul, the one they think hit the Baghdad Museum?”

  “Bingo!”

  “But what was he doing in Fayetteville?”

  “You’re slow this morning, Ghost. The museum gold, two break-ins at that house, Vinnie Pastorini — why else would they ignore a KIA and go right back in to search the place again? It has to be the gold. They think it’s inside the house, or that the girl knows where it is.”

  Bob thought about it for a moment. “But they tore the whole house apart, all of it. If they found the gold, wouldn’t they have stopped and left?”

  “I don’t know if they found it or not, but I haven’t told you the worst part. The blood on the doorframe was Benson’s.”

  “Benson’s?”