The Collectors cc-2

by David Baldacci

  “Leave it to Bagger to get morons to line up for that crap and then drop their paychecks in his casinos while they’re getting fat and drunk,” Leo snarled.

  “Jerry collects chumps; that’s the lifeblood of the casino business.”

  “I remember when the first casino opened here in ’78,” Leo said.

  Annabelle nodded. “Resorts International, bigger than any Vegas casino at the time except the MGM. Paddy ran some crews here for a while at the beginning.”

  “Well, your old man never should have come back with you and me!” Leo lit a cigarette and pointed down the line of casinos. “I started out here. The casino crews back then were mostly locals. You had nurses, garbage truck drivers and gas jockeys all of a sudden dealing cards and running craps and roulette tables. They were so bad you could run any scam you wanted. Hell, you didn’t even have to cheat. You could make money just off their mistakes. That lasted about four years. I sent both my kids through college on the money I made back then.”

  She looked at him. “You never talked to me about your family before.”

  “Yeah, like you’re a real blabbermouth when it comes to that stuff.”

  “You knew my parents. What could I add to that?”

  “I had kids early. They’re grown and gone and so’s my old lady.”

  “Did she know what you did for a living?”

  “Hard to hide it after a while. She liked the money, just not the way I earned it. We never told the kids. I wasn’t going to let them get near the business.”

  “Smart man.”

  “Yeah, they still ditched me.”

  “Don’t look back, Leo, too many regrets start popping out.”

  He shrugged and then grinned. “We had a helluva roulette thing going here, didn’t we? Any con can past-post craps and blackjack, but only real pros can do it long-term at roulette. It’s as close as you can get to a long con at a casino table.” He looked at her admiringly. “You were the best claimer I’d ever seen, Annabelle. You could bring the heat or the cool. The pit bosses melted every damn time. And you saw the steam coming before any of us,” he added, referring to suspicious casino employees.

  “And you were the best mechanic I ever worked with, Leo. Even when some rook cut into your move, you still nailed it before the dealer turned back around.”

  “Yeah, I was good, but the fact is you were just as good a mechanic as me. I think sometimes your old man kept me on because you said to.”

  “You give me way too much credit. Paddy Conroy only did what Paddy Conroy wanted to do. And what he ultimately did was screw us both.”

  “Yeah, and leave us for Bagger to feed on. And if you hadn’t been cat-quick about it and made him miss by a couple inches?” He looked out toward the ocean. “Maybe we’d be out there somewhere.”

  She plucked the cigarette out of his mouth. “And now that we’re done patting each other on the back down memory lane, let’s get to work.”

  They started toward the casino entrance and then abruptly stopped. “Let the cattle drive get by,” Leo warned.

  Each casino had a bus drive where the charters would start lining up at eleven o’clock in the morning. They’d disgorge their usually elderly passengers who’d spend all day in the casino running through their Social Security money and eating junk food. Then they’d hop back on the bus and head home with little to live on for the rest of the month, but certain that they would be back when their next government check rolled in.

  Leo and Annabelle watched the senior citizen brigades charge into the Pompeii in time for the first eruption of the day and then wandered in after them. They spent several hours walking the place and even played a few games of chance along the way. Leo had a nice ride at craps, while Annabelle stuck to blackjack, winning more than she lost.

  They hooked up a little later and had a drink at one of the bars. As Leo watched a curvy thong-wearing waitress carry a load of drinks to a hot craps table three deep with bettors looking to ride some action to riches, Annabelle said in a low voice, “Well?”

  He munched on some pecans and sipped his Jack and Coke. “Blackjack table number five. Looks like we got a little monkey business coming out of the shoe,” he said, referring to the device that held the packs of cards.

  “Dealer in on it?”

  “Oh, yeah. How about you?”

  Annabelle took a swallow of her wine before answering. “Roulette table next to the spinning car, we got a four-person past-posting team dragging and doing an okay job of it.”

  “I thought they taught the dealers to really case their bets now. And how about all the sophisticated eyes-in-the-sky and microcameras they got these days?”

  “You know how crazy the roulette table is, that’s why it’s past-posting Mecca. And if you’re good, anything’s possible despite all the high-tech stuff.”

  He touched his drink against hers. “Don’t we know that?”

  “How’s security look?”

  “Nothing out of the ordinary. I’m assuming the vault’s under a thousand tons of concrete surrounded by a million guys armed with machine guns.”

  “Good thing we’re not going that route,” she replied dryly.

  “Yeah, you don’t want to mess up your manicure.” He put his drink down. “How old would Jerry be now?”

  “Sixty-six,” she answered promptly.

  “I bet he hasn’t mellowed with age,” Leo said grumpily.

  “He hasn’t.”

  She sounded so sure, he looked at her suspiciously.

  “You check out the mark, Leo, remember? Con Man 101.”

  “Damn, there’s the asshole himself,” Leo hissed, and immediately turned away.

  As Annabelle watched, six men, all of them young, big and burly, walked by. They were surrounding another man, shorter but very fit, with broad shoulders and thick white hair. He was dressed in an expensive blue suit with a yellow tie. Jerry Bagger’s face was heavily tanned. Down one cheek ran a scar, and it looked like the man’s nose had been broken at least a couple times. Underneath his thick white eyebrows was a pair of canny eyes. His gaze darted across his casino, seemingly absorbing all sorts of interesting data from his empire of slots, cards and crushed hopes.

  As soon as they passed by, Leo turned back around and struggled to regain his breath. A ticked-off Annabelle said, “Your hyperventilating when the guy is all the way across the casino didn’t really figure into my plan, Leo.”

  He held up a hand. “Not to worry, I’m over it.” He drew one last deep breath.

  “We’ve never even met the guy face-to-face. It was his goons who tried to kill us back then. It’s not like he’s going to recognize you.”

  “I know, I know.” He finished his drink. “What now?”

  “When it’s time to go, we go. Until then, we work our script and practice our cues and look for any edge we can get, because Jerry’s so damn unpredictable that even if we’re perfect, it may not be enough.”

  “You know, I forgot what a cheerleader you are.”

  “Nothing wrong with stating the obvious. If he throws us a curve, we have to be ready to hit it out, or else.”

  “Yeah, we know all about or else, don’t we?”

  He and Annabelle both stared silently across the casino at Jerry Bagger and his army as they exited the casino, climbed into a mini-motorcade and headed off, perhaps to break somebody’s kneecaps for cheating the casino king out of thirty bucks, much less 30 million.

  CHAPTER 18

  AT THE END OF A WEEK THEY were ready. Annabelle was dressed in a dark black skirt and high heels, and she wore minimal jewelry. Her hair was now blond and spiky. She looked nothing like her enhanced casino photo. Leo’s appearance had been altered even more radically. His toupee was gray and thin, with a hard widow’s peak. He sported a small goatee, slender glasses and a three-piece suit.

  He said, “You know the only thing that bugs me about this is ratting out other cons.”

  “Like they wouldn’t do it to us if t
hey had the chance to walk away with millions? Besides, the ones we pegged aren’t all that good. Sooner or later they’ll get caught anyway. And it’s not like the old days. No more bodies buried in the desert or chucked into the Atlantic. Past-posting’s a conspiracy to commit theft by deception crime, something like a third-degree misdemeanor. They’ll pay their fine or do their bit of time and go hit the casino boats in the Midwest or pester the Indians in New England until enough time passes and then they change their appearance, come back here to start all over again.”

  “Yeah, but it’s still a raw deal.”

  She shrugged. “If it’ll make you feel better, I’ll get their names and send them twenty grand each for their troubles.”

  Leo brightened but then said, “Okay, just don’t take it out of my share.”

  They had left Freddy and Tony and checked into one of the best hotels on the Boardwalk. They would have no further direct contact with either of the men from now on. Before leaving them she had admonished both, particularly Tony, to keep in mind that spies were everywhere in this town. “You don’t flash cash, you don’t joke, you don’t say anything that might tip someone that a con is going down, because they’ll go running to somebody to tell and collect some scratch. One slip and it could be over, for all of us.”

  She had looked directly at Tony when she added, “This is the real deal, Tony. No screwups.”

  “I’m covered. I swear,” he’d declared.

  Leo and Annabelle rode in a cab to the Pompeii and immediately took up their vigils. Annabelle watched a crew that she’d been observing running a past-posting scam at the roulette tables in casinos up and down the Boardwalk. There were various incarnations of past-posting, which had taken its name from a horse-racing scam where bets were laid down after the results of the race were known by the bettor. With roulette it involved surreptitiously sliding big dollar chips on winning numbers after the ball had dropped and then collecting. Some teams used a different technique. The bettor would hide the big chips under the cheaper ones before the ball dropped. Then the bettor would either “drag” or pull the big chips off the table if the number lost or do nothing except scream for joy if the number won, all right under the dealer’s nose. The latter technique had the distinct advantage of taking the powerful eye-in-the-sky out of the equation because it would only be called into play if the bet won. Then the tape would show that the bettor had done nothing with the chips, since he would only pull the chip if the bet lost. Past-posting at the roulette table involved enormous amounts of practice, timing, teamwork, patience, natural skill and, most of all, nerve.

  Annabelle and Leo had once been masters at this game. However, the surveillance technology in use today by the casinos drastically reduced the chances of anyone except the very best cheats being able to conduct the scam successfully over time. And the nature of the con meant that you could only work it a limited number of times at a casino before you were taken down, so the bet and the odds had better be large enough to justify the risk.

  Leo kept his eye on a blackjack table and a gent who’d been playing and winning for a nice stretch. Not big enough to arouse suspicion, but cumulatively Leo figured the guy was making a lot more than the minimum wage for sitting on his butt and sipping free drinks. He used his cell phone to call Annabelle.

  “You ready to do this?” he asked.

  “Looks like my past-posters are just about ready to hit it, so let’s go.”

  Annabelle walked over to a thickset man she’d easily sized up as a pit boss and whispered into his ear, inclining her head toward the roulette table where the scam was happening.

  “There’s a third-section-straight-up drag going down at table number six. The two women seated on the right side are the check-bettors. The mechanic’s in the chair near the bottom of the table. The claimer’s the skinny guy with glasses hanging back behind the dealer’s left shoulder. Call up to the eye-in-the-sky and tell the layout camera to zoom in on the action and hold until the drag’s executed.”

  Roulette tables were so large they were routinely covered by two ceiling cameras, one aimed on the wheel, the other on the table. The problem was the surveillance tech could only look at one camera at a time. The pit boss stared at her for a second, but Annabelle’s authoritative description couldn’t be ignored. He quickly spoke into his headset, relaying this order.

  Meanwhile, Leo sidled up to the pit boss in his section and whispered, “At blackjack table number five you got a bad dealer doing the zero-shuffle. The player in seat number three has a card counter analyzer strapped to his right thigh. If you get close enough, you can see the impression through his pant leg. He’s also got an intracranial in his right ear where he receives the call from the computer. The eye-in-the-sky won’t pick up the deck cut because the dealer’s movements obscure the slice, but if you get a handheld down here, you can record it easy enough from floor level.”

  As with Annabelle’s warning, the pit boss only took a few seconds to call upstairs, and the handheld came down to take pictures.

  Five minutes later the stunned cons were led away and the cops called.

  Ten minutes after that, Annabelle and Leo found themselves in a part of the casino where no grandma with a Social Security check to blow would ever be invited.

  Jerry Bagger rose from behind the huge desk in his lavish office, his hands in his pockets and several nice pieces of bling around his wrists and his muscular, tanned neck.

  “Excuse me for not thanking you for saving me a few lousy grand,” he said in a bark of a voice that revealed his Brooklyn background. “Fact is I’m not used to people doing me favors. It makes the hair on the back of my neck stand up. I don’t like the hair on my neck standing up. The only thing I like erect on my body is what’s behind my zipper.”

  The six other men in the room, all in high-dollar suits with big shoulders that were not the result of padding, stared at Leo and Annabelle, their hands clasped in front of them.

  Annabelle stepped forward. “We didn’t do it as a favor. We did it so we’d end up here to see you.”

  Bagger spread his hands. “So you’re here. You’ve seen me. Now what?”

  “A proposition.”

  Bagger rolled his eyes. “Oh, here we go.” He sat down on a leather couch, picked out a walnut from a bowl on the table there and cracked it open using only his right hand. “Is this the part where you say you’re going to make me a ton of money, even though I already got a ton of money?” He ate the bits of nut.

  “Yes. And you can serve your country at the same time.”

  Bagger snarled, “My country? Is that the same country that keeps looking to lock my ass up for doing something that’s perfectly legal?”

  “We can help with that,” Annabelle said.

  “Oh, so now you’re feds?” He looked at his men. “Hey, guys, we got feds in the casino. Call the fucking Orkin man.”

  The muscle all laughed on cue.

  Annabelle sat down on the couch next to Bagger and handed him a card. He looked at it. “Pamela Young, International Management, Inc.,” he read. “Means shit to me.” He tossed it back to her. “My guys tell me you two really know your casino scams. They teaching that in fed school now? Not that I believe you’re feds.”

  Leo said in a gruff tone, “You run what in a day, thirty, forty mil? You have to keep a certain level of reserves to comply with state gaming regs, but that leaves a lot of cash to float. So what do you do with the excess? Come on, tell us.”

  The casino owner looked at him in amazement. “I wallpaper my fucking house with it, asshole.” He looked at his muscle. “Get this jerk-off outta my face.”

  His men moved forward, and two of them actually lifted Leo off the floor before Annabelle said, “What would you say to a ten percent return on that money?”

  “I’d say that sucks.” Bagger rose and went toward his desk.

  “I meant ten percent every two days.” He stopped, turned and looked at her. “What do you think of that?” sh
e said.

  “Too good to be true, so it is.” He took a steel-gray $5,000 casino chip from a desk drawer and tossed it to her. “Go have some fun. No need to thank me. Consider it a gift from God. Don’t let the door hit that nice ass on the way out.” He signaled his men to let Leo go.

  She said, “Just think about it, Mr. Bagger. We’ll be back tomorrow to ask again. In accordance with my orders, we’re required to ask twice. If you don’t want in then, Uncle Sam will just go down the Boardwalk and give the deal to one of your competitors.”

  “Good luck on that.”

  She said confidently, “It worked in Vegas, it’ll work here.”

  “Yeah, right. I wish I was smoking whatever it is you are.”

  “Gambling revenue topped out five years ago, Mr. Bagger. So how can the Vegas crowd keep putting up billion-dollar properties? It’s like they’re printing money.” She paused. “And they are. And helping their country at the same time.”

  He sat down behind his desk and stared at her with, for the first time, just a hint of interest. That was all Annabelle needed at this point.

  “And did you ever wonder why none of the Vegas players have been investigated by the feds in the last ten years? I’m not talking Mafia prosecutions, that’s old news. But you and I know what goes on there. And yet like you said, the Justice Department is all over your butt.” She paused. “And I know a man as smart as Jerry Bagger can’t believe in that much luck.” She laid her card down on his desk. “You can call anytime. People in my business don’t keep regular office hours.” She glanced at the big men who still hovered next to Leo. “And we can see ourselves out, fellows, thanks.”