Vegas Vengeance

by Randy Wayne White

  “And that includes the Vegas police?”

  “To a certain extent. Hell, that’s why I knew we had to bring in an outsider. Even my cop friends can’t find out anything. They have to play everything exactly by the book. And until these bastards come out in the open, they can’t even hit them with a loitering charge.” Kevin Smith stood suddenly, smiling as if his good humor had returned. “But that’s enough talk about those bums for now, Hawk. I haven’t even given you a tour of the casino yet.”

  “Can you include a visit to your switchboard terminal station in the tour?”

  Smith looked at him oddly. “Sure. If you want.”

  “I want.”

  Even though it was a Thursday afternoon, the casino was crowded.

  The noise of a jazzy band from one of the lounge areas mixed with the alto garble of crowd noise. Men in white dinner jackets. Middle-aged women in gowns designed to reveal rather than conceal. Cigarette smoke and wild peals of laughter.

  Hawker didn’t like crowds. He decided it was to be one of those tours that had to be politely endured.

  He was wrong.

  Kevin Smith knew the casino business, and Hawker soon found himself fascinated by the intricacies of managing a big-time gambling operation. Smith led him through the rows of slot machines in the lobby, all attended by handle-yanking women, purses on their laps.

  “There’re more than sixty thousand slots in Nevada,” Smith said, raising his voice above the noise of the crowd. “I think I already told you the kind of revenue they produce. It’s because people get addicted to the little bastards. Hell, they’re always trying to beat them one way or another. They try foreign coins, wire shims, kicking and punching them—it must have something to do with people hating to lose to machines. We went through a period when ladies were bringing big magnets to throw off the mechanism. They’d carry the magnets in their purses and hold them up to the window to stop the wheels. Christ, one night we caught a lady in here with a magnet that must have weighed forty pounds—carried the damn thing in a purse the size of a suitcase. When we asked her how she’d managed, she told us in absolute seriousness, ‘Practice.’ Turns out she’d ripped off just about every casino in Vegas. And the old dame was proud of herself!”

  The women at the slot machines did not glance up as the two men pressed by.

  The main casino was ballroom-sized. The balcony was right out of a Western movie. The gambling tables were the color of fine putting greens. The roulette wheels took center stage, spinning and clattering as the players watched, mesmerized.

  To Hawker, it was a blur of random activity. But Smith began to bring it all into focus.

  “Hawk, a casino manager has to win his money three times here. First I have to win it from the players. Then from the dealers. Then from my behind-the-scenes people.”

  “Am I supposed to understand that, Kevin?”

  The older man laughed. “Stealing, Hawk. Greed. I employ good people here. But it’s an awful damn big temptation to handle all those high-stake chips every night without trying to pocket one or two. In Vegas, you see, a casino chip is as good as cash. So to combat that, I use the same system most of the casinos use. For each eight-hour shift, I have a shift boss. He’s the overseer. He runs the show. Under him, we have pit bosses. There’s a pit boss for the blackjack pit, where all the blackjack tables are; a pit boss for the dice pit, one for the baccarat tables; and so on. The pit bosses are in charge of all the tables in their area—a big responsibility with all the noise and activity going on. So to help them, we have floor men who walk up and down behind the dealers to make sure no one gets lighthanded. At the baccarat tables, we have a ladder man—a guy who sits on a stand and watches from above …”

  As Smith talked, all the random activity came into focus for Hawker. The strategic placement of the employees, he realized, was as carefully planned as the location of teller windows at banks.

  What Hawker found especially interesting was the way Smith said the casinos dealt with gamblers who owed them money.

  “All casinos have a marker system, Hawk. That means we will extend the customer credit if he signs a marker for it. Sometimes customers skip when it comes time to collect. Every year, the Five-Cs complex extends about a million in credit, and we usually fail to collect about two hundred thousand. So we send out our collectors. In the movies, our collectors would be Humphrey Bogart types. You know, tough guys. They’d break legs, threaten wives, whatever it took to get the money.” Smith laughed. “But it’s nothing like that. You see, a gambling debt cannot be legally collected. And there isn’t a casino manager or stockholder who doesn’t want it to stay that way.”

  “What?”

  “I’m serious. Making gambling debts legally collectible would be the beginning of the end of our business. Think about it. A day wouldn’t go by that a newspaper didn’t carry the story of how some local family man had lost everything to a Vegas gambling casino. Very bad for the image, and the voters don’t like that sort of thing. Plus, ruining an avid gambler is strictly a stupid thing to do. Even if he does owe you money, he’s going to keep working and keep gambling as long as he’s not in prison—which he would be, if we had to take our debtors to court. You see, Hawk, a casino owner looks upon each avid gambler as an annuity. A gambler pays steady dividends over the years. And we’ll go way out of our way to make sure he doesn’t get hurt too badly on a trip to one of our casinos. We want to keep him healthy. We want to keep him working.”

  “But why would you have to collect? Even if the debt was legally collectible, why would you have to pursue it?”

  “Because the IRS would make us. The IRS is the only one that wants to make gambling debts legally collectible. That way they can tax the money twice. You see, when a debtor welches on us, we don’t have to pay taxes on it because it’s money we never received. It goes down as a business loss. So the IRS says we have to make a ‘reasonable’ effort to collect. So we send out collectors. If the gambler tells the collector to get the hell off his property, the collector gets in his car and comes home. We’ve made our reasonable effort. And our gambler is still healthy and working. When he’s feeling lucky, he’ll return to our casinos and place a few bets. Of course, the IRS is pissed off, but what else is new?”

  Kevin Smith spent another hour showing Hawker the casino. The terminology was new but interesting. Hawker learned about shills, drop boxes, croupiers and crossroaders.

  It was while he was at the roulette table that the key to Jason Stratton’s code finally came to Hawker.

  Kevin Smith was explaining how the random probabilities aren’t always so random in roulette.

  “Big-time gamblers have hired scientists to make studies,” Smith was saying. “See, all the numbers on the wheel are either red or black. These scientists discovered that red paint and black paint have different chemical properties. Black paint tends to make the wooden fibers of the wheel harder, and thus helps the ball to bounce out. But red paint eats into the wooden fibers of the slot and helps the ball stick. The difference in the percentages is small, but I’ve read there is some truth to it …”

  Hawker didn’t hear the rest of what he was saying. Something he had said kept echoing in his head. “… the random probabilities aren’t always so random.”

  Now excited about finally getting into Stratton’s journal, Hawker cut the tour short. Kevin Smith insisted on going with him to the switchboard terminal. It was downstairs in the guts of the building, amid boxes of musty show costumes, retired slot machines, roulette wheels.

  The terminal station had a room all its own. On each wall was a closet-size beige terminal box. Inside each box was a vein-work of candy-colored wires running to rows of clattering switching stations.

  Hawker brought out the VL-34 and drew out the antenna. With all the electrical equipment around, the audio alert went off immediately. But it wasn’t until he pointed the antenna at the second bank of switches that the flashing yellow light told him there was an in-house t
ap.

  It took Hawker all of thirty seconds to find the mouse-size bug.

  Captain Kevin Smith looked on, beaming his approval as Hawker held up his find.

  But then the door to the terminal flew open, and a man dressed in coveralls stepped in.

  The stocking knotted over his head contorted his face into a fleshy mass.

  The .45 automatic in his right hand was up and firing before Hawker could react.

  There were two deafening explosions, and Kevin Smith was smacked back against the wall.

  Hawker was already in mid-stride as the .45’s muzzle vectored toward him.

  thirteen

  Hawker stepped under the gun, then locked both hands on the man’s arm. He slammed downward, as if trying to break firewood over his knee.

  The man in the stocking mask screamed in agony as the gun fell to the cement floor.

  There was an explosion. For a crazy moment, Hawker thought Kevin Smith had somehow found a weapon and fired. The man in the stocking mask jolted backward, blood spouting from beneath his chin.

  It took Hawker a second to realize what had happened.

  The impact of the .45 hitting the cement had triggered it.

  The man had been killed by his own weapon.

  Hawker had been holding him by the bib of his coveralls. The accidental shot had come all too close. Hawker released his grip, and the man fell heavily to the floor. His hand moved sleepily to the black hole in his throat.

  Hawker rushed to the fallen Captain Smith. He was still conscious, but bleeding from the shoulder.

  Smith winced as Hawker forced him to lie flat on his back. Because there was nothing else available, Hawker dragged the corpse of their attacker over and used it to elevate Smith’s feet.

  More gunshot victims die because of shock than because of the slugs in them.

  “How bad is it?” Smith demanded. “Where did he get me?”

  “The shoulder. He shot twice, but I think one of them went into the wall.”

  “Shit, it feels like Nolan Ryan hit me with a brick from about five feet away.” He chuckled through the sweat and pain. “All those years on the force, and I never even got a scratch. This is a real pisser, Hawk.”

  “You’re going to be okay, Kev. Just hold tight. I’m going to get help.”

  As Hawker turned to go, Smith called after him. “Hawk! I want you to nail these bastards, Hawk. I want you to make them wish they had never been born.”

  Hawker winked at him. “Forty-eight hours, Captain. If things go right, it should all be over in forty-eight hours.”

  So Hawker made his way through the throng of gamblers as fast as he could without causing panic. He buttonholed the same deskman from the day before.

  When Hawker told him Kevin Smith had been shot, the deskman’s European facade fell away like a cheap suit. His eyes bulged as he dialed the emergency number. He screamed for an ambulance in a rank Bronx accent.

  Hawker carried a blanket and a flagon of water back to the basement. Smith was in pain but resting when the men with the stretcher got there. The EMTs agreed the wound wasn’t too bad. Smith would be okay.

  And then the police came, and Hawker had to keep repeating his story. Policemen ask a great deal of questions when there is a corpse involved. Hawker did his best to seem naive, helpful and polite.

  “No, Officer, I have no idea who the man was and why he might want to shoot Captain Smith. Hell, this is my first trip to Vegas. Captain Smith was just showing me around. Yes, Officer, I was so scared I guess I kind of got woozy and fell toward the guy. I must have hit his hand or something, because his gun dropped to the floor and went off. What? No, the guy never said a word after he fell. But frankly, I wasn’t doing much listening. All that blood and excitement. I think I must have passed out for a second. Next thing I knew, the guy in the stocking mask was dead, and Captain Smith was telling me to go get help. No, Officer, he didn’t say a word to us. At least, I don’t think he did. Captain Smith could probably tell you better. He was a policeman, so he’s probably used to this kind of excitement. Personally, if I never hear another gun go off in my life, I’ll be happy. I still feel kind of dizzy. Like I might faint or something.”

  The John Q. Public act worked, and the police dismissed Hawker quickly. They had enough on their minds without having to worry about some tourist with a bad case of the faints.

  Hawker didn’t waste any time getting back to his room. After first making sure the strands of hair were still safely in place at the front door, Hawker entered, slipped his shoes and jacket off, grabbed a cold beer from the refrigerator and carried Jason Stratton’s journal to the desk.

  The problem he had had with the journal was that he couldn’t segment the seemingly random letters into word blocks. All the letters ran together with an occasional number thrown in. Some of the numbers had up to four digits.

  A sentence might read:

  S73hbr3521usra9lXzwxzwz.…

  The use of the numbers was the most confusing thing. Hawker had at first assumed they filled their obvious role. Stratton was a scientist, and scientists use a lot of numbers.

  But then Hawker saw that there were numbers throughout the entries. Far too many numbers to be anything but part of the code.

  And that was what had stumped him.

  But when Kevin Smith had said the random numbers in roulette weren’t always so random, it crossed Hawker’s mind that Stratton’s journal might benefit from the same paradox. The random numbers weren’t random.

  It took Hawker an intense two hours to crack the code. And when he finally got the key, he cursed himself for not recognizing the simplicity of it. Stratton had invented it as a teenager, after all. It had to be reasonably basic. And it was. But Stratton had been smart enough to use numbers to camouflage it, make it seem harder than it was.

  Stratton had invented the code to protect his most private thoughts from the prying eyes of outsiders. Later, as an adult, he had used it out of habit, secure, perhaps, in the knowledge that someone else in his field would find it difficult to plagiarize his observations.

  Hawker concentrated on decoding the last three entries. He stopped only to dial the front desk and demand that a typewriter be sent to his room immediately.

  Probably because of the tone of Hawker’s voice, room service was uncharacteristically efficient. The typewriter arrived ten minutes later.

  It was a simple surrogate code, taken from the arrangement of a typewriter keyboard. Z had replaced A, X had replaced B and so on. All the numbers did was denote spaces between the words. They had no other meaning. And were chosen completely at random. Numbers that actually belonged within the context of the sentence were enclosed in brackets.

  Slowly, the last three entries began to reveal themselves.

  There were a few touching references to Barbara Blaine. His lover; his wife to be. But the entries largely concerned a discovery he had made. A wonderful discovery, in the mind of Jason Stratton.

  A discovery that would make it possible for Barbara to give up her business. A discovery that would bring them enough money to get married and live happily ever after. The discovery all keyed around a word Hawker didn’t recognize.

  The word was pitchblende.

  At first, Hawker thought the word was just more of Stratton’s code talk. But on a hunch, he called room service again, and in the same dire tone, demanded that the necessary reference book be sent up immediately.

  The book took twenty-five minutes.

  It was worth the wait.

  Jason Stratton had made an interesting discovery, all right.

  Pitchblende.

  But it was a discovery that had, in fact, sentenced him to death.

  As Hawker labored over the journal, he began to feel as if he had known Jason Stratton. And he liked him. Stratton had the brain of a scientist but the heart of a man-child.

  The innocence Barbara Blaine had mentioned permeated the journal. Stratton wrote with wonder and joy and humor. And Hawk
er felt himself feeling very damn bad that they had never had the chance to meet.

  Hawker could picture Stratton as a shy teenager, hunched over the typewriter keys as he invented his secret code, grinning at his own cunning, delighted that he had finally figured out how to fool the intimidating adults in his world.

  Later, the code would be used to record such esoteric findings as sedimentary clastic deposits in an ancient riverbed.

  Hawker wondered how Stratton would have reacted if he could have known his code would someday make it possible to take revenge on his killers.

  fourteen

  Hawker got the name of the corporation from Stratton’s journal.

  He got the address from telephone information, but the address meant nothing to him.

  Rural Route #7, Pahrump, Nevada.

  Where in the hell was Pahrump, Nevada?

  He decided Barbara Blaine might be able to help. He picked up the phone to call her, then reasoned it might be better to see her face-to-face. Making love with an unidentified woman in pitch darkness can, after a time, become a disruptive influence on the powers of ratiocination.

  Hawker wanted a clear mind for the work ahead. Besides, he was growing anxious as hell to find out whom he had slept with the previous night.

  He telephoned downstairs to the deskman. The deskman had recovered his composure and his European accent. After being reassured that Kevin Smith had been transported to the hospital and was in good condition, Hawker asked that a car be sent around for his use.

  As he stepped outside, he saw the bellboy dangling the keys to the Jaguar in his hand. Hawker took them wordlessly and slid in behind the wheel. The bullet hole in the windshield had been fixed, no questions asked. But it did explain the wicked grin on the bellboy’s face.