by James Swain
“Well, it’s all wrong,” Valentine said. “Crooked dealers will create spots on their clothing to hide stolen chips. Like behind wide cuffs and down their pants. Your dealers need to start wearing cummerbunds.”
“But they look stupid,” the chief said.
“Maybe so, but they prevent theft. You ever hear of a pants sub?” Neither man had, so he explained. “The dealer takes two pairs of underwear, puts one inside the other and sews the bottoms together. Stolen chips are dropped behind the waistband and released. They’ve got nowhere to go but the pants sub. Years ago, a gang of croupiers in Nice got caught using pants subs. They’d stolen fourteen million bucks.”
Running Bear frowned. “You getting this down, Harry?”
Smooth Stone picked up a pad and pen off the desk and started scribbling. Valentine suddenly felt warm, and tugged at his collar. There no longer seemed to be enough air in the cramped trailer. Then he realized what was happening.
He was having an epiphany.
He’d been having epiphanies most of his life. Long ago, he had accepted that a part of his brain worked on its own, filtering information. And what this part was telling him was that Jack Lightfoot was dead, and Running Bear and Smooth Stone knew it. If not, they would have been out in the Everglades with bloodhounds searching for him. That was the smart thing to do. In fact, it was the only thing to do.
A man was missing. Find him.
Only, they weren’t looking. Instead, they were concentrating on trying to figure out how Lightfoot had cheated them. They knew Jack Lightfoot was dead, but were they his murderers?
“So what you are saying,” Running Bear said, “is that it’s a miracle we haven’t had more cheating before now.”
Valentine blinked awake. Lois had told him he looked like a zombie when he had these episodes. Then he’d hit sixty, and people had stopped commenting about them.
“That’s right,” he said.
Running Bear opened his desk drawer and removed a videotape. Scotch-taped to it was a check. The chief’s long arm reached across the desk. “This is the surveillance video of Jack Lightfoot cheating us. We need to know what he was doing, so we can prevent it from happening again.”
Valentine slipped the video under his arm. He planned to overnight the video to Bill Higgins first thing tomorrow. Running Bear and Smooth Stone were either murderers or accomplices to murder, and he wanted nothing to do with them. Standing, he felt a bead of sweat roll down his face. He hoped the men did not see it.
“Call you in a few days,” he said.
6
The first thing Valentine did after he got into his Honda was to tear up Running Bear’s check. He was a man of principles. Principle No. 1 said that he didn’t work for crooks. It meant turning away business, as certain casinos all over the world routinely swindled their customers. Mabel didn’t agree, and felt he should take the money and give it to charity, but Valentine stuck to his guns and felt a hell of a lot better for it.
A gibbous moon gave his car a purple sheen, and he found himself thinking about Donny and his purple suit. Donny wasn’t the sharpest knife in the drawer, but he was always entertaining, and Valentine realized how much he missed the big lunk. Then he thought about Vixen and her vegetarian cooking. No meat, no bones, yet most of it had tasted pretty good. Then he thought about Zoe and her barrage of annoying pubescent questions. One day, they would stop, he was sure of it.
And finally, he thought about Kat.
He’d planned to take her out to dinner tonight and give her the diamond pin while telling her how much she meant to him. He wasn’t good at expressing himself, so he’d composed a little speech and memorized it. Sitting there in the dark, the words came back to him. I go to bed at night thinking about you. You make me happy every day. I hope I do the same for you. You’ve made me look past who I am and try new things.
He gripped the wheel and stared across the parking lot. The wrestling had been fun, until Kat’s ex-husband had shown up. Seeing Ralph and Kat and Zoe together, he’d been reminded of what his own previous life had been like, and how much he still missed it.
He powered up his cell phone and called Mabel.
“You still down in the dumps?” she asked.
“Yeah, but I’ll get over it. Anything going on?”
“Our old pal Jacques called earlier.”
“What did he want?”
“He searched his employees’ lockers like you suggested. Well, you’re not going to believe this, but—”
Valentine felt something heavy bump his car. The parking lot backed up onto a swamp, and he was the only living soul out here. “Let me call you back,” he said.
He hung up, then heard the noise again, a sharp rustling sound like sandpaper rubbing against a blackboard. A sudden flickering movement caught his eye. Turning his headlights on, he saw an alligator lying beside his car, its tail whacking his door.
“For the love of Christ.”
He beeped his horn, and a second gator appeared. It was a monster, and his stomach churned as he saw the bleeding hunk of raw meat between its jaws. He watched the two reptiles fight over dinner.
He thought about starting the car and driving over them, then decided against it. They were just stupid beasts, doing what God created them to do. If he waited a few minutes, they’d probably return to the swamp.
It wasn’t unusual for him to get threatened while on a job. Casino personnel stole from their employers at a rate far higher than the national average. When he was called in, the thieves sometimes tried to scare him off. Usually it came in the form of threatening phone calls or a broken windshield. Once, someone had taken a shot at him. But no one had ever used alligators. That was new.
His eyes drifted to the floor of the passenger side of his car. Something was lying there, and he flicked on the interior light. It looked like a steak. Taking out his pocket handkerchief, he picked it up.
It was an inch-thick porterhouse, the meat starting to go bad. He started to toss it out the window when the Honda’s folding backseat came down with a loud bang! and the alligator hiding in his trunk threw itself between the two front seats and snatched the steak out of his hand.
He heard himself yell, then looked to see if he still had his fingers. All there. The alligator munched on the steak while staring menacingly at him with its giant green eye.
Valentine jammed his elbow into the gator’s face, and an electrifying jolt of pain shot through his arm. The gator shook its head, acting more pissed off than hurt. And he thought, You’re out of options.
Except one. With a strength he didn’t know he possessed, he pulled himself through his open window and climbed onto the roof of his car. He’d seen Charles Bronson do this in a movie once and hadn’t thought it was possible. He crawled to the roof’s center and saw the gator in his car stick its head out the driver’s window, looking for him. The other gators circled the car, trapping him.
Valentine lifted his head. Multiple surveillance cameras were perched atop the casino, and he felt certain that whoever was on duty in the casino’s surveillance control room had seen him and called for help.
He stared down at the gators, his heart racing out of control. Were they agile enough to climb onto the car? He didn’t think so, but didn’t want to be surprised, either. He waved at one of the rooftop cameras.
“Hurry!” he yelled.
7
It had started out as a friendly game of poker, the hands being played for quarters and laugh rights. Then Rico had broken out the booze, and after everyone had a few belts the game had turned serious. With each hand the pots had grown, and now over four thousand dollars in chips was sitting on the table.
“I’m going to shoot the pickle,” Rico announced.
The other four men at the table fell silent. To Rico’s left sat Barney Swing, a retired New York mobster with kidney stones; next to Barney, another retired hood named Joey Clams; next to him, the ultrasmooth card mechanic Rico had hired from Las Vegas named
Sporty. Next to Sporty, in the hot seat, sat Nigel Moon. He’d been knocking back Johnnie Walker straight, and his accent no longer had a nice ring to it.
“Shoot the pickle?” Moon declared loudly. “What in bloody hell does that mean?”
“It means Rico’s going to shoot his wad,” Sporty explained, having intervened several times when Moon’s bad manners had threatened to ruin the evening.
“That’s phallic, isn’t it,” Moon said. “You Americans are filled with the strangest bloody expressions. And all center around sex. All right, Rico, you have everyone’s permission—shoot the pickle.”
Rico pushed his chips into the center of the table. Rico had spent weeks planning this night, getting the right guys, hiring Sporty to work his magic, and the hardest part, teaching Candy how to talk Moon into playing cards with “some old friends of mine” without making it look as suspicious as hell. She’d done her job, and Moon had come to the Eden Roc Hotel on Miami Beach without a fuss.
Moon called his raise, then turned over his hand. He had a full house, kings over eights.
Rico did his best double take.
“You win,” he told the rude Englishman.
Moon raked the pot in. “What you got?”
“Does it matter?”
“To me it does,” he said drunkenly.
Rico revealed his hand. He had the straight that Sporty had dealt him off the bottom of the deck. Moon’s hand had also come off the bottom. Hustlers called it dealing a plank, and Sporty was the best in the business. An unassuming guy, except for his hands. They were as delicate as butterfly wings, and just as quick.
“Shoot the pickle, my ass,” Moon said.
Had it been anyone else, Rico would have shot him.
“I say we take a break,” Sporty suggested.
The others agreed and rose from the table.
They went onto the balcony and stared at the glittering lights on the cruise ships anchored off Miami Beach. Down below, girls in string bikinis and muscular boys were playing volleyball under the lights. Rico could remember when no one would have been caught dead in this crummy town. Then the clubs in South Beach had sprung up, and overnight it had become Party Central, with nose candy in every bar and enough gorgeous women to have a heart attack over. He’d come down for a weekend and never left.
He went inside and refreshed everyone’s drinks. Moon’s he made extra stiff, everyone else’s water with a splash of vodka, in case Moon got a whiff. Victor Marks, his mentor, had tipped this little trick. Rico had liked it, but then he’d liked everything Victor had taught him. He served his guests.
Barney Swing offered a toast. “Well, boys, here’s to not working.”
The others said, “Hear, hear,” and lifted their glasses. Barney was smiling. He was the only player besides Moon to win any money. Glancing at his watch, Barney said, “I’m flying to Newark tomorrow to see my new granddaughter.” He stared directly at Moon. “What do you say we play one more hand, head-to-head?”
Out of anyone else’s mouth, the line would have died. But Barney knew how to act. Moon agreed, and they went inside.
Moon and Barney took opposing seats at the card table. Barney picked up the deck and gave it a shuffle. His hands betrayed his advancing years, and cards flew around the table.
“Let me do that,” Sporty said. He was sitting to Barney’s left. He picked up the scattered cards, squared them, then shuffled.
Standing against the wall, Rico saw what really happened. Sporty had secretly taken another deck out of his jacket and placed it in his lap. This deck was in a prearranged order, what hustlers called a cooler. In the act of shuffling the cards, Sporty tossed them into his lap, then brought the cooler into view.
Moon saw none of it.
Sporty handed the cooler to Barney. Leaning back in his chair, he scooped up the cards in his lap, and hid them in his pocket. Rico was impressed. He had seen some gutsy plays in his life, but nothing like this.
Barney put a thousand in chips on the table.
Moon anted up. “What are we playing?”
“Five-card draw poker.”
“Anything wild?”
“Just the dealer.”
It was for guys like Barney Swing that the expression sweet had been coined. Barney dealt the round, then picked up his cards. Rico saw his hand clearly. Three kings, a jack, and a lowly four.
“Your bet,” Barney said.
Moon tossed a grand into the pot.
Barney called, and raised him a grand.
Moon saw his raise and asked for two cards. Barney dealt them off the deck without taking the cards off the table. Moon peeked at his cards. Then his face turned to stone.
The drunk Englishman was holding the eight through queen of hearts, a straight flush. You could play poker your whole life and never get a straight flush. Earlier that evening in the hotel bar, Rico had asked Sporty what the odds were of drawing one.
“Sixty-five thousand to one,” Sporty said.
Sporty was practicing as he spoke. The bar was empty, and Sporty was dealing cards into his lap. Only the cards weren’t coming off the top. Some came second from the top, others off the bottom, and some from the deck’s center. Most card mechanics saw sleight of hand as a means to an end. For Sporty, it was a lifetime passion.
“He gambles a lot,” Rico said. “He’ll know he’s being set up.”
“You said he plays BJ,” Sporty said, using the pro’s term for 21.
“That’s right.”
“BJ isn’t poker. BJ is about playing basic strategy, knowing how to count. Poker is about money. The more a guy wins, the more predatory he gets. And when the cards start to fall his way, he starts believing he’s Superman. Get it?”
Rico hadn’t believed him until he saw Moon raise Barney two grand. Barney called him, then watched Moon turn over his hand and reveal his straight flush.
“Jesus,” Barney whispered, turning over his four kings.
Moon counted the pot. “You owe me five thousand.”
Barney dug into his pocket. “Will you take a check?”
Moon hesitated. He wasn’t as drunk as he acted, Rico realized.
“Everyone in the room will vouch for me,” Barney said defensively.
“All right,” Nigel said.
Barney wrote him a check and started to hand it over. Reaching over Barney’s shoulder, Rico snatched the check from his hand.
“Barney, this is a friendly game, for Christ’s sake,” Rico said. Folding the check in half, he tore it up and tossed the pieces into an ashtray. “You being on a fixed income and all, I’m sure Nigel will understand.”
Moon’s mouth dropped open. He looked royally pissed. Rico dropped his hand to his side and opened his fingers, letting Moon see Barney’s finger-palmed check. Sporty lit up a cigarette and tossed the match into the ashtray. The fake pieces caught fire.
Moon blinked, slowly understanding.
“Don’t you, Nigel?” Rico said.
Rico smiled. Victor called moments like these turning points. It was the thing about being a con man that Rico liked. You got to peel suckers one layer at a time and see how much they could be taken for.
“And a friendly game it will remain,” the Englishman said.
Bingo, Rico thought.
Splinters drove Rico and Sporty to Miami International Airport in Rico’s limo. The moon was out, a big silver coin waiting for someone to pluck it from the sky, and Rico started to retract the roof. Sporty, who wore his hair in an architecturally complex comb-over, objected. Rico pushed the button in the opposite direction.
“You were great back there. That switch was awesome.”
Sporty took the switched deck out of his pocket. “Thanks.”
“How long you been handling cards?”
Sporty hesitated. “What’s today, Friday?”
“Very funny. Twenty, thirty years?”
“My father gave me a deck when I was five,” Sporty said.
The airport was a to
mb. Splinters pulled in front of the Delta terminal and threw the limo into park. He had his Walkman on and was clicking his fingers and swaying his head like Stevie Wonder. He was a definite embarrassment, Rico decided.
Rico reached into his jacket to pay the mechanic. A gun appeared in Sporty’s left hand. Rico felt his nuts tighten. It was one of those plastic jobs the Israeli secret police had invented to sneak through airport security systems. He looked toward the front at Splinters. His driver was in la-la land.
“Take your hand out of your jacket,” Sporty said.
“With or without your money?”
“Slo-owly.”
Rico brought his hand out. Then, carefully, he grabbed his lapel and pulled it back, letting Sporty see the white envelope sticking out of his inside pocket.
Sporty wiggled the gun’s barrel. Rico reached in with his left hand and carefully removed the envelope. Sporty took it from his grasp, and said, “Sorry, but your reputation precedes you.”
Rico was shocked. What reputation? He’d killed two people in his entire life, which hardly qualified him as some major menace. One to get into John Gotti’s gang, one as a favor. Two people and the double-crossing Indian the other night. Make that three people. Among the guys he used to associate with, three scalps didn’t qualify for bragging rights. Judging by the way Sporty was clutching the gun, Rico didn’t think he’d killed anyone.
Sporty visually counted his money. Satisfied, he said, “Tell me something.”
“What?”
“What kind of scam you got going here? I’ve never been hired to make a sucker win. You setting this chump up for a killing?”
Rico nearly told Sporty the score. He wanted to tell someone, it was such a beautiful thing he and Victor had going. Only if Victor found out, he’d disown him, and Rico didn’t want that.
“None of your fucking business,” Rico said.
Sporty got out of the limo. The departure area was eerily quiet, the sliding doors to the Delta terminal wide open. He tossed the piece into a receptacle by the door, then glanced over his shoulder as he went inside.
Rico winced. He’d been suckered by a toy gun.
