by James Swain
The family would enter a department store and stand next to the desired item. Dad would give a signal, and the kids would start moving around the floor as if doing a square dance, their movements choreographed to mesmerize any onlookers into looking the wrong way. At the same time, two sons would pick up the item and brazenly walk out the front door.
All scams eventually ran their course. Seeking greener pastures, the Gypsies had moved to Nevada in the 1990s and hit the casinos. Using the same ploys, they’d attacked the blackjack tables and switched the dealing shoes with dealing shoes containing stacked decks of cards. Other scams involving dice, roulette, and rigging slot machines soon followed.
Decades later, they were still going strong.
Billy sat in the director’s chair and tried to avoid looking at Ricky’s corpse. Shaz handed him three items off the night table: an iPhone, a light meter, and a small notepad.
“Those are his things,” she said. “Now tell me what the little fucker was up to.”
He examined the iPhone first. There were no text or voice messages, just an e-mail from JetBlue confirming a flight out of town departing Saturday night. He now knew something important: the Gypsies were planning to scam Galaxy’s casino on Saturday afternoon. Cheaters always left town a few hours after ripping off a casino.
The notepad was next, its pages filled with cryptic notations and measurements. When he looked up, Shaz was burning a hole in him.
“Explain the notes,” she said.
“Ricky was measuring the distances to the exits, in case his family needed to beat an escape. Later, he was going to draw everything out, like a blueprint.”
“A blueprint for what?”
“His family practices their scams in a fake casino. They try to duplicate the conditions inside your casino to see what problems might come up.”
“How does the light meter play into this?”
“Ricky was measuring the light inside the casino so his family could duplicate it inside the fake casino. The family videotapes their practice sessions, and later critiques the tapes. It lets them see what the surveillance cameras see.”
The answer seemed to satisfy her. She pulled up a chair, and sat in it backward so she faced him. “You’re a clever guy, aren’t you?”
“If I was so clever, you wouldn’t have caught me.”
“I hear you went to MIT and blew everyone out of the water.”
He stiffened, not knowing what to say.
“I also hear you’ve banged half the beautiful women in Las Vegas. You’re a regular love machine, is what I hear.”
The punishers laughed under their breath.
“It’s why you’re so successful,” she went on. “The girls you recruit won’t give you up, even if they get caught. They’re in love with you.”
The things she had said only a handful of people knew. No one had ever ratted him out before, and he didn’t have a clue who was behind this betrayal.
“So what’s the Gypsies’ scam? You must have figured it out by now,” she said.
She was right. He had figured it out, or at least enough to catch them.
The scam would occur between 3:55 p.m. and 4:05 p.m. Saturday afternoon, right as the day shift ended and the swing shift began. Employees going home, new employees taking over their spots, the casino in a state of flux, no one in surveillance paying attention to the monitors, just the way cheaters liked it.
He also knew what they’d be wearing. Clothes whose colors matched. This was true for every scam the Gypsies had pulled and would be no different come Saturday. Perhaps they’d be posing as a family on vacation, or a group of zany conventioneers who dressed alike.
He also knew that it was an outside job, and that no casino employees would be involved. The Gypsies were a tight-knit group and avoided using outside agents whenever possible.
It was enough information to nail them. But if he told Shaz what he knew, the punishers would ice him. They really didn’t have a choice. He’d seen the stiff in the closet and was now a witness. Witnesses talked, so they had to kill him. The best he could do was buy more time.
“I’m waiting,” she said impatiently.
“I don’t know exactly what the scam is. But I can catch them.”
“How are you going to do that?”
“It takes one to know one.”
“Instincts, huh?”
“I know how they think.”
“You’d better not be fucking with me.”
“I’m not fucking with you.”
Shaz made a call on her cell phone. “Hey, Marcus. He wants to cut a deal with us.” She listened intently before ending the call.
“Marcus wants him to see the film,” she told the punishers. “Hold him down.”
T-Bird dropped to the floor behind Billy’s chair, and put their prisoner into a half nelson. Shaz powered up the room’s flat-screen TV. A snuff film of Ricky Boswell began to play. She grabbed Billy by the hair and pulled his head back, forcing his eyes to stay open.
“Watch this. Learn,” she said.
Billy didn’t think he could learn anything from watching a poor guy get beaten to death, but he was wrong. The punishers were nothing more than bit players, while Shaz was the real star in the horror show. With cold sweat pouring down his face, he watched her break Ricky’s toes and snip off his fingers and finally swing the baseball bat that popped Ricky’s eye out of his head.
The poor kid was alive for all of it. To his credit, Ricky stuck to the code of never betraying the people he ran with. His family would have been proud of him for doing that.
The beating finally ended. Ricky had taken everything a man could possibly take. He was laid on the bed and started to die, his body a quivering mass of ticks and tremors as his life seeped away. His good eye blinked like the emergency blinker on a car, then grew frozen.
Billy could not help it and started to cry.
“Let him go,” Shaz said.
T-Bird released Billy. The young hustler wiped away his tears.
“Get up,” she said. “We’re going upstairs to see Marcus.”
He rose on shaky legs. He was never going to forget this for as long as he lived. He started to follow her out of the bedroom, then froze. On the TV screen, a stranger had entered the picture and moved next to the bed. The stranger brought his hand to his chin, as if trying to decide how to dispose of the body, and offered his profile to the camera.
The breath caught in Billy’s throat. It was his old pal Crunchie.
TWELVE
Riding an elevator to the penthouse, Billy thought back to his meeting at the Peppermill with the old grifter. Crunchie had been throwing off bad vibes, which Billy had ignored, too swayed by the lure of a huge score to realize he was being set up.
The doors parted, and they walked down a carpeted hallway to a corner office with a gold nameplate that read, “Marcus Doucette, President & CEO / Galaxy Entertainment.” Doucette’s name had been in the papers lately. A sleazoid strip-club owner from LA, he’d broken every building code and bribed a building inspector to get his casino built. Money talked in the desert, and the joint had opened on time.
Shaz opened the doors and they entered. The office was sleek and soulless, with as much charm as a terminal at McCarran. Neon bursts from the Strip’s casinos danced in the floor-to-ceiling windows, bathing the room in lurid hues. An oversized granite desk sat in the room’s center, in front of it, a single chair. Two men stood outside on the balcony, talking.
“Have a seat,” Shaz said.
He did as told. A framed wedding photo on the desk caught his eye. In it, Shaz and a handsome devil with burnt-blond hair and soap opera blue eyes stood on a sandy beach, exchanging wedding vows. So she was married to the boss.
The men on the balcony came inside. Doucette sat on the edge of the desk and fired up a cigarette. H
e favored the movie-studio-executive look and wore a cream-colored Armani suit, an unbuttoned white silk shirt, and crocodile loafers sans socks.
“Crunchie tells me you’re the smartest cheater in town,” Doucette said.
Crunchie stood by the slider, cowboy hat in hand.
“You’re a piece of shit,” Billy said.
“Shut up, and listen to Marcus,” the old grifter said.
“I want you to tell me what these Gypsies are up to,” Doucette said. “Do that, and you’ll walk out of here with your skin. Fair enough?”
It was as good as Billy could have hoped for, and he decided to play his hand. “I found some information on Ricky Boswell’s cell phone that told me his family’s planning to scam your casino on Saturday afternoon during the shift change. They’re going to do a little hocus-pocus in the middle of the casino floor and rig one of your games. Your security guards will be watching, and so will the eye-in-the sky, but you still won’t see them.”
Doucette shifted his gaze to Crunchie. “Is this little prick telling the truth?”
“I think Billy’s nailed it,” the old grifter said.
“Why didn’t you catch that? You saw the cell phone.”
“Billy’s eyes are a little better than mine.”
Doucette shifted his attention back to his guest. “All right, so the play is going down Saturday afternoon. How do I nail them?”
“Do we have a deal?” Billy asked.
“Not until you tell me the rest.”
The conversation had taken a bad turn. There was nothing to stop Doucette from snuffing him once he had the information he needed. It was time for Billy to take a stand.
“Get lost,” Billy said.
“What did you say to me?”
“You heard me. Take a hike.”
Doucette exploded, and searched his desk for something sharp to stick into Billy’s chest. He’d been sweating over the Gypsies for days, and the tension inside him had reached a boiling point. Knowing you were going to get ripped off was almost as bad as the crime itself. Shaz came to her husband’s side and grabbed him by the arm.
“Calm down. He’s nothing but a little street rat,” she said.
“Nobody talks to me that way,” Doucette said.
She pulled a gold vial from her pocket and cut up three white lines of gutter glitter on the blotter. Doucette snorted them with a small metal straw. It took him to another place, and he tilted his head back and shut his eyes. His wife massaged the tension from his shoulders.
“Feel better?”
“Yeah. Thanks, baby.” To Crunchie he said, “Deal with this little asshole.”
The old grifter came away from the slider. “Sorry, Billy, but we need to know what the scam is. You’re in no position to refuse.”
“How long have you been working for these people?” Billy asked him.
“Since they opened. They pay me to keep the place from getting ripped off. I don’t have any regrets, if that’s what you’re thinking.”
“Not one?”
“Nope. Not even with you. Your time was running out, the way I see it. You can’t rip off as many casinos as you have and not get taken down.”
“Is that why you set me up in the salon? So you could film it and blackmail me?”
“You catch on quick. But you always did. Now let’s get this over with.”
Whatever notion he’d had to save his own skin had just flown out the door. He wasn’t going to roll on the Gypsies, even if the punishers hung him over the balcony by the balls and threatened to drop him on his head.
“Fuck you,” he said.
“What’s that supposed to mean?” Crunchie said, startled.
“It means I’m not telling you.”
“Not even if we turn the surveillance tapes over to the police?”
“I’m not ratting the Gypsies out. Not for you, or anyone else.”
Crunchie tossed his cowboy hat on the desk and let out an exasperated breath. “We caught a flash of the mirror in the cigarette pack on the tape. The jury sees that along with the fact that you were using a false identity, they’ll send you to the federal pen. You’ll do hard time, Billy. Do you know what happens to little guys in the pen? They get turned into bitches.”
“I’ll take my chances in the pen.”
“You sure about this?”
“I’ve never been more sure in my life.”
The old grifter looked pissed off, but not defeated, as if he had another card stuck up his sleeve. He took his Stetson off the desk and held it like he was taking a collection.
“Empty your pockets,” the old grifter said.
“Fuck you.”
“Ike, T-Bird, help our guest here.”
Ike yanked Billy out of the chair and held him while T-Bird picked Billy’s pockets clean and tossed his personal belongings into the cowboy hat. Wallet, gaffed cigarette case, Droid, and a handful of loose change was the haul. Crunchie went straight for Billy’s wallet and was rewarded with a receipt inside the billfold. A smile creased his wrinkled face.
“Look at this. A drink receipt from the Four Queens with a time and date stamped on it. You were there at six thirty last night. What were you doing at the Four Queens, Billy?”
Billy cursed to himself. Normally, he tore up receipts after a job, and he guessed this one had gotten tucked in his change without him realizing it.
“I’ll tell you what you were doing there,” the old grifter said. “You and your crew were pulling your red hot dice scam. Isn’t that right?”
He stared at the floor. A fucking receipt. He’d forgotten to tear up a fucking receipt, and now he was going to pay for it.
“I’ll bet that if I called the gaming board and told them to review the surveillance tapes from the Four Queens last night, you’ll pop up, along with the rest of your crew. I could help them by pointing out which people at the craps table are involved. I’m guessing you use a couple of hot girls for distraction, a pair of clean-cut college boys as takeoff men, and a mechanic to execute the switch while you direct the action.” He paused. “Am I getting warm?”
Crunchie was messing with him. Billy had patterned his crews after the old grifter’s, right down to using women from the sex industry as shade.
“Of course, we don’t know the names of the people in your crew, or where they live, or anything about them. That’s going to make it tough to run them down. Unless we give the gaming board your cell phone.”
The old grifter removed Billy’s cell phone from the hat. “A Droid. I’ve got one of these, too. I’d be willing to bet you that your crew’s phone numbers are logged into it. Aren’t they, Billy?”
“You’re a piece of shit,” Billy said under his breath.
“The gaming board will use the phone numbers to track your crew down, and haul them in. They’ll match their faces to the faces on the Four Queens surveillance tapes, and charge them with conspiracy, and you’ll have a real mess on your hands. You know how many years you’ll face on a conspiracy rap?”
Billy knew the law. The state’s lifeblood came from casino taxes; when you stole from the casinos, you stole from the state, and they didn’t take it lightly. Travis, Gabe, Misty, Pepper, Cory, and Morris were in a world of trouble, as was he.
“I still won’t tell you,” he said.
“That’s stupid. You’ll do time, and so will your crew. Hard time.”
“We’ll take our chances.”
The office grew deathly still. Crunchie’s face turned crimson, embarrassed by his own miscalculation. Out of frustration he tossed Billy’s cell phone back into the hat. Something inside the hat caught his eye, and he removed the double-sided Slots A Fun chip.
“My, my, what do we have here?” the old grifter said. “A double-sided chip from Slots A Fun. That joint’s right down the street from th
e Peppermill. You went there tonight before you met with me, didn’t you Billy? You were doing one of your side scams, working with a female dealer, stealing chips out of the tray.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Billy said.
“Come on, Billy, I know you too well. I got you red-handed.”
Billy said, “Fuck me” under his breath.
“Maybe I’ll call Slots A Fun, tell them to watch tonight’s surveillance tapes of their blackjack pit. I’m betting you and your friend are on them, ripping the joint off. They’ll have her arrested, and the cops will work her over real good. You don’t want that, do you?”
Billy imagined Ly being grilled by the cops. She wasn’t loyal to him and would roll in a heartbeat and spill her guts. The cops would arrest him, then use the information Crunchie gave them and burn his crew for the Four Queens scam. No lawyer in town could save him, or his crew, if that happened.
“No,” he blurted out.
“I didn’t think so. Now are you going to play ball, or do I call Slots A Fun?”
He was beaten. It was a crummy feeling, and he wanted to crawl in a hole and die.
“Yeah, I’ll play ball,” he said.
Crunchie glanced Doucette’s way. The casino boss nodded his approval.
THIRTEEN
Billy came clean. He didn’t know how the Gypsies were planning to rip off Galaxy’s casino Saturday afternoon. The scam might be at blackjack, or a slot machine with a monster jackpot, or maybe they were going to take a direct run at the cage. It didn’t matter; he knew enough about the operation to stop it from happening.
Crunchie didn’t say very much, but his face said a lot. He knew the difference between the truth and flat-out bullshit, and he knew that Billy was leveling with him. When Billy was finished talking, he walked around the desk and spent a minute whispering in Doucette’s ear.
“You sure about this?” the casino boss asked.
The old grifter grunted that he was entirely sure.