Kim replies, “She was planning on quitting blackjack and becoming an actuary, so she’s not afraid of being banned.”
“Perfect,” says Max. A few moments later, as Kim leaves, Max adds, “Tell Rob to come see us.”
Rob has barely sat down when Max launches into his lecture.
“Rob, for you, it’s all about profiling. Sure, the more pockets you pick, the more cash you collect. But for each pocket you pick, you also risk getting caught. And if you’re caught, you can’t add any more wallets towards our ten million. So it’s not just about picking pockets. It’s about picking which pockets. Do you understand that?”
Max couldn’t be more right. Some blue-collar thirty-something with a non-ironic mustache and a Dallas Cowboys jersey drinking Bud Lights probably only holds a hundred bucks. How about a Japanese businessman with an affinity for craps? He’s more likely to be holding some real cash.
“And wallets are only half the game,” adds Max. “There are also chips.”
Depending on the exact bills, a thousand dollars in cash can be bulky (and therefore difficult to steal), but a thousand-dollar casino chip isn’t much bigger than a ten-dollar chip.
“The other factor you need to worry about is surveillance. This is a town decorated with cameras.”
“Focus on the areas where the camera can’t touch you,” I add. “Corners. Escalators. Bathrooms. Crowds.”
Max stands and puts a hand on each one of Rob’s shoulders. “You’ve got to play it safe, but not too safe. You’ve got to be hungry.”
Mars comes in next. When he sits down across from us, Max instructs him that he must find himself in games that share three qualities.
“First off, you’ve got to play for big bucks. There are people looking to play ten or twenty dollars a game.”
I chime in, “At ten dollars a game, you’d have to win 100,000 games for us to hit a million.”
Max continues, “Seek out games at a minimum of a thousand dollars. Second off, you must choose games you know you can win. These can’t be back and forth series.
“And third off, you have to play short games. If someone wants to play for a thousand dollars, great. But if they want to play a race to five games, that’ll take a half hour at least. Even if you know you can win a grand, you can’t spend 45 minutes doing it.”
While we wait for Mars to send Jesse in, Max turns to me.
“Pi, for you, it all boils down to two keys. Conning as many men as possible. And maximizing how much you get out of each mark. I’ll work my connections at the escort services to get you as many appointments as possible. And I’m going to try to line up back-to-back appointments on the same side of The Strip rather than having you trek back and forth. Time walking is less time conning.
“If there’s time in between appointments, you’ll go to the bars and lounges where men go to pick up high-class prostitutes, and you’ll choose your own marks. Are you up for that?”
A method I’ve never attempted before. But that won’t stop me.
“You know I’ll do whatever it takes,” I say just as Jesse enters the room.
Max motions for him to take a seat. “Jesse, I wish I could give you more to do, but there’s no time. Your role will mostly be support. You can play Mars’s backer in the pool hall. You can be a heat-spotter in the casinos for Kim. You can serve as emergency back-up for Piper’s cons. And if you’re not doing any of those, you can help identify high rollers for Rob to rob.”
“Whatever I can do.”
“Good,” says Max as he nods his head towards the door. Jesse takes the hint and leaves the room.
“Piper.”
“Yeah?”
“Go get ready.”
***
The penthouse is all bustle. Emergency preparation time. The last minutes before we part ways to try to pool together a million in cons.
Mars uses a shaper cube to file the tip of his pool cue. Kim talks with Vivi on the phone, setting a rendezvous point. Rob listens to loud rap music in his room while he gets dressed. Having just put on a midnight blue Louis Vuitton cocktail dress, I walk into the main room to hear Max shouting from the master bedroom.
“Piper!”
He’s pacing when I walk inside.
“Sit down. I forgot one thing.”
The last thing I want to do is sit down; I’m nervous and jumpy. But knowing I won’t be sitting much for the next 36 hours, I comply.
Max opens his closet. He reaches above his 31 suits and pushes aside a few shoeboxes on the upper shelf. He grabs a locked box in the back and lowers it to the carpet.
He sits across from me, then opens the dusty box. After pausing, he pulls out a small handgun. A Smith & Wesson J-Frame. I knew Max had the thing, but I have never before actually seen it.
“I never wanted to give you this before, because I never wanted to put you on a job where I thought you’d need it.”
Holding the gun – or any gun – for the first time, I find it surprisingly heavy. Especially for how light it looks.
Holding it scares me – the ability to take life at the tug of a finger. But, in some twisted way, it also empowers me – the ability to take life at the tug of a finger.
“But with everything we’re trying to do in the next 36 hours, I can’t check these jobs out, make sure they’re safe. At least not to the degree that I normally do. I’d feel better if you kept this in your purse.”
Taking my silence as acceptance, he goes on to tell me how to use the gun. How to load it. How to flip the safety on and off. How to aim it. “And to fire it, you just… well, you just pull the trigger,” he says at the end. “Oh and don’t worry, there’s not too much recoil.”
I conceal the gun. About triples the weight of my purse.
“Piper, I know you’re mad at me about Dennis Cane and the poker tournament. But I really was looking out for you.”
“I know.”
I’m not ready to forgive him yet, but that’s mostly because my mind can’t process anything that doesn’t directly relate to saving my sister. Our falling-out will fall back in, but not now.
He keeps his left hand on my shoulder while leading me back out into the main room.
There, we all gather. Kim taps her foot repeatedly. Rob mutters rap lyrics below his breath. Mars holds his eyes shut. Nervousness in the air. Both nervous tension and nervous excitement. As daunting as one million dollars might seem, we’re ready for this. I hope.
In the city that never sleeps, we all know we might have to go the full 36 hours without rest. Adrenaline will be our coffee.
“Everybody understand what they’re doing? I’ll be here at home base. I’m on call if anybody has an issue. Anytime you get a big score, text me so I can keep a running tally. Oh and once you get up to ten or twenty thousand, bring the cash by. I don’t want you guys sauntering around with too much green. It’s too risky.”
No one responds to Max. In the place of words: nervous nods.
Max gestures to me with his index finger. His way of asking if I have anything to add.
“We are going to do this,” I say. “We are prepared to do this. We are capable of pulling this off.
“We all live here together. Sometimes we pull grifts together. But we don’t tend to ask each other a lot of favors.
“But I need you guys today. All of you.”
For a moment, I half expect everyone to put their hands in for a pregame team cheer. I’ve never played any organized sports before – one disadvantage of dropping out of school and becoming a professional con artist at age 11. But that’s what we feel like: a team. A team in a must-win game. And not for some plastic trophy that’s been painted to look like gold. For my sister’s life.
“For Sophie,” Kim says.
Rob nods in agreement. “For Sophie.”
“For Soph,” Mars chimes in.
“For Sophie,” Jesse says. “And for Piper.”
Liquid pools in both eyes. Looking at Max, Kim, Rob, Mars, and Jesse throu
gh salty tears, it feels like a dream where I’m seeing them under some crystal clear ocean.
The tears don’t flow just for Sophie. But also for these people. For my friends. For Sophie’s friends who will risk everything in the next 36 hours to get her back.
Coach Max offers some parting words before we climb on the elevator: “You are all amazing con artists. Vegas is your canvas. Go make a masterpiece!”
***
My first mark: some tax attorney who I meet at the far north end of The Strip. Surprising he chooses a Starbucks as the rendezvous point. As if it were a Match.com date. I’m worried this means he wants to get a Mocha Frappuccino and chat for an hour before we get a room.
But as it turns out, Starbucks just serves as an arbitrary meeting place. Thirty seconds after we meet in the coffee shop, we walk towards the Palazzo. And ten minutes later, I ride the Palazzo elevator down, my purse stuffed with three thousand dollars cash. Not a bad first job, but at this rate, it won’t suffice.
My next job isn’t for 45 minutes, but I’ve got to get to the south side of The Strip. I contemplate taking a cab, but the traffic has backed up the whole Strip.
While I’m riding the monorail, the old lady next to me grabs my attention. She’s on the brink of sleep. Her eyelids fighting gravity and losing. After she nods off, my eyes wander from her face to her purse.
No one’s watching. I could snatch her purse and hop off at the next stop. I look at the purse, then the old lady. How much cash does she have on hand? Her clothes might as well be straight off the clearance rack at Ross. But the purse is Versace.
Should I take it? I lean over, peer inside the purse. A bulky wallet sits tucked behind a petite purple Nalgene. I could just reach in and take the wallet and leave the purse. Every dollar counts.
I should take it.
The train is coming to my stop. I figure I’ll grab the wallet right before I exit the monorail car. The train stops. I reach forward to snatch the wallet just as six people walk into the car. One of them a cop!
I retract my hand, pretending I just finished tying my shoe. Then I dart off the train.
I exhale a whopping puff of air. I have to pull it together. I can’t get distracted by opportunities to make a couple hundred here or there. Especially when there’s that much risk attached. If I had taken that purse and gotten arrested, there’s no more getting Sophie back. This serves as a good wakeup call early on:
Focus.
On.
Big.
Jobs.
My next big job is scheduled at the Cosmopolitan. My client looks in his mid 30’s, and he looks strung out. Sure enough, two minutes after I knock and he lets me in his suite, he snorts two curved but parallel lines of cocaine. Together, the white lines look like white train tracks headed around a turn.
He looks up at me. He has huge, gaping nostrils, and I can see tiny white particles ensnared in his long, dark nose hairs.
“You want to do a line before we…”
“No thank you,” I say.
“An escort who turns down cocaine?” he says. “What are you in this for? The sex?”
I force a laugh. Can this guy not fathom anything else anyone would spend money on other than drugs?
He asks if I want champagne, and I request Bollinger. After he orders room service, he has another urge. He disappears into the bedroom of the hotel suite. After a few seconds, frustrated grumbling echoes out of the bedroom. He ran out of coke.
He paces in and out of the different rooms of the suite as he talks on the phone. Living room. Bathroom. Bedroom. Living Room. Bedroom. Living room. From a few phrases I pick up like “delivery time,” and “eight-ball,” it’s not difficult to deduce that he’s conversing with his dealer. Madeline used to use those expressions all the time.
While he jabbers on the phone, I find myself staring out at The Strip from the hotel room’s spectacular view. From up here, with all the neon lights, Las Vegas really does look fabulous.
It looks different down on The Strip, walking amongst the overweight, tattooed, blue-collar tourists drinking their margaritas and Miller Lights.
Our penthouse suite in Treasure Island removes us from the grit and the grime of the street level. Vegas often gets associated with luxury, but take a walk on The Strip and you’ll quickly realize Vegas has its lower class too. People walking around, filled to the brim with desperation. Desperate to get rich quick. Desperate to fulfill their desires. Desperate to forget their miserable lives back home.
And now I’ve joined them. Joined the city in its desperation. Desperate to make a million dollars. Desperate to win that poker tournament. Desperate to get my sister back.
I force myself to look away from the view of the Vegas skyline just as my client hangs up the phone.
My heel rapidly taps the ground. I grow more and more uneasy, wanting to get onward with the con, when I catch a peek of him getting money for the drugs. The cokehead has a gym bag full of cash in the bedroom closet.
Jackpot!
He puts a couple thousand dollars on the table as if it’s pizza money left out to give to the deliveryman. He saunters back over to me.
I’m anxious to get as much money out of this guy as possible, but I can’t risk doing it right this second. I picture pulling off the con, then fleeing the hotel room and running smack into the drug dealer as he arrives.
Just as I’m realizing I’ll have to wait until after the drug dealer leaves to execute the grift, he asks me to perform a particular sexual act on him while we’re waiting for his drugs.
Um, no thanks.
“How about I give you a lap dance now, and after your blow gets here, I’ll give you the best you’ve ever had.”
This was one of the early lessons Max taught me. If a mark demands something you don’t want to do, delay them using the power of anticipation.
“The best,” I repeat as I bite my lower lip.
He grins as he sits down on the couch. I proceed to give him a 20-minute lap dance.
“You love it, don’t you?” He keeps saying it. As if he enjoys the idea of my enjoying dancing more than he enjoys the dance itself.
All I do is smile. Then I keep swaying and riding his legs as sensually as I can.
“Yeah, you do. You love it.” He believes I’m into it, but it’s easy to fake the smile on my face. All I have to do is think about that gym bag full of cash.
Finally, a knock on the door echoes through the room. I un-straddle him. He fiddles with his belt and adjusts his pants on his route to the door.
I don’t know who I expected but the bearded, hippy-looking guy wearing white jeans and a white scarf was not him.
A simple trade comes next: cash for a baggie of white powder. The dealer and my mark make small talk for a couple minutes, mostly about Sasha who I presume is a girl they know in common.
“We’re not talking about regular RFB status,” my client says. “The guy threw down a couple hundred thousand on one spin of the wheel. Sasha’s got an eye for whales. That’s for sure. The casinos should hire her to rope ‘em in. Some kind of a whale hunter.”
“Well, I gotta be in Barstow in a couple hours,” the drug dealer says.
They hug out a very metro embrace – one that somehow matches the dealer’s scarf. When the dealer reaches the door, he stops and turns back to me.
“Don’t worry, he won’t last two minutes.”
My client flips him the bird just as the white scarf disappears behind the closing door.
The drug dealer is another witness. Another person who sees the con artist. But the con artist has seen him dealing drugs so the con artist is not particularly worried about it.
Now it’s time to get on with my job. I’d been mulling over a couple different cons, but I don’t feel like taking the time for either one. Plus, neither would insure I get the entire gym bag of cash. I know it’s not the reason Max gave me the gun, but now that I have it, I can’t help wanting to use it.
Two minutes later, m
y client picks his head up from doing a line of cocaine to see Max’s Smith & Wesson in his face.
“Get me the gym bag.”
He hesitates. He’s testing me. Are the drugs making him audacious or am I just not that intimidating?
Time to get more fucking intimidating. And say words like fuck.
“I will fucking shoot you. And when I fucking shoot you, it’ll be in a fucking part of your body that will make hiring an escort fucking useless.”
At the word useless, my gun no longer points at his chest.
I added the fucks for intimidation, but it was useless that did the trick.
His courage falls limp. He gets up. Walks to the closet. Then brings in the gym bag.
Having seen it happen a thousand times on TV, I fear having my gun knocked away. I keep at least two yards between us.
“Throw the bag on the ground.”
He tosses the gym bag towards me. Smith, Wesson, and my eyes stay on him the whole time I scoop up the bag.
“Down on the ground.”
He sits on the ground, resting his elbows on the inside of his knees.
“On your stomach!”
He lies down on the ground.
“Now, close your eyes. If you open your eyes in the next five minutes, I’ll shoot you!”
I slip out the door, leaving it ajar so he won’t know I’m gone.
Riding down the elevator, I’m riding the high of the job. Having pulled some of the same cons dozens of times, the effect tends to fade over time. Robbing this guy at gunpoint has me feeling like Jessie James.
I don’t count the money until I get back to Treasure Island. Max and I rifle through the bag, putting the money in stacks of five thousand dollars.
“Where we at?” I ask him as we sort the cash.
“We’ve already got ninety-seven grand, and that’s before this batch.”
I look down at my watch. About four and a half hours into the thirty-six, we have just over thirty-one hours left.
Max sees me doing the math in my head. “It’s possible.”
“I know, Max. We’re going to get her back.”
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