These were the pleasant thoughts that kept repeating themselves in my mind as I tried in vain to get to sleep at a reasonable hour. A marathon of House Hunters on HGTV finally did the trick somewhere between an annoying couple shopping for a mansion in Belize and an impossibly cute lesbian couple shopping for a Parisian pied-Ã -terre.
CHAPTER FOUR
In the morning, my own bathroom scale betrayed me even worse than the ones at Cougar’s had. Hoping to be greeted warmly by a trusted ally, I had instead been stabbed in the chest with a dull blade by a traitor lurking in my very own home. Reasoning that a mini vacation would allow the scale to take stock and reconsider, I removed the battery for a few seconds and then replaced it, allowing it a complete reboot or lobotomy. But instead of appreciating the time off, the vile little machine claimed I had gained two-tenths of a pound! In less than a minute! Screw it, I thought. I flipped the scale over and switched it to metric. That would show it who was in charge.
I made breakfast but didn’t enjoy it, my brain still fixated on my weight gain. Even though I knew eggs were healthy, every bite had me feeling like the nine-hundred-pound swine at the state fair. And, as if I needed another buzzkill, I knew a long session in the gym lurked in my imminent future.
As it turned out, the gym was just what I needed. For one thing, I was by far the thinnest, sexiest person in the whole place. I loved working out alone! But really, sweating away on the treadmill got me thinking philosophically about what was really important, and I realized that in the grand scheme of things, four pounds wasn’t very important. After all, it was less than two kilograms! Even so, I resolved to get past my lingering denial of my new realityâI had to eat better and exercise more. So, instead of jumping off the treadmill after forty minutes, I stayed on and powered through another set of commercials, most of which were pitching things like reverse mortgages, prescription drugs, and bankruptcy lawyersâthe trifecta of daytime TV ads. And when I was all done, I had burned a whopping 412 calories. Which made me very, very hungry. And lunch wasn’t even a blip on the radar screen yet. “No good deed goes unpunished,” I grumbled to myself.
The rest of the day I resolved to stop thinking about food and weight, which only made me think about food even more. So I whipped out a couple dusty decks of cards and forced myself to practice keeping the running count. I would deal through both decks, scanning each card and registering whether it added or subtracted from the count, knowing that the count at the end of both decks had to be zero. Once I got through them a few times, I increased the speed, forcing my brain out of its comfort zone as the numbers whizzed by. And it wasn’t just numbers. The brain had to recognize that a colorfully designed picture with a Q or J on it counted as a ten. It was becoming easier, but it wasn’t second nature just yet. Not with this brain.
I was scheduled to meet up with Dan and his team at six. I had grown used to having nothing to do on Friday nights, but it was nice to have a date, of sorts, even if it involved meeting a bunch of geeky card counters. And there had been a vague promise regarding pizza. But the meeting was at a church. That’s the weird part of it. Located between downtown Vegas and the Strip, it was called The Meadows Worship Center, a reference to the English meaning of “Las Vegas.” The church itself was an old gray industrial building made out of concrete blocks, but it greeted visitors with a gaudy, colorful sign that said Welcome in a half dozen languages. Surrounding it was a series of smaller buildings, including one marked Annex B which is where our meeting was to be held. The neighborhood itself was kind of sketchy, but I figured that’s what allowed them to afford such a big complex.
I admit to having a few butterflies in my stomach as I parked my car, a brand new Porsche Cayenne convertible, which I had bought partly with the insurance money I received after my Audi had been smashed to smithereens a few weeks earlier. The butterflies weren’t because I was nervous about the car being stolen. Instead, I was apprehensive about walking into a room full of strangers, strangers who would be judging my card-counting skills and thus my overall worthiness to be in their presence.
In light of Dan’s concerns about his wife, who he obviously feared, I had worn my loosest-fitting jeans and a Burberry Oxford shirt I had bought on a drunken whim and that I’d never even taken the tags off of. It was classy, in a distinctly middle-class sort of way. “Hey, look at me,” it screamed. “I’m an expensive name brand!” But the point was no cleavage, no curves, all business.
A half dozen people were milling about in the room, which looked like a repurposed machine shop. White painted walls, high ceilings, and no ornamentation, but the wood floors had been refinished so that they gleamed with a welcoming, comforting glow under the shop lights. Dan spotted me and gave me a subtle once-over. “Thank you,” he mouthed, referring to my deliberately buttoned-down appearance.
He came over and shepherded me around to meet the others. The first was a six-three stick of a man-boy with frizzy red hair falling over his forehead and fashionable glasses.
Dan introduced him. “This is O’Scannlain, but we just call him O. Don’t worry. He cleans up very well. He’s been with us about six months, right?”
O nodded, his head bobbing up and down like some kind of giant owl. “Before that, I worked behind a desk, night shift, doing telemarketing. This is much better.”
“I can imagine!” I said, craning my neck upwards.
Dan took me around to the others. Among them were a dark-skinned, middle-aged man named Dinesh who had an earnest face and smooth black hair and a young woman named Neva who I placed as Russian or Ukrainian. She seemed not to like me right from the outset. There was also a blond guy from California who looked like he’d just washed up on the beach and a short squat man with an egg-shaped head who was garbed head to toe in Chicago sports team attire. He told me just to call him Jordan, after his favorite basketball player.
We milled around for another few minutes with additional team members trickling in. The last to join us was Dan’s wife. When she entered, everyone in the room grew still, like a swarm of noisy crickets that suddenly sensed danger. Her physical presence was anything but intimidating. She stood five foot four, maybe, with short brown hair and a round face, her clothes even more conservative than mine. She was pretty enough, in her own way, and I couldn’t resist doing a mental makeover on her. Grow out the hair, add some color to the face, and by God, get rid of those clothes. And smile, woman! She was standing in the doorway regarding us with obvious displeasure, but when her gaze finally fell upon me, her face brightened, and she approached.
“Laura Hartman,” she said, extending a hand. She was looking me over without being obvious about it. “You’ll do,” she said simply. “With the right tweaks, you’ll blend in anywhere.” And then she focused on my face. “You have a good complexion for this. Almost olive. You could be Jersey-Italian one day, Spanish the next. Um, maybe Puerto Rican? It’s a stretch, but it might work.”
Dan came over to consult. With the two of them inspecting me, I felt like a carcass at a meat auction. Obviously, they were considering what kind of disguises I could use, should the need arise. “You speak Spanish?” Dan asked.
“No,” I said.
Dan chuckled. “‘No’ is how you say ‘no’ in Spanish, so you do speak some Spanish. Technically.”
Laura and I rolled our eyes in unison. “I have to live with him,” she muttered, seeking sympathy. Then she turned abruptly and clapped her hands loudly. “Let’s begin.”
The ten of us found seats at two long tables which were pushed into a kind of V. Dan began by reintroducing me, and once again, I felt all the eyes examining my face. Were the others trying to imagine me in various disguises, too?
After a little small talk, the meeting soon grew boring, a problem compounded by the fact that I was getting very hungry. Laura began working on a laptop computer and showing PowerPoint slides of the team’s performance over the last month. The faces in the room were stony and grim as she went through the num
bers. Some of it was hard to follow, but most of it made sense to me. One of the most important metrics was the baseline expectationâthe amount they’d expect to lose per hour just playing “normal” blackjack where the house had about a one-percent edge even if the player played perfectly. Then, for my benefit, Laura explained what their expectations were when the odds shifted to the players’ advantage. At a plus-one-percent table, which was quite common, the player was expected to raise his bets slightly. At a plus-two table, a little bit more. At these kinds of tables, there was an expected profit, although it was nothing to write home about. But at plus-three percent or higher, when there were lots of tens still in the deck, the player would issue the secret signal to alert his partner to join the table and start betting really big. That was where the real money was made, as Dan had already explained to me.
“The problem,” Laura explained, “is that we don’t seem to be hitting anything big when the table is really strongly in our favor. When you’re betting big and losing, that wipes out all the smaller gains.”
There was some gentle murmuring, but she pretended not to hear.
“The long and short of it is, guys⦔ she said then paused, possibly to soften the blow, “we need some additional OOP.”
More murmuring. Before I could ask what OOP meant, Dan touched my arm and leaned over. “Out of pocket,” he whispered.
Laura continued. “It doesn’t have to be much, but we’re thinking three thousand each to seed a new run.”
The guy on my right sighed audibly. Looking around, I could tell no one was happy about this turn of events, but their expressions were resigned, most of them probably expecting it. They were going to have to dig into their own pockets to keep the venture going.
“It doesn’t have to be today,” Laura said. “But by next week Friday. And then we can go out there and start winning again like in the old days. For now, we only have a kitty of eighteen thousand and change which will have to last us.”
The others were glancing at each other uncomfortably. I sensed a bit of rebellion in the room, an unwillingness to roll over, but the numbers were the numbers. If they wanted to continue, they needed to fund themselves, and they were all intelligent enough to understand that.
“So,” the California surfer guy began, “are we working this weekend? Eighteen thousand is enough to stake a couple teams.”
Laura nodded. “Yes. We want to break Raven in, so we wouldn’t want a full stake anyway,” she said. “No offense,” she whispered, looking at me.
I smiled, remaining silent.
“We haven’t been to Canyon Creek in a while,” the surfer guy said, his voice serious and refined, nothing like what I expected. “And last time we were there, we did okay, right? Maybe this will break the streak.”
Dan was nodding along next to me. “Good idea,” he said. He looked to his wife for approval, and she offered a curt nod.
Dan stood up. “Raven’s going to be joining Team 2, so let’s have them go to Canyon Creek. Raven, that means you’re paired with Dinesh, Tyler, and O’Scannlain.” He pointed at the three guys who were sitting together at the other table. “They’ll fill you in.”
There was a knock at the door, and Laura went to answer it. The faces of the others in the room brightened noticeably.
“Pizza,” Dan whispered, joining his wife at the door.
Dan and Laura schlepped in eight boxes of pizza from Mamma Mia’s, a place I’d heard of but never tried.
“Eight pizzas?” I asked to no one in particular. It was kind of like visiting my family. Ten people, food for thirty.
Tyler, my new card-counting partner, smiled knowingly, revealing two rows of gleaming teeth. “There will be leftovers,” he said excitedly. “Lots of leftovers.”
“Well, I’m impressed,” I said, meaning it. The smell in the room was intoxicating.
“I’m Tyler, by the way,” he said somewhat shyly. He was a cutie pie, this Tyler, with curly blond locks falling partly over his inky-blue eyes. He had a teenager’s haircut and mannerisms, but on further inspection, he was probably in his late twenties.
“Raven,” I said, offering a hand, which he shook tentatively.
“We’ve got some work to do here,” Tyler said, eyeing the mountain of pizza. I helped him open up the boxes and spread them out on both tables. Tyler went straight for a deluxe pizza that seemed to have at least ten toppings on it. But I was happy to see my old standby, a simple pie with just pepperoni and black olives on it. That was the standard by which I usually judged a pizza joint, so I figured I’d start there.
I grabbed a few slices and sat down next to Tyler. The amazing smell of cured meat and tomato sauce had my stomach going on overdrive, so I dug in, oblivious to everything else. When I looked up, having devoured my first piece, I noticed that I was the only one eating. The others had sat down and seemed to be awkwardly waiting in silence. I made eye contact with Dan who offered me a thin smile and held up a single finger which I took as a sign to take a break from gorging myself.
“Dear Father,” Dan began, spreading his arms apart. “We thank you for this bounty and for providing us with the means to provide for ourselves and our families by fighting to punish sin in all its forms, and we humbly ask your blessing on this meal, just as we ask your good fortune for our work in the days and weeks and months to come. Amen.”
“Amen,” echoed the room.
During the prayer, my face had grown as red as the pepperoni. I was used to looking like an idiot, but this was one for the idiot record books, a faux pas made worse by the fact that I was just meeting this crowd for the first time. Why hadn’t Dan clued me in? How hard would it have been to say, “Hey, Miss Piggy, I know you can’t wait to stuff your pie hole, but we’re going to say a little prayer first.” But then I realized I couldn’t blame Dan. After all, we were meeting in a church. Was it really so surprising that they’d pray before digging into their pizza? That realization only made me more embarrassed.
Tyler elbowed me. “Don’t sweat it,” he whispered. “No biggie. Here, try some of mine.” He held out a wedge of the deluxe, which I felt compelled to try.
“Wow, that’s really pretty good,” I said, genuinely impressed. I had been so hungry that I hadn’t even noticed how my first slice tasted, but the deluxe seemed like it was even better. It was salty, owing to all the cured meats and green olives crammed onto the thin crust.
Tyler and I made chitchat for a few minutes, but mostly we were focused on filling our stomachs with copious quantities of food. I had to force myself to be mindful of appearances and to slow down, especially after blowing the pre-meal prayer. I leaned over in Tyler’s direction. “What did Dan mean in the prayer when he said something about providing for ourselves by punishing sin?”
Tyler smiled and finished chewing. “That’s the funny part. Or ironic, I guess. We all believe gambling to be sinful activity. It wrecks people, destroys relationships, you name it. And so part of our mission is to punish the casinos themselves by hitting them where it hurts the most.”
I nodded. “Got it,” I said. “Hopefully, the luck will change for the better.”
“You’re telling me,” he said, half sighing. “This is a wicked stretch we’re on. I’ve been doing okay, but I guess the others aren’t getting the hits when they need them.”
“Is that pretty common?” I asked. I was growing a liking for Tyler, so I felt a little bad about spying on him. But not too bad.
He shrugged. “It happens sometimes. You have to remember that even at an awesome table, you can lose your shirt. The player could have a ten-point edge, but that’s all it isâan edge. We’re going to win six times out of ten, and in the long term, we make money. But the house can get very lucky sometimes. It can go on winning streaks too. And if you have five grand out there, a single hand can ruin your whole week.”
“And that’s what’s been happening?” I probed.
“Basically,” Tyler said. “You wait hours to get a gre
at table, bring in your partner, and then the dealer somehow manages to win. So not only do you not win, but you lose a small fortune. That’s what’s been happening, I guess.”
“You guess?”
“Well, I mean, not to me. Our team has been running okay. Not great, but okay. Up maybe ten grand in the last month. But I guess the others are having some problems.”
I nodded. I didn’t want to press too much since it felt like pouring salt in the wound. And apparently, we’d be spending some time together over the weekend, so there was no need to keep pumping him for information.
The conversation in the room began picking up as people finished eating. As predicted, there were still about four pizzas left over.
I couldn’t resist asking. “So why so many pizzas? Do you do this every week?”
Tyler pushed his plate away and smiled. “It’s deductible. See, this is a business meeting. We all get leftovers to have for breakfast or whatever, and the whole thing is a write-off for the business.”
I chuckled. “You guys have it all worked out, don’t you?”
He shrugged. “We aren’t real big on the federal government either, so we try to avoid paying taxes as much as possible, too. It’s all on the up and up, of course. You should see what the big corporations get to deduct. This is nothing.”
I leaned back, stuffed, and began trying to process everything. It was an interesting bunch. Tyler was nice, cute, and ringlessâthe dating trifectaâand yet there was a streak about him I couldn’t quite get a grasp on. Idealism, that was it. Whether I agreed with him or not, it was clear he actually believed in things, had principles, and tried to live up to them. That was rare, at least in most of the men I came in contact with.
A gentle touch on my shoulder caused me to turn around.
“I’m Dinesh,” the man said with a kindly smile.
I stood up and shook his hand, which was delicate and clammy.
Double Down (Raven McShane Mysteries Book 4) Page 3