Cody pouted and turned away. “Got it,” he muttered. I had probably been too hard on him, but seriously. Who tells a girl she’s gaining weight? Especially if it’s only like five pounds? Or a couple of kilograms?
“Let’s get out of here,” I said, grabbing his impossibly sculpted shoulder. He could easily have still been a dancer if he wanted, but unlike me, he didn’t need the money.
On the way down the hill, he began pulling off his T-shirt, which was soaked with perspiration.
“Don’t,” I said.
“Why not?”
“It’s too painful. The fact that you look like that and don’t even like women? It’s a crime against humanity. That’s what it is. I don’t need to see your abs again.”
He sighed and left his shirt on. “If I liked women,” he said, “you’d be at the top of my list. You’re beautiful, okay? Forget about what I said.”
Oh, so now he was pitying me. Great. I remained silent, but it was hard to stay mad at him. We headed out of the park, grabbed lunch, and then parted ways, but not before Cody could apologize sixteen more times. Men. The fact that he was so nice about it almost made it worse.
The next day, Dinesh called me up much too early for my taste. It had been a surprisingly busy Sunday night at Cougar’s, so I hadn’t gotten to sleep until after four. From what I could understand in my sleepy-headed, noncaffeinated state, the team was going to meet up at another off-Strip casino that evening. Dan had staked us with another ten grand based partly on our winnings from last time. I was instructed to dress like a tourist, whatever that meant. Tyler was going to play the role of my boyfriend, something I didn’t completely object to.
Everything was going smoothly that night until I went on a bad run, losing a remarkable twelve hands in a row which nearly wiped out my stake. Luckily, my “boyfriend,” Tyler, was able to spot me another three hundred, and he made sure to grumble about it as any real boyfriend would do. Among us, we finished the night up only six hundred bucks. We repaired to the nearest Denny’s restaurant to lick our wounds.
“If we could make six hundred bucks every day, it would be pretty sweet,” Tyler said. “But we only have a limited number of days before they catch on. So that’s why it’s important to win big and get out of there.”
Dinesh was nodding. “Six hundred is basically a waste. There are only so many casinos around, and now we can’t go back to this one for months.”
“Without lots of crazy disguises, anyway,” I said.
Dinesh smiled, patting the fake gut he was still wearing underneath his shirt. It made him look forty pounds heavier. “The disguises are just a crutch,” he said. “We’re trying to fool the human beings who might be watching us. But once they turn the facial recognition software on, none of it matters.”
We went through the routine of signing the back of an envelopeâmuch thinner than the first envelopeâand Tyler promised to take it over to Dan. And then I was on my own.
On my drive home, I reflected on the situation. Without being able to physically observe the other players on my team, I wouldn’t be able to guarantee that they weren’t slipping some cash into their pockets without reporting it to the team as a whole. That was the weak link. By design, we played at different tables in order to cast as wide a net as possible, fishing for the elusive hot table. Even so, my sense of the other guys was that they were rooting for us as a team and that the thief, if there was one, wasn’t in my own group.
I relayed my thoughts to Dan in a long-winded voicemail the next day, and he texted me back to say he would place me in another group at next Friday’s meeting. I’d still have the problem of not being able to watch each individual player, but at least I could get a sense for how they operated and whether or not anything fishy was going on.
The rest of that week had me doing grunt work for a regional bank whose president, until recently, had been one of my most reliable lap dance customers. For a while, I had even agreed to give private dances to accommodate his schedule. He always tipped generously and behaved himself, so it had been a major bummer when he had to give me up. The way I looked at it (being a black belt in rationalization), I was letting him blow off a little steam and have a little bit of fantasy in his life without him crossing the line and having a full-blown affair. Not surprisingly, however, his wife hadn’t seen it the same way, and so when she found out about his expensive little hobby, she went ballistic. Whether or not she’d cooled off by now, he’d seen me in the newspaper and decided to hire me to do some investigative work. I took it for granted that he hadn’t told his wife about our little reunion.
The job was at least a little bit interesting. The bank was about to sign off on a large mortgage to an unmarried couple. They’d provided all the necessary paperwork and had solid credit, but my CEO friend said his underwriter had a “funny feeling” about them, that something wasn’t on the level. So he wanted me to follow them around and see what made them tick. Did they actually go to the jobs they claimed they had? Did they have any weird hobbies or drug habits? That kind of thing.
It turned out they did have some interesting habits. For example, they’d neglected to mention on their application that the man, a thirty-six-year-old computer programmer, was interested in hydroponics, the practice of growing plants with only water and nutrients. Now, it was possible that the guy had a legitimate interest in botany, but it was equally possible that he was growing marijuana in his basement. When I examined the online photos of the house they were planning to buy, it started to come together. It had a huge unfinished basement and sat on a remote lot backing up into the hardscrabble and mountains. There was also a large rusty shed in the corner of the property. If I was going to manufacture drugs, that’s where I’d do it. My banking friend was grateful for the information and paid me more than I’d billed. It was nice to have a new client.
CHAPTER SEVEN
Friday night’s meeting got off to a slow start. For one thing, Dan wasn’t there yet. The rest of us were milling around awkwardly until the guy known as O noticed a box of toys in the corner. Inside, he found three tennis balls and began juggling them, first in a tight little circle and then in a more whimsical and lofty pattern nearly hitting the ceiling. It was amusing for a few seconds, but O seemed to think he was deserving of some sort of medal just because he could keep a couple of balls in the air. He seemed disappointed when our attention drifted after only a few seconds.
Laura soon joined us, followed quickly by Dan, who was panting again. Dan reported on the last week’s efforts, which were better than in previous weeks but not enough to lift us out of a general funk. Our team had done the best of the three, but Dan noted that I had called in Dinesh with only a few hands left in the shoe, thus squandering what could have been a much bigger opportunity. He wasn’t mean spirited about it but instead used it as a constructive reminder to everyone else.
Dan then announced that I would be joining a different team which consisted of “Jordan,” the guy wearing nothing but Chicago sports attire, a pious-looking woman named Lisa, and a German guy with thinning blond hair named Ulrich. My greatest accomplishment of the evening would be to avoid horking down five slices of pizza during the pre-meal prayer. I bowed my head somberly and tried to look like my mind wasn’t fixated on the imminent feast of pepperoni and cheese spread on top of a diabolically savory tomato sauce. But then I remembered that gluttony was a sin, and I figured thinking about food during a prayer was probably some kind of cardinal sinâa sin on steroids. For penance, I resolved not to grumble the next time my church took up a second collection.
My new team would be hitting a large new casino just off the Strip, only about a mile from my home. The plan was to do it Saturday beginning at seven. That would cut into my work time at Cougar’s a little bit, but I was game.
Saturday found me with none of the butterflies and nerves that had plagued me the previous week. It wasn’t that I had achieved grandmaster-level expertise in card countingâsome of t
he others were using much more advanced counting techniquesâbut I was comfortable enough that I knew it was impossible for me to screw it up too badly. I arrived uncharacteristically late, which meant I was there only three minutes early, and prowled the tables without looking like I was prowling them. In private eye school, they’d stressed that acting like a dingbat (i.e., like a regular American) seemed to help in any kind of attempt at deception. So I whipped out my cell phone and began talking to some imaginary person while my attention was focused on the dealers and their tables.
The first one was a dud. A young dealer, probably from Malaysia, was ripping the cards out of the shoe with practiced abandon, thwackking them down on the table with almost blinding speed. No thanks. The guy next to him was a little better, but the table was full. The third table was the charmed one, luckily. The guy could have been fifty or seventy. I couldn’t tell, but his hair was a shiny greasy white tinged with a yellowish hue that was either a remnant of a natural blond color or, more likely, a half century’s residue of cigarette smoke. He seemed more interested in telling stories than in dealing cards. Just my kind of guy.
After waiting out the tail end of a shoe, I began winning instantly and somewhat dramatically. Splitting aces and drawing tens to get a pair of twenty-ones, doubling down and drawing twenty against a dealer’s seventeen, and even drawing two natural blackjacks in a row. Unfortunately, it wasn’t the kind of action I was looking for. All my great hands had drawn out lots of the good cards in the deck, so I knew the remainder of that shoe would be weak. And it was.
An hour passed with no rhyme or reason to the cards, no pattern that would cause me to change my own bets, much less to call in Jordan, our team’s big better. A late run near ten o’clock got me back to even, but that was as high as I got for the night. It made sense. The house had an edgeâthat was why they offered the game in the first placeâand if a player couldn’t find any advantage, she was lucky to come out even, as I had.
Apparently, eating junk food was a time-honored tradition among card counters because Jordan and Ulrich all but demanded that we repair to an In-N-Out Burger to do a postmortem on our session. Not wanting to rock the boat, I didn’t object, even though I had to get to Cougar’s. And I had learned last time that it was indeed possible, and even preferable, to perform nearly-nude dance routines on a stomach full of french fries and burgers. I say preferable because I wasn’t constantly tempted to have snacks during my breaks which meant I probably ended up eating less over the course of the evening. Not that my scale had noticed.
Lisa wasn’t joining us for the novel reason that she had other interests that were more pressing, including her own familyâa husband, three kids. To me, it seemed almost quaint, given the crowd I normally ran withâa Who’s Who of ne’er-do-wells, no-goodniks, ex-strippers, bouncers, and lowlifes of all stripes. Not to mention lawyers.
Jordan was in a good mood. He’d had a nice little run and all on his own had won more than twelve hundred dollars. He regaled us with his big wins as though they were war stories, and he was the commanding general, taking obvious pride in his strategy and bet changes. Jordan’s enthusiasm was contagious, enough so that I all but ruled him out as the source of any theft. If he’d wanted to skim a bunch off the top, it would have been simple enough to tell us he’d done merely okay instead of great. None of us would have been the wiser.
Ulrich had an okay time of it himself, up two seventy, and Lisa had reported a small loss. Our total profit was about fifteen hundred, but that wasn’t nearly enough to put a dent in the team’s deep hole. Four-digit evenings weren’t going to cut it. We needed the big scores, when the big bettor could sit down and start making fifteen hundred a hand and play half a shoe that way. Even so, everyone seemed reasonably satisfied, and my guess was that by winning a small amount, they could at least say the team’s overall problem didn’t lie with them. According to Jordan, they’d had similar results throughout the past several months. Up a little, down a little less, profitable but without any big scores to boast about.
On my way out, Ulrich stopped me with a tap on the arm. He seemed flustered.
“Hi,” he said in his accented English.
“Hi.” We were staring at each other like seventh graders at a school dance.
“Um,” he stammered. “Never mind.”
I stifled a chuckle. I’d seen that look before. That look of hmm, what do I do now? He was trying to ask me out but had lost his nerve at the critical moment.
“No, what?” I asked, trying to sound as kind as possible. I wasn’t going to say yes, but I was trying to help him get over his obvious nervousness.
“Well, it’s just that⦔ he trailed off again.
This was an especially bad case of nerves, I thought. It was very sweet, not to mention flattering.
“Did you want to ask me something?” I asked, trying to make it as simple as possible.
“Not exactly,” he said. “It’s just that⦔ he looked down at the floor in embarrassment and then continued. “You have a french fry stuck to your chin.”
CHAPTER EIGHT
So far, I figured Dan had racked up about nine hundred bucks in fees without learning the first thing about the problem he’d hired me to investigate. I had managed to win myself a little money along the way, but it was becoming clear that our approach of “embedding” me in the various team units was not going to uncover some kind of smoking gun. The players I’d met all seemed like decent peopleâhell, they operated their team out of a church. Lisa was a little squirrely for my tastes, quiet but passive-aggressive and obviously not impressed with me in any significant way. But I wasn’t there to make buddies. I was there to find a thief.
For the sake of completeness, Dan found an excuse to switch me to the final team of card counters, who I joined on Monday night at a sprawling casino out in the desert. The costumes were different, but the story was the same. We were posing as a group of bikers just passing through on the highway, which had given me an excuse to buy a black Harley-Davidson tank top I’d been coveting for months. It looked so good on me that I considered officially becoming a biker chick. How, I wondered, does a girl make that transition from nonbiker chick to biker chick? Is there an application process? Or do you just start wearing biker clothes and declare your new identity? I assume you’d start out at the poser level then graduate to wannabe, and ultimately, if you stuck with it long enough and wore enough leather, you would be taken into the fold. The beauty of it was that as a woman, I didn’t need to buy a motorcycle. The downside, of course, was the danger of attracting biker dudes, the kind of guys who lived on beef jerky and unfiltered cigarettes and wore the same pair of jeans nineteen days in a row. Ew.
I’m not sure if people were buying our biker vibe or not, but no one seemed to take much notice of us, and we got out of there with twenty-eight hundred and change, another decent score. It just reaffirmed my belief that none of the players were skimming anything off their winnings. And if they were, it would be almost impossible to prove it without catching them in the act. But because we were almost always at different tables, I couldn’t keep dibs on the other players very closely. My ability to assess them was limited to reading their body language when they turned in their winnings. If any of them was being dishonest, I couldn’t tell.
“Kind of what I figured,” Dan said. I’d called him to report my findings, such as they were.
“You figured?” I asked.
“Well, I didn’t want to tip my hand right at the outset, or else, you know⦔ he trailed off.
“I’m not following.”
He cleared his throat. “If I told you up front that I wasn’t expecting you to find anything, then maybe you wouldn’t work as hard. Not you personally, but just, you know, people in general.”
I smiled. He was kind of paranoid, but it made a little sense. “I get it. No offense taken. So what exactly was the point of hiring me?”
“It’s a first step. A
preemptive strike, really. My real suspicion, actually, is that my wife is the one taking the money somehow. I can’t confront her about it if it’s just a hunch, of course. But ifâ”
I cut him off. “If you’ve already hired an investigator and checked out everyone else, you’ve got a leg to stand on.”
“Yup, you got it,” he said. “As soon as I bring this up, which I’m dreading, she’s going to start pointing fingers at the players. So I want to be ready for that.”
“It’s something,” I said. “But you know what she’s going to say?”
“What?”
“She’s gonna say, ‘You believe that bimbo over your own wife?’”
He was silent for a second, and then I heard a sigh come through the line. “You’re right, of course. But what else are we gonna do? Have everyone submit to a polygraph?”
“I know,” I said, trying to sound reassuring. “This was a good idea, all things considered. I’m just trying to prepare you for the shitstorm that’s about to blow through.”
He coughed uncomfortably.
“Shit,” I muttered, making matters worse. “Sorry about my language.” I’d forgotten he was pretty churchy. I generally tried to watch my mouth around children, but it wasn’t because I thought foul language was inherently evil or un-Christian. The Jesus I heard about in my own church was a long-haired dude who hung around prostitutes, fisherman, and lepers. Whenever you get that kind of crowd together, the language can tend towards the salty end of the spectrum.
“Anyway,” he continued. “What do we do now?”
“She must keep books, right?” I asked.
“She does, but I don’t know how helpful they’ll be.”
I thought for a second. “I’m pretty worthless, but I have a friend working on his MBA. He’s got an accounting background. We could take a look for you.”
Double Down (Raven McShane Mysteries Book 4) Page 5