by James Swain
“Correct.”
“What will he do? Destroy it later on?”
“No,” Valentine said. “He’ll add it to his cards, and toss it into the muck. That way the deck won’t be short. Hustlers call it ‘cleaning up.’”
On the monitor, they saw Skins drop his guilty hand into his lap and stick the switched card into the bug. If a problem arose during the game, Skins would simply toss the card beneath the table.
“So let’s arrest this guy,” the tech said. “We’ve got enough evidence.”
It was the sanest thing Valentine had heard anyone say since he’d started investigating the tournament. He felt a hand on his shoulder and looked up. Bill Higgins was standing behind him with a grim look on his face. Valentine got up, and they went to a corner where no one could hear them.
“I just got some bad news from the FBI’s Las Vegas office,” Bill said. “Guess who escaped from Ely prison this morning.”
“Someone I know?”
“Al ‘Little Hands’ Scarpi. The FBI thinks Scalzo was behind it.”
Valentine clenched his teeth. Every holiday, postcards from Ely State Penitentiary appeared in his mailbox, the name U.R. Dead scribbled in the return address box. Of all the twisted souls he’d put away, Al Scarpi was the one he still had nightmares about.
“Look, Tony, I won’t be mad if you say you want to leave town,” Bill said. “This is getting awfully hairy.”
Valentine shook his head. He would leave Las Vegas after he busted Scalzo. It was that simple.
“I’m not going anywhere,” he said.
31
“I’ve never ridden in a helicopter before,” Little Hands shouted, gazing down at the flat, unforgiving landscape of northern Nevada. The pilot, an athletic blonde wearing aviator shades with mirrored lenses, flashed a toothy grin. He’d picked Little Hands up on a dusty field outside the Ely Conservation Camp ninety minutes ago, tossed a bag lunch into Little Hands’s lap, then pointed his chopper toward Las Vegas.
“Where do you pee in this thing, anyway?” Little Hands asked.
The pilot continued grinning. It was a long trip, over 250 miles, and Little Hands had wished like hell he’d taken a leak before departing.
“You got a radio to listen to?” Little Hands asked.
The pilot continued to grin. Then Little Hands got the picture. The pilot couldn’t hear him over the roar of the helicopter’s blades. Little Hands felt like a fool and folded his hands in his lap. In prison, he’d gone to the library every day and tried to educate himself. If he’d learned anything from the books he’d read, it was that the best thing a dumb person could do was keep their mouth shut and say nothing at all.
Rows of identical tract houses littered the landscape, the roofs dotted with satellite-TV dishes. Past them, a giant steel structure shaped like a needle pierced the sky. Little Hands realized it was the Stratosphere, the tallest casino in Las Vegas.
The pilot tapped him on the arm, then pointed at a sprawling industrial park down below. Behind the park was a concrete helipad with a car parked beside it. Little Hands sucked in his breath as the helicopter descended.
Once the helicopter’s blades stopped whirring, Little Hands climbed out and stretched his legs. It was hard to believe that less than five hours ago he’d been pumping iron in the prison weight room. The pilot pulled a duffle bag out of the helicopter, and dropped it on the ground.
“This is yours, buddy,” he said.
Little Hands unzipped the duffle bag and pulled out its contents. New clothes to replace his prison work out fit, a set of car keys for the vehicle parked beside the helipad, and an envelope stuffed with twenty-dollar bills. The envelope also contained a typed sheet with the hotel and room number where Tony Valentine was staying. Taking the money out, he quickly counted it.
One thousand bucks.
He ran over to the helicopter. The pilot had restarted the engine and was about to take off. Little Hands tapped on the pilot’s window, and he pulled it back.
“Where’s the rest of my money? I get five grand for a job.”
“You’ll get the rest when the job is done,” the pilot said.
“Fuck that shit. I want it now.”
“Do the job, then call the number on the back of the instructions. They’ll meet you, and give you the rest.”
“I want it now.”
“I don’t have it,” the pilot said.
“You’re saying they didn’t pay you, either?” Little Hands shouted.
“What they paid me is none of your business. You should be happy you’re out of jail,” the pilot said.
Little Hands stuck his hand through the open window and got his fingers around the pilot’s throat. Before he could squeeze the life out of him, the pilot drew a gun from the console between the seats and stuck it in Little Hands’s face.
“Want to die, asshole?”
Little Hands let go of the pilot and withdrew his arm.
“You’re a dumb son-of-a-bitch, you know that?” the pilot said. “Now, stand back.”
Little Hands retreated a few steps. The helicopter rose uncertainly, like a bird testing its wings. When it was at face height, Little Hands leaped forward and wrapped his arms around the landing gear, called skids. He twisted and pulled the skids as the helicopter continued to rise. He wasn’t going to let the pilot call him dumb.
When the helicopter was higher than a house, Little Hands let go, and fell back to earth. He landed on the grass and rolled onto his back. He waited for the pain in his legs to subside while staring into the sky. The helicopter was spinning crazily, the skids twisting. The pilot wouldn’t be able to land without crashing.
Little Hands saw the pilot shaking his fist and cursing him. He laughed.
He drove into Las Vegas thinking about the money. A thousand stinking bucks. He’d never taken a job with out getting paid up front. Either his employer didn’t know the rules, or wanted to keep him on a short leash. It’s like I’m still a prisoner, he thought.
He came into town on the north side, where the Riviera, Frontier, and Sahara were still struggling to survive, and parked beneath the Frontier’s mammoth marquee, its giant letters proclaiming BIKINI BULL RIDE, COLD BEER, DIRTY GIRLS.
Across the street from the Frontier was the Peppermill restaurant and lounge. The local cops didn’t like the prices, and as a result criminals often used the cocktail lounge for meetings. He needed time and a place to think, and decided it was as good a spot as any.
The lounge was behind the restaurant, a mirrored room with a sunken fire pit and plenty of intimate seating. The place was dead, and he took a seat at the bar and ordered a draft from the cute bartender, who seemed happy for the company. She set a tall one in front of him. “You look familiar,” she said.
It was his first beer since going to the joint. He savored it, saying nothing.
“Now I remember,” the bartender said. “You came in here awhile back, and stuck your hand in the fire pit.”
The fire pit was the lounge’s gimmick, the bright orange flames erupting from a bubbling pool of green water. Little Hands had stuck his hand into the flames on a dare and burned himself real good. “That was a long time ago,” he said.
She smiled like he’d made a joke, then tapped the screen of the video poker machine in front of him. Every seat at the bar had a video poker machine. It was how the lounge made money.
“Make sure you play Joker’s Wild,” she said.
“Why’s that?” he asked.
“It’s paying off real good.”
He drank some more beer. She played this game with every customer who came in. She sold them on the idea of winning, even though no one ever did. He needed to figure out how he was going to kill Valentine, and fished a twenty out of his pocket.
“Thanks,” he said.
The beer went straight to his head, and he could hardly sit upright in his chair. This was how guys who broke out of jail got caught, he thought. The bartender came back. “How yo
u doing?” she asked.
He looked at the video poker screen. “Shitty.”
She watched him play a hand. On the screen five cards appeared. He had a pair of jacks. He discarded the other three cards by pressing on them with his finger. The machine dealt him three more cards. They didn’t help his hand, and he won a dollar. She reached over the bar and touched his wrist.
“Can I give you some advice?”
“Sure.”
“Play the maximum amount of coins each time. That way, if you get a good hand, you’ll win big.”
He’d been betting a quarter a hand, thinking it would let him play longer, which would increase his chances of winning. Only, she was saying that it was a bad strategy, and would deny him the chance to really win. He pushed the button on the screen that said PLAY MAXIMUM AMOUNT.
“There you go,” she said.
Five new cards appeared on the screen. The ace of hearts, king of hearts, three of clubs, nine of hearts, and ten of hearts. He started to discard all the cards but the ace and saw her eyebrows go up.
“Discard the three and nine,” she said. “That way, you might make a royal flush.”
A royal flush was the best hand of all. According to the payout chart on the screen, he’d get two grand for a royal flush.
“Nobody gets those,” he said.
“That’s because they don’t try,” she said.
The day had been filled with surprises. He discarded the three and the nine. Two new cards appeared on the screen, a queen of hearts and a joker. She let out a war whoop. “You won! You won!”
He stared at the screen. “No, I didn’t. That ain’t a royal flush.”
“Yes, it is. Jokers are wild. That’s why they call it Joker’s Wild.”
He realized the screen was flashing. It didn’t feel real, and he touched the PAYOUT button with his finger. A slip of paper spit out of the machine saying he’d won $2,000.
He handed it to her, and she went into the restaurant to get the money from the manager.
He sucked down the beer left in his glass. Living in Vegas, he’d heard countless stories about people winning big in casinos, and how it had changed their lives. He’d always assumed the stories were bullshit.
The bartender returned holding a thick stack of bills. She counted the money onto the bar then pushed it toward him. Lifting her eyes, she looked into his face expectantly.
He hesitated picking up the stack, wondering how many customers heard her spiel each day. Fifty? A hundred? Giving suckers hope was how she made her living. He knew that, yet it didn’t change how she’d made him feel.
He put three hundred on the bar and walked out.
32
Valentine was ready to make a bust.
He’d shown Bill Higgins the surveillance tape of Skins Turner mucking a card. Bill had seen his share of muckers, and he whistled through his teeth when Skins did his switch in plain view of everyone else at the table.
“Guy’s got balls,” Bill said.
“He’s also got tremendous misdirection,” Valentine said.
“How so?”
“Everyone’s watching DeMarco.”
Taking out his cell phone, Bill had put into motion the necessary steps to go into Celebrity’s casino, and arrest Skins Turner. For starters, he alerted the casino’s head of security and explained exactly what Skins was doing. Then he gave a detailed description of what Skins looked like and where he was sitting in the game. More than one cheater had gotten away when a security guard had, in his haste to make a bust, nabbed the wrong person.
Then Bill called the Metro Las Vegas Police Department and went through the same drill with a sheriff. Skins would eventually end up in the Metro LVPD clink, and Bill didn’t want some judge letting him out on a hundred-dollar bail because the arresting officer hadn’t understood the seriousness of the charge.
The next thing Bill did was invite the other techs in the room to look at the tape of Skins and confirm that cheating was taking place. Juries in Nevada hated the casinos and would not convict a cheater without clear and compelling videotape evidence. A cop’s word simply wasn’t good enough.
Once the techs had agreed Skins was cheating, Bill did a background check on Skins. Nothing could be more helpful to prosecuting Skins than him having a prior conviction for cheating. Bill got Skins’s name and address from the hotel’s reservation department, and then called it in to the police, and his own people. If Skins had ever been arrested, either Metro or the Gaming Control Board would have a record of it.
Ten minutes later, both Metro and the GCB called Bill back.
“Damn,” Bill said, hanging up the phone.
“He’s clean?”
“Got a couple of speeding tickets down in Houston, but that’s it. Where the hell is Sammy Mann, anyway? Maybe he knows this guy from the past.”
“Sammy flew the coop,” Valentine said. “He ran right after we grilled him.”
Bill clenched his jaw. “That lousy prick. I gave him a second chance, and this is how he repays us.” He asked the tech to replay the tape of Skins, and they both watched it again. Bill cursed under his breath. “This isn’t good enough to convict.”
“It isn’t?”
“No.” Bill pointed at Skins’s right hand. It hung over the edge of the table and beneath his other arm, hiding the palmed card from his opponents but not entirely from the camera’s eye. A tiny sliver of card showed between Skins’s third and fourth fingers. Cheaters called this “leaking.”
“Our illustrious mayor, who used to be a high-priced defense attorney, was able to get specific laws put on the books in regards to how close a mucker’s hands had to be to the table for a crime to have actually been committed,” Bill said. “Skins’s hands aren’t close enough.”
“But we saw him switch cards,” Valentine protested.
“We saw him cover the cards with his hands,” Bill corrected him. “We didn’t see the actual switch. The only evidence we have of foul play is him leaking the card, and since his hand is off the table, that isn’t technically cheating. I know it sounds stupid, Tony, but it’s the law.”
Valentine felt himself getting angry, and took a walk around the room. Old-time gamblers had a special name for conversations like this. They called them “Who shot John?” They were so ridiculous, there was absolutely nothing to compare them to.
When he came back, Bill was still standing there.
“So what do we do?” Valentine asked.
“We wait, and get another tape of Skins cheating,” Bill replied.
“You’re going to let Skins play some more?”
“I don’t have a choice.”
“But that’s crazy. It’s an elimination tournament. Every time Skins cheats, some poor guy is getting knocked out.”
“I want the evidence to stand up in court,” Bill said. “Look, you want to bust DeMarco at the same time, right? Grab the dealer and the equipment and figure out once and for all what the kid’s doing. Well, if we arrest Skins, and it doesn’t hold up, then neither will a case against DeMarco if we find evidence of him cheating. His attorney will be able to say we seized his client under false pretenses.”
“Hey,” the tech who’d originally replayed the tape for Valentine called out. “They’re back playing poker.”
Valentine and Bill went over to the tech’s monitor and stared at the screen.
Within ten minutes of play resuming, Skins chopped a card from his hand, stuck it beneath the table, and on the next hand, mucked the card in, and won the pot. DeMarco had folded and sat at the other end of the table, wearing a disgusted look on his face. He knows something’s wrong, Valentine thought.
The tech replayed Skins doing the switch on a monitor. Bill cursed.
“Let me guess,” Valentine said. “The video isn’t good enough.”
“You don’t see the switch actually taking place,” Bill said. “It won’t fly in court.”
Valentine felt like kicking something. Nothing made hi
m angrier than a cheater ripping off innocent people. He supposed it had something to do with the crime itself. The cheater wasn’t just stealing money. He was betraying a trust as well.
The tech spoke up. “Maybe I can help.”
“How?” Bill asked.
“There’s another surveillance camera on the table. The angle’s from the side.”
“Let’s see it,” Bill said.
The tech played the tape from the second surveillance camera. On this tape, the palmed card in Skins’s hand was visible while it rested on the table. Bill slapped the tech on the back.
“Let me know if you ever want to come work for the GCB,” Bill said.
“Thanks, Mr. Higgins.”
“Is that enough to nail him?” Valentine asked.
“Yes,” Bill said. “Now, how do I handle this, so we can expose DeMarco?”
Valentine pointed at the dealer on the monitor. “The dealer needs to be grabbed, plus whatever he brought to the table with him. Either he’s wearing transmitting equipment, or it’s hidden somewhere nearby.”
“How’s he sending the signals?”
“It happens when he deals the cards,” Valentine said.
“How’s DeMarco reading the signals?”
“Either he’s wearing an inner-canal earpiece, or a thumper strapped to his leg, or they’re coming through a cell phone on vibrate mode in his pocket.”
“You figured this all out just now?”
Valentine nodded, annoyed he hadn’t seen it sooner. The only way to effectively transmit information to a blind person was through sound. That was the secret to DeMarco’s scam. Now, Valentine just had to find out how the cards were being read, and the case could be put to bed.
Bill put his hand appreciatively on Valentine’s shoulder. “Good going,” his friend said.
Picking up the phone on the tech’s desk, Bill called downstairs to Celebrity’s head of security and informed him that they were coming downstairs to “freeze” the table where Skins and DeMarco were playing. The GCB’s greatest power was its ability to enter any casino, stop a game, and cart away the equipment for examination in their labs. Bill hung up the phone and looked at his watch. “Head of security needs five minutes to get his troops together.”