He shouldn’t be that strong at nine months, but then, Kenny thought, look at his mother, who had filled up some plastic gallon laundry jugs after breakfast and used them as weights so her arms wouldn’t get stale.
Stale. Her word. She used slang Kenny hadn’t heard outside of movies from the fifties, Marine Corps language. Like describing the experience as “outstanding,” when she returned from a run through the scorpion-infested desert at sunset.
The sleeping thing had gone well, if you wanted to stay a virgin forever. Jessie slept in the back with the baby and Kenny curled up on the vinyl dinette bench that folded out into what Nina had optimistically called a bed. He rolled himself up in the blanket and lay awake for a long time thinking that someone else, the mythical man in the magazines that he was not, would have taken her in his arms long before bed and then the baby would be the one out here with the coyotes.
After lunch he called Nina, who told him that the pale-eyelashed man sitting on the stool next to him had been murdered.
“With a Glock?” he asked.
“My question exactly. They didn’t find the gun. They have the bullet but the test results won’t be in for a few days.”
“Murder,” Kenny said. “The man in the hooded sweatshirt.” He felt cold fear.
“Man or woman, you said. There may not be a connection. We don’t know that it was your gun.”
“Well, I’m sure glad, Jessie and I and—that we’re out here in the desert.”
“Me too. You’re being careful?”
“Absolutely.”
Nina said, “Are you learning anything? Could Kemp have had a reason to think he would win the jackpot?”
“I’m on it. I’ll call you right away if I have something.”
“Kenny?”
He was looking at the baby, and he was afraid. “What?”
“Hurry.”
He got the laptop booted up, though without a surge protector he could crash anytime, Nina’s electrical system being what it was. Jessie came out wearing her jeans and sweater and they talked about Charlie Kemp.
“What does it mean?” Jessie said.
“The shooter is at large, but we don’t know why Kemp was shot,” Kenny said. “Maybe it has nothing to do with us.”
“Come on. He came after us too.”
“I know. I’m glad we got out.”
“So what now?”
“Keep on doing what we’re doing, I guess.”
“Well, since there’s no McDonald’s on the corner, I still have to lay in food,” she said. “What kind of tea do you want?”
“Lipton’s. We’re only thirty miles from Minden, where the body was found. Maybe we should go together. But I have this work I have to do for Nina.”
“I won’t be long. I’ll go to Carson City.”
“Take the rifle.” He couldn’t believe he was talking like this. “Take the rifle,” like in an old Western.
“I don’t like leaving, but we have to eat. You and Gabe are safe here. No one could find us here. Don’t be afraid.”
“I’m not afraid. Except for you and Gabe.”
“You know something?”
“What?”
“Now that the worst has happened, Potter has come at me hard, people are getting killed, I feel better than I have in a long time. I feel relieved. Waiting for the war is so much harder than the war. I know what I’m doing now. I’ll check the booby traps on my way out.”
He heard the car start up and roar down the sandy road. She hadn’t even mentioned the money. With her, Potter was still the focus.
He put the Portacrib right by the computer and explained a few things to Gabe, who seemed to enjoy watching the screen. When he jumped into the Net, Gabe was right there with him.
Kenny wanted to know all about Charlie Kemp. As to how Kemp had ended his life in a dumpster in a small Nevada town not half an hour from the trailer, there was too little information to form a hypothesis, so he abstained. The Nevada Appeal and the Reno Gazette reported the murder with few details. A shooting behind a pizza place. No witnesses to the shooting, but police had some leads they weren’t talking about. Kenny learned that Kemp was a welder from Nottingham, England, age forty-two, on an unexpired work visa.
Kemp’s nationality posed a problem. Kenny couldn’t find anything on his background in England.
He put Kemp aside for the moment and started working on the list Nina had given him. Her logic made sense. On what basis could Global Gaming show the jackpot was invalid?
The only answer would be cheating. But Jessie hadn’t cheated. She was many things, but technologically hip she was not. Slot machine cheating would involve hacking into the microchip that controlled the machine. She couldn’t do that. Supposedly, nobody could do that.
The wins had to be random. It was all in the doctrine of fair play Nevada guaranteed.
However, thinking about it, he was quite interested in the psychology behind the spinning reels. The reels came so tantalizingly close to lining up on a perfect hit so often. Could they actually program the microchips to do that? Make two sevens stop and the third go by? And was that legal, anyway?
There was lots of news about past jackpots on the Global Gaming site. A California woman had won more than eight million at the Tahoe Hilton in Crystal Bay at a Megabucks machine, lining up four eagles. In Las Vegas, someone had won over twenty-seven million at the same kind of progressive slot machine. The casinos and gaming technologists were taking advantage of the big news to offer up some of their own, a new game called Super Megabucks which would average fifteen million dollars per win. Just this year, the payoff had already surged up to over twenty-nine million at Harrah’s Lake Tahoe.
The slots were now the dominant revenue-producing devices in the gaming industry. This was news to Kenny. He would have thought the gaming tables were the big moneymakers.
He found a site that discussed the computer chip inside the big-payout slot machines, called an EPROM chip. These chips used a program called a “random number generator.”
“Gabe, you won’t believe this,” he muttered. Gabe made inchoate noises and kicked the Portacrib. Kenny hadn’t been around children much. Gabe was a budding King Kong. Right now he was shaking the bars, trying to tear down the walls of his prison. The effort was grand but the effect was comic.
Back to the screen. Unlike the old mechanical free-spinning reels, video reels used a stepper motor which allowed stops to be programmed based on a secret “source code.”
Several of the Nevada clubs had asked the Gaming Control Board for permission to “set” some of their slots more “loosely” than the others, so their Red Carpet members would have better odds than the hoi polloi. How could anyone do that? In what way was this random?
He tried to think. The chips were set to stop and to consistently provide certain percentages, yet they did so in a way that could not be predicted. How?
Puzzled, Kenny went to the Web site on the Triple Eight court case. First of all, he admired the psychology of using eights as the winning numbers. In China eights were very lucky numbers. He himself would have wanted to play such a machine.
All right. Three eights, but they did not perfectly bisect the win line. Kenny examined a diagram of the positions of the eights on the reel. The eights all touched the central win line, but haphazardly. Then Kenny read that Global Gaming had proved it wasn’t a true jackpot by examining the random number generator, which indicated the machine wasn’t supposed to hit right then.
Jessie’s Greed Machine—he saw the three brown banks again. Right across the middle line. No problem there. But what about the random number generator? Jessie’s machine must have already passed that test too. The check only took a couple of hours.
Kenny scratched his head. What the heck was this thing they called a random number generator? Software, obviously, on a chip they could remove and examine. So far, so good. It generated random numbers. Uh huh.
The real question remained: what was th
is random number generator?
He read on. Nevada casinos were free to set their slot machines so that they paid out only 75 percent. And casinos did set their machines and changed the payouts whenever they wanted to. They weren’t supposed to change the random number generator program, though. Not supposed to?
The Nevada Gaming Control Board had six field inspectors for the state. In 1996, Nevada had 185,610 slot machines.
Kenny did the calculation. Say they could check one hundred machines a day—it would take them five years to do a round of the machines!
He had a sinking feeling in his stomach. He wished he had a strong cup of tea right now. Working at the computer was no joke without tea. This sinking feeling was a somatic expression of the thought he was having, that Jessie’s chances had sunk.
He went to Nina’s cupboard in another search for a tea bag tucked in a corner. No tea, but he found three kinds of coffee. Two more sacks of the stuff in the fridge. She ought to get hold of herself. He played with Gabe for a few minutes, then went back to work.
Cheating was as traditional as winning and losing in gambling. As weevils will always burrow into flour, the industry would never be able to construct a machine that was completely impregnable from the cheaters.
But a lot of the cheating seemed to be within the industry. He learned that it was legal in Nevada to program the virtual reels on the slots so that, for instance, three sevens would appear above or below the pay line. But it wasn’t legal to put two sevens on the payline and drop one below. In other words, programming a “near-miss” on a payline was illegal, a near-miss above or below wasn’t.
And since the player who saw too many blank blank blanks on the payout line might lose heart and leave, many machines were now programmed to detect that such a line was about to appear, and to insert a couple of encouraging winning symbols.
In other words, what the player saw on the machine wasn’t necessarily the actual result of his playing. If he won, he did still win, but if he lost, the programming tried to make the loss look like a near-win.
The old mechanical reels had been fixed in the traditional way. Every player noticed eventually that the winning symbols showed up much more on the first two reels. That was because the third reel only contained one winning symbol. This carnival-style scam had always been legal and universal.
But the new programming offered a new world of cheating possibilities.
Now Kenny was looking actively for slot machine cheating. Software microchips that were illegally modified were called “gaffed” chips. In 1989 a slot machine manufacturer called American Coin had been discovered to be fixing the chips in their video poker machines to reduce the number of royal flushes. The programmer who had programmed the gaffed chips had been shot to death at his house in Las Vegas just before he was due to give testimony in the case. Nevada had decided this kind of industry deception was illegal. But where was the line?
Kenny even found a case of a Gaming Control Board official who had reprogrammed the EPROMs in some slots so they would pay out when a certain combination of coins was inserted. He did the programming and handed the gaffed chips to the field inspectors, who unknowingly inserted the cheating program into the machines while trying to test them. He had been convicted of attempted theft by deception.
The interesting thing was, this guy had used co-conspirators, people who sat at the machines and actually won the jackpots.
He thought of Charlie Kemp again, and of the faceless men he had met the night of the jackpot who owned, maintained, and supervised the payouts on the slots. But Kemp didn’t seem to have any connection to the gaming industry, other than being a gambler. And being dead like that witness.
Kenny felt even worse. He was actually starting to believe someone could have somehow changed the EPROM on Jessie’s Greed Machine. The Gaming Control Board seemed to be thinking along the same lines. But they must not be sure, or Jessie would be arrested.
How could they not be sure? All they had to do, according to these articles, was run a test program on the chip. They would know right away if the program had been altered. Then they would nullify the win.
What was going on?
Then Gabe needed food, a graham cracker with jelly on it and a bottle, then Gabe’s diaper had to be changed, then Gabe had to be put down for a nap in the back room. Jessie had left written instructions, which Kenny carried out to the letter. And the little tyke lay right down and put his thumb in his mouth and went to sleep. Just like clicking off AppleShare and the ISP connection and shutting down.
Kenny tiptoed back to the front room. The ceiling fan whirred. He moved back to Charlie Kemp. He searched Lake Tahoe newspaper police logs for a few years, and found nothing. That didn’t surprise him. A police record would have been a red flag to the Gaming Control Board inspectors.
He sat back, arms behind his head, and focused on his memory of the night of the win.
Kemp had been taking notes, and consulting his watch. He had been nervous.
Provocative. Suspicious. But so many gamblers thought they had systems.
But Kemp had acted like he was supposed to win. Like the jackpot was his.
Kenny thought about Kemp’s speech, his level of intelligence as extrapolated from his vocabulary. Kemp hack into Global Gaming’s security systems? No way.
Had to be an inside job. But an inside job would have shown up.
Jessie’s Greed Machine had been tested down to the binary code. Kenny didn’t see how they could find anything now after taking the machine down to its binary code. Nina didn’t need to worry.
He would call her and—Kenny had just remembered that someone had said something to Kemp while he sat on the stool. He remembered the girl in her wheelchair, gamely having a good time. Had she spoken a few words to him?
Or was it the boyfriend, the biker with the ponytail. And what had been said? Kenny couldn’t remember. Intoxication had affected his memory.
Somebody had said something to Kemp! An old rock song had gone through Kenny’s head when he heard it.
The boyfriend had worn Harley pins. Kenny went to motorcycle club sites’ membership lists. Nevada was full of bikers. No photos of this particular biker popped up. He pushed up his glasses and took another break, during which he cleaned up the harrowing results of Gabe’s play with the lamb.
Back to the dinette table.
He logged on to some casino sites. He had a strong subprogram for hacking into HR sites. He spent time examining payroll records for Tahoe casino employees.
He found no sign of Charlie Kemp. If a casino had employed him, he had managed to keep himself well hidden or was using an alias.
Then, just as Gabe began making small sounds in the back room that contained within them the implicit threat of high-decibel sounds to come, Kenny found something.
He had hacked into some employee newsletters. And there on the cover was a picture for an article on disabled employees. And smiling front and center he saw the girl in the wheelchair.
Her name was Amanda Lewis, and she was a cashier at the Horizon.
Gabe woke up and took over the proceedings. Another round of diapers and food. Gabe spoke intensely throughout of his feelings but Kenny couldn’t understand any of it.
Jessie got back about five, her arms full of groceries. “Any trouble?”
“Empty roads. No trouble. Anything happen here?”
“Only in my mind.”
“You found something on the computer?”
“I don’t think Nina needs to worry. If there had been cheating, Global Gaming would have caught it right away and never made the payout.”
“Great! How’s the boy?”
“Rowdy. I’m teaching him HTML.”
“No fever?” She dumped the bags in the galley kitchen and came over to the computer center, which consisted of the dinette table and the Portacrib. Gabe was waving his arms excitedly, and in a second she was holding him, cheek to cheek, her eyes closed. “He’s nice and cool.�
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“I hope that fever thing hasn’t retreated to the cell cytoplasm level where it’s just waiting to break out again,” Kenny said.
“I hate it when you say things like that. Do you even know what you’re talking about? Because I sure don’t.”
“Sorry.” Here he went, irritating her again, when he was merely interested in sharing some intriguing tidbits of knowledge he had picked up in his browsing. He was a Renaissance man in a time when many talents were useless and one miserly, focused ability got you what you wanted.
“That was a higher temperature than ever three days ago,” she said. Gabe echoed that thought with a wail. “I was scared.”
“I thought medicine was a science,” Kenny said. “Why can’t the doctor look at him and figure out what is wrong?”
“You haven’t been around very many sick people, have you?”
“Did they give him antibiotics? Just in case?”
“No. Because he had no sign of an infection and if it’s a virus, that wouldn’t help. C’mon, Gabe, back into the Portacrib, Mommy’s right here putting stuff away. See?” She dropped her head back and rolled her shoulders, and Kenny watched, helplessly admiring the hollow below her clavicle and the swelling skin below.
“Lipton’s. I’ll put some water on and you can go nuts.
I bought myself a pint of vodka and Rose’s lime juice. You ever have a gimlet?”
“I’m not much of a drinker.”
“You can try one out, if you want. Anyway, he says babies get these ambiguous fevers often,” she went on. “Some of them even have seizures. As long as you catch it before the fever is too high, it’s no big deal.”
“Gabe’s seizure was no big deal?”
“He seemed to think it wasn’t. They’re common in infancy, he said.” She looked unconvinced. “I couldn’t tell if he just said that to make me feel better, either.”
She finished putting the food in the tiny cupboard and poured spring water into Nina’s saucepan on the stove and said, “Damn. I was thinking as I drove up the dirt road, it’s just us and the buzzards out here. This can’t go on much longer. I need a decent place to live, some land where I can . . . I need for this kid to get a thorough workup. I don’t care what that doctor says, this just doesn’t feel right to me.”
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