Smooth Call
Page 2
Rick Mills drove up to the second floor of the Pechanga Casino’s North Parking Garage in a tow truck with “Ed’s Towing” painted on the doors. He parked in a spot with empty spaces on either side hoping for a smooth exit when he returned. On the way to the stairs he noticed a blue Cadillac backed into a parking space ten or twelve cars down from his truck. The plates read COOLCAD. A cool Cadillac, Rick thought. The owner must be a cool dude himself, or at least think so.
He walked down the stairs to the casino entrance and, once inside, past the slot machines, the customer assist windows, the box office, the high limit area, and the table games then up the escalator to the poker room.
The poker room doors opened automatically and he approached a high desk with a slanted top where two women sent players to the various poker games, or put them on an electronic board if there were no seats and they wanted to wait.
“Can I help you?” asked the older of the two women.
“Yes, do you have a two, five no limit hold ‘em game available?
“I think we do,” she said as he picked up a small microphone. She twisted around so she could see the floor and spoke into the microphone, “Gary do you still have a seat open?”
A dealer nodded and the lady turned back around and said, ”Table 28.”
“Thanks,” said Rick as he headed toward the middle of the large room. Table 28 was in an area slightly raised with brass railings to separate it from the rest of the floor. This was where the larger games were played and even though 2,5 no limit was the smallest of the large games and Rick usually bought in for the minimum it still made him feel like a high roller every time he sat up there.
He got to the table and took the only seat available, number one next to the dealer, who had just finished dealing the first two cards of a new hand. The first player to bet was Frank Salucci who had his car keys on the table. Connected to the keys was a silver rectangle with COOLCAD spelled out in sequins and fake diamonds. COOLCAD vanity plates, a piece of COOLCAD phony bling on his keys, the guy certainly wanted people to know what he rolled in, Rick thought.
Frank came in for a raise and the guy next to him called. Then Gloria Hesselgrave, an attractive woman who worked as a nurse and played a lot of Texas hold’em, raised again. Frank called as did the guy next to him. The dealer dealt the burn card down, and then the flop which he turned over and spread out in front of him – 2 of hearts, 3 of spades, 6 of clubs – three to a straight.
Frank, and the guy next to him, checked. Gloria thought for a moment and bet. Salucci called without hesitation and the guy next to him folded. The dealer burned one and turned one, the ace of spades. Somebody had to have a straight, Rick thought. He hoped it was the lady. This time Frank bet $100 and the lady raised him his last $55. Frank called.
The last card was the four of diamonds. Since there would be no more betting the dealer told the players to flip over their cards.
The lady turned over two red aces. The ace on the board gave her a set of aces.
“I’ve got a straight!” Salucci yelled excitedly as he flipped over the 7 and 8 of hearts. “I’ve got a straight!
It normally takes a few seconds for people to react and it was momentarily quiet while the whole table contemplated the hands. The dealer slowly turned the lady’s aces face down and started pushing the pot toward Salucci who scooped it up like a greedy child. He began stacking his chips in the two racks before him as the dealer turned over the board cards. That’s when everyone started talking at once.
“That wasn’t a straight, you were missing a 5.”
“You had nothing, she had 3 aces, she beat you.”
“Give her the money, it’s not your pot.”
But by this time Salucci had the chips racked and was headed for the cashiers cage. A couple of floormen were trying to talk to him but his answer to all their questions was, “No, no, no!”
Gloria realized she’d been cheated the same time everyone at the table did, seven to ten seconds after it happened. She realized that Salucci had acted fast, raking in her chips, stacking them in racks, and heading for the cashiers cage because all though the hand he’d been planning his sly sneaky move. If he made his inside straight he would have won but only an idiot would put that much money into a pot in hope that a five would fall. And Salucci wasn’t an idiot, that was obvious, he was a cheat.
Most of the floor men were gathered around Salucci listening to him proclaim his innocence, how he’d had the winning hand blah, blah, blah. Gloria saw a large Indian watching the commotion from a distance. He was a floor man, his grey suit and brass nameplate gave him away.
“Deal me out,” said Gloria as she stood up and walked toward him, her hands at her sides, balled into fists. “You know what that’s about?” she said, motioning with her chin at Salucci and the crowd around him. “It’s about that guy stealing a five hundred dollar pot right out from under the nose of your dealer. Of course no one else caught it either but no one else is being paid to catch it. Isn’t that one of the reasons people come to play poker here, because the management keeps the games fair? Keeps cheaters out?”
The floor man nodded his head but didn’t say anything. “We’ll isn’t it?” Gloria was fighting to keep her voice down but her last comment turned a few heads. “They’re not going to do anything about this are they?”
“Probably not.”
“Why?”
“Look at him. He’s not going to voluntarily give up those chips. The only way to get them would be to hold him down and take them and there are a lot of problems with that. They might talk to him; tell him if he ever does it again they’ll ban him from the casino. We’ll keep an eye on him from now one but that will probably be the extent of it.”
Gloria squeezed her fist tighter and said, “I feel like going over there and punching his lights out.”
“I know how you feel. I might have come over the table right when he did it. But what good would that do? I’d be the one led off by security and turned over to the cops for starting a fight in a casino. The same would happen to you if you were fast enough to give him a black eye and a bloody nose before he had a chance to put his chips down. You’d spend a night in jail and he’d sue you for the injuries you inflicted on him and in the end it would cost you a lot more than the five hundred he stole from you.”
“I guess you’re right. It just pisses me off that he planned it, he did it to me, and he’s getting away with it.”
“Yeah, it’s a bummer, there’s no way of getting around that.”
“Well thanks for listening and letting me blow off some steam.”
“Happy to do it,” the big Indian said. “It comes with the territory.”
Rick, who hadn’t bought any chips yet, made a decision and walked away from the table and out of the poker room. He walked to the escalator, took it down to the ground floor and walked until he reached the exit near the north parking garage. Once outside he started a slow jog toward the parking garage. He took the steps two at a time to the second floor and walked to the tow truck, passing the COOLCAD as he went.
He opened the truck’s door and quickly threw on his brown work jacket that said “Ed’s Towing” on the back and “Rick” in cursive writing over the left breast. He was pretty sure the card cheat wouldn’t recognize him. He hadn’t played a hand and was only at the table for five minutes or less. He pulled on a San Diego Padres baseball cap and drove to where the Cadillac waited.
His cousin Ed, who was the owner of Ed’s Towing, always told all his drivers to get the vehicle hooked up first thing. If you want to talk to the cop or pour a coffee from your thermos fine, but hook up first because once you got them hooked you know you’re getting paid.
Good advice, Rick thought. He lined up in front of the Cadillac, got out of the cab and pulled the lever that tilted the bed down toward the front bumper of the car. Another lever slid the bed toward the front wheels. When the truck was in position Rick took the two h
ooks that were attached to the winch and hooked one under each side of the front axle. Then he started to winch the car up. When the car was on the bed and the bed was still tilted Salucci arrived. He wasn’t happy.
“Hey, what the hell’s going on here? What are you doing with my car?”
“Apparently you missed some payments sir. Your car’s being repossessed.”
“What are you talking about, the car’s paid off.”
“You can work that out with the parties concerned but I still have to tow it.”
“Is that right?” said Salucci as he used his electronic key to unlock all four doors and the trunk. Rick knew he’d head for the trunk and sadly Salucci didn’t disappoint him.
Rick knew from experience that using a fake gun could be dangerous. When he was in college he’d pulled a lifelike toy gun on some other students who were hassling him outside a movie theater. The hassling stopped but later that night one of the students, who was half drunk and pissed off, walked into his dorm room with a real gun, put it to his head and roared, “no one pulls a gun on me!”
Fortunately, another student, a basketball player, heard the shouting and intervened. He talked the gun away from Rick’s head and maybe kept him from becoming a corpse.
Still, it could be more dangerous to let this guy go to his trunk and pull out God knows what kind of weapon, so Rick reached into his jacket pocket and produced a good sized, heavy, businesslike pistol that could have been a Glock, or Beretta, or a Sig Saur but was, in reality, a pellet gun with the barrel bored out to make it look like a 9 mm or a .45 might come out of it.
“Back away from the car.”
Scalateri saw the gun and stopped advancing , keeping a hard stare on Rick.
“Hey, tough guy, put away the evil eye and we can talk about your options.”
“Yeah, we can do that, ah…..Rick is it? That’s what’s written on your jacket? Let’s talk about my options and your future. You don’t have much future left, Rick.”
“Why don’t you let me worry about my future. Now, do you want your car dropped here or do you want to pick it up in San Diego? That’s what you need to concern yourself with now.
Salucci stared and remained silent but Rick could tell his blood was boiling, probably because he was coming to the conclusion that it was going to cost him to get the car back.
“Alright, I’ll drop the car right here for the non-negotiable price of $600. Or you can pick it up in San Diego.”
“So you want $600 to not tow my car.”
“That’s right.”
“It seems like the ‘not towing’ business is more lucrative than the towing business.”
“Sometimes.”
Salucci reached into his pocket and came out with a roll of bills. He peeled off six one hundred dollar bills and handed them to Rick.
Rick walked over to the truck, pushed a lever, and watched as the Cadillac started a slow roll off the bed of the truck. When it reached the floor and the cable was slack Rick said, “Move back twenty yards and keep in my line of sight.”
Salucci moved and Rick unhooked the cables from the front axle. Salucci walked to his car, got in, and with a curse, a threat, and an obscene gesture, screeched out of the parking lot,
Rick finished securing the truck and headed for the top floor despite the fact that there were plenty of parking spots on the floor he was on. It was a long shot that Salucci would come looking for the truck but if he did Mills didn’t want to make it easy for him.
He walked down the wide open-air stairs and back into the north entrance of the casino. Inside he walked by the rows of slot machines, with their lights and beeps, and dozens of customers, some casual gamblers, others slot machine zombies. He walked until he reached the escalator and then stepped on.
The minute he started up the escalator he saw her coming down. She was beautiful, twice as beautiful standing up as she was sitting down. Maybe because he could see more of her, as dumb as that sounded. When they were almost eye to eye, he said, a little too loud, “Excuse me, can I talk to you?”
She gave him a cold stare. “About?”
“It’s very important,” he said as they passed each other, “just wait for me, I’ll be right down.”
When he got to the top of the top he made a quick U-turn and headed back down. When the escalator reached the bottom she was nowhere in sight. He felt a slight panic and then realized it wasn’t really a problem. If she skipped out the $500 was his. He certainly wasn’t going to try and track her down if she wasn’t interested in talking to him.
He heard a whistle and then another one. He looked around and saw her sitting at one of the tables that surrounded the circular bar next the escalators. She didn’t wave him over, which would have been nice, he thought. But she had to be the whistler since there was no one else around, so he walked to her table.
She motioned with her hand to the chair across from her.
He sat down and she said, “I hope this doesn’t sound rude but I don’t know you and I don’t normally meet men on escalators so I talked to the bartender. He’s a friend of mine and he’s going to keep an eye on me.”
Rick looked up at the bar where a tall, bald, broad shouldered man in a white shirt and black tie was drying glasses. He looked at Rick gave a slight smile and nodded. Rick nodded back. The guy seemed pleasant enough but was not someone you’d like to see come over the bar with malice in his eyes. “I don’t think it’s rude,” said Rick. “I think it’s smart. Prudent.”
“Good. So, what can I do for you?”
Rick took the five hundred dollars out of his pocket and laid it on the table between them. “I came to give you this money. I…” Rick stopped talking because the woman was staring at him like he’d thrown a dead fish on the table.
She said, “You think I’m a hooker?”
“What? No, why would I think that? Why would you ask me that?”
“What am I supposed to think when a man I’ve only seen twice lays $500 on a table in a bar and says it’s for me?”
“You’ve seen me twice?”
“On the escalator just now and at that two, five game when that creep ripped me off. You left without playing a hand.”
“You’re observant. I didn’t think you’d remember me with all that was going on.”
“You can’t play winning poker if you’re not observant. So what about the $500?”
“Well, believe it or not the card cheat willingly handed it over.” Rick then told her the rest of his north garage adventure.
When he finished Gloria waited a few seconds and then said, “It couldn’t have befallen on a nicer guy.”
“He’s a bit of a pill isn’t he?”
“Oh, yeah,” she said, “he’s the whole bottle.”
“It sounds like you know him.”
“Just from playing cards. His name is Frank Salucci. He’s a better than average card player who likes to irritate people. Sometimes I think it’s the main reason he plays. That’s the first time I’ve ever seen him cheat.”
Rick looked around the bar. “Why hasn’t anyone come to take a drink order?”
“Because I asked them not to.”
“Didn’t want to drink with the Escalator Stalker huh?”
“Something like that. But I think I could make an exception if you want something.”
“No, I’m okay.”
“Look, can I take you out to dinner? I owe you one.”
“You can take me out to dinner, but you don’t owe me anything. I would have done the same thing for any hot female in your age bracket that wasn’t wearing a wedding ring.”
“Well I’m glad I made the cut.”
“You did, convincingly.” Rick paused for a moment. “Actually I might have done it for the sheer pleasure of it. I hate to see loud mouth tough guys trying to bully their way over people. I’m just glad that this time I was lucky enough to be in a position to do something about it.”
Rick reached his hand across the table, “My name is Rick Mills.”
Gloria shook his hand and said, “Gloria Hesselgrave.”
They both smiled and then Gloria said, “When should we have our dinner?”
“Tomorrow night?”
“Okay. What time? Is seven good for you?”
“Perfect.”
“Alright. Where?”
“Do you have any ideas?”
“Well I’ll be here tomorrow afternoon and then I’ll drive to San Diego. I know a nice place in Escondido if you want to meet there. It breaks up the drive for me.”
“That works.”
”Alright, it’s Joe’s Garden Cuisine. It’s on Grand Street. You need directions?”
“No, I’ll Google it.”
“Okay, see you there at seven.”
“Deal.”
* * *
Chapter 2