JENNIFER ELLIS
VIVA LAS VEGAS
1
In her six years as a surveillance officer at the Casino Martinique, Maria Cisneros had earned something of a well-deserved reputation for being able to spot cheaters or scammers in record time. At the moment, however, that reputation was on the line, for she found herself having one hell of a time trying to discern how the man wearing a tweed jacket and rumpled khaki trousers was able to walk away from three different poker games a big winner without her being able to discern how he was cheating, or if in fact he was. That he could simply be a professional who was preying on rabbits, rank amateurs who came to Vegas to enjoy a serious game of poker with likeminded people or to see if they could beat the big boys, could not be discounted. Either way, the pit manager was concerned with the character Cisneros had come to refer to as Mr. Tweed.
It didn’t take long before she was able to see he didn’t have a colleague at the table who was either swapping cards with him or in a position that allowed him to read the hands of the other players and pass that information on to Mr. Tweed. Mr. Tweed was also not a mechanic, a player who used sleight-of-hand techniques to improve his odds of winning. Only after she had worked her way through the entire list of known techniques without being able to come up with an answer did she call her shift supervisor over to see if he could unravel this mystery.
Ambling over to the console where Cisneros was monitoring a trio of screens, each with a different view of Mr. Tweed, Jack Hughes placed a hand on the back of her seat and leaned over. “Don’t tell me Maria the Magnificent, the undisputed queen of the surveillance room, is having a spot of trouble,” he whispered in her ear.
Though annoyed by Hughes’s use of the moniker her coworkers had for her, Cisneros sighed as her shoulders slumped. “I’m afraid so, boss man. This one’s got me and the pit manager stumped.”
“What’s he been doing?” Hughes asked as his eyes darted from screen to screen, carefully watching how the player in question was dealing the cards to the others at his table.
“He’s been playing hit and run all night, going from table to table after he’s won a big hand,” Cisneros explained as she too watched a CCTV screen, now tightly focused on the way Mr. Tweed was handling the cards. “Each time he moves to a new table after cashing in most of his chips, he starts by playing small, throwing in only what he needs to in order to stay in the game awhile, even if he does have a good hand. Then wham! He goes all in when there’s a big pot on the table and he’s sure he has a winning hand.”
Like Cisneros, Hughes could see the player they were watching was dealing correctly. It was only when he’d finished doing so and after he’d taken a long, hard look at his own cards that Hughes saw a tell he hadn’t seen in decades. “Son of a bitch!” he muttered before chuckling to himself.
Unsure why her supervisor was acting the way he was as they watched Mr. Tweed use the pinkie of his left hand to pick his nose, Cisneros frowned. “What?”
“Can you give me a close-up of his face?” Hughes asked.
Without bothering to answer him, Cisneros zoomed in on Mr. Tweed’s round face that was as dispassionate and inscrutable as a member of the Imperial Chinese Guard.
Straightening up, Hughes used the hand he’d been resting on Cisneros’s seat to give her a pat on her shoulder. “Tell the pit manager to relax. I’ll handle this one myself.”
“If you say so, boss man.”
As he was leaving the surveillance room, Hughes called out over his shoulder to no one in particular, “If anyone asks, tell them I’m on my dinner break.”
With his full attention focused on the garishly made-up octogenarian across from him who always stopped talking about her grandchildren whenever she had a good hand, Tommy Tyler didn’t notice Jack Hughes coming up behind him until he spoke. “Of all the gin joints in all the towns in all the world, you have to walk into mine, you wretched little taffy.”
Over the years, Tommy had come to appreciate there were some people who were totally forgettable, the sort who came into his life and out again quicker than a greasy burger. Jack Hughes wasn’t one of them. Memories of a character like him were the kind that didn’t diminish one jot over the years.
Taking care to lay his cards facedown on the table, Tommy turned in his seat, ignoring the glare from the player to his right when his knee brushed against one of the man’s legs.
“Your joint?” Tommy intoned playfully as he rose from his seat to greet a friend he hadn’t seen in over fifteen years.
“In a way, it is,” Hughes replied as he reached out to accept Tommy’s hand. “I’m the senior surveillance supervisor.”
“You? Someone hired you to keep an eye out for miscreants like me?”
“It’s a dirty job, but someone has to do it.” Hughes grinned as he continued to match the way Tommy was pumping his hand. “What do you say the two of us head off to one of the restaurants, order the biggest slab of beef they have, and catch up on old times?”
“Love to, as soon as I finish this hand,” Tommy replied as he tried to pull his hand away from Hughes.
“Oh, I don’t think the nice people here would mind if you called it a night,” came the response as he glanced over Tommy’s shoulder at the other players seated at the table without releasing the grip on his friend’s hand.
“You back rooming me?” Tommy asked as he cocked a brow.
“Me? No. I don’t do that sort of thing. They do,” he replied, tilting his head off to one side to where a couple of uniformed security officers were standing side by side just behind a casino pit manager with a scowl on his face, all of whom were watching their every move.
“Well, since you put it that way, I guess I will take you up on your kind invitation.” With that, Tommy managed to free his hand, collect his winnings, and left a tableful of tourists and wannabe card sharks scurrying to collect their own chips and flee before someone came by and took them away.
The restaurant Hughes led Tommy to was a steak house located within the casino. Over a couple of juicy prime cuts and baked potatoes the size of a football used by the mini rugby league, the two men caught up on what each of them had been up to after they’d left the army.
“I tried the police for a while, but it didn’t suit me,” Hughes explained. “It was too much like the army, with the added disadvantage of not affording you an opportunity for a change of scene every now and then.”
“And you get that here, in the middle of what the Americans call a desert?” Tommy asked incredulously as he was about to shovel an oversized piece of beef into his mouth.
“Oh, the scenery this place offers is far better than any the regiment ever offered us,” Hughes shot back as his eyes cut over to a table of young, smartly dressed women who were obviously enjoying a girls’ weekend in Vegas.
“And what does your wife say about your bird-watching?” Tommy grinned as one of the girls, a fair-haired lass with a pair of legs that went on forever, caught him staring at her. By way of response, she smiled and gave him a wicked little wink.
“‘Where’s my alimony check, you bastard?’”
“Oh,” was all Tommy could think of as he turned his attention back to Hughes.