“Like a giant smoke screen,” Longo said.
“Exactly,” Valentine said. “This afternoon, I’m going to create a smoke screen, and distract everyone who I think had something to do with my son and his friends being abducted. Once that happens, I want to have a chat with Jinky Harris.”
“By yourself?” Longo said skeptically.
“Yes.”
“The guy has twenty guys on his staff, and a seven-foot-tall bodyguard.”
Valentine glanced at Bill. “Think your agents can handle twenty guys?”
“Not a problem,” Bill said.
Valentine looked back at Longo. “Anything else about Jinky we should know?”
“Yeah,” the detective said. “The bodyguard fancies himself a karate expert. He fights in those tough-man competitions.”
“What’s his name?”
“He calls himself Finesse.”
Valentine had never cared for fighters who gave themselves comic book names, and decided he could deal with Finesse. “There are two things I’m going to need from you, Pete.”
“Name them,” Longo said.
“First, I want you to pull any cops from the vicinity of Jinky’s club when Bill’s agents raid the place.”
Longo looked at Bill. “I’ll need you to coordinate the time of the raid with me.”
“Done,” Bill said.
Longo looked at Valentine. “No problem.”
“Second, I’m going to need a SWAT team at my disposal,” Valentine said. “Once I get Jinky to tell me where Gerry is being held, I want that team to rescue him.”
“Consider it done,” Longo said.
The three men shook hands, and the deal was struck.
Longo picked up the tab, then leaned forward on his elbows. His eyes swept the room the way only a cop’s can before he spoke. “Since we’re putting our cards on the table, I guess it’s time for me to show mine. Tony, does the name Ray Callahan ring any bells?”
Valentine gave it some thought. “Not particularly.”
“You busted him in Atlantic City fifteen years ago.”
Valentine hated hearing that his mind was going, and struggled with the name some more. “I arrested a Raymond Callahan at Resorts International in 1991 for cold-decking a poker game where he was the dealer. The prosecutor let him cop a lesser charge, and he did probation. Same guy?”
“Same guy,” Longo said. “Callahan’s a dealer in the World Poker Showdown. He collapsed yesterday and was rushed to the hospital. The hospital ran a background check and his rap sheet popped up. How do you cold-deck a poker game?”
There were many ways to switch a deck of cards during a game of poker. Some involved wastepaper baskets, others, umbrellas and sports jackets with large pockets. But in the end, what made any deck switch fly was a pair of steady hands and nerves of steel. Raymond Callahan, as Valentine recalled, had an abundance of nerve.
“Practice,” he said. “How can Callahan be a dealer at the World Poker Showdown when he has a criminal record?”
“I asked myself the same question, and decided to talk to my boss about it,” Longo said. “Karl Jasper, the president of the WPS, didn’t submit a list of names of their poker dealers to us. Those dealers are working without Sheriff’s Cards.”
By state law, employees of Las Vegas casinos could not work without Sheriff’s Cards. Possessing one meant you’d been vetted, and had a clean record.
“How can that be possible?” Bill asked.
Longo’s eyes again swept the room. His voice dropped an octave lower. “Jasper is claiming that this is a private event, and that his organization did the vetting.”
“Your boss isn’t buying that, is he?” Bill asked.
“My boss says he’s going to put the screws to Jasper, but we’re now into day four of the tournament, and so far, nothing has happened,” Longo said. “I’ve seen him act this way before. He talks a big game, but doesn’t do anything.”
“Why?” Bill said.
“High jingo.”
High jingo meant the sheriff was getting pressure from above not to interfere with the tournament, and Valentine wondered if it was coming from the mayor or even the governor. To them, the World Poker Showdown was a good thing, since it brought money and exposure to Las Vegas. They didn’t see the harm a crooked tournament could cause, simply because it was easier to look the other way. He tossed his napkin onto the table and slipped out of the booth.
“I need to talk to Callahan,” Valentine said. “Where is he?”
43
Valentine drove to the University Medical Center of Southern Nevada where Ray Callahan was a patient, and parked in the visitor parking lot. Bill had let him keep the photograph of Gerry, and he placed it on the steering wheel. For a long while he stared at his son’s bloody face and the cornered look in his eyes. Saving his son’s ass had become something of a specialty over the years, but each time he’d done it, it had been with the knowledge that one day he’d run out of luck and his son would take a hard fall. Closing his eyes, he prayed that this was not that day.
Inside the hospital he found a friendly receptionist who directed him to Callahan’s room on the fourth floor. Callahan was in the intensive care wing, the cancer he’d been battling having come back with a vengeance. Valentine explained that he was doing an investigation for the Gaming Control Board, and asked if Callahan had had any recent visitors. The receptionist opened up the visitor logbook, and thumbed through its pages.
“Just his lawyer,” she said.
Valentine wrote down the lawyer’s name and put it into his wallet. He thanked the receptionist, and took the elevator to the fourth floor.
Of all the employees who worked in a casino, the dealers were a casino’s biggest concern. There were a lot of reasons for this. Dealers handled large sums of money at the tables, but rarely got to keep any of it. They tended to make scale, and relied on tips to pay their bills. And they usually gambled on the side.
Some dealers ended up resenting the casinos, and decided to pay them back. There were dozens of ways a dealer could do this, from using sleight-of-hand to rig a game, to collusion with outside agents, and sometimes even forming a conspiracy with other dealers. Whatever the method, the end result was almost always the same. The casinos lost their shirts.
The elevator parked on the fourth floor and he got out. A sign pointed the way toward ICU and he started walking. During the drive, his memory of Callahan had come back. Callahan had used a cold-deck machine to switch during a game in the casino’s card room. A cold-deck machine was a black bag concealed behind the waist of the dealer’s pants. Inside the bag was a metal clip that held a stacked deck. At the appropriate time, the deck in use would be dropped in the bag, and the stacked deck grabbed. The term cold-deck came from the fact that the switched deck was colder to the touch. As he recalled, Callahan had made the bag disappear during the bust, which had helped reduce his sentence.
Callahan’s room was at the hallway’s end. Valentine stuck his head in, and saw that Callahan was propped up in bed on oxygen, taking a nap. He walked into the room and stood by the bed. After a moment, Callahan’s eyelids flickered open. A look of fear spread across the dealer’s face.
“Did I die and go to hell?”
Valentine grinned. “You remember me, huh?”
“Of course I remember you. You nailed me in Atlantic City. That crummy partner of yours isn’t with you, is he?”
Doyle Flanagan, Valentine’s partner, had been the bad cop of the team, and liked to kick the chairs out from underneath any cheater they hauled in. Landing on your ass had a way of staying with you, and most cheaters never forgot the experience.