Sucker Bet
James Swain
Ballantine Books • New York
For Thomas Swain
It’s morally wrong to allow suckers to keep their money.
CANADA BILL JONES
Special thanks to Deborah Redmond,
Shawn Redmond, and my wife, Laura
THE TURN OF A CARD
The mark’s name was Nigel Moon.
Jack Lightfoot recognized Moon the moment he stepped into the Micanopy Indian reservation casino. Back in the eighties, Moon had played drums for an English rock band called One-Eyed Pig, his ransacking of hotel rooms as well-publicized as his manic solos. Unlike the other band members, who’d fried their brains on drugs and booze, Moon had opened a chain of popular hamburger joints that now stretched across two continents.
As Moon crossed the casino, Jack eyed the delicious redhead on his arm. She was a plant, or what his partner Rico called a raggle. “The raggle will convince Moon to come to your casino,” Rico had explained the day before, “and try his luck at blackjack. She’ll bring him to your table. The rest is up to you.”
She looked familiar. Jack frequented Fort Lauderdale’s many adult clubs and often picked up free magazines filled with ads of local prostitutes. The raggle was a hooker named Candy Hart. Her ad said she was on call twenty-four hours a day, Visa and MasterCard accepted.
“Good evening,” Jack said as they sat down at his empty table.
Moon reeked of beer. He was pushing fifty, unshaven, his gray hair pulled back in a pigtail like a matador’s coleta. He removed a monster wad from his pocket and dropped it on the table. All hundreds.
“Table limit is ten dollars,” Jack informed him.
Moon made a face. Candy touched Moon’s arm.
“You can’t bet more than ten dollars a hand,” she said sweetly. “All of the table games have limits.”
Moon drew back in his chair. “Ten bloody dollars? What kind of toilet have you brought me to, my dear? I can get a game of dominos with a bunch of old Jews on Miami Beach with higher stakes than that.”
Candy dug her fingernails into Moon’s arm. “You promised me, remember?”
“I did?”
“In the car.”
Moon smiled wickedly. “Oh, yes. A moment of weakness, I suppose.”
“Shhhh,” she said, glancing Jack’s way.
Moon patted her hand reassuringly. “A promise is a promise.”
Moon slid five hundred dollars Jack’s way. Jack cut up his chips. During a stretch in prison, Jack heard One-Eyed Pig’s music blasting through the cell block at all hours, and he knew many of the lyrics by heart.
Jack slid the chips across the table. Moon put ten dollars into each of the seven betting circles on the felt. Jack played a two-deck game, handheld. He shuffled the cards and offered them to be cut.
“Count them,” Moon said.
“Excuse me?” Jack said.
“I want you to count the cards,” Moon demanded.
Jack brought the pit boss over, and Moon repeated himself again.
“Okay,” the pit boss said.
Jack started to count the cards onto the table.
“Faceup,” Moon barked.
“Excuse me?” Jack said.
“You heard me.”
Jack looked to the pit boss for help.
“Okay,” the pit boss said.
Jack turned the two decks faceup. Then he counted them on the table.
“What are you doing?” Candy asked.
“Making sure they’re all there,” Moon said, watching intently. “I ran up against a dealer in Puerto Rico playing with a short deck and lost my bloody shirt.”
Jack finished counting. One hundred and four cards. Satisfied, Moon leaned back into his chair.
“A short dick?” Candy said, giggling.
“Short deck. It’s where the dealer purposely removes a number of high-valued cards. It gives the house an unbeatable edge.”
“And you figured that out,” she said.
“Yes, my dear, I figured it out.”
Jack saw Candy’s hand slip beneath the table and into Moon’s lap. Moon’s face lit up like a lantern. “You’re so smart,” she cooed.
Jack reshuffled the cards. For Moon to have figured out that a dealer was playing with a short deck meant that Moon was an experienced card-counter. Card-counters were instinctively observant, and Jack realized that he was going to have to be especially careful tonight, or risk blowing their scam before it ever got off the ground. He slid the two decks in front of Moon, who cut them with a plastic cut card.
“Good luck,” Jack said.
Then he started to deal.
Jack Lightfoot was not your typical card mechanic.
Born on the Navajo Indian reservation in New Mexico, he’d been in trouble almost from the time he’d started walking. At seventeen, he’d gone to federal prison for a string of convenience store robberies and spent the next six years doing hard time.
The prison was filled with gangs. Jack had gravitated to a Mexican gang and hung out in their cell block. The Mexicans were heavy gamblers and often played cards all day long. They liked different games—seven-card stud, Omaha, razzle-dazzle, Texas hold ’em. Each game had its subtleties, but the game Jack fell in love with was blackjack. And whenever it was Jack’s turn to deal, blackjack was the game he chose.
Dealing blackjack gave Jack an edge over the other players. He’d worked it out and figured it was slightly less than 2 percent. It was offset by the fact that if he lost a round, he had to pay off the other players, and that could be devastating to his bankroll. But if he won, the other players had to pay him. Blackjack was the game with the greatest risk but also the greatest reward.
One night, Jack had lain on his cot, thinking. He’d seen a lot of cheating among the Mexicans. They marked cards with shoe polish or palmed out a pair before a hand began. It occurred to him that if he was going to cheat, wouldn’t blackjack be the game to do it in?
He thought about it for months. The Mexicans were suspicious guys, and manipulating the cards was out of the question. But instead of manipulating the cards, why not manipulate the other players into making bad decisions? Guys did it in poker all the time. It was called bluffing.
Why not blackjack?
One night, one of the Mexicans gave Jack a magic mushroom. Jack ate it, then went to bed. When he woke up a few hours later, he was screaming, his body temperature a hundred and six.
While Jack was strapped to a bed in the prison infirmary for two days, his brain turned itself inside out. When he finally came out of it, a single thought filled his head.
With the turn of a single card, he could change the odds at blackjack.
With the turn of a single card, he could force other players into making bad decisions.
With the turn of a single card, he could master a game that had no masters.
One card, that was all it took.
And all Jack had to do was turn it over.
He howled so hard, they kept him strapped to the bed for an extra day.
Nigel Moon’s stack of chips soon resembled a small castle. A crowd of gaping tourists had assembled behind the table to watch the carnage. The Brit cast a disparaging look over his shoulder, like he was pissed off by all the attention.
“You’ve got groupies,” Candy said.