“That’s as old as the hills, Billy. No one uses luminous readers anymore.”
“Which is why you resurrected it. Marking cards with luminous paint is so old that pit bosses in Vegas have stopped looking for it.”
“But a pit boss can look for it,” Victor reminded him. “And if the pit boss finds the marks, I’m screwed.”
“If you’re not using luminous readers, why did you squint?”
“Allergies. Check the tray if you don’t believe me.”
Every blackjack game had a discard tray that the dealer placed cards into after the hand was over. The trays were made of translucent red plastic, which acted like a filter and let the pit boss look through the rear wall of the tray and spot luminous paint on the backs of cards.
Billy placed a card into the tray and stared through the rear wall. No secret markings popped up. He did this with more than a dozen cards. They were all clean.
Billy took a C-note and gave it to Victor. “You win. I have no clue what you’re doing.”
“That’s high praise coming from you,” Victor said.
They heard the front door slam. “That must be one of my kids,” Victor said.
“Hey, Dad,” a female called from the front of the house.
“Kat? I thought you went to the Tropicana to practice your strong-arming,” Victor said.
“That was the plan,” she called back. “I got made and had to leave.”
“You got made? What happened?”
“I need a drink. Can I get you something?”
“I’m good.”
A moment later, Kat Boswell came into the room holding a can of diet soda. She was barely legal and wore blue and purple streaks in her hair to make herself look older. She said hello to Billy before sitting down beside her father at the blackjack table.
“Who made you?” Victor asked.
“Casino security,” she said. “I was working a blackjack game with a green dealer. He dealt me a twenty-two and I pounded the table and said, ‘Yeah, twenty-one!’ and the dope paid me off. It happened so fast, I didn’t think anyone noticed.”
“Do you think you were being watched?”
“It sure felt that way.”
Strong-arm cheating encompassed the rankest scams imaginable, including lying about your hand and betting late. Cheats practiced these scams to build up their nerve.
“Tell me exactly what happened,” Victor said.
Kat took a swallow of soda before putting the can in a cup on the table. “A security goon came to the table and said that I looked like a woman who’d given them trouble last night. He wanted to see some ID, so I gave him my driver’s license.”
Victor’s eyes flashed. Security at the Golden Gate had used the same line on Nico. “Was the goon by himself, or did he have backup?” Victor asked.
“He was working solo. He spent a minute reading my license. Then he handed it back to me and said it was a case of mistaken identity.”
Now Victor looked worried. Nico Boswell had been given the same bullshit line.
“Did he offer to give you a free drink or comp you a meal?” Victor asked.
“Nope. Fucker didn’t offer me anything,” Kat replied.
“This isn’t good, Kat.”
“It gets worse. I decided to leave. On my way out, I glanced over my shoulder, and the goon was tailing me. I went to the valet and got my car—”
“How many times have I told you, never use the valet,” Victor scolded her. “You don’t know where they take your car or what they do to it.”
“I’m sorry, Pop. I wasn’t thinking.”
Victor loved his children more than anything in the world, and he placed his hand on his daughter’s arm and gave it a fatherly pat. “Never again.”
“I promise, never again.”
“Good. Continue your story.”
“As I pulled onto the Strip, I saw a line of yellow cabs at the curb, waiting for fares. One of the cabs started to follow me. At the next intersection, I did a U-turn and lost the asshole.”
“You lost him.”
“That’s right.”
Victor swallowed hard. He was thinking the same thing Billy was thinking. Kat may have lost the tail, but she hadn’t lost the people who were following her. The sixty-four-thousand-dollar question was, did Kat realize that?
“Did you drive straight back here?” Victor asked hesitantly.
“Come on, Pop, I’m not that dumb. I pulled into a strip mall and inspected the car. First I checked the roof to see if there was a silver disc attached. You told me that the cops put them there so police helicopters can follow vehicles in traffic. Well, there wasn’t, so then I climbed underneath, and lo and behold, guess what. I found a GPS tag in a plastic case held to the bottom of the car with a magnet. I opened it up, and it had a miniature transmitter and two AA batteries. They must have put it on while I was inside the casino.”
“It wasn’t hard-wired to an electrical wire in the car,” Victor said.
“No. It was a short-term surveillance.”
“Did you destroy it?”
“I was going to chuck it into the trash, but then I had an idea. There was a Papa John’s in the strip mall, so I climbed underneath one of the delivery cars and reattached the transmitter. A delivery boy came out with some pizzas and took off.”
Kat’s ingenuity made Billy smile. The GPS would send an uninterrupted signal, allowing its holder to track the location of the rental on a laptop map. Whoever had attached the tag would spend the rest of the day chasing a pizza delivery boy and not knowing it.
“Then you drove home,” Victor said.
Kat had a gypsy’s skeptical eyes. She gave her father a look that would have turned most men to stone. “Of course not! I went to McCarran and dumped the rental. Then I took a stroll through the main terminal to make sure I wasn’t being tailed.”
“For how long?” Victor asked.
“Thirty minutes. You’re going to see some charges on my credit card.”
Victor rolled his eyes. “You went shopping?”
“I had to do something to kill the time.”
“How much did you spend?”
“Enough to jump-start the economy. The good news is, no one followed me. I rented a car from another company and drove here.”
Kat’s tale was over. Victor gave her a hug and told her she’d done good. Her father’s words brought a smile to her face, and she bid Billy good-bye before leaving the room.
“Jesus Christ, this isn’t good,” Victor said.
Billy felt the same way. Two different casinos had made Kat and Nico. It could have been a coincidence, only Billy didn’t believe in those. More than likely, the gaming board had Kat and Nico on their radar and had distributed their photographs to the casinos.
“This smells like the gaming board,” Billy said. “Did Kat and Nico get caught together in a casino recently?”
“Not that I know of,” Victor said.
“Would they tell you if they’d screwed up?
“Absolutely. My children are trustworthy.” Victor paused. “Do you still want to go through with this? I won’t be pissed if you pull out.”
“Are you pulling out?” Billy asked.
“I can’t. The super con has a shelf life. If I don’t pull it off soon, it will never happen.”
A shelf life. Now Billy was really confused. If he didn’t hang around, he’d never find out Victor’s secret, and that would bother him, along with not cashing in.
“I’m not going anywhere. We’ll give Kat a makeover along with Nico,” Billy said.
“Works for me,” Victor said. “Now, let’s iron out the details.”
Eleven
Billy and Victor spent the next hour working out the super con. Their plan called for five teams to descend upon five different Strip casinos next Saturday evening with the purpose of scamming a high-stakes blackjack game. If successful, each team would steal two million bucks of their respective casino’s money.