The football players nodded. So far everything he’d said had made sense. Now came the tricky part.
“Blackjack games have different betting limits,” he said. “Low-limit tables have minimum bets of five dollars and maximum bets of five hundred dollars. High-limit tables have minimum bets of a hundred dollars and a maximum of ten thousand dollars. The games I’m going to rig will be low limit. Know why? Because surveillance hardly watches low-limit games.”
“How do you make money in a low-limit game?” Night Train asked. “Even if you’re cheating, you can’t win that much.”
“You’re going to ask the pit boss to raise the limits at your tables. But first you play for a little while and lose. That’s when you ask the pit boss to raise the table limit so you can bet more. When the pit boss asks you how much, you say, ‘Ten grand a hand.’”
“Will he go along with that?”
“Of course he’ll go along with it. It’s what suckers do when they get behind. At that point, you should have drawn a good crowd. I’ll be in the crowd, wearing my tinted sunglasses. That’s when we start scamming.”
Night Train wasn’t far behind and said, “You’re going to read the dealer’s cards and signal us how to play our hands. Is that the deal?”
“Correct. I play your hands for you, and we clean up.”
Night Train flashed his famous smile. His teammates also looked happy. If the boss was good with the scam, then so were the troops.
“Remember,” he said. “You’re pretending to be suckers. That means talking to the crowd and flirting with the girls. In other words, don’t get serious when you start winning.”
“Just keep acting like dumb shits, is what you’re saying,” Night Train said.
“I can do that,” Choo-Choo said.
“No problem,” Sammy chimed in.
Clete and Assassin grunted that it wouldn’t be hard to act like dumb shits.
“Last thing,” he said. “When you reach a million bucks in winnings, you ask the pit boss to raise the table limit to fifty grand a hand. The pit boss will say yes, in the hopes you’ll lose everything back that you’ve won.” He paused. “Are we good?”
“I think we’re real good,” Night Train said. “Aren’t we, boys?”
His teammates bobbed their heads in unison. Loyal to the point of being blind, they would have jumped into a vat of boiling oil if Night Train had asked them to.
It was time to explain the signals. Signals let a crew secretly communicate inside a casino. For the super con, Billy planned to employ a sky signal. A sky signal was visible to the crew but invisible to the surveillance cameras, which filmed straight down from the ceiling.
The sky signal used a common beer bottle, held at chest height. If the bottle was in the left hand, with the right hand below but not touching it, this meant take a card.
If the bottle was held with the right hand, with the left hand below, this meant to stand pat. The difference in these two actions was plainly visible to a player at the table but couldn’t be seen — or filmed — by the eye-in-the-sky.
Left hand holding the bottle, take a card. Right hand holding the bottle, stand pat.
The third signal was called the chin. If Billy dipped his chin, it meant start the play. This was also invisible to the eye-in-the-sky.
He ran through the signals a dozen times, just to make sure the football players got it right. In conclusion, he said, “If I take a drink of my beer, it means we’re done. Any questions?”
There were none.
“Now get to practice before you’re late,” he said. “The prop bets can’t be fixed if you guys are benched at the start of the game.”
“You got it, boss,” Night Train said.
And with that, the football players burst out laughing.
Forty-Four
Mags came to the set filled with confidence, the burden of Grimes’s threat to destroy her career a thing of the past. The world was her oyster, and she couldn’t wait to nail today’s scene and deliver the kind of performance the CBS honchos needed to green-light Night and Day.
To her surprise, the set was deserted. No cameramen, no crew, no snippy director with a bad attitude, and, worst of all, no Rand. The shoot had been cancelled, the equipment packed up, and no one had bothered to tell her.
“Somebody should have called you. I mean, you are the star,” Amber said.
“This is Hollywood, honey. They call you when they feel like it.”
She checked her cell phone. There were no messages, leading her to wonder if Rand was sick in his room. On a hunch, she called the hotel’s main line and asked for him.
“I’m sorry, but there’s no one registered in the hotel under that name,” the operator said.
“He’s staying in your damn hotel. Check again,” she said.
The operator’s fingers danced on a keyboard. “Here he is. Rand Waters. According to my computer, he checked out late yesterday. Is there someone else you’d care to speak with?”
She was shaking with rage and hung up. Rand had run out on her like a cheap one-night stand. No message, no note slipped under her door, nothing. She marched off the set and into the hotel with her daughter on her heels.
“Where are you going?” Amber asked.
“To the bar to talk to my cameraman, Sean Mulroney. Sean will know what’s going on.”
True to form, Sean was perched on a stool in LINQ’s bar getting plowed. Despite the early hour, Sean’s nose was deep purple, his eyes bloodshot. Mags took the adjacent stool while Amber sat down next to her mother. Sean nodded drunkenly.
“Sean, this is my daughter, Amber,” Mags said. “Amber, meet Sean Mulroney, the best cameraman in Hollywood.”
“My mom’s told me all about you,” Amber said.
“Whatever she told you was a lie. Either of you ladies want a drink? It’s on me.”
“We’re good,” Mags said. “What’s going on, Sean? Where’s the crew?”
“They were sacked.” To the bartender he said, “Another round, my good man.”
Mags’s face nearly hit the bar. “When? By whom?” It was the wrong thing to say, and she grabbed Sean by the wrist. “Did you get canned as well?”
Sean did not reply until he had a fresh beer in one hand, a shot in the other. “I will answer your questions in the order in which they were received. The firing took place at eight a.m. this morning on the set. The executioner was none other than the evil Rand Waters, who spoke to us from LA using Skype on a laptop computer that sat on a chair. Rand gave no explanation but simply stated that our services were no longer required. And yes, I also got the boot, which led me here to my present endeavor.”
Her show was over. Mags knew that soulless sharks ran Hollywood, but she had convinced herself that she’d come out on top. Stupid her.
Sean laid a gentle hand on her wrist. “Don’t tell me you didn’t know.”
“No, not a word.”
“Rand’s a bastard. If it’s any solace, I thought you did a fine job.”
She kissed his cheek. “Thank you for saying that. You take care.”
“May our paths cross again.”
Mags left the bar beneath a dark cloud. For the last few months, Night and Day had consumed her life. With acting classes, rehearsals, and coming to Vegas to shoot the pilot, she hadn’t contemplated her future if the show got cancelled. Reality had just dumped a hundred pounds of steaming shit on her head, and it was all she could do not to scream.
“What are you going to do?” her daughter asked.
“Maybe I’ll take a vacation, go back east. Like a roommate for a few months?”
“You can always stay with me, Mom.”
Mags went to her trailer to grab her belongings. Stepping inside, she found Billy sipping a bottled water. Billy had warned her this might happen, and it was all she could do not to slap him.