When the car chimed her awake, she stretched and took over, drifting slowly through three lanes of sub-cruise traffic to cross the Mississippi bridge in the slow lane and take the first Illinois exit. There was a big blinking billboard directing you to Harrah’s Showboat West. “You want to go straight there?” she asked.
“Sure, let’s do it. Run the money through and get back on the road. Be in Indiana by nightfall. Kentucky.” Panic and caffeine overdose, a real recipe for casino success. Take a couple of deep breaths.
The parking lot was huge, serving both the casino and a miniature Disneyworld that didn’t have any Disney characters. We parked at Tombstone A-5 and discussed strategy.
Kit had been to Vegas with her parents, and knew how to play blackjack conservatively. I could do the same with side bets on the craps table, though it took more concentration, and the ambience at craps was loud and testosterone-soaked. So we’d stick to blackjack and not play at the same tables.
We’d move around, playing for a couple of hours, cashing the G-notes at different tables. There were $100-minimum games where the big bills wouldn’t be uncommon. I was hoping that if we cashed them at the tables rather than at the cashier, the serial numbers wouldn’t be scanned immediately.
This was the overall plan: lose steadily but not spectacularly. Quit when we still had 80 or 90 percent of our stake, converted into somewhat used C-notes and fifties.
We quizzed each other on betting strategy for half an hour, using the iPak to deal out of a four-deck shoe, which is what Google said they used here. Then we got on the slidewalk a few minutes apart, agreeing to meet at the main entrance at 5:00.
The entrance foyer was ice-cold and not too loud, a good distance from the muted clang of slot machines and susurrus of crowd noise. As I approached it, it was like walking toward crashing surf.
Trying to look casual, half expecting some cop to appear out of nowhere, I strolled into the slots area and sacrificed a few tens and twenties, keeping track. I put in $210 and got back two hundred. A little slow, and the machine wouldn’t take anything bigger than a fifty. It paid back in metal-and-plastic medallions, of course, and dollar coins. They weighed down my left pocket as I walked toward the table games.
Kit had a small stack of gold and silver chips in front of her. We waved, as prearranged—there were cameras all over the place, and they probably had our names and Social Security numbers locked in before we bought a chip. The probability that the casino’s computer knew we had come in the same car was high enough that ignoring each other might be suspicious. We didn’t want to play at the same table, though, two people who knew each other flashing G-notes together.
I went on to a smoking table, since it had a couple of empty chairs and I could stand the smoke for a little while. It would also be a good cover if I wanted to leave early, coughing.
“Hundreds,” I said, and set down two bills. The dealer didn’t blink and slid over two short stacks of silver chips. The G-notes went straight into a slot without being scanned, good.
We had agreed that the best strategy would be the least conspicuous, simply “by the book.” I knew that a lot of high-rollers played with dramatic sloppiness, either not knowing better or demonstrating how little money meant to them, or for some peculiar thrill, but most of them knew the basic algorithm and won or lost more slowly. Hit sixteen unless the dealer shows less than seven; stand on seventeen or more, always. Split any pair under nines, and nines if the dealer has between three and eight. Double down on eleven, or on ten if the dealer has shit.
There were about a dozen exceptions to those rules, but we weren’t playing to win. We wanted to appear mildly interested for a short while and then leave with a handful of high-denomination chips.
The casino was quite happy with people who played this way, bleeding customers by transfusion rather than amputation. Some places even handed out business cards with the strategy printed on the back, which is how I learned it as a kid, a souvenir that Dad brought back from Mississippi.
Even careful players presented less of a gamble for the house than putting money in a savings account. A bank can fail, but hope is constantly reborn—not to mention greed.
I was down three hundred when the dealer played out the shoe and shuffled. Feigning impatience, I tossed out three more notes. “Gold, please,” I said, and he gave me twelve chips. They did have platinum thousand-dollar chips, but I didn’t want to hemorrhage all over the table.
With the fresh shoe I had a disconcerting run of luck betting the gold chips, but then bet heavily and lost three times in a row. Just a little behind, I said I wanted to take a walk, and went to the cashier window and cashed in all my chips. So I’d gotten rid of five of the G-notes, and still had $4,900 in a thick roll in my pocket, mostly hundreds. Headed for Kit, I took a detour through the slot area and turned ten of the C-notes into twenties, a separate roll in the other pocket.
I panicked a moment when Kit wasn’t at her place at the table, but then she came up behind me: “Hey, sailor! New in town?”
I turned and asked her sotto voce how she was doing.
“I could leave,” she said with a broad grin. “Have you cashed in?”
“A hundred behind.”
“My hero.” She took my arm. “Let’s not go straight out to the car.” She steered me into a bar area, and ordered two Heinekens. We sat at the bar.
“You’re drinking beer?”
“Oh, yeah.” She touched the back of my hand with her little finger and opened her palm for a second. On it she’d written with eyeliner: WATCHED PICK U UP EXACT 5:17. “What time you have?”
I checked. “Quarter to five.”
“Good.” She launched into a long anecdote about her Aunt Betty going to Vegas, which I’d just heard. I made appropriate responses, ignoring my watch until she said she had to go to the “little girls’ room,” a phrase she never used.
I finished my beer and left a good tip and carried her bottle out with me. Sat and played poker machines until 5:11. Wandered toward the entrance, stopped to take a leak, and stepped out into the wall of dry heat at exactly 5:17. She pulled up and I got into the car and we rolled away.
I exhaled heavily. “So you were being watched?”
“Who knows. Probably just a casino cop; maybe they check you out when you flash a thousand-dollar bill. Maybe he was a gigolo, about to make a move. Or I might just be paranoid.”
“Paranoid is good.”
“I changed tables twice and he followed me like a shadow, not even trying to be subtle. Smiled at me all the time.”
“Maybe he was just interested in rich beautiful women.”
“Oh, stop it. If he wasn’t trying to scare me, he would have made some small talk. Not just stalking.”
“Think you got rid of him?”
“Went in the ladies’ room and straight out the other door, then out the exit and walked halfway around the building. He didn’t follow me out through the parking lot, for whatever that’s worth.” She checked her mirrors.
“Yeah, he could—”
“Hold on!” She crossed three lanes without signaling, gunned through a left-turn light as it turned red, and spun the car in a fast U-turn and accelerated through another yellow light, then braked sharply and pulled into a side road and parked.
I was still clinging to the seat. “That… that should do it.”