Jackpot

Chapter 10

The pit bulls had Gerry pinned in the corner of the living room. Gerry held a cushion he’d grabbed off the couch for protection, and the dogs were ripping it apart with their teeth, the stuffing littering the floor like cotton candy.

Valentine stood fifteen feet away, looking for something to knock the dogs away. Bill came into the living room with his gun drawn, trying to get a bead on one of the dogs, but afraid of hitting Gerry.

“Pop, do something,” his son cried.

Valentine grabbed the gun out of Bill’s hand. He inched closer to his son, while remembering a pair of attack dogs he’d dealt with during a botched jewelry store heist in Atlantic City. Raising his arm, he aimed the gun at the ceiling, and pulled the trigger. The blast was louder than he’d expected, and the side of his head went numb. The dogs hit the floor, their legs splaying out spastically. He let off another round, and they hightailed it back into the other part of the house. He tossed the gun back to Bill.

“Lock them up, will you?”

“How did you do that?”

“It’s the way they’re trained. At least some of them.”

Bill went down the hall to deal with the dogs. Valentine went to Gerry, took the tattered cushion out of his hands, and stood waiting for an explanation.

“Bill told me not to touch the door,” Gerry said.

“So what happened?”

“I opened it anyway,” his son said.

Bill went outside, and found the pair of local cops sitting in their car by the curb. They hadn’t heard the dogs, or Gerry screaming, or the gun being fired. Bill explained what had happened, and asked them to call Animal Control.

Twenty minutes later, a pair of dog catchers appeared. Gerry sat on the couch with a cold beer, and watched the dogs being marched past. Valentine sat down beside him, took the beer, and poured it into a potted plant.

“No drinking on the job,” he said.

“They nearly ripped me apart, Pop.”

“People get hurt at work all the time,” Valentine said. “You think they all stop what they’re doing, and slug down a beer?”

They resumed searching Bronco’s house. The dogs had been living in a spare bedroom with an open bag of dog food, and a water bowl that refilled itself. The room didn’t smell, leaving Valentine to guess that a neighbor had been letting them out. The room was otherwise empty, save for a metal table. On it were dozens of coin holders filled with silver-dollar sized coins. They were slugs, and designed to fool a device in a slot machine called a comparitor. Valentine flipped one to his son.

“I thought only amateurs used these,” Gerry said.

“Slugs cost casinos ten million dollars a year in lost revenue,” Valentine said.

“Can’t the machines detect them?

“Not if they’re well made. That’s why casino personnel are trained to watch slot players. If they see someone feed a coin into a machine that isn’t shiny, they arrest the player on the spot.”

“Tony, come here for a minute,” Bill called out.

He found Bill in the master bedroom. It had nice furniture, with drapes that matched the bedspread, and felt like a room in a model home compared to the rest of the house. Bill stood by an open closet, staring at the collection of women’s clothes hanging from the racks, the dresses and outfits still in their dry-clean bags.

“Strange, don’t you think?” Bill said.

“Looks like she lives here,” Valentine said. “Any makeup in the bathroom?”

“Just a razor and some shampoo.”

Valentine examined one of the outfits. It reminded him of clothes his late wife used to wear. “These clothes are old,” he said.

“Maybe she split on him,” Bill said.

Valentine searched the room. On the dresser he found a framed photograph of a couple taken on a beach. It was Bronco and the woman Valentine had seen on the surveillance tape. Marie.

He stared at the photograph. What he’d seen on the surveillance tape hadn’t been staged. Bronco had cheated at the craps table, and Marie had reacted in shock. She hadn’t known him. But now here was evidence that she had known him. He put the picture down and looked at Bill. His friend was staring at him.

“Does this make any sense to you?” Bill asked.

“None whatsoever,” he said.

Valentine went outside the house to the backyard. It backed up onto the desert, the baked earth flat and unforgiving. He found Gerry by the pool, torturing his lungs with a cigarette. His son started to throw the butt away, and Valentine stopped him.

“Let me have a hit.”

“I thought you were trying to quit.”

“One hit won’t kill me.”

His son passed the butt with a grin on his face. “Thanks for saving my ass.”

“And your testicles.”

“Those, too.”

Valentine took a drag off his son’s cigarette. It was a Marlboro, the same brand he’d smoked and his father had smoked. He handed it back, and Gerry flicked the butt into the pool’s sickly green water. It floated lazily across the surface, trailing a thin line of smoke.

“Give me your impressions of what you saw in there,” Valentine said.

“My impressions?”

“Yeah. What do you think is going on?”

Gerry fired up another cigarette. The dogs had scared the daylights out of him, but his father asking his opinion scared him even more. When he answered, his voice was subdued. “Based on the condition of the house, I’d say Bronco is on a downward slide. He sits at home at night, chain-smokes and gets blistered. Except for cheating slot machines, he doesn’t have a life.”

“Anything else?”

“One thing did surprise me. Based upon what you told me about him, I expected his place to be filled with high-tech computers and stuff. He doesn’t even own a computer.”

“So?”

Gerry faced him. “Think about it, Pop. Bronco is claiming that a Nevada Gaming Control Board agent is stealing jackpots from new machines, right? Well, there’s no way to corrupt those machines unless you use computers. You agree?”

Think about it. It was the kind of language Valentine had been using with Gerry since he was a kid.

“Okay,” he said.

“Bronco doesn’t have a computer in his house. Which tells me that either Bronco doesn’t know what this agent is doing, or the information is worthless to him.”

“How can you know that?”

“Because he’d be trying to duplicate it, Pop,” his son said. “There’s no honor among thieves. Whatever the secret is, Bronco isn’t using it.”

“Otherwise, we’d have found it.”

“You got it.”

Valentine took the cigarette from his son’s hand. Gerry had nailed the incongruity on the head. He took a drag, this one deeper than the first, and knew he was hooked again. He handed the cigarette back to his son.

“Sure you don’t want one of your own?” Gerry asked him.

“I’d rather smoke yours,” Valentine said.