Mr. Lucky

4

Two days after the tragic fire at the Riverboat, Bill Higgins, the director of the Nevada Gaming Control Board and one of Valentine’s closest friends, called from Tampa International Airport. He had just flown in from Las Vegas and needed to talk.

“You here on business?” Valentine asked him.

“Afraid so,” Bill replied.

A yellow cab deposited Bill on Valentine’s doorstep thirty minutes later. He was dressed in a somber black suit and walking without his cane, the color of good health having returned to his cheeks. Four months before, a gangster had shot him in the leg, and his rehab had been slow but steady. He was a Navajo by birth, and wore his emotions several layers below the surface.

Valentine pumped his hand, then showed him into the living room and got two Diet Cokes from the kitchen. Serving his guest, he said, “So how’s life treating you?”

“Crummy,” Bill said, loosening his tie. He took a long swallow of soda, then said, “You know, you’ve gotten me addicted to this stuff. I’m up to three cans a day.”

“Sorry.”

“Where’s Mabel? You know, we talk all the time, but I’ve never met her.”

“She has the day off,” Valentine said. “She’s been working a lot of weekends, and I figured I’d better give her a vacation before she quit.”

Valentine saw Bill’s eyes scan the living room. Piles of casino surveillance tapes were on every piece of furniture and every table. Attached to each tape was a note from the casino’s head of security, describing the alleged cheating taking place. The notes always came with a check, and Bill whistled through his teeth.

“Business must be good.”

“It’s picking up. How about you?”

Bill drained his can and wiped his mouth on his sleeve. “Lousy. I’ve gotten myself in a real jam and need to ask you a favor.”

“Sure.”

“Don’t agree just yet. Hear me out.”

Valentine stretched out in his La-Z-Boy. A young kid had tossed him hard at judo class the day before, and he’d woken up that morning feeling like a one-legged man after an ass-kicking contest. “Go ahead.”

“I’m sure you’ve been following the Ricky Smith story in the newspapers.”

He nodded. Ricky Smith was an overnight media sensation. After jumping off the balcony of the burning hotel into a swimming pool, he’d waltzed into a casino across the street called the Mint, borrowed twenty bucks from a retired bookkeeper, and proceeded to win more than two hundred thousand dollars playing blackjack. From there, he’d gone and played roulette, won another quarter million bucks, then went to the craps table and won another three hundred thousand. He capped off the evening by playing poker with a legend named Tex “All In” Snyder and beat the pants off him. It was an amazing streak even by Las Vegas standards, and the newspapers had dubbed him the world’s luckiest man.

“I got a call from the owner of the Mint that night,” Bill said. “He didn’t have enough cash in the cage to pay Ricky off. Ricky agreed to come back the next day for his money. The owner decided to put the time to good use and asked me to check him out.”

“Just in case he was cheating,” Valentine said.

“Exactly.”

“Was he?”

“Ricky Smith is a straight arrow; no criminal record of any kind. I got a credit card company to pull up his files. He lives in a little town in North Carolina called Slippery Rock. This was his fourth trip to Las Vegas since January. Each time he was here, he stayed at the Riverboat. That was all I had to go on. Four trips in the past year.

“I got the Mint to give me the surveillance videotape of him beating them. I watched it for a few hours. Everything appears normal. He sits down, places a bet, and wins. No hanky-panky on anybody’s part. It looks like he got lucky, plain and simple.

“For the heck of it, I decided to call around and see if he’d played at any other casino during his other trips. Come to find out, he did. He played blackjack at the Bellagio two months ago. Guess what? They pegged him a card counter.”

“Did they ban him?”

Bill shook his head. “He was losing, so they let him continue. But they kept a file on him, just in case he decided to come back.”

Valentine tossed his empty soda can into the trash. “Let me guess. You then looked at the tape of him playing at the Mint a little differently.”

“I sure did,” Bill said, leaning forward in his seat. “And I found a discrepancy. When he played blackjack at the Mint, he didn’t card count. Matter of fact, he didn’t adhere to Basic Strategy. He played like a moron, yet won every hand he played.”

“Every hand? No losses?”

“Not a one.”

Basic Strategy had been developed by a mathematician named Edward Thorp and was the optimal way to play blackjack. Card counters knew Basic Strategy like the back of their hand and never deviated from it. For Ricky to have stopped using Basic Strategy was like saying he’d woken up one morning and started brushing his teeth with a different hand.

“I called the owner of the Mint and told him what I’d found,” Bill went on. “I told him I thought it was suspicious, but that there could be an explanation.”

“The jump from the burning hotel,” Valentine said.

“Exactly. Ricky Smith was in shock and therefore deviated from normal behavior.” Bill grew silent and stared at the worn spot in the rug beneath his feet. “This is the rug you had in Atlantic City, isn’t it?”

Valentine said that it was. Since moving to Palm Harbor, he hadn’t bought a single piece of furniture except a wide-screen TV, and that was because the old one had gotten blown out of the wall during a lightning storm. Spending money had been his wife’s job, not his.

“I think I wore that hole in it,” Bill said, still staring. “Anyway, the owner of the Mint tells his people to delay paying Ricky Smith off. Legally, they’re allowed to conduct an investigation if they suspect any impropriety.”

“That was dumb,” Valentine said.

“Tell me about it. Ricky Smith’s lawyers filed papers against the Mint yesterday afternoon. The casinos in town are freaking out. They think the publicity will be horrible. I got called on the carpet last night.”

“Why you?”

“The owner of the Mint is saying he based his decision on my recommendation. He left out the part about Ricky maybe being in shock.”

“How convenient.”

“I need your help. My gut tells me Ricky Smith’s winning streak isn’t on the square. Ricky told a newspaper that except for blackjack, he’d never played any of the other casino games before, yet he still somehow managed to win.”

“Beginner’s luck? Come on.”

“That’s what I said. I need you to tell me what he’s doing.”

Valentine had known Bill a long time and considered him one of his best friends. He liked to think he’d do just about anything to help Bill out of a jam; only, this was Las Vegas they were talking about, the only city in America where rats wore thousand-dollar silk suits and screwed people because it suited them.

“I’m afraid I can’t help you, Bill,” he said.

Bill didn’t act mad or particularly surprised. He went outside the house to make a call on his cell phone. Palm Harbor didn’t have many cell towers, and the reception was rarely good. Besides the great weather, Valentine considered the lack of reception one of the area’s greatest attributes. Bill returned to the living room, shaking his head.

“I can’t get a line out. Can I use your office phone?”

“Sure,” Valentine said.

Bill disappeared into the back of the house. Valentine guessed Bill was calling the casino owners to explain the situation. Las Vegas’s casinos routinely alerted other casinos around the country about cheaters and card counters they’d spotted playing in their establishments. Six weeks ago, they’d sent a notice out calling Valentine’s son, Gerry, an undesirable. As a result, Gerry had been forced to quit working for him, and was now unemployed.

Valentine had responded by refusing to do any more work for Las Vegas’s casinos. Gerry was no choir boy, but did not deserve the leper status. To replace the work he’d lost from Las Vegas, Valentine had started taking jobs from casinos in Europe and the Far East. The time difference was a drag, but like his mother used to say, their money was as green as anyone else’s.

Picking up the remote, he got the VCR working, and stared at a surveillance tape of a Japanese gambler playing craps at a posh casino in New Zealand. The Japanese gambler was betting a few hundred dollars a roll. Then, out of the blue, he bet five thousand dollars and won. It looked suspicious as hell.

Valentine found the letter the casino boss had sent him and reread it. According to the boss, the Japanese gambler made a single five-thousand-dollar bet each time he played. He bet this amount only when another player was throwing the dice. And he always won.

Valentine rewound the tape and hit play. This time, he watched how the Japanese gambler placed his bets. Instead of using chips, he was using cold hard cash. As the dice were in the air, he leaned forward over the table to make a Field Bet. This meant if the shooter tossed a 2, 3, 4, 9, 10, 11, or 12, the Japanese gambler won. But the shooter threw the dice too fast and yelled for the Japanese gambler to watch out. The Japanese gambler pulled back, never letting go of his cash. Instead, he looked at the craps dealer running the game. The banker nodded, accepting his bet. Valentine felt a smile cross his face. The scam was as old as the hills. The Japanese gambler had a hidden fold in the bills. The big money was folded in half, giving him two bets. If the shooter won the Field Bet, the Japanese gambler would drop all of his money on the layout. If the shooter lost, the big money was palmed in the Japanese gambler’s left hand, while the visible bills were dropped to the table with his right hand. When Bill came out of the study, Valentine killed the tape.

“That your granddaughter in those pictures on your desk?” Bill asked.

“That’s her. Her name’s Lois.”

“She’s a real beauty.” Bill parked himself on the couch and cleared his throat. “I just had a conference call with the Strip’s major owners. They want to offer you a deal.”

“I hope you told them to go to hell.”

“It’s a good deal.”

“Not interested.”

Bill frowned. It was rare for him to show emotion, and Valentine guessed it hadn’t been a pleasant conversation. “Let me guess. They threatened to fire you if I didn’t play ball.”

Bill nodded solemnly.

“Think they’ll do it?”

“Of course they’ll do it.”

“When you up for retirement?” Valentine asked.

“Next year.”

“Getting fired would kind of spoil that, huh?”

“Just a little.”

Valentine tossed the remote on the table beside his recliner. He missed, and it hit the floor and shattered, the batteries rolling under the couch. It was a well-known fact that the Mafia had been run out of Las Vegas years ago. What wasn’t well known was that the men who’d replaced them were just as ruthless; only, they had MBAs from Harvard Business School.

“Let’s hear their deal,” Valentine said.