Sucker Bet

34

Luck, Rico believed, was a tiny naked chick who looked like Jennifer Lopez and sat on his shoulder whispering advice in his ear.

Luck had been good to him over the years. She’d made sure his voice wasn’t taped when John Gotti was causing mischief, and spared Rico from a life in prison. And she’d managed to keep him out of harm’s way when a dozen other schemes had gone haywire.

Today was another good example. Driving south from Palm Beach, Rico had decided that after he got Tony Valentine to tell him who the snitch was, he would take Valentine out of the picture. Valentine knew too much and could only hurt him in the long run.

So he’d come up with a plan. He’d drive to the Fontainebleau, tie Valentine to a chair, and shoot him between the eyes. He’d make Gerry watch, then let him go. Word would spread fast as to what he’d done. And wise guys like Valentine would start leaving him alone.

Walking into the Fontainebleau’s lobby, he passed the coffee shop. A menu board was outside. Today’s special was a BLT on whole wheat.

His favorite meal as a kid.

Eat, the little naked chick on his shoulder said.

So he went in and ordered a BLT. Firing up a cigarette, he’d heard a familiar voice from the next booth. Gerry Valentine’s Brooklyn accent was sharp enough to cut bread with, and he’d leaned back and listened.

And heard everything.

More than once, he’d considered shooting all three men right there in the coffee shop. Bang, bang, bang, and leave their brains on the walls. Only, Florida had the death penalty and let condemned men’s heads catch on fire in the electric chair.

So he’d swallowed his rage, eaten his sandwich, and waited.

Eventually, the three men left. Throwing money down, Rico slid out of the booth and made a slow advance toward the front of the coffee shop.

Out in the lobby they stood, plotting his doom. Rico’s hands began to tremble, wanting to do it right then. The three men went outside. Rico watched their movements through the glass front doors.

The valets brought up their cars. Valentine drove a beat-up Honda, the old man a Toyota Corolla. They drove away, and Rico ran outside.

His limo was parked by the door, too big to fit into a conventional spot. He got his keys from the valet and jumped in.

Then he had to make a decision. The Honda had turned left, heading toward the causeway, while the Toyota was going north toward Bal Harbour. Who should he follow?

The old man, Rico decided, just to get him out of the way.

Mabel awoke tied to a chair.

She was in Tony’s office in the back of the house. The blinds were drawn, and she had no idea how much time had passed since the deliveryman had sent her into dreamland. By now, she imagined he’d taken Tony’s big-screen TV and anything else of value and hightailed it back to the hole he’d crawled out of.

A dull, aching throb clouded her vision. The guy had looked like a creep, so why had she let him in? Because she’d wanted to believe he was all right. A character flaw for sure, but one she was not about to give up on. Most people were decent. It was the minority that spoiled things.

She wiggled her chair over to the desk and banged it with the chair arm. The phone, which sat less than a foot away, did not move. Which left what? Yelling at the top of her lungs, she decided.

She was about to do just that when the door banged open.

“Oh, my,” Mabel said.

It was her attacker. He wore a pair of dirty blue jeans, no shirt, no shoes, his long, lifeless hair flopping on his shoulders. His upper torso was lean, the skin covered in angry red dots. He pulled up a chair and sat in it backwards. His breath reeked of marijuana.

“Don’t scream,” he said.

“No, sir.”

“You’re going to help me,” he said.

Mabel found herself staring at his feet. The soles were black, as were all his toes. Tarzan of the swamps, she guessed. “I am?”

“The guy you work for, this Valentine guy, you need to call him, tell him to come home.”

“Then what?”

He took a second too long to answer.

“Then I leave.”

Mabel glanced at the phone on the desk, then shrugged her shoulders.

“That’s easier said than done,” she said.

“How’s that?”

“He doesn’t leave his cell phone on. His number is there on the desk. Call him if you don’t believe me.”

Her attacker scratched his chin. There was not an ounce of fat on his body, and every time he moved, his muscles redefined themselves.

“I can relate to that,” he said.

He went into the kitchen and returned with two sodas that he’d taken from the refrigerator. He untied her arms and gave her one. “Okay, so we wait for him to call. Then you tell him to come home.”

“That could be a while,” Mabel replied.

“Your boss doesn’t care about you, huh?”

The comment caught her by surprise. She’d never looked at Tony’s not calling in that light. Tony was a wounded male, walking around the world without his mate of forty-plus years, and as a result now doing stupid things. But he still cared about her. Because if he didn’t, she’d stop working for him, plain and simple.

That was, if she lived through this.

“He’ll call eventually,” she said. “May I ask you a question?”

He took a long swallow of soda. “Sure.”

“What’s your name?”

“Joe,” he said. “My friends call me Slash.”

Mabel felt a knot tighten in her chest. What kind of name was that? You’re a goner, she thought.

“Mine’s Mabel,” she said.

Tony’s study was the largest room in the house and contained his library of gambling books, a weighted roulette wheel, several boxes of marked cards and loaded dice, a rigged poker table from a gambling club in Gardena, California, and other assorted ephemera.

Slash searched the room, looking for money. Finding none, he began examining the equipment.

The Kepplinger holdout caught his eye, and he took it off the shelf, strapped it to his body, and tried to make it work. The device was used by hustlers to secretly hide cards up the sleeve of a jacket. Tony said it took hundreds of hours of practice to properly use it. After five minutes, Slash ripped the device off his body and threw it on the floor.

Then he noticed the painting hanging over Valentine’s desk. “This must be worth something,” he said, taking it down.

The painting was a reproduction of Caravaggio’s The Card Sharps. It showed three men playing cards, two of whom were cheating. Caravaggio was famous for his paintings of saints and Bible stories, and a museum curator in Italy had hired Tony to examine the work and determine if Caravaggio knew anything about card cheating.

Tony had spent exactly one minute examining the painting. Based upon the hand positions of the young cheater with the plume in his cap, he had determined that Caravaggio was indeed in the know about his subject matter.

“It’s a copy,” Mabel said.

Slash put his fist through it. Then he entered the closet and started opening boxes and shaking them out on the floor. Mabel wondered how long it would be before Slash got bored and decided to kill her. Tony had said that violent people could not stay focused on a subject for any length of time, and Slash was proving this to be true. Eventually he’d run out of things to rip apart and would take out his frustrations on her.

“What the hell is this?” he asked.

“You’ll have to bring it over here so I can see.”

He brought the item over. It was still in its box. Mabel stared for a moment before realizing what he’d discovered. Then had an idea.

“That’s the most amazing cheating device ever made,” she said.

“Cheating at what?”

“Blackjack.”

Slash pulled up the chair and sat in it backwards.

“Do you play?” Mabel asked.

“Used to,” he said.

“Well, the device you’re holding is called the David, as in David vs. Goliath. It’s a blackjack strategy computer. Have you ever heard of card-counting?”

Slash grunted in the affirmative.

“The David does the counting for you. With it, you can beat any casino in the world for thousands of dollars. I’ll take that back. Millions of dollars.”

“Is your boss a cheat?”

“He catches cheaters,” Mabel said.

Slash emptied the box onto the desk. The David was the size of a deck of cards. With it came a battery pack, connector wires, and a special pair of men’s boots with microswitches buried in the toes. There was also a keyboard that was used to “talk” to David while practicing.

“What are the boots for?”

“Each boot has a hidden microswitch,” Mabel said. “You input the cards with your toes.”

He tried the boots on. They fit. A knowing look spread across his face.

“You know how to work this thing?”

Tony had spent twenty minutes showing her. Mabel didn’t think that really constituted knowing. Only, she wasn’t going to tell him that.

“Why, yes,” she said. “Yes, I do.”