Super Con

Ten

Billy pulled into the driveway of the Boswells’ rental house and killed the engine. Many crews that traveled for jobs had switched from staying in hotels to renting houses. Owners of rentals rarely keep records, and for a thief, that was always a good thing. The Boswells’ rental was a testament to suburbia, with a basketball hoop over the garage door and an artificially green lawn. He texted Victor to say he’d arrived.

He got out of his car and had a look around. Like a bad penny, gaming agents had a habit of turning up, usually in the form of a stakeout. The car parked across the street was empty, as well as the SUV down the block. He decided it was safe and crossed the lawn.

Victor greeted him at the front door. His host wore a starched white shirt and black dress slacks, and he had a cigarette tucked behind his ear. Victor was getting on in years, but instead of trying to hide his age, he owned it and was the epitome of class. Leaning on his cane, he escorted Billy to a gaming room in the rear of the house with a felt blackjack table in its center.

“Want some coffee? I just made a fresh pot,” Victor said.

“I’m good. Did the blackjack table come with the house?”

“I bought it from the Gambler’s General Store. Wanted to be ready for the big day.”

“Are you practicing the super con on your family?”

“Every day. They still can’t figure out how it works.”

“You like keeping them in the dark, don’t you?”

“Come to mention it, I do. This might be the best play I’ve ever come up with. Ready to take another shot at the champ?”

“You bet I am.”

Billy walked behind the table and took the dealer’s position. Victor took the chair across from him and stuck the unlit cigarette in his mouth. Victor had smoked since he was a kid but had quit after one of his children had pointed out that his lips trembled whenever he got nervous, sending a smoke signal to observant pit bosses.

The game was handheld, single deck. Billy shuffled the cards and had Victor cut them with a plastic cut card. He placed the deck into his hand in preparation to deal.

“Place your bets,” Billy said.

Victor had three denominations of play chips stacked in front of him. Thousand-dollar chips, five-thousand-dollar chips, and ten-thousand-dollar chips. He slid three ten-thousand-dollar chips into the betting circle.

“That’s a big bet to start with,” Billy said.

“I’m feeling lucky,” Victor said.

Billy’s cheeks burned. Victor wouldn’t make a bet that large unless he knew what the outcome was going to be. Yet he had done absolutely nothing to compromise the game.

Billy dealt the hand. Victor got a blackjack, which paid three-to-two.

“Would you look at that,” Victor said with a grin.

“What the hell are you doing?”

“Deal another round. You’ll catch on eventually.”

“What are you saying — that it’s right in front of my nose?”

“You know what I’m doing, you just don’t recognize it.”

Billy dealt another hand, which Victor won with a huge bet. Then Billy dealt three more rounds. Victor won the first but lost the next two. On the hands that Victor lost, smaller bets were placed, indicating that he knew which cards were going to be dealt to him.

“What happens if a pit boss smells a rat and stops the game?” Billy asked.

“He won’t find anything,” Victor said.

“Can I look anyway?”

“Be my guest.”

Billy gave the deck a thorough examination. Because players were allowed to touch their cards in single-deck games, cheats had resorted to marking the backs of the cards with secret substances, allowing the cheat to learn the values of the cards as they were dealt. By knowing the dealer’s cards, the cheat had a huge edge over the house and cleaned up.

The deck was normal. Victor said, “I bought the cards with the table.”

“You like rubbing it in, don’t you?”

“Just being honest with you.”

“What if the pit boss pulled you into a back room and patted you down?”

“You think I’ve got a camera up my sleeve?”

“I wouldn’t put it past you.”

Victor cuffed his shirtsleeves. Cheats often strapped cameras to their wrists to spot the dealer’s hole card. The information was transmitted to the cheat’s partner, who sat in a cocktail lounge, looking at a live feed on a laptop. The partner signaled the information to the cheat using a device called a thumper, which was strapped to the cheat’s leg.

Victor’s sleeves were clean.

“I can do this in my birthday suit, in case you were wondering,” the older man said.

Billy was starting to feel stupid. After taking the cards out of the discard tray, he added them to the deck and reshuffled.

“Let’s try it now,” he said.

“Trying to mess me up? I like your spunk,” Victor said.

The next round was Victor’s as well. Victor had won $30,000 of the house’s money in the amount of time it took to drink a beer. Billy noticed something he hadn’t seen before. The corners of Victor’s eyes narrowed as the cards were dealt. That was a tell, and Billy picked up a card and examined its back.

“You’re using luminous readers. The cards are marked with luminous paint, which you’re reading with a special pair of contact lenses. That’s your scam.”

“That’s as old as the hills, Billy. No one uses luminous readers anymore.”

“Which is why you resurrected it. Marking cards with luminous paint is so old that pit bosses in Vegas have stopped looking for it.”

“But a pit boss can look for it,” Victor reminded him. “And if the pit boss finds the marks, I’m screwed.”

“If you’re not using luminous readers, why did you squint?”

“Allergies. Check the tray if you don’t believe me.”

Every blackjack game had a discard tray that the dealer placed cards into after the hand was over. The trays were made of translucent red plastic, which acted like a filter and let the pit boss look through the rear wall of the tray and spot luminous paint on the backs of cards.

Billy placed a card into the tray and stared through the rear wall. No secret markings popped up. He did this with more than a dozen cards. They were all clean.

Billy took a C-note and gave it to Victor. “You win. I have no clue what you’re doing.”

“That’s high praise coming from you,” Victor said.

They heard the front door slam. “That must be one of my kids,” Victor said.

“Hey, Dad,” a female called from the front of the house.

“Kat? I thought you went to the Tropicana to practice your strong-arming,” Victor said.

“That was the plan,” she called back. “I got made and had to leave.”

“You got made? What happened?”

“I need a drink. Can I get you something?”

“I’m good.”

A moment later, Kat Boswell came into the room holding a can of diet soda. She was barely legal and wore blue and purple streaks in her hair to make herself look older. She said hello to Billy before sitting down beside her father at the blackjack table.

“Who made you?” Victor asked.

“Casino security,” she said. “I was working a blackjack game with a green dealer. He dealt me a twenty-two and I pounded the table and said, ‘Yeah, twenty-one!’ and the dope paid me off. It happened so fast, I didn’t think anyone noticed.”

“Do you think you were being watched?”

“It sure felt that way.”

Strong-arm cheating encompassed the rankest scams imaginable, including lying about your hand and betting late. Cheats practiced these scams to build up their nerve.

“Tell me exactly what happened,” Victor said.

Kat took a swallow of soda before putting the can in a cup on the table. “A security goon came to the table and said that I looked like a woman who’d given them trouble last night. He wanted to see some ID, so I gave him my driver’s license.”

Victor’s eyes flashed. Security at the Golden Gate had used the same line on Nico. “Was the goon by himself, or did he have backup?” Victor asked.

“He was working solo. He spent a minute reading my license. Then he handed it back to me and said it was a case of mistaken identity.”

Now Victor looked worried. Nico Boswell had been given the same bullshit line.

“Did he offer to give you a free drink or comp you a meal?” Victor asked.

“Nope. Fucker didn’t offer me anything,” Kat replied.

“This isn’t good, Kat.”

“It gets worse. I decided to leave. On my way out, I glanced over my shoulder, and the goon was tailing me. I went to the valet and got my car—”

“How many times have I told you, never use the valet,” Victor scolded her. “You don’t know where they take your car or what they do to it.”

“I’m sorry, Pop. I wasn’t thinking.”

Victor loved his children more than anything in the world, and he placed his hand on his daughter’s arm and gave it a fatherly pat. “Never again.”

“I promise, never again.”

“Good. Continue your story.”

“As I pulled onto the Strip, I saw a line of yellow cabs at the curb, waiting for fares. One of the cabs started to follow me. At the next intersection, I did a U-turn and lost the asshole.”

“You lost him.”

“That’s right.”

Victor swallowed hard. He was thinking the same thing Billy was thinking. Kat may have lost the tail, but she hadn’t lost the people who were following her. The sixty-four-thousand-dollar question was, did Kat realize that?

“Did you drive straight back here?” Victor asked hesitantly.

“Come on, Pop, I’m not that dumb. I pulled into a strip mall and inspected the car. First I checked the roof to see if there was a silver disc attached. You told me that the cops put them there so police helicopters can follow vehicles in traffic. Well, there wasn’t, so then I climbed underneath, and lo and behold, guess what. I found a GPS tag in a plastic case held to the bottom of the car with a magnet. I opened it up, and it had a miniature transmitter and two AA batteries. They must have put it on while I was inside the casino.”

“It wasn’t hard-wired to an electrical wire in the car,” Victor said.

“No. It was a short-term surveillance.”

“Did you destroy it?”

“I was going to chuck it into the trash, but then I had an idea. There was a Papa John’s in the strip mall, so I climbed underneath one of the delivery cars and reattached the transmitter. A delivery boy came out with some pizzas and took off.”

Kat’s ingenuity made Billy smile. The GPS would send an uninterrupted signal, allowing its holder to track the location of the rental on a laptop map. Whoever had attached the tag would spend the rest of the day chasing a pizza delivery boy and not knowing it.

“Then you drove home,” Victor said.

Kat had a gypsy’s skeptical eyes. She gave her father a look that would have turned most men to stone. “Of course not! I went to McCarran and dumped the rental. Then I took a stroll through the main terminal to make sure I wasn’t being tailed.”

“For how long?” Victor asked.

“Thirty minutes. You’re going to see some charges on my credit card.”

Victor rolled his eyes. “You went shopping?”

“I had to do something to kill the time.”

“How much did you spend?”

“Enough to jump-start the economy. The good news is, no one followed me. I rented a car from another company and drove here.”

Kat’s tale was over. Victor gave her a hug and told her she’d done good. Her father’s words brought a smile to her face, and she bid Billy good-bye before leaving the room.

“Jesus Christ, this isn’t good,” Victor said.

Billy felt the same way. Two different casinos had made Kat and Nico. It could have been a coincidence, only Billy didn’t believe in those. More than likely, the gaming board had Kat and Nico on their radar and had distributed their photographs to the casinos.

“This smells like the gaming board,” Billy said. “Did Kat and Nico get caught together in a casino recently?”

“Not that I know of,” Victor said.

“Would they tell you if they’d screwed up?

“Absolutely. My children are trustworthy.” Victor paused. “Do you still want to go through with this? I won’t be pissed if you pull out.”

“Are you pulling out?” Billy asked.

“I can’t. The super con has a shelf life. If I don’t pull it off soon, it will never happen.”

A shelf life. Now Billy was really confused. If he didn’t hang around, he’d never find out Victor’s secret, and that would bother him, along with not cashing in.

“I’m not going anywhere. We’ll give Kat a makeover along with Nico,” Billy said.

“Works for me,” Victor said. “Now, let’s iron out the details.”