Super Con

Seventeen

Tuesday, early morning, twelve days before the Super Bowl

There was nothing glamorous about shooting a TV show. Early mornings, late nights, endless takes. Mags was working on the day’s scene when there was a knock on her trailer door.

“Can it wait? I’m memorizing my lines,” she said.

“We need to chat for a minute. It’s important,” Rand said.

“Well, then come on in.”

Rand made his entrance. As was befitting a Hollywood producer, he wore designer jeans and a gold T-shirt that appeared glued to his body, along with a pair of sunglasses perched on the tip of his nose. Mags took the shooting script off her lap and tossed it to the floor.

“Whoever wrote this doesn’t know jack,” she said.

“It’s a she, and she’s one of the best scriptwriters in the biz,” Rand said.

“Well, she doesn’t know shit about casinos, and you can tell her I said so.”

Today’s scene had Mags walking through a casino and catching a player slipping a metal slug into a slot machine. The scene was intended to display Mags’s innate ability to spot cons and grifts and was integral to her character as a gaming agent. The problem was, any dummy could spot a slug from a mile away. The scene sucked.

“We have guests,” Rand said. “The gaming board decided to pay us a visit. They caught wind that our show features a gaming agent and aren’t happy about it.”

Her stomach did a flip-flop. She had a history with the gaming board, and it wasn’t a pretty one. For eighteen months, she’d acted as a snitch while being under the thumb of an agent named Frank Grimes. To keep Grimes under control, she’d had an affair with him, a decision she’d come to regret. “I thought you cleared the show with the gaming board,” she said.

“I thought I had. It seems they just got around to reading the script. Be your usual charming self, and everything will go fine.”

“When did you send it to them? Yesterday?”

Rand flashed a phony smile. Mags guessed Rand had delayed showing the gaming board the script because her character moonlighted as a cheat. TV shows were a boon to the local economy, and her producer was banking on the gaming board giving them a pass.

“Have you ever dealt with the gaming board before?” she asked.

“No. What are they like?”

“You’re in for a real treat.”

“They’re waiting for us inside one of the hotel’s restaurants,” Rand said as they entered LINQ. “Please be on your best behavior with these folks. I don’t want them shutting us down.”

“How much of the script have they read?” Mags asked.

“All of it. They even e-mailed me some suggestions. I told them their ideas were great and that I wanted to use them and give them writing credits.”

“Aren’t we clever.”

“I think we’re going to be okay. If not, I’ll offer to send the show’s carpenters over to their houses to do some repairs. That should do the trick.”

“Won’t the studio object?”

“It’s built into the budget. When you shoot on location, you have to bribe the cops or local politicians to cut through red tape and get things done. The best bribe is free repairs. They’re impossible to trace.”

Guy Fieri’s Vegas Kitchen & Bar had more words in its title than entrees on the menu. It was a brightly lit room with as much charm as an army mess hall. Rand escorted her to a corner table where a pair of gaming agents awaited them. One had a shiny butter stain adorning his necktie. It was her old pal Frank.

Introductions were made. The second agent was a stocky Latina named Valles who ran the gaming board’s PR department. Clutched in her hand was a copy of the shooting script with no less than fifty yellow Post-it tabs on pages where the desired changes were to be made. A waitress took drink orders. Coffee all around.

Rand picked up the script from the table and casually thumbed through it. “Is this it? I thought there’d be more,” he said sarcastically.

“We tried to keep things within reason,” Valles replied. “The gaming board plays a prominent role in your series. We’d prefer our agents be showcased in a positive light.”

“The main character in the series cheats the casinos. Is that a problem?”

“We think it is.”

Valles and Rand locked stares the way bulls lock horns. This was not going to be fun. To Mags’s surprise, it was Grimes who seized the moment. “Why don’t Miss Flynn and I move to another table so you two can talk this through? It might make things easier.”

“That’s a terrific idea, Frank,” Valles said. “Nice meeting you, Miss Flynn.”

“Same here,” Mags said.

Grimes and Mags took a table away from the brewing battle. The waitress was on the ball and brought their coffees. Grimes lifted his steaming mug in a toast.

“Congratulations. Here’s to making it,” he said.

“Are you trying to be funny?” Mags asked.

“Not at all. Remember the first time we slept together? I took you to a suite at the Wynn and we ordered room service and screwed like rabbits. When we were done, you told me you were going to make it big one day, and now you have. Not many people do that, Maggie.”

Mags vividly remembered their first sexual encounter but not for the same reasons. It was the first time she’d seen Frank naked. His body was covered in curly black hair and looked like something that had washed up dead on the beach after a low tide. She’d made him turn off the lights and had shut her eyes and imagined she was screwing a young Harrison Ford.

“Thanks,” she said. “So how are things with you? Still pounding the pavement?”

“My boss put in his papers for retirement. I’ve applied for his job. Unfortunately, a lot of other agents in the department are vying for his desk. All I can do is hope.”

“That asshole Tricaricco is finally leaving? It’s about time.”

“Bill isn’t that bad, once you get to know him.”

“He wasn’t very nice to me. Look, I hope you get the job. You’ve earned it.”

“Do you really mean that?”

“Yeah, Frank, I do. Good luck.”

They clinked mugs. Mags believed in keeping your friends close and your enemies closer. Frank was her enemy and always would be, even if she was no longer scamming the casinos. Frank put down his mug and cleared his throat. “I’ve been meaning to call you. I need your help on a case I’m working. If I can break it, I should get the promotion.”

“Help you how?”

“I’m trying to nail some cheaters. You don’t have to give me names or anything. Just point me in the right direction.”

Mags suppressed the urge to laugh in his face. If anything, she would send Frankie boy in the wrong direction, to hell with his new job.

“What’s the case?” she asked.

“Six months ago, a Money Vault progressive slot machine at Galaxy Casino paid off a huge jackpot. The winner was a retired school principal from Sacramento named Linda Olson. The Money Vault slots pays off once every five years, and the gaming board always does a background check of the winners. This lady didn’t pass the smell test.”

“How so?”

“We studied the surveillance tapes that showed Olson playing the Money Vault. She kept dropping the coins while inserting them in the machine. She also kept looking over her shoulder, as if she was afraid of being watched.”

“Maybe she drank too much coffee,” Mags said.

“There was more. Her criminal record was clean, but the report from the Driver and Vehicle Identification Database wasn’t. Olson had a dozen tickets for speeding. The most recent ticket had come the morning she won the jackpot. She’d gotten pulled over for doing ninety driving to the casino. It made us think that the Money Vault machine was rigged, and she was just dying to get there so she could win it.”

“A claimer,” Mags said. Claimers were individuals with squeaky-clean backgrounds who worked with cheats to claim jackpots of rigged slot machines. Their take was 5 percent.

“Correct. While Olson waited to be paid off, she went to a restaurant inside Galaxy and had lunch with three people who we think rigged the machine. We pulled photos of them off a surveillance camera inside the restaurant.”

Grimes showed her the photos. Three of the people had swarthy complexions and looked related. The fourth was an attractive woman with snow-white hair.

“Is Snow Cone the claimer?” Mags asked.

“That’s Olson. I was wondering if you’d ever seen the other three.”

The faces weren’t the least bit familiar, and Mags shook her head.

“Never seen them before. Why do you think they’re dirty?”

“Their faces have shown up at several Native American reservation casinos when large sums of money were lost. My boss met with the head of tribal gaming last year, and they decided it was time to start sharing information. The Indians have gotten taken for some major scores.”

Native American casinos were considered soft targets among cheats. The dealers were rubes, and the heads of surveillance often got their jobs because of blood ties.

“We think they’re part of a family called the Gypsies,” Grimes said. “They’ve been scamming the casinos for years but never caught. If I can bust the Gypsies, it will be a major feather in my cap. They’re in Vegas right now.”

“You’ve spotted them?”

“Two of them. They run in a pack, so we’re sure the rest are also here.”

Mags tried to hide her discomfort. The scam Billy had asked her to be a part of involved the Gypsies. If they got taken down, Billy would certainly go down as well. She didn’t want Billy in her life, but that didn’t mean she wanted him to get hurt, either.

Grimes jabbed the surveillance photo with his finger. “We made the short one down on Fremont Street at the Golden Gate Casino. The girl to his right was made at the Tropicana yesterday morning. We don’t know who the third one is yet, but he should be easy to spot.”

The third member of the Gypsies in the surveillance photo had an enormous Adam’s apple and would be easy to make in a crowded casino.

“We’ve distributed his photo all over town,” Grimes said. “The moment our friend with the bulging Adam’s apple enters a casino, the casino will call us, and we’ll come running.”

“You’re going to bust him?”

“Not right away. We’ll take photos and use our facial recognition software to see if he turns up on any other surveillance videos. We’re in the process of building a case against the family. When we take it to the grand jury, we want the charges to stick.”

The gaming board busted hundreds of cheats every year, with the majority of cases being pleaded out and never going to trial. But this case was different. Grimes had a grand jury in his back pocket, which meant he’d already presented his evidence to the DA’s office and gotten their blessing to proceed and build a rock-solid case. Every so often, the DA made an example out of a cheat and put him away in prison for a long stretch. This sounded like one of those special cases, and Mags could not help feeling sorry for the Gypsies.

Rand and Valles appeared at their table. Their arm-wrestling match was over, and they both looked satisfied with the outcome. Mags rose from her chair.

“Good luck with your show,” Grimes said.

“Thanks, Frank,” she said.

Mags and her producer walked back to the trailer. Rand didn’t have the doctored shooting script in his hand, and Mags quizzed him with a glance.

“Special Agent Valles has a nephew in LA who wants to get into directing,” Rand said. “Kid’s waiting tables till his big break comes along. I offered to help him, provided the gaming board stays out of our hair.”

“Help him how?”

“I’m going to arrange for him to get a directing fellowship at the American Film Institute. If the kid isn’t a total douchebag, it should lead to his getting work.”

“Can you do that?”

“I sit on AFI’s board. I can pull a few strings and get him in.”

“Does this kid have any talent?”

Rand burst out laughing. “We’ll find out!”

Mags could feel the apprehension that always came before she shot a scene. She didn’t have her lines down yet, and the fear of messing up in front of the camera was never far from her thoughts. She pecked Rand on the cheek and headed up the short flight of steps into her trailer.

“We’re going to break early today. I’ll see you this afternoon at four,” Rand said.

“What’s the special occasion?”

“Special Agent Valles has agreed to give us a tour of LINQ’s surveillance room and show us how they catch cheats. It should give you real insight for your character.”

Surveillance rooms were off-limits to everyone except for the handful of casino employees, and Mags had to believe that no hustler in town had ever been inside one.

“How the hell did you arrange that?” she asked.

“What can I say? I strike a hard bargain,” he said with a wink.