Super Con

Twenty-Eight

Wednesday, eleven days before the Super Bowl

A lot of cheats in Vegas also hustled on the links. It was a great way to stay in shape, work on your tan, and make a few bucks on the side.

Every golf hustle was different. Some cheats lied about their handicaps. Others resorted to having their caddies secretly move their opponent’s balls to unfavorable lies. And there were cheats who coated their clubs with Vaseline to make the ball fly straighter. There were many scams like this, designed to give the cheat a few extra strokes during the course of a match.

Billy’s scam used simple math to give him a mathematical edge over his opponents. There was no trickery involved, and as a result, he’d never had a sucker make a beef. The scam only worked at the Royal Links course, which was located ten miles east of the Strip. The course was designed to reflect the links-style play found on the British Isles. There was the Road Hole and Hell Bunker from St. Andrews and the infamous Postage Stamp from Royal Troon. Making par was a struggle for even the best golfer.

Billy was a member at Royal Links in good standing and friends with the golf pro. The pro had taught Billy how to hit his drives straight and true and how to sink a putt from ten feet out, every time. This was the key to Billy’s scam — the ability to hit certain shots at certain times, every time. The pro would set Billy up to play with a wealthy guest looking for a friendly game. Most of these guests were strong players with lower handicaps than Billy. But that didn’t mean Billy couldn’t steal their money.

The scam always started the same way. Billy would play a few holes while making small talk. Where you from, what do you do, how many kids you got? It was his standard spiel and made the sucker think that Billy was a stand-up guy and not a person who’d resort to robbing him blind.

After three holes, Billy would ask the sucker if he liked to gamble. Every person who visited Vegas liked to gamble, being that there was nothing else to do in town except get drunk, eat, and see the shows. The sucker always said yes.

Billy would suggest two simple wagers. The first wager was to see who could drive the ball the longest without the ball leaving the fairway. The wager was for $500 per hole. If the sucker was wearing a nice shiny Rolex, the wager was a $1,000. The second wager was to see who took fewer strokes on the green. This wager also ranged between $500 and $1,000. During an average match, Billy would pocket between five and ten thousand bucks of the sucker’s dough.

The secret to winning the drive was simple. The sucker drove the ball longer than Billy, but that wasn’t an advantage on a links course, where sand dunes and narrow fairways resulted in balls not staying inbounds. Since the bet required the sucker to keep the ball on the fairway, the sucker’s strength off the tee usually betrayed him.

Billy won this bet 70 percent of the time. To keep the sucker in the game, he’d sometimes deliberately blow a hole. Charity wasn’t his strong suit, and he won the money back on the greens, where his putting excelled. His average for these wagers was also 70 percent.

Today’s sucker worked in finance and was named Arnie. Every couple of minutes, Arnie’s cell phone chirped like a sick bird. He’d say, “Hold on, I gotta take this,” and play would stop so he could make another earth-shattering deal.

On the ninth hole, a golf cart pulled up with Morris driving and Cory in the passenger seat. Billy sometimes brought them to Royal Links to work on their games, and he guessed that they’d used Billy’s name to get past the guards posted at the front gate.

Billy looked up from his putt. “What’s up?”

“There was a problem last night,” Cory said.

“What kind of problem are we talking about?”

“Travis came over to our place.”

“It didn’t end well,” Morris added.

“What did you do, smack him in the head with a lead pipe?”

Morris dropped his voice. “Worse.”

Morris was white as a ghost. So was Cory. Billy got his bag and put it in the back of their cart. Then he walked over to Arnie, who’d just wrapped up his call.

“I need to run. Let’s do this again sometime,” he said.

“You leaving?” Arnie asked.

“Business calls. You know how it is.”

“But I’m way down. You need to let me win my money back.”

To take your opponent’s money before a match was over was considered bad action and would land Billy in hot water if the club found out. Suckers needed to believe they could win, even when they didn’t have a snowball’s chance in hell of coming out ahead. It was the hustle that kept Las Vegas going.

“We’re square,” Billy said.

Arnie’s mouth dropped open. “You mean I don’t have to pay you off?”

“That’s right. Have a nice day.”

The clubhouse looked like a sandblasted castle, the bar a stodgy British pub. It was quiet, and Billy chose a corner table away from the talkative bartender.

“The usual, Mr. Cunningham?” the bartender called.

“Yes, Nigel. The same for my guests.”

“Coming right up.”

Billy sat with Cory and Morris facing him. Neither had shaved, and they both wore yesterday’s wrinkled clothes. They knew the importance of appearances, and this was totally out of character for both of them. Billy didn’t need a crystal ball to figure out what had happened between them and Travis. It was written across both their faces.

Three pints of Newcastle brown ale were brought to the table. Billy clinked his glass against theirs in a toast. “Which one of you took Travis out of the picture?”

“How did you know?” Cory gasped.

“Educated guess. Was it you?”

“That distinction would go to me,” Morris said. “He threatened Cory, and I shot him dead. Bastard wanted to start his own crew, if you can believe that.”

“Any witnesses?”

Morris shook his head. He was normally the timid one. That had obviously changed. Morris was growing up, right before his eyes.

“What about your neighbors?” Billy asked.

“I turned the TV on full blast before I plugged him. It drowned out the shots.”

“Is his body still in your house?”

“We wrapped him in plastic sheeting and backed the car up into the garage, then put him in the trunk,” Cory said. “We rent an air-conditioned storage unit where we have a foot locker. We put the body in the locker along with bags of ice.”

“So you iced him,” Billy said.

The joke was lost on them. It was out of line to make fun of the dead, only the way Billy saw it, Travis’s departure was a blessing and could not have come a moment too soon. Everyone got what was coming to him in this life, and Travis had gotten his.

“What did you do with his car?” Billy asked.

“We parked it in the garage at our house,” Cory said. “We wanted to ditch it, but by the time we got back from the storage unit, it was light, and we didn’t want anyone seeing us.”

Up until this point they’d been batting a thousand. Keeping the car was a major foul ball, and Billy reminded himself that they were both still young. “The car is new and probably has a stolen vehicle recovery system. If Karen files a missing person’s report with the cops, they’ll turn on the system and find his car in your garage. You need to get rid of it.”

“His wife is in Reno with her kids, visiting relatives,” Morris said.

“Who told you that?”

Morris removed a sleek Samsung Galaxy cell phone from his pocket. “His phone did.”

“That’s his cell phone?” Billy said incredulously. “For the love of Christ, there are apps on the Internet that let you trace a cell phone just by number. Turn the fucking thing off.”

Morris slid the phone across the table. “You need to read some stuff first.”

“What stuff?”

“After I shot Travis, his phone let out a beep. Broken Tooth had texted him, wanting an update. So we texted him back.”

“Please tell me you’re kidding.”

“What else were we going to do?” Morris said. “If we ignored the text, Broken Tooth would know something was wrong and kill Leon. We had to act, so we did.”

“You realize that just about anyone can trace that phone.”

“We know that. Come on, Billy, read it.”

Billy hit the text icon on the cell phone’s screen. A thread of messages between Broken Tooth and Travis appeared. Travis was big on the bullshit and had told Broken Tooth that Gabe, Pepper, and Misty were on board, when in fact the opposite was true. To complete the story, the final message in the thread claimed that Cory and Morris were ready to leave Billy’s crew and run with Travis. This was the message that Cory and Morris had composed.

In disgust, Billy tossed the phone onto the table and shook his head.

“You guys are something else,” he said. “You need to get rid of the car, the phone, and the body, and then you need to get the hell out of Vegas and lay low. And make sure you get the trunk of your car cleaned, just in case.”

“What about the Gypsies’ super con?” Morris asked. “You need us to pull it off. Let us hang around until the job’s done, then we’ll split.”

It was all Billy could do not to explode. He reminded himself that Cory and Morris were invincible twenty-three-year-olds, and they had no concept of how miserable their lives would become if the police linked them to Travis’s death.

“You’ll leave once you finish cleaning up. Understood?”

“Are you firing us?”

“Call it a sabbatical. I don’t want either one of you getting arrested.”

“Where should we go?”

“Cancun’s nice this time of year. You can stay at my condo.”

Billy threw down money, and they walked out of the pub. No one said anything until they were in the parking lot.

“Are you going to try and save Leon?” Morris asked.

Billy nodded. He was expecting to meet up with Broken Tooth later and get the good-faith money to give Night Train and his pals. At this meeting, Billy would ask Broken Tooth to release his driver now, instead of after the big game. Billy had kept his end of the bargain and hoped Broken Tooth would cut him some slack.

His car was parked by the pub’s entrance. Billy hit the unlock button on his key chain, then stopped. “Before you shot him, did you ask Travis what his beef was?”

“Yeah. Travis didn’t like you critiquing his sleight of hand,” Cory said.

“Pissed him off, huh?”

“In a major way.”

Cheats who did sleight of hand were called mechanics. In Billy’s experience, mechanics had inflated egos and high opinions of themselves. Every cheating move had a bad angle that could be detected by a powerful camera lens. Yet somehow Travis had forgotten this and let Billy’s criticisms get under his skin. Talk about ruining a beautiful thing.

“Call me after you dump the body,” he said.