Deadman's Bluff - James Swain [69]
He realized the screen was flashing. It didn’t feel real, and he touched the PAYOUT button with his finger. A slip of paper spit out of the machine saying he’d won $2,000.
He handed it to her, and she went into the restaurant to get the money from the manager.
He sucked down the beer left in his glass. Living in Vegas, he’d heard countless stories about people winning big in casinos, and how it had changed their lives. He’d always assumed the stories were bullshit.
The bartender returned holding a thick stack of bills. She counted the money onto the bar then pushed it toward him. Lifting her eyes, she looked into his face expectantly.
He hesitated picking up the stack, wondering how many customers heard her spiel each day. Fifty? A hundred? Giving suckers hope was how she made her living. He knew that, yet it didn’t change how she’d made him feel.
He put three hundred on the bar and walked out.
32
Valentine was ready to make a bust.
He’d shown Bill Higgins the surveillance tape of Skins Turner mucking a card. Bill had seen his share of muckers, and he whistled through his teeth when Skins did his switch in plain view of everyone else at the table.
“Guy’s got balls,” Bill said.
“He’s also got tremendous misdirection,” Valentine said.
“How so?”
“Everyone’s watching DeMarco.”
Taking out his cell phone, Bill had put into motion the necessary steps to go into Celebrity’s casino, and arrest Skins Turner. For starters, he alerted the casino’s head of security and explained exactly what Skins was doing. Then he gave a detailed description of what Skins looked like and where he was sitting in the game. More than one cheater had gotten away when a security guard had, in his haste to make a bust, nabbed the wrong person.
Then Bill called the Metro Las Vegas Police Department and went through the same drill with a sheriff. Skins would eventually end up in the Metro LVPD clink, and Bill didn’t want some judge letting him out on a hundred-dollar bail because the arresting officer hadn’t understood the seriousness of the charge.
The next thing Bill did was invite the other techs in the room to look at the tape of Skins and confirm that cheating was taking place. Juries in Nevada hated the casinos and would not convict a cheater without clear and compelling videotape evidence. A cop’s word simply wasn’t good enough.
Once the techs had agreed Skins was cheating, Bill did a background check on Skins. Nothing could be more helpful to prosecuting Skins than him having a prior conviction for cheating. Bill got Skins’s name and address from the hotel’s reservation department, and then called it in to the police, and his own people. If Skins had ever been arrested, either Metro or the Gaming Control Board would have a record of it.
Ten minutes later, both Metro and the GCB called Bill back.
“Damn,” Bill said, hanging up the phone.
“He’s clean?”
“Got a couple of speeding tickets down in Houston, but that’s it. Where the hell is Sammy Mann, anyway? Maybe he knows this guy from the past.”
“Sammy flew the coop,” Valentine said. “He ran right after we grilled him.”
Bill clenched his jaw. “That lousy prick. I gave him a second chance, and this is how he repays us.” He asked the tech to replay the tape of Skins, and they both watched it again. Bill cursed under his breath. “This isn’t good enough to convict.”
“It isn’t?”
“No.” Bill pointed at Skins’s right hand. It hung over the edge of the table and beneath his other arm, hiding the palmed card from his opponents but not entirely from the camera’s eye. A tiny sliver of card showed between Skins’s third and fourth fingers. Cheaters called this “leaking.”
“Our illustrious mayor, who used to be a high-priced defense attorney, was able to get specific laws put on the books in regards to how close a mucker’s hands had to be to the table for a crime to have actually been committed,” Bill said. “Skins’s hands aren’t close enough.”
“But we saw him switch cards,” Valentine protested.
“We saw him cover the cards with his hands,” Bill corrected him. “We didn’t see the actual switch.