Deadman's Bluff - James Swain [77]
“Let me guess,” Valentine said. “You have a sore throat.”
“Very sore,” Sammy said.
“Probably prevents you from talking.”
Sammy nodded solemnly. Valentine glanced around the room, seeing a lot of upgrades since his last visit, but nothing that would tell you what Sammy did for a living. You had to know him to know what he was.
“You want to hear a funny story?” Valentine asked.
“I love a good laugh,” Sammy said.
“You don’t sound like you have a sore throat.”
Sammy coughed into his hand.
“That’s better. Okay, here it is. I’m a rookie cop in Atlantic City, and as green as they come. One day, I’m walking my beat with my partner, and he tells me that the crooks in Atlantic City are more violent than the crooks in New York. He tells me that in New York, if one crook is trying to steal a truck of furs, and another crook steals the truck first, the first crook won’t take it personally. Not so in Atlantic City. If a crook catches another crook trying to steal the truck away from him, he’ll kill him.
“That didn’t make any sense to me. Why would the crooks in Atlantic City, which has twenty thousand residents, be more violent than crooks in New York, which has six million residents? I was obviously missing something, and finally my partner explained it to me. There were less things to steal in Atlantic City. A lot less. In New York, a crook could go steal something else. But in Atlantic City, big scores were few and far between. That was the piece I was missing.
“So here’s the thing, Sammy. I’m missing something that’s right in front of my face, and it’s bothering the hell out of me. I have to know, you know?”
Sammy lifted his arms off the armrests of his chair. Let them hang in the air for a few seconds, then shrugged and dropped them. “You know the answer,” he said.
“I do?”
Sammy nodded. “You just told it to me. Atlantic City is different than New York. Well, Las Vegas is different, too.”
Gloria slipped off the couch and came up beside Sammy’s chair. She knelt down and put her hand onto Sammy’s arm, all the while looking into the old cheater’s eyes, which were dark and unflinching. “How is it different?” she asked.
Sammy laughed under his breath and looked at Valentine. “How long you been a team?”
“You’re our first victim,” Valentine said.
“You’d never know it,” the old cheater said.
Rising, Sammy went to an entertainment center on the opposite side of the room, pulled open a drawer, and rummaged through a collection of videotapes, taking out two. He powered up the TV, then popped a tape into the VCR. Returning to his chair, he picked up a glass of water and took a sip.
“Just watch,” he said.
The tape was of a heavyweight boxing match, the grainy color showing its age. George Foreman fighting a game German kid named Axel Schultz. Valentine followed boxing and had a vague memory of the fight. Mid-nineties, Las Vegas, with Foreman getting slapped around for twelve unspectacular rounds, yet somehow winning the decision. Schultz had gone back to Germany, never to be heard from again.
Sammy shut the tape off after the decision was read, and Foreman announced the winner. Poor George hadn’t looked like the winner, his face more damaged than Freddy Kruger’s in the Halloween movies. Sammy stuck the second tape into the VCR, fast-forwarded it to a spot near the end, then returned to his chair. The tape was of a college football game and looked more recent.
“I recognize this tape,” Gloria said, still kneeling beside Sammy’s chair. “This is a game between the Wisconsin Badgers and the Las Vegas Rebels played here in Vegas a few years ago, isn’t it?”
“That’s right,” Sammy said. “You like college football?”
“I’ve covered it for years,” she said. “This game was a big upset. The Rebels were heavy favorites, but the Badgers ran them all over the field