Sucker bet - James Swain [12]
Mr. Beauregard’s crooked fingers froze on the strings of his beloved instrument. He picked up a tin sheriff’s badge from the floor of the cage and clipped it to his shirt. Striking a he-man pose, he pounded his chest.
“Thank you, Mr. Beauregard.”
The cops. Rico should have known. Organized crime had never gotten a strong foothold in south Florida, and for one simple reason. The local cops were too crooked to be influenced by the mob.
“Forty-two hundred it is,” Rico said.
Rico sat in his limo, staring through binoculars at Moon and Candy. They were standing at the Six-Cat booth. Knock three stuffed cats off a shelf, win a prize. It looked easy, only no one ever won. The operator made sure of that. By stepping on a foot break, he moved a loose board behind the cats back a few inches. By widening the shelf, the cats would not fall no matter how hard they were hit.
Rico watched Moon throw the baseballs. One, two, three cats fell in a row. By not touching the foot brake, the operator had given Moon a fair game. Candy squealed as the operator handed her a giant panda bear. She already had a Kewpie doll and a Big Bird, and looked like she’d robbed a toy store. The operator caught Moon’s eye and winked.
Rico loved it. Carnival people were great at building up suckers. He folded up his binoculars and put them on the seat.
“Forty-two hundred is too much,” Splinters said, sitting behind the wheel.
“I got what I wanted,” Rico said. “Moon’s having a gas.”
“Two grand, maybe,” Splinters said.
“You think so?”
“Yeah,” his Cuban driver said. “Two grand, tops.”
“Don’t worry about it.”
“Fucking guy robbed you.”
There it was again: the refusal to let things go. It was starting to get on Rico’s nerves. Splinters was not your ordinary Cuban refugee. He was sensitive about things like honor and a man’s reputation. Once, in South Beach, Rico had seen him carve up a guy just because he had found Splinters’s name funny.
“Fugettaboutit, will you?”
“Ahhh,” his driver said.
Splinters just didn’t understand how business was done in America. Hicks had given him good value on his dollar. Rico had no gripe with him.
Soon they were speeding south on I-95, and Splinters was blowing monster clouds of smoke out his window, obviously pissed off. That was the problem with Cubans, Rico had decided. They thought you cared how they felt.
Splinters needed to get over it, or Rico would have to get rid of him.
4
Valentine ate lunch, then called Smooth Stone and took the job. Smooth Stone sounded relieved. He explained to Valentine how a blackjack dealer named Jack Lightfoot had rigged a game and dealt a player eighty-four winning hands in a row. Smooth Stone wasn’t above admitting that he had no idea what had gone down.
“What was he trying to do, get into the Guinness Book of World Records?”
“It was damn stupid,” Smooth Stone said.
“How much did he take you for?”
“Eight hundred and forty dollars. We have a ten-dollar limit on blackjack.”
“You have problems with this Lightfoot character before?”
“No, but he’s new.”
Valentine found none of this surprising. Indian hustlers had been popping up all over the country. Because Indian casinos were not regulated by government agencies, many of these dealers were exceedingly bold. Valentine had heard plenty of stories, but dealing eighty-four winning hands was a record. The Micanopys needed to address it before another dealer “in the know” tried to rip them off again. He got instructions to the reservation, then set a time to meet Smooth Stone. They agreed on seven that night.
Taking his suitcase to his car, Valentine remembered something. Florida law limited the Micanopys to running Class II games, like bingo and slot machines. Table games like blackjack were forbidden, which meant the Micanopys were breaking the law.
Again.
Eight weeks earlier, Florida’s baby-faced governor had sent shotgun-toting federal agents onto the Micanopy reservation with orders to remove a hundred video poker machines. While not a table game, video poker fell into a gray area in terms of classification.