Sucker bet - James Swain [73]
Candy shook her head no.
“It sounds great,” he said. “And in the beginning, it is. Like one of those great Charles Dickens tales about a young boy being mistaken for a prince and given the run of the castle. It’s fun, but then it starts to wear thin. You’re not the person people think you are. The person you really are, you can never go back to being. It’s like dying, and waking up in someone else’s bloody body.”
He touched her chin, then managed a faint smile. “I hang out with guys like Rico for the same reason that I gamble. It makes me feel alive.”
33
Valentine and his son spent the afternoon in their hotel room watching the surveillance tape of Jack Lightfoot.
Valentine had enjoyed the company. Normally, Gerry would have been poolside, talking a pretty girl into slathering tanning lotion on his back. Only, he seemed more interested in figuring out how Lightfoot was cheating, and asking lots of questions.
Valentine’s cell phone rang. He retrieved it from the night table and glanced at the caller ID. It was Mabel, calling from his house.
“You shouldn’t be working on a Sunday,” he said by way of greeting.
“Don’t worry, I’m putting in for overtime,” she replied. “I called to see if you got my fax.”
“What fax?”
“The one I sent to your hotel. It was an E-mail from a person named mathwizard. I think he figured out your blackjack scam.”
“You sent it to the hotel’s main desk?”
“Yes. Yesterday morning. When I didn’t hear from you, I figured I’d better call.”
“Thanks for the heads-up.”
He said good-bye, then called the front desk on the house phone. Two minutes later an apologetic bellman was standing at the door with his fax. Valentine gave him a buck and slipped his bifocals on.
Mathwizard was the alias of a prominent southern California college professor, and one of the top blackjack cheaters in the world. With his son looking over his shoulder, Valentine read the E-mail several times, then found himself staring at the passage at the bottom of the page.
The strategy, which I call Big Rock/Little Rock, has an enormous impact on the game’s outcome. When a dealer chooses to expose a Big Rock (any ten, jack, queen, king, or ace), instead of a Little Rock (deuce through seven), he’ll win most of the time.
Valentine put the E-mail down, then thought back to the piece of sandpaper in the aspirin bottle in Karl Blackhorn’s locker. And then it hit him. This was something new.
His skin tingled. In all his years policing Atlantic City’s casinos, he’d uncovered only a handful of new ways to cheat the house—things that had never been done before—and each time, he’d walked on air for a few days. It was a unique feeling, and he’d had to consult a thesaurus to find a word that accurately described it.
Only one had. Aggrandizement.
He called Gladys Soft Wings. “How soon can you get the Micanopy elders together?”
His son said, “You nailed it?”
Valentine nodded that he had.
“Way to go!”
“How about tomorrow morning?” Gladys suggested.
“How about right now?” he replied.
Mabel hung up the phone and glanced at her watch. The movie started at three. If she hurried, she’d still get a good seat. She heard the computer on Tony’s desk make a doorbell sound, indicating new E-mail had arrived. She hesitated, then let her curiosity get the better of her.
It was from Jacques, informing her that he’d been fired from his job. Too many cheaters had been caught in the past few days for management to have any faith in him. So they’d sacked him.
Mabel erased the message and pushed herself out of her chair. That was the thing that people never understood about cheaters: They often cost security people and pit bosses and dealers their jobs. When the losses were really bad, whole shifts were often fired.
Someone was knocking at the front door. It was a loud, impatient sound. Annoyed, she hurried down the hall into the living room. Through the front window she spied a young man standing on the stoop. His right hand held a padded envelope.