The Thousand - Kevin Guilfoile [39]
About a year after he started working at the Colossus, Wayne caught a dealer conspiring with a gambler to cheat the casino. In blackjack, the players’ cards are dealt faceup. The dealer gives himself one card up and one card facedown. If the dealer is showing an ace, he offers insurance to each of the players—a smaller side bet that the dealer has an unbeatable hand of twenty-one. Wayne caught one dealer tipping a friend when he had blackjack so that the gambler would know when to take the insurance.
That night, Steve Rhodes had met Wayne outside the conference room where he was sweating the dealer. “I don’t want the cops to find out about this,” Rhodes said.
Wayne didn’t understand. “You want me to let him go?”
Rhodes shook his head. “I want you to take care of it.” When Wayne didn’t respond, he leaned into Wayne as if for a kiss. “I want you to fuck him up.” He stood straight again. “He won’t press charges. Hell, he’ll think himself lucky to have it behind him. He’ll also be a walking billboard that you don’t fuck with Steve Rhodes.” Rhodes started to walk away, stopping to pound twice on the door of the adjoining room. He turned back to Wayne. “Make sure his friend in there sees the result.”
Wayne had been in fights, sloppy, drunken four-on-six bar fights where nobody really connected and everybody walked away bloodied and mad but with most of their pride. Before that night, he’d never punched a man—much less a man he knew and liked—handcuffed to a chair.
But he’d done it twice since.
Tonight, shuttling between rooms, Wayne would check his phone often, just glance at it as if acknowledging an e-mail. Before Jimmy, the dealer, let Nada go, he had attached her name to the serial numbers on her chips, which could now be tracked anywhere in the hotel—from table to table to restaurant to gift shop to room. This allowed the hotel to follow the play and spending of its best customers. The more the casino learned about the behavior of their biggest spenders, the better they could serve them, please them, and keep them coming back. Wayne didn’t know exactly how it worked—some geek from the manufacturer had given a PowerPoint show, something about low-frequency radio broadcasts and thousands of receivers placed throughout the casino—but the specifics hadn’t seemed important, so he’d tuned them out.
What was important to Wayne was a little green dot in his palm that, until she either left the casino or traded those chips for cash, showed him the whereabouts of Canada Gold.
Every time he checked his phone, she appeared to be sitting at the bar in Club Nikita. For one hour. For two.
Thirty minutes ago, he had passed Steve Rhodes on the floor. Rhodes was leading the Concrete Sheik to the private elevators, probably up to his office to show him an item from one of his expensive and oddball collections—maybe a fifty-million-dollar Picasso, or a ceremonial ax alleged to have been wielded by Genghis Khan, or even a clown rug latch-hooked in prison by an Oregon serial killer. Wayne was walking quickly back to the room where they were holding the Cowboy and he was muttering into his ear bug at Peter Trembley with more urgency than needed, the stress more to do with the increasing unlikelihood of a relationship with Nada than with the cheats and perverts filling up his incident logs. Behind the Sheik’s back, Rhodes gave Wayne a look that asked if any of this was something he should be worried about, and Wayne shook his head once. Rhodes paused and smiled and motioned for Wayne to follow them.
Wayne recalled one of the few (and very first) conversations he’d ever had with Steve Rhodes. It was the final stop in the final round