James Swain - Super Con

“Cut!” Arms extended, Hud came out of his chair. “Perfect — perfect! That’s what I call acting. Mark my words, you’re going to be a star.”

“From your lips to God’s ears,” she said.

Filming a TV show was exhausting, and Mags went to her trailer and lay down on a cot. Amber was arriving tonight, and she wanted to be bright-eyed and bushy-tailed when her daughter stepped off the plane. A tapping on the door lifted her eyebrows.

“Come on in.”

Rand entered wearing his best smile. The first time they’d met, Mags had fleeced Rand at poker. Instead of getting pissed, Rand had turned on the charm and offered her work. He was a phony, through and through, but he was her phony, so she put up with him.

“Hud said you were fantastic,” Rand said.

“Doing the best I can. What’s up?”

“We have a date with the gaming board. They’re going to give us a tour of the surveillance control room of LINQ’s casino.”

“I’m beat. Why don’t you go, let me get some rest?”

“No can do. You’re playing a gaming agent in the show, and you need to see what these people actually do. Come on, it will be a good learning experience.”

“But I can hardly keep my eyes open.”

“In case you’ve forgotten, the gaming board is the key to our show’s success. If they decide they don’t like us, we’ll have to switch locations.” A plastic bag dangled in his hand, which he placed on the cot. “This was delivered by courier, courtesy of Special Agent Grimes. There was a note asking that I personally give it to you.”

She sat up and had a look inside the bag. The breath caught in her throat.

“What is it?” her producer asked.

“A chip tray,” she said.

“And what is a chip tray?”

Casinos gave chip trays to customers who purchased large amounts of chips, making it easier for the customer to carry around the chips, as opposed to stuffing them in their pockets.

The chip tray Grimes had couriered over had five tubes designed to hold twenty chips, a hundred chips in all. This was the standard size for every Vegas casino. The tray in her hands was altered. Each tube had been ground out with a router so it could accommodate an additional chip.

Mags had once lived in an apartment on the south end of town. Down the hall lived a Mexican girl named Louisa who worked as a cashier at Circus Circus. One night they’d gotten drunk on cheap wine, and Mags had persuaded Louisa to steal a chip tray and bring it home. The next night, Mags had gaffed the tray while explaining the scam to her new partner.

Louisa would keep the tray at her station in the cage. Mags would enter the casino and approach the cage when things were quiet, then pass $2,500 through the bars to Louisa. Louisa would exchange the money for a hundred green chips, which were worth twenty-five dollars apiece. But instead of putting twenty green chips into each tube, Louisa would put twenty-one.

Mags would visit the ladies’ room with the tray, enter a stall, and deposit the five stolen chips into her purse. Then she’d enter the casino and play a slot machine. After an hour, she’d exchange the chips at the cage and leave $125 ahead.

The scam shouldn’t have worked, yet it did. Every transaction inside the cage was videotaped and scrutinized. Only the dopes working surveillance thought a chip tray could hold only a hundred chips, so the scam flew right by them.

They’d pulled the scam twice a week for a year. Mags called it the Rent Scam, since the money went to covering their monthly rent. Every scam had a shelf life, and Mags had decided to retire the scam while they still were ahead.

Or so she’d thought.

If the gaffed tray was any indication, Louisa had found a partner and continued the scam until she got caught. That was how the gaffed tray had ended up in Grimes’s possession.

But how had Frank tied the scam to her? Had Louisa grown a tail and ratted out Mags? That was the logical explanation, and since any videos of the theft from Circus Circus were long gone, Grimes had sent Mags the tray just to rattle her cage.

Frank was being a prick. Nothing new there.

A garbage pail sat in the corner of the trailer. The gaffed tray made a loud bang before falling inside. Mags checked her makeup in the vanity and went to the door.

“Are you going to explain?” Rand asked.

“There’s nothing to explain,” she said. “Let’s go see what the inside of a surveillance room looks like, shall we?”

Back when the mob ran Vegas, lifeguard chairs could be found on casino floors, in which sat cigar-smoking gangsters who’d stared down at the tables, trying to catch cheats. After the corporations took over the town, these chairs were replaced with catwalks, letting security experts with binoculars watch the action through two-way mirrors in the ceiling.

Over time, cameras replaced catwalks. These cameras had pan-tilt-zoom lenses and were wired to the casino’s surveillance room, where heavily caffeinated techs sat zombielike in front of monitors, hoping to nail a bad guy. These surveillance rooms were also above casinos, on floors with restricted access.

This arrangement had changed with modern casinos. Today’s surveillance rooms were in basements and had special cooling systems so the equipment ran properly. They also had their own elevators, which eliminated any social contact with the casino’s employees.

Special Agent Grimes awaited them in the lobby of LINQ. The knot in Grimes’s necktie was undone, and his chin sported a dark shadow.

“Catch any bad guys?” Mags asked as they took the elevator down.

“Slow day so far. Like the present I sent over?” Grimes asked.

“What present? I didn’t get any present.”

“Let me guess. You’ve never heard of Louisa Cruz.”

“Sorry. Name doesn’t ring any bells.”

Rand stared at the floor, pretending not to hear. The elevator landed and they walked down a hallway to a steel door with a security camera perched over it. Grimes hit a buzzer.

“Before we go inside, I need to remind you that it’s against the law to take photos of the equipment. If I catch either of you doing that, I’ll confiscate your cell phone. Got it?”

“Of course,” Rand said.

“You’re the boss,” Mags added.

A short man wearing a turtleneck ushered them in. The room was dimly lit and designed like a bunker, and it took a moment for Mags’s eyes to adjust. Twenty-eight monitors took up the main wall; in front of them sat a dozen techs at desks, using joysticks, keypads, and desktop screens to jump among feeds from the casino’s many cameras.

At one desk sat a plump guy eating a burger in a fast-food wrapper. Frank slapped him on the shoulder. “This is Blake, one of LINQ’s table games specialists. How’s it going, Blake?”

“Living the dream,” Blake replied without humor.

“Any bites?”

“Not yet, but the day’s still young.” With a flick of the joystick, Blake jumped from a craps table to a blackjack game with lightning speed. “I thought I saw your boy earlier, but it wasn’t him. Is your offer still good?”

“Absolutely. Five hundred bucks if you nail him,” Grimes said. “That goes for the other techs as well.”

A glossy photograph was propped on Blake’s desk. It was the same photo Frank had shown Mags of the Gypsies having lunch with the claimer. Frank had nailed two of the Gypsies already but let them slip through his fingers. Now he was offering a bounty to capture the third Gypsy in the photo — the one with the prominent Adam’s apple, who would be easy for Blake or one of the other techs to spot if he entered LINQ’s casino.

“You must really want to catch this guy,” Rand said.