James Swain - Super Con

If Billy could determine the value of the dealer’s hole card, he would possess an edge over the house that would allow him to win more than he lost. It was all about the odds, and this piece of information tilted the odds in his favor.

There were several ways to peek at a dealer’s hole card. Each used a hidden device or an accomplice. Unless, of course, the dealer unwittingly gave away this information.

Dealers who gave away their hole cards were called flashers. Kenya was a flasher. As she slipped the second card beneath her first card, the nail on her manicured forefinger dug into the felt and caused the card to bow, briefly exposing its left corner. There wasn’t enough time to read the card’s value but plenty of time to determine if the card was a paint card or a number card. Paint cards had a lot of ink on their faces and were either a jack, queen, or king. Number cards were the rest of the cards in the deck.

On the first round, Kenya flashed paint. Ten in the hole. Kenya’s face card was a five, giving her a total of fifteen. A stiff.

Billy had a fourteen and waved his hand over the cards, indicating that he would not take another card. Amber had a pair of tens.

“Should I stay?” Amber asked.

“Split them,” Billy said.

Amber hesitated, then split her tens and doubled her bet. Kenya dealt a five on the first ten, a six on the second. Both hands were stiffs. Amber groaned.

“It’s not over,” Billy said.

Kenya flipped over her hole card, revealing a jack. Kenya dealt herself a third card and busted. She gave a practiced smile and paid off her customers.

“I just won a hundred bucks,” Amber said under her breath.

“You sound surprised,” Billy said.

“Do it again.”

Kenya was as easy to read as an open book. Billy took his sweet time and slowly built up his winnings. Had he won too quickly, it would have alerted a pit boss or a sharp tech in the surveillance room that something fishy was going on at Kenya’s table.

Amber said little, content to watch the scene play itself out. She was like a sponge, and little seemed to escape her attention. Glancing at her watch, she said, “Time’s almost up.”

Billy visually counted their chips. They were ahead $2,200. Rising from his chair, he graciously tossed Kenya a two-hundred-dollar tip.

“Thanks for the good time,” he said.

Casinos were designed for their patrons to lose track of time, and the blinding afternoon sunshine caught Billy by surprise as he walked out of SLS.

“I think I figured out your little scam,” Amber said. “It was based upon our dealer’s long fingernails. She kept scraping the felt, and you spied her hole card.”

Amber was sharp, but he wasn’t about to tell her that.

“What if I told you that you were wrong?” he said instead.

Her face crashed. “Then how did you do it?”

“Doesn’t matter. What matters is, if I tell you I’m going to win two grand, I’ll win two grand. And if I tell you that I’ll deal with a slimy gaming agent giving your mother a hard time, I’ll take care of him.”

“Can you really fix my mother’s problem?”

“Stop questioning me, will you?”

She briefly stared at the ground. “I’m sorry I underestimated you.”

“Don’t do it again.”

“I won’t.”

“Your mother loves you more than anything in the world. You know that, don’t you?”

“Yeah, I know that.”

“She’d do anything for you, she loves you that much.”

“I figured that out.”

“Glad to hear it.” He took out his winnings and shoved the money into her hands. “Now, go show your mother a good time.”

“The money’s mine?”

“Yes. There’s plenty more where that came from.”

She hesitated. The good angel sitting on her shoulder said, Give the money back, it’s stolen. But the bad angel perched on the other shoulder said, Take the fucking dough and have a party, this is Vegas, kiddo. The bad angel won, and she shoved the money into her pocket.

“What’s the deal between you and my mom?” she asked.

He wasn’t going there, and he started walking backward.

“You’re in love with her. I can see it in your face.”

“It was nice meeting you,” he said.

“You’re the devil, aren’t you?”

The words stung more than he would have liked.

“I’m whatever you want me to be,” he said.

Getting rid of Travis was proving trickier than Cory and Morris had anticipated. They’d stowed his body in their rented storage unit at night when no one was around. Now, in broad daylight, the facility was swarming with people, and they couldn’t move him without being seen. Certain criminal acts you could talk your way out of. Unloading a corpse wasn’t one of them.

Cory sat behind the wheel of the SUV. He’d placed a call to Billy and was waiting for a call back. Billy was the champ at fixing messes and would know how to dispose of Travis. Before coming to Vegas, Billy had worked for a gangster, and he knew all sorts of valuable stuff.

While he waited, Cory watched horse racing from Santa Anita on his cell phone using an app called BetAmerica. His account with BetAmerica also let him place wagers. He also had accounts with sites with catchy names like Twin Spires and Horse Races Now.

The horses exploded out of the gate and galloped around the track. A ringer named Sally Boy pulled ahead and never looked back. It won at odds of ten-to-one. Cory had bet $500 on Sally Boy, which put him ahead five grand. He’d also bet $500 on a nag, which finished dead last. The racing sites monitored their customers’ action and would become suspicious if a customer won too much, too often. By purposely betting on a losing nag in the same race as a ringer, he was avoiding any unnecessary scrutiny.

Morris climbed in and took the passenger seat. Morris hadn’t slept and looked like death warmed over. The shock of having shot Travis was slow to wear off.

“Any word from Billy?” Morris asked.

“Not yet.” They fell silent. The car’s interior was suffocating. Morris held his hands in his lap. His fingers were trembling as if he had palsy. Cory had read that when a cop was forced to shoot and kill a suspect, the cop was put on leave for several weeks. Cory had thought this was an administrative thing but now realized otherwise. The cop needed to heal.

“So where are we going to hide out?” Morris asked.

“Billy suggested we head down to Mexico.”

“Refresh my memory. What’s in Mexico?”

“Billy owns a beachfront condo in Cancun that he hustled off a rich sucker with the newspaper scam. We’ll hang there and drink piña coladas and look at pretty girls.”

“Sounds good. What’s the newspaper scam?”

“I never told you about this? It’s beautiful.”

“Lay it on me. I could use some cheering up.”

“It’s done at a hotel pool. The cheat and the sucker play high-stakes gin rummy. At the next table sits the cheat’s partner smoking a cigar and reading the newspaper with a slit in it. The partner peeks through the slit at the sucker’s cards and signals their value by coughing.”

“The sucker doesn’t notice?”

“Guys who smoke cigars cough a lot. It flies right by the sucker.”

“We should try it in Cancun. Who’s going to feed the fish while we’re gone?”

Cory started to say, “Travis,” but stopped the word from leaving his mouth.

“You think Gabe will do it?” Morris asked.

“The way Gabe feels about me these days, he’ll probably poison them.”

“You really in love with his daughter?”

“It’s starting to feel that way. I’ll find out when I’m in Cancun, see how long it lasts when we’re apart. Absence makes the heart grow fonder. Yeah, right.”