Lee Child - Bad Luck and Trouble

The others had.

How?

Why?

Neagley handed out the key cards and they arranged to freshen up and meet again in ten minutes to start work. It was after midnight, but Vegas was a true twenty-four-hour town. Time had no relevance. There were famous clichés about the lack of windows and clocks in the casinos, and they were all true, as far as Reacher knew. Nothing was allowed to slow down the cash flow. Certainly nothing as mundane as a player’s bedtime. There was nothing better than a tired guy who kept on losing all night long.

Reacher’s room was on the seventeenth floor. It was a dark concrete cube tricked out to look like a centuries-old salon in Venice. Altogether it was fairly unconvincing. Reacher had been to Venice, too. He opened his folding toothbrush and stood it upright in a glass in the bathroom. That was the sum total of his unpacking. He splashed water on his face and ran a palm across his bristly head and went back downstairs to take a preliminary look around.

Even in such an upmarket joint, most of the first-floor real estate was devoted to slot machines. Patient, tireless, microprocessor-controlled, they skimmed a small but relentless percentage off the torrent of cash fed into them, twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. Bells were ringing and beepers were sounding. Plenty of people were winning, but slightly more were losing. There was very light security in the room. No real opportunity to steal or cheat either way around, given a slot’s mechanistic nature and the Nevada Gaming Board’s close scrutiny. Reacher made only two people as staff out of hundreds in the room. A man and a woman, dressed like everyone else, as bored as everyone else, but without the manic gleam of hope in their eyes.

He figured Sanchez and Orozco hadn’t spent much energy on slots.

He moved onward, to huge rooms in back where roulette and poker and blackjack were being played. He looked up, and saw cameras. Looked left and right and ahead, and saw high rollers and security guards and hookers in increasing concentrations.

He stopped at a roulette table. The way he understood it, roulette was really no different than a slot. Assuming the wheel was honest. Customers supplied money, the wheel distributed it straight back to other customers, except for an in-built house percentage as relentless and reliable as a slot machine’s microprocessor.

He figured Sanchez and Orozco hadn’t spent much energy on roulette.

He moved on to the card tables, which was where he figured the real action was. Card games were the only casino components where human intelligence could be truly engaged. And where human intelligence was engaged, crime came soon after. But major crime would need more than a player’s input. A player with self-discipline and a great memory and a rudimentary grasp of statistics could beat the odds. But beating the odds wasn’t a crime. And beating the odds didn’t earn a guy sixty-five million dollars in four months. The margin just wasn’t there. Not unless the original stake was the size of a small country’s GDP. Sixty-five million dollars over four months would need a dealer’s involvement. But a dealer who lost so heavily would be fired within a week. Within a day or an hour, maybe. So a four-month winning streak would need some kind of a huge scam. Collusion. Conspiracy. Dozens of dealers, dozens of players. Maybe hundreds of each.

Maybe the whole house was playing against its investors.

Maybe the whole town was.

That would be a big enough deal for people to get killed over.

There was plenty of security in the room. There were cameras aimed at the players and the dealers. Some of the cameras were big and obvious, some were small and discreet. Probably there were others that were invisible. There were men and women patrolling in evening wear, with earpieces and wrist microphones, like Secret Service agents. There were others, undercover, in plain clothes. Reacher made five of them within a minute, and assumed there were many more that he was missing.

He threaded his way back to the lobby. Found Karla Dixon waiting by the fountains. She had showered and changed out of her jeans and leather jacket into a black pant suit. Her hair was wet and slicked back. Her suit coat was buttoned and she had no blouse under it. She looked pretty good.

“Vegas was settled by the Mormons,” she said. “Did you know that?”

“No,” Reacher said.

“Now it’s growing so fast they print the phone book twice a year.”

“I didn’t know that, either.”

“Seven hundred new houses a month.”

“They’re going to run out of water.”

“No question about that. But they’ll make hay until they do. Gambling revenues alone are close to seven billion dollars a year.”

“Sounds like you’ve been reading a guide book.”

Dixon nodded. “There was one in my room. They get thirty million visitors a year. That means each one of them is losing an average of more than two hundred bucks per visit.”

“Two hundred thirty-three dollars and thirty-three cents,” Reacher said, automatically. “The definition of irrational behavior.”

“The definition of being human,” Dixon said. “Everybody thinks they’re going to be the one.”

Then O’Donnell showed up. Same suit, different tie, maybe a fresh shirt. His shoes shone in the lights. Maybe he had found a polishing cloth in his bathroom.

“Thirty million visitors a year,” he said.

Reacher said, “ Dixon already told me. She read the same book.”

“That’s ten percent of the whole population. And look at this place.”

“You like it?”

“It’s making me see Sanchez and Orozco in a whole new light.”

Reacher nodded. “Like I said before. You all moved onward and upward.”

Then Neagley stepped out of the elevator. She was dressed the same as Dixon, in a severe black suit. Her hair was wet and combed.

“We’re swapping guide book facts,” Reacher said.

“I didn’t read mine,” Neagley said. “I called Diana Bond instead. She got there and waited an hour and went back again.”

“Was she pissed at us?”

“She’s worried. She doesn’t like Little Wing’s name out there. I said I’d get back to her.”

“Why?”

“She’s making me curious. I like to know things.”

“Me too,” Reacher said. “Right now I’d like to know if someone scammed sixty-five million bucks in this town. And how.”

“It would be a big scam,” Dixon said. “Prorated across a whole year, it would be close to three percent of the total revenue stream.”

“Two point seven eight,” Reacher said, automatically.

“Let’s make a start,” O’Donnell said.

They started at the concierge desk, where they asked to see the duty security manager. The concierge asked if there was a problem, and Reacher said, “We think we have mutual friends.”

There was a long wait before the duty security manager showed up. Clearly social visits were low on his agenda. Eventually a medium-sized man in Italian shoes and a thousand-dollar suit walked over. He was about fifty years old, still trim and fit, in command, relaxed, but the lines around his eyes showed he must have done at least twenty years in a previous career. A harder career. He disguised his impatience well and introduced himself and shook hands all around. He said his name was Wright and suggested they talk in a quiet corner. Pure reflex, Reacher thought. His instincts and his training told him to move potential trouble well out of the way. Nothing could be allowed to slow down the cash flow.

They found a quiet corner. No chairs, of course. No Vegas casino would give guests a comfortable place to sit away from the action. For the same reason, the lights in the bedrooms had been dim. A guest upstairs reading was no use to anyone. They stood in a neat circle and O’Donnell showed his D.C. PI license and some kind of an accreditation note from the Metro PD. Dixon matched it with her license and a card from the NYPD. Neagley had a card from the FBI. Reacher produced nothing. Just tugged his shirts down over the shape of the gun in his pocket.