Дэвид Балдаччи - The Collectors

He munched on some pecans and sipped his Jack and Coke. “Blackjack table number five. Looks like we got a little monkey business coming out of the shoe,” he said, referring to the device that held the packs of cards.

“Dealer in on it?”

“Oh, yeah. How about you?”

Annabelle took a swallow of her wine before answering. “Roulette table next to the spinning car, we got a four-person past-posting team dragging and doing an okay job of it.”

“I thought they taught the dealers to really case their bets now. And how about all the sophisticated eyes-in-the-sky and microcameras they got these days?”

“You know how crazy the roulette table is, that’s why it’s past-posting Mecca. And if you’re good, anything’s possible despite all the high-tech stuff.”

He touched his drink against hers. “Don’t we know that?”

“How’s security look?”

“Nothing out of the ordinary. I’m assuming the vault’s under a thousand tons of concrete surrounded by a million guys armed with machine guns.”

“Good thing we’re not going that route,” she replied dryly.

“Yeah, you don’t want to mess up your manicure.” He put his drink down. “How old would Jerry be now?”

“Sixty-six,” she answered promptly.

“I bet he hasn’t mellowed with age,” Leo said grumpily.

“He hasn’t.”

She sounded so sure, he looked at her suspiciously.

“You check out the mark, Leo, remember? Con Man 101.”

“Damn, there’s the asshole himself,” Leo hissed, and immediately turned away.

As Annabelle watched, six men, all of them young, big and burly, walked by. They were surrounding another man, shorter but very fit, with broad shoulders and thick white hair. He was dressed in an expensive blue suit with a yellow tie. Jerry Bagger’s face was heavily tanned. Down one cheek ran a scar, and it looked like the man’s nose had been broken at least a couple times. Underneath his thick white eyebrows was a pair of canny eyes. His gaze darted across his casino, seemingly absorbing all sorts of interesting data from his empire of slots, cards and crushed hopes.

As soon as they passed by, Leo turned back around and struggled to regain his breath. A ticked-off Annabelle said, “Your hyperventilating when the guy is all the way across the casino didn’t really figure into my plan, Leo.”

He held up a hand. “Not to worry, I’m over it.” He drew one last deep breath.

“We’ve never even met the guy face-to-face. It was his goons who tried to kill us back then. It’s not like he’s going to recognize you.”

“I know, I know.” He finished his drink. “What now?”

“When it’s time to go, we go. Until then, we work our script and practice our cues and look for any edge we can get, because Jerry’s so damn unpredictable that even if we’re perfect, it may not be enough.”

“You know, I forgot what a cheerleader you are.”

“Nothing wrong with stating the obvious. If he throws us a curve, we have to be ready to hit it out, or else.”

“Yeah, we know all about or else, don’t we?”

He and Annabelle both stared silently across the casino at Jerry Bagger and his army as they exited the casino, climbed into a mini-motorcade and headed off, perhaps to break somebody’s kneecaps for cheating the casino king out of thirty bucks, much less 30 million.

At the end of a week they were ready. Annabelle was dressed in a dark black skirt and high heels, and she wore minimal jewelry. Her hair was now blond and spiky. She looked nothing like her enhanced casino photo. Leo’s appearance had been altered even more radically. His toupee was gray and thin, with a hard widow’s peak. He sported a small goatee, slender glasses and a three-piece suit.

He said, “You know the only thing that bugs me about this is ratting out other cons.”

“Like they wouldn’t do it to us if they had the chance to walk away with millions? Besides, the ones we pegged aren’t all that good. Sooner or later they’ll get caught anyway. And it’s not like the old days. No more bodies buried in the desert or chucked into the Atlantic. Past-posting’s a conspiracy to commit theft by deception crime, something like a third-degree misdemeanor. They’ll pay their fine or do their bit of time and go hit the casino boats in the Midwest or pester the Indians in New England until enough time passes and then they change their appearance, come back here to start all over again.”

“Yeah, but it’s still a raw deal.”

She shrugged. “If it’ll make you feel better, I’ll get their names and send them twenty grand each for their troubles.”

Leo brightened but then said, “Okay, just don’t take it out of my share.”

They had left Freddy and Tony and checked into one of the best hotels on the Boardwalk. They would have no further direct contact with either of the men from now on. Before leaving them she had admonished both, particularly Tony, to keep in mind that spies were everywhere in this town. “You don’t flash cash, you don’t joke, you don’t say anything that might tip someone that a con is going down, because they’ll go running to somebody to tell and collect some scratch. One slip and it could be over, for all of us.”

She had looked directly at Tony when she added, “This is the real deal, Tony. No screwups.”

“I’m covered. I swear,” he’d declared.

Leo and Annabelle rode in a cab to the Pompeii and immediately took up their vigils. Annabelle watched a crew that she’d been observing running a past-posting scam at the roulette tables in casinos up and down the Boardwalk. There were various incarnations of past-posting, which had taken its name from a horse-racing scam where bets were laid down after the results of the race were known by the bettor. With roulette it involved surreptitiously sliding big dollar chips on winning numbers after the ball had dropped and then collecting. Some teams used a different technique. The bettor would hide the big chips under the cheaper ones before the ball dropped. Then the bettor would either “drag” or pull the big chips off the table if the number lost or do nothing except scream for joy if the number won, all right under the dealer’s nose. The latter technique had the distinct advantage of taking the powerful eye-in-the-sky out of the equation because it would only be called into play if the bet won. Then the tape would show that the bettor had done nothing with the chips, since he would only pull the chip if the bet lost. Past-posting at the roulette table involved enormous amounts of practice, timing, teamwork, patience, natural skill and, most of all, nerve.

Annabelle and Leo had once been masters at this game. However, the surveillance technology in use today by the casinos drastically reduced the chances of anyone except the very best cheats being able to conduct the scam successfully over time. And the nature of the con meant that you could only work it a limited number of times at a casino before you were taken down, so the bet and the odds had better be large enough to justify the risk.

Leo kept his eye on a blackjack table and a gent who’d been playing and winning for a nice stretch. Not big enough to arouse suspicion, but cumulatively Leo figured the guy was making a lot more than the minimum wage for sitting on his butt and sipping free drinks. He used his cell phone to call Annabelle.

“You ready to do this?” he asked.

“Looks like my past-posters are just about ready to hit it, so let’s go.”

Annabelle walked over to a thickset man she’d easily sized up as a pit boss and whispered into his ear, inclining her head toward the roulette table where the scam was happening.