James Swain - Take Down

“What’s Doc’s specialty?”

“Depends who you’re asking.”

“Come again.”

“Doc’s a major-league bullshitter. He sits around all day practicing dealing off the bottom of the deck and hopping the cut, but he never uses that stuff in a game, too risky, even though he’ll tell you otherwise. His real specialty is ringing in a cooler.”

“A what?”

“Deck switching during a game.”

“How’s he pull that off?”

“He has a stacked deck sitting in his lap. The deck in play is shuffled and passed to Doc for the cut. Doc switches it in the act of doing the cut and passes the stacked deck to the sucker, who deals the hand. It’s a perfect illusion.”

“What happens to the switched deck?”

“During a break, Doc drops the switched deck into a garbage pail by the door and pours beer on it. If anyone sees the deck, they’ll think it was old and got thrown away.”

Rock was trying to read Billy’s face. From his pocket the drug dealer removed a stack of chips and toyed with them. “Doc’s done a stretch in the federal pen and has a file. Plenty of what you just told me’s in that file. Tell me something that isn’t, or I’ll take you out right now.”

Getting clubbed to death like a baby seal in an overpriced clothing store was not how Billy wanted to exit this life. Doc had visited Vegas a few years back, and a mutual friend had set up a meeting at the Ghostbar at the Palms. They’d traded stories until the sun peeked its head over the brown desert sand. Although they came from different worlds, they spoke the same language, and they’d parted knowing their paths would cross again.

“Doc’s superstitious,” Billy said, taking his last shot. “When he does his deck switch, he holds a fan of bills in his hand to cover the move. There’s always a two-dollar bill in the fan. There’s a reason for that.”

The chips made a loud clacking sound in Rock’s hand.

“I’m listening,” Rock said.

“Doc’s last name is Jefferson, and Thomas Jefferson’s face is printed on the two-dollar bill. Get Doc drunk enough, and he’ll tell you how his family tree starts with one of Jefferson’s slaves on a plantation in Virginia.”

A chip fell out of Rock’s hand to the floor. “Shit. You do know him.”

“I sure do. We’re pals.”

Rock removed his stick from Billy’s shoulder. “My gut tells me I shouldn’t trust you, but I’m going to let it pass. Take your pretty shirts and get the hell out of here.”

The errant chip lay at Billy’s feet. Bending down, he saw that it was a coveted gold chip, worth a hundred grand in Galaxy’s high-roller salon. Rising, he glanced at the stack resting in Rock’s palm. They were all gold. Rock was treating them as if they were pocket change, and a crazy thought went through Billy’s head. If Rock wasn’t listening to his gut, then he was vulnerable. Why not rip him off?

He decided to put his idea to the test. Placing the errant chip in Rock’s hand, he clicked it loudly against the other chips, then flipped his own hand over to expose a clean palm. Rock never saw the deception.

“Don’t want to lose that,” he said.

“Plenty more where it came from,” the drug dealer replied.

It wasn’t every day that Billy made a hundred large, and he walked out of the clothing store with a thin smile creasing his face.

Billy’s head was spinning. He’d just ripped off a drug dealer and lived to tell about it. Now he had to figure out how to cash in the gold chip resting in his sleeve and not get caught. It wasn’t the big score he’d dreamed about a few nights ago, but it was better than nothing.

Cashing the chip in wouldn’t be easy. Many Vegas casinos embedded their high-value chips with radio-frequency-identification microchips, and he assumed Galaxy did as well. The technology could be beaten; it just took time to figure out how.

He walked through the casino with the punishers. It was hopping, the tables filled with suckers drinking free booze while slot machines rang in the background, every note in the letter C because it made people piss away their money faster.

He thought better with a drink, and entered a cocktail lounge. A waitress took their drink order and gave them short pencils and keno tickets before departing. Keno was a game for chumps, but that didn’t stop millions of people from playing it.

He fished the gold chip out of his sleeve. The lounge was dimly lit, and he didn’t think anyone watching via a surveillance camera could make out the gold color. He deliberately placed the chip on the table in front of the punishers.

“Help me cash this in, and I’ll give you a cut,” he said.

“You got a lot of balls, ripping Rock off,” Ike said.

“Without risk, there is no reward.”

The punishers talked it over. “What’s our cut?” Ike asked.

“Ten percent.”

“Make it twenty, and you’ve got yourself a deal.”

“Twenty works for me.”

Ike picked up the chip. “Cool. I’ll get this taken care of.”

“Hold on. We need to figure out how to get around the RFID chip.”

“Galaxy’s chips don’t have those,” Ike said. “Doucette was against it. He was afraid certain customers wouldn’t appreciate them, if you know what I mean.”

He took the gold chip from Ike and peeled back the label. There was no microchip lurking beneath. He guessed the customers Ike was referring to were criminals who didn’t want to be electronically monitored during their stay.

“Better put that away. Here comes Rock,” Ike said.

He sent the chip back up his sleeve just as Rock and his posse passed the cocktail lounge. Rock had slapped on funky shades and a fedora and was lugging two black leather briefcases.

“Is that what I think it is,” Billy said under his breath.

“Yeah,” Ike said. “One of his lieutenants usually comes.”

“This is Rock’s first visit to Galaxy?”

“Uh-huh. He don’t leave LA much.”

Rock’s destination was the cage. The cage manager engaged Rock in conversation, then emerged through a side door and took possession of the briefcases. Back inside the cage, the cage manager removed stacks of money, which he placed in towering piles on the counter. Billy assumed the money had come from an army of drug pushers, the bills tainted by blood, coke, and serial numbers used by the DEA to trace them, which was why Rock had brought them to Galaxy to be laundered.

The cage manager counted the stacks. By law, casinos were required to manually count every dollar passed into the cage, the procedure filmed by the eye-in-the-sky so there was a record of the transaction. Only that wasn’t happening. Instead, the cage manager was counting the stacks and writing down the total on a pad. When the cage manager was done, Rock signed a chit, and the cage manager slid a tray of chips through the bars.

It had to be one of the slickest money-laundering scams Billy had ever seen. There was no way of knowing how much money Rock had given the casino, which was exactly the idea. If a gaming agent reviewed the tapes of the transaction, the discrepancy would pass muster, unless the agent had been tipped off what to look for.

Rock dumped the chips into his pockets. They were all gold and worth millions. Rock would spend a few days enjoying the casino’s lavish accommodations, then return to the cage when he was ready to leave, and exchange the chips for clean bills, with Galaxy having deducted their cut. Vegas had invented money laundering, and this was as good as it got.

Rock and his posse crossed the casino and entered the salon. Rock was a fool to be carrying around that much money, even if it was in chips. Billy had already scammed Rock once and gotten away with it. Why not again?