F. Wilson - The Select

No foreign entanglements.

But snuggling close to him tonight, his arms around her...a nice thought, a warm thought. But it would remain just that: a thought.

*

"You're sure you saw it?" Verran said.

He was standing with Elliot and Kurt on the rise overlooking the student parking lot.

Kurt nodded. "It was there, right where Elliot said it was—same coat, same place. I could've reached out and grabbed it."

"That you'll do later on. In AC. Follow them there. Watch them. Stay out of sight. Be patient. Wait for your chance and make it a good one. You got what you need?"

Kurt nodded. "Reversible jackets, gloves, ski masks, the works."

"Isn't there another way we can do this?" Elliot said.

He'd been quiet and edgy all day. Verran knew Elliot was picturing himself in a jail cell, but he didn't want to pussy out so he was hanging in there with Kurt.

"This is no big deal, Elliot. And it's perfect if it happens up in Jersey. That way The Ingraham isn't involved in any way. And should there be any question, you were both here with me all night. Now get going. You don't want to lose them."

Verran watched them get into their separate cars and roar off. By tomorrow morning he'd have the missing bug back and he could rest easy again.

*

"Mmmmmm," Tim said as they came off the Delaware Memorial Bridge and turned onto New Jersey Route 40. "The road to Atlantic City. I can smell the money already."

Quinn looked around at the surrounding darkness as the four-lane blacktop quickly narrowed to two.

"Pretty desolate."

"This is mostly farmland. If you think it's dark here, my dear, wait till we get into the Jersey Pine Barrens. A million acres of nothing. Then you'll see dark. AC is still almost sixty miles off, so now's as good a time as any to plan our strategy."

"Strategy?"

"Sure. We're both going to play."

"Oh, no. I don't know the first thing about gambling. And I can't afford—"

"You'll be playing with my money. Here's how it works. In the casinos, blackjack is dealt—"

"Blackjack? I've never played blackjack."

"Sure you have. It's twenty-one. The guy who gets closest to a twenty-one value in the cards he's dealt, without going over, wins. Number cards are face value, picture cards are worth ten, and the ace can be worth one or eleven—your choice. You get dealt an ace and a picture card—say a queen—that's twenty-one. That's blackjack, and you win automatically."

"Win what?"

"Money. If you just plain beat the dealer, you double your money. So if you bet ten bucks, you get your ten back, plus another ten. A blackjack pays even more."

"Who pays you?"

"The house."

"Whose house?"

"The casino! Quinn, where've you been for the past 22 years?"

"I've been lots of places." Why was Tim getting so worked up? "I just haven't been in casinos."

"That's obvious. And that's probably a good thing. But..." He wrinkled his nose as a pungent odor seeped into the car. "Whew! What's that?"

Quinn recognized it immediately. "Cows," she said. "Somebody's got a herd along here. You don't grow up on a farm without knowing that smell."

"Yeah? Well, they do call this the Garden State. But let me lay the situation out for you. We're going to be customers of the casino, and since the casino's business is gambling, we're going to be called gamblers."

"I'd rather be a customer."

"Bear with me, Quinn. We're going to go into the casino and sit at the table with other gamblers. But we're not going to play each other. We're going to play the casino—the house. The house will be represented by the dealer. The dealer is nothing more than a guy—or lots of times a woman—who is paid to be a machine."

"I don't get it."

"Dealers have no decision-making powers. If the cards they've dealt themselves total sixteen or less, they deal themselves another card. When the cards total more than sixteen, they take no more. The casinos have calculated that this strategy gives them the best odds of staying ahead of their customers. And they're right."

The whole concept baffled Quinn. "Well, if you know the casino—excuse me, the house—is going to win, why bother gambling at all?"

"An excellent question, Quinn. A question many gamblers have asked themselves countless times."

"It sounds to me like you should simply walk into the casino, hand your money to the dealer, and walk out again. You'd save yourself all the sweat and apprehension and maybe you could do something useful with the extra time you had."

Tim stared at her, awe in his voice and a look of utter amazement on his face.

"You're not kidding, are you? You're really for real, aren't you?"

"The road, Tim," Quinn said, pointing through the windshield. "Please watch the road."

He faced front again. "How about excitement, Quinn?"

"What's exciting about losing money?"

"But that's just it. You don't always lose. Sometimes you win. And it's not so much the winning or losing but the process itself that matters. It's a chance to beat the system—or at least a system. And everybody likes to beat the system. Especially me."

"I think we've had this conversation before."

"Right. While we were waiting to hear if The Ingraham was going to accept you. That was when I told you that I can beat the casinos' system."

"Isn't it an old joke that if someone comes up with what he knows is a sure-fire, fool-proof, can't-lose gambling system, the casinos will have a car waiting for him at the airport to take him directly to their tables?"

"Right. Because the casinos have got their own system: the structure of the pay outs, the ceilings on the bets, the simple mathematics of the law of averages—everything is geared toward guaranteeing them the lion's share of the action that crosses their tables. But no casino's system is set up to handle a wild card like me."

Dustin Hoffman's face suddenly flashed before Quinn's eyes and she laughed. "You think you're Rain Man, don't you."

"I beg your pardon, Miss Cleary. I may be an idiot, but I am not an idiot savant. Rain Man and I work differently. His brain was number oriented, mine is picture oriented. But the end result is the same: after a few decks have been played, we both have a pretty good idea what's left in the shoe."

"Now I'm completely lost."

Tim sighed patiently. "Okay. Casinos don't deal Blackjack from a single deck anymore since a bunch of people worked out a counting system that gave them a decent edge over the house."

"But—?"

He held up a hand. "Let me finish. So the casinos started shuffling up to eight decks at a time and loading them all into this hopper called a shoe and dealing from that. Most folks can learn to keep track of a fifty- or hundred-card deck, but not four hundred cards. But I can."

"Your photographic memory," Quinn said.

"Yep. I remember every card that's been played."

"But what good is that?"

"Not much until you get down to the end of the shoe. But when we do get down to the last hundred cards or so, I usually know exactly what's left in the shoe."

"But if you don't know the order they're in, what good is it?"

"I don't need to know the order. All I need to know is if there's a predominance of high cards or low cards. If those last hundred or so cards are tilted heavily in either direction, that's when I make my move. That's when I make my killing and beat their system. And you're going to help."

"What do you mean?"

"Know what this is?" He held up his right hand; his thumb and forefinger were extended, the three middle fingers folded down. He wiggled it back and forth. "It's the Hawaiian hang-loose sign." He wiggled his hand again. " In hoc signo vinces ."

She knew the translation, but..."I still don't get it."