Loaded Dice

the bank accounts of well-known wise guys. The wise guys weren’t shouting about it, knowing a bribe when they saw one.

He couldn’t do that. That would be suicide.

He would lie about the money.

“Jesus Christ,” he said aloud.

He’d get thrown off the force, and Cindi would surely leave him. His teenage daughters would shun him, and his parents wouldn’t be too thrilled, either. His life was about to be ruined. And all because he’d gone and fallen in love.

Standing, he slid the chair beneath the table. The leg hit something soft, and he looked beneath the table and saw a black gym bag. The bag was open and stuffed with casino chips from several different casinos. He pulled it out and let his fingers run through the chips. Reds, greens, purples, and yellows. There was even a brown chip. You didn’t see those very often.

He blew his cheeks out. There was twenty grand here, easy. This was worse than bad. He couldn’t explain this. And if there was any part of the story the investigators would want explained, it was why twenty grand in casino chips was in Kris’s townhouse.

Zipping the bag closed, he saw a sliver of paper tucked in a side pocket. He pulled it free. It was an embossed business card, and he stared at the raised lettering.

Grift Sense

International Gaming Consultant

Tony Valentine, President

727/591-5115

It was a small world. He knew Valentine. A retired Atlantic City detective who helped casinos catch cheaters. Had he blown into town, met Kris, and made her an offer she couldn’t refuse?

Sticking the card into the bag, Longo searched the bag’s other pockets and found a pack of Marlboros. He went into the living room and stared at the filter of the cigarette lying in the ashtray. It was a match.

Back in the kitchen, he grabbed the gym bag off the floor and exited through the back door. He went straight to the community trash area and buried the bag beneath a ton of garbage.

Coming back inside, he dialed the police station on the kitchen phone. An automated message greeted him. While he waited for an operator, he wondered how hard it would be to track Valentine down. Valentine was probably in town on a consulting job, staying at one of the nice joints on the Strip. A few phone calls at most, he decided.

His thoughts shifted to his dead girlfriend. Her memory was going to stay with him for the rest of his life. He was going to make Valentine pay for this, only he wouldn’t be as kind as Valentine had been to her. There was no reason why he should be.

2

Tony Valentine watched a police cruiser race down Maryland Parkway, the morning sunlight beating brightly off its roof. Distances were hard to determine in the desert, and he guessed the cruiser was five miles away. Back home in Florida, the landscape didn’t play tricks with you like it did out here. But that was the appeal of Las Vegas: You didn’t know what was real and what was an illusion.

He turned from the window. He was standing in a penthouse office of Sin, Las Vegas’s newest casino. Three thousand guest rooms and a gaming area as big as an airport terminal. It was Vegas’s second new casino this year, the public’s appetite for throwing away their money knowing no bounds.

Three of the most powerful men in Nevada stood on the other side of the room: Shelly Michael, CEO of Michael Gaming, the country’s largest casino chain, the man the Wall Street Journal called “a barracuda in pinstripes”; Rags Richardson, the African American owner of three Strip casinos and founder of BE BOP SHABAM Records; and California beach boy Chance Newman, owner of Sin, who’d made his fortune in Silicon Valley before the tech bubble burst.

Crossing the room, he stuck out his hand. “Tony Valentine. Nice to meet you.”

They all shook hands. Normally, Valentine didn’t kowtow to anyone. Only these guys had made his day. They’d called yesterday and offered him twenty-five thousand dollars for a private demonstration. Even if he hadn’t already been en route to Las Vegas to check up on his son Gerry, he still would have accepted the job.

Twenty-five grand was a lot of dough. More than he’d made his first years as a cop in Atlantic City. When he and his wife retired to Florida, he’d figured his earning years were over. Then Lois had died, and he’d opened a consulting business to help casinos catch cheats. It kept his mind off the past. And the pay was good.

He caught the three men smirking and guessed it was his clothes. The airline had lost his luggage, and he’d bought pants and a shirt in Sin’s haberdashery for the meeting. The pants had set him back three hundred bucks and didn’t fit worth a damn.

A blackjack table sat in the center of the room, along with four stools and a dealer from the casino. Hitching up his trousers, he crossed the room and pulled a stool out from the table. “Care to join me?” he asked.

The three men elbowed up to the table. Shelly Michael had an annoying habit of continually looking at his watch. Valentine saw him do it again.

“Got a train to catch?”

Shelly glared at him. He wore an exquisite silk suit that was offset by a toupee too flat for his head. He also wore a wedding ring, and Valentine wondered why his wife hadn’t bothered to tell him how ridiculous he looked.

“You may begin,” Shelly said.

Valentine had a feeling that he wouldn’t be getting any jobs from Michael Gaming after today. That was okay. He had to draw the line in the sand somewhere.

“As you know, blackjack is the favorite table game of every casino in the world,” he began. “It is also, unfortunately, the game that’s most susceptible to cheating. I personally know of a hundred ways to cheat at blackjack, and that doesn’t include card-counting. That’s why casinos monitor their blackjack tables so zealously.”

He shifted his attention to the dealer behind the table, a good-looking Italian kid named Sal Dickinson. They’d talked briefly in the elevator. Sal was an A dealer, which meant he got to work the high-roller salon and made good tips.

“Sal,” Valentine said, “please shuffle up.”

Sal removed six decks of playing cards from a plastic shoe on the table and began to shuffle. Valentine turned his attention to the three casino executives.

“For every method of cheating at blackjack, casinos have devised a way to beat it. Computers, cameras, mirrors, daub, you name it, and the casinos have figured out how to stop it. Then something called Deadlock appeared on the scene.”

“So it does exist,” Shelly said.

“That’s right.”

“You’ve seen it, or just heard about it?” Shelly asked.

The challenge in his voice was unmistakable. Valentine could hear the soft purr of the cards being shuffled behind his back. “I own one,” he replied.

Chance Newman acted surprised. He wore hip designer threads and moved like he’d spent his life on a dance floor. “I thought they were impossible to get,” he said.

“They are,” Valentine replied.

“Then how did you get one?” Shelly demanded.

Valentine’s face burned. Shelly’s mother had obviously left him in diapers for too long. Taking out a pack of Marlboros, he banged one out and stuck it between his lips. Leaving it unlit, he said, “A casino in the Philippines I