Loaded Dice

needs two people.”

It took a long moment before the words sunk in. Then Shelly erupted. With venom in his eye, he stared across the blackjack table at Sal. “You tricked us!”

Sal was a classy guy and held his ground. “Mister Newman told me I was to do whatever Mister Valentine wanted. Mister Valentine asked me to help him demonstrate the scam. So I helped him.”

“Sal didn’t shuffle the first one hundred and twenty cards,” Valentine explained. “He only pretended to, while I was distracting you. He shuffled the rest of the cards, which was what you saw, and remembered. When I cut the cards, I brought the unshuffled cards to the top.”

“That won’t work in a casino,” Shelly said.

“Of course it will,” Valentine replied.

“Now this I’ve got to see,” Rags Richardson said.

“It’s called putting the eye to sleep,” Valentine explained. “The average surveillance technician in a casino watches forty different video monitors. He tends to focus on things that attract his eye. Like a guy betting heavy. Or a pretty woman. Things that most casinos are filled with. Especially at night.

“The cheater knows this. So he plays like a dummy for a few hours, splashes money around. He’s not seen as a threat, so the technician stops watching him. That’s when the scam happens.”

“What if the tapes were watched later on?” Shelly said, still not believing him. “Wouldn’t they see that the cards weren’t shuffled?”

Valentine looked at Sal. “Sal, would you please demonstrate the zero shuffle?”

Sal slid a deck across the felt, broke it in two, and prepared to shuffle the cards together. Only he didn’t interweave the cards. He simply ran his thumbs up the sides of the decks, while leaving one half atop the other. Then he squared them.

“Looks stupid, doesn’t it?” Valentine said. “The only eye it will fool is the one in the ceiling. To the camera, this shuffle looks legitimate.”

Shelly climbed up on a stool and had Sal do the shuffle again. Chance and Rags got on their stools as well.

“That does look good,” Rags admitted.

“Radical,” Chance added.

Valentine had Sal do the zero shuffle again. From above, it looked perfect, and that was all that mattered.

“Jesus!” Chance exclaimed.

“Impressive, huh?” Valentine said.

“I’m not talking about that,” Chance said, pointing at the picture window on the other side of the penthouse. “Looks like we’ve got a jumper.”

The three men turned and stared. Next door was a dump called the Acropolis. On its top floor, an attractive woman stood on a balcony on the wrong side of the guardrail. They hurried across the room just as she started to cross herself.

Valentine put his face to the glass. Then he swallowed the lump rising in his throat. The woman looked like his late wife, right down to the short dark hair and the way her dress clung to her slender frame as the wind whipped it around her body. His wife, whom he missed more than anyone in the world.

“Call the police,” he said.

Then he ran out of the penthouse as fast as his pants would let him.

3

Reaching Sin’s lobby, he flagged down a security guard on a bicycle. One of the annoying things about Las Vegas was that nothing was close. The city’s architects had somehow forgotten how difficult it was to get around in the desert, and had spaced the casinos far apart from each other.

“There’s a jumper next door,” he told the guard. “I need your bike.”

The guard was a red-haired guy with a face that looked like a swarm of bees. “You a cop?” he asked.

Valentine had been a cop so long that being retired was something of a joke. “Yeah,” he said.

The guard relinquished his bike. Valentine hopped on and sped through the casino’s front doors. As he pedaled furiously down the front entrance, he looked straight up, and saw the woman that resembled Lois standing on the edge of the balcony, getting ready to take a swan dive into the great beyond.

He rounded the corner and rode up the Acropolis’s entrance, still staring at the sky. The woman saw him, and he waved to her, hoping to get her attention. That was key: Get her thinking about something besides dying. He’d dealt with jumpers in Atlantic City several times. A couple he’d saved, a few he hadn’t. There was no magic to it.

He passed the Acropolis’s famous fountains and got sprayed with water. Nick Nicocropolis, the hardheaded little jerk who owned the place, had erected toga-clad statues of his voluptuous ex-wives—a stripper, two showgirls, two beauty queens, and a retired hooker who’d run for mayor and gotten six votes—and bathed them in orgasmic bursts of water. A seventh statue had been added, the beautiful Nola Briggs. Nola was a blackjack dealer who’d stolen Nick’s heart, while her boyfriend, a cheater named Frank Fontaine, had nearly stolen Nick’s casino.

He parked at the valet stand and ran inside. The lobby was jammed, and his eyes scanned the crowd’s faces. He worked for Nick often and knew most of his security people by first name. He didn’t see anyone he knew.

An elevator reached the lobby and opened its doors. He jumped in and held out his palm as others tried to board. “Police. This is an emergency.”

No one argued with him. The doors shut, and he hit the button marked PH. The Acropolis wasn’t one of those fancy joints where a special key was needed to reach the top floor. Rich and poor rode together here.

At the penthouse floor he got out. He knew which suite the jumper was staying in: It was the same suite Nick had put him in two years ago.

The door was locked. He raised his right leg, put all his weight and momentum into his heel, and kicked it above the knob. Thirty years ago, he could take a door down with one good kick. Now it took several. He went in.

“Don’t come in here,” a woman wailed from the balcony.

He looked around the suite and tried to imagine where she was. He decided she was right behind the wall he was staring at.

“I’m not the police,” he called out.

“I don’t care,” she shrieked.

He searched the living room for something with her name on it. The room was still furnished in loud LeRoy Neiman paintings and chrome furniture, the color scheme painful to the eye. On the coffee table he spied a suicide note, her name at the bottom of the page. Lucy Price.

He stepped into the dining room, and through the slider saw her sitting on the balcony railing. She’d closed the slider behind her when she’d gone out, another bad sign.

“Lucy Price,” he said.

She swung her head around. Early fifties, Italian, with a slender nose, high cheekbones, and dark, penetrating eyes. Not his wife, but from the same tree.

“Stay away from me!” she shouted.

He crossed the room and opened the slider. Sticking his head out, he said, “I need to talk to you.”

“Didn’t you hear what I just said?”

She was glued to the railing, the wind whipping her skirt up into her face. Embarrassed, she tried to flatten her skirt out, lost her balance, and started to scream.

He stepped onto the balcony and stuck his hand out. He’d known a cop in Atlantic City who’d grabbed a jumper, and they’d both ended up falling to their deaths. He braced himself. “Take my hand,” he said.

She regained her balance and glared at him. “They stole my money! I finally got my life sorted out, and they stole my money.”

“Who?”