But the people manning the eye in the sky can’t hear him because there isn’t any audio on their tapes. The croupier is giving his partners a chance to see where the ball is going to fall, and place a late bet.”
Kent and Boomer stared at the monitors. After a minute Kent spotted the past-poster. It was a man sitting in a wheelchair at the table’s end. He was hugging the table and slipping late bets onto the layout.
“Right in front of our noses,” Kent said.
“How’s the craps scam working?” Lamar asked.
Gerry glanced at him. “Let me guess. You’ve got a bet with Kent and Boomer that I won’t figure them all out.”
Lamar bit his lip and didn’t reply. Kent and Boomer burst out laughing.
“How much?” Gerry said.
“Twenty bucks,” Kent said.
Gerry looked at him. “Twenty between the two of you, or twenty each?”
“Twenty each,” Boomer said. “Lamar is a gambling man.”
“What’s my cut?” Gerry said.
The two ex-football players stopped laughing.
“What do you mean, your cut?” Kent said.
“If I win, you win.
Kent shrugged. “How about ten bucks?”
“Each?”
Now it was Lamar’s turn to laugh. “Man strikes a hard bargain.”
Kent and Boomer looked at each other. “Okay,” Kent said.
Gerry turned back to the monitors. Kent typed in a command, and the screens showed the craps table where the stealing was taking place.
“The craps scam is similar to the roulette scam, in that it exploits the fact that there’s no audio being captured on the casino floor. The craps dealer and a partner are pulling off verbal scams. They’re pretty basic, but very effective.
“The craps table is crowded with players, and they’re making lots of noise. The partner comes over to the table and throws his money down. He tells the craps dealer what his bet is. Only, no one at the table hears him. There’s so much noise, no one can. The craps dealer says, ‘Money plays,’ indicating the bet has been accepted. The dice are thrown. Whatever the outcome is, the craps dealer pays the player off as if that was his bet.”
Gerry pointed at the craps dealer on the video monitor. They watched in silence as he paid a player off for a bet that was never made. The payoff was several thousand dollars, and Lamar let out a groan.
“You owe us twenty bucks, each,” Boomer told him.
“He still hasn’t explained the blackjack scam,” Lamar reminded him.
The blackjack scam was Gerry’s favorite of the bunch. It employed an ordinary box of Kleenex and a dealer with a head cold. His father had called it the Runny Nose Scam. He glanced over his shoulder at Lamar. “Want to make another bet?”
“No thanks,” Lamar said.
Above the door was a monitor that showed the outside of the trailer. Standing outside was a fat guy in bib overalls, holding an automatic rifle. The fat guy raised the rifle to his shoulder and took dead aim at the trailer.
“Duck!”
A fusillade of bullets ripped through the aluminum walls. It happened so fast that no one moved. Lamar, Kent, and Boomer let out moans and fell to the floor. Gerry touched himself. He had an angel sitting on his shoulder and was unhurt.
In the monitor he saw the fat guy reloading. Lamar saw it, too. He was lying on the floor, holding his bleeding arm. He drew the gun from behind his belt buckle, then offered it to Gerry.
“You’ve got to stop him,” Lamar said.
31
Someone had once told Mabel that the month of May was beautiful wherever you went. Not just in the United States, but all over the world.
It was certainly true in Florida. The air was warm but not too humid, the grass and vegetation blooming everywhere you looked, the days longer and more fulfilling. She sat on a rocker on her front porch, taking it all in. The trip to Gibsonton had been fun, but now she was exhausted. She put in long hours working for Tony. Usually she enjoyed it, but sometimes it also wore her out.
A FedEx truck came down the street and stopped in front of Tony’s house. FedEx delivered on Sundays, but you had to pay them through the nose. It was probably a videotape from a casino that had lost a bundle of cash. It seemed to be happening more and more, despite the breakthroughs in technology that were available, like facial- recognition databases and digital cameras that could photograph a pimple on an elephant’s behind. Because casinos generated so much cash, they attracted the worst that society had to offer. Like Tony was fond of saying, it wasn’t a matter of
She signed for the package, then watched the truck pull away from the curb. Moments later, she saw Yolanda come out of her house with the baby in her arms. Yolanda looked harried, and Mabel saw that she had on mismatched slippers. Mabel pushed herself out of her rocker and walked down the path to the sidewalk in front of her house.
“Is everything all right?” she called across the street.
Yolanda shook her head. “No.”
“Is this about Gerry?”
“Yes.”
“Give me a minute.”
Mabel went inside, made sure the teakettle wasn’t boiling on the stove, then grabbed her keys and hurried out the door. It had bothered her that Gerry hadn’t come home right away from his trip to Gulfport. Something about his reason for staying had sounded fabricated. Reaching Yolanda’s house, she let herself in.
She heard Yolanda in the kitchen, talking in Spanish on the phone. As she walked down the hallway, Mabel glanced into the different rooms. Each was spotless, with not a single child’s toy or piece of child’s clothing lying on the floor. Mabel was convinced that Yolanda would one day surrender to motherhood, but so far it hadn’t happened.
In the kitchen she found Yolanda sitting at the table, the baby struggling in her lap. Mabel took the baby from her and felt its heavy diaper. She went into the master bedroom and changed her.
“It’s my mother in San Juan,” Yolanda called out. “She’s had a premonition about Gerry.”
“Is he in trouble?”
“Yes.”
Yolanda’s mother had this uncanny ability to see into the future and predict when bad things were about to happen. By having a son-in-law like Gerry, she was going to be busy for a long time. Mabel finished changing Lois’s diaper and returned to the kitchen. “What did he do?” she asked.
Yolanda was saying good-bye to her mother, which could take anywhere from ten seconds to a full minute. Finally she hung up. “My mother had a dream while she was taking a siesta this afternoon,” Yolanda said, taking the baby from her. “In it, she saw Gerry being pursued by a man who looked like a bear. My mother said Gerry took something from him.”
Yolanda’s lips were trembling. Mabel didn’t believe in psychics, or the frauds on TV who claimed to communicate with the dead; only, Yolanda’s mother’s premonitions somehow always came true.
“This isn’t good,” Mabel said. “Have you called Gerry and asked him to come clean?”
“No,” Yolanda said.
Mabel glanced at the cell phone sitting on the table. So did Yolanda. Her mother had spooked her, and Mabel watched her bring the baby to her chest and rock her.
“Would you like me to call him?” Mabel asked.
Yolanda kissed the top of Lois’s head with her eyes closed.
