“Here you go, Mr. C. Twig’s the luckiest dealer around.”
DeSantis pulled back a chair at the blackjack table with a thousand-dollar bet minimum. Billy’s eyes fell on the young guy sitting to the dealer’s right. It was one of the Boswell clan, and Billy struggled to remember the kid’s first name. He decided it was Nico. That’s what happened when you lived in your old man’s shadow. No one remembered you.
Billy took the seat and began pulling chips from his pockets.
“Good luck, Mr. C. I’m a call away if you need me,” DeSantis said.
“Thanks, Eddie,” Billy said.
Billy placed a gray five-thousand-dollar chip in the betting circle. The other players at the table placed their bets as well. Nico Boswell bet an orange chip worth $1,000.
Billy knew he was being watched by the eye-in-the-sky. All whales were watched when they gambled. The house didn’t have a choice. If they weren’t careful, a whale could go on a lucky streak and ruin them in the amount of time it took to smoke a cigarette.
Billy wasn’t cheating, but Nico Boswell was, and the eye-in-the-sky might pick up the scam. If that happened, Nico would get busted, and the gaming board would review the video of the play and, with their trained eyes, spot Billy in his disguise.
And then Billy would be royally screwed.
It didn’t take him long to figure out Nico’s scam. Every high-valued chip in the casino had an RFID microchip hidden beneath the label. Installed in the player’s betting circles were devices that detected pulses sent out from these RFID microchips. If a player placed a counterfeit chip into the circle, it would show up on an LED display in front of the dealer.
Nico was playing with counterfeit orange chips. He got away with this by having a real orange chip strapped to his knee. Each time Nico slid a fake chip into the betting circle, his knee touched the bottom of the table, tricking the detection device.
Playing with the house’s money didn’t work every time, nor did it have to. When Nico won a hand, he pocketed the winnings. When he lost, the house got the fake chip.
When Nico was up ten grand, he rose from the table and left.
Billy breathed a sigh of relief.
Nico made for the elevators, which made Billy think the Boswells were staying in the hotel while ripping off the casino. That took nerve, but so did most of the heists the Boswells pulled. They were known as the Gypsies and were legends in the cheating world.
Billy assumed the family patriarch, Victor, was running the show. They’d met months ago after Victor was shot in the leg by a gaming agent named Frank Grimes. Victor had nearly bled to death, and Billy had saved the older man’s life.
Billy and Victor had traded phone numbers and promised to get together, but like the best-laid plans, it hadn’t happened. Now Billy needed to talk with Victor, and it wasn’t going to be an easy conversation. Billy couldn’t pull his scam on Carnivale while the Gypsies were ripping off the joint. Someone had to leave.
Billy played a few more hands before quitting. He tipped the dealer and walked out of the casino, his destination a row of high-priced stores by registration. In keeping with the casino’s Latino theme, one of the men’s shops sold pastel-colored guayabera shirts and Panama hats. He changed in a dressing room, and a minute later he was back on the casino floor, looking much different than the whale who’d just left.
Finding the other members of the Boswell clan wasn’t terribly difficult. Their thick manes of dark hair made them easy to spot.
The Boswell clan had a dozen members. Victor and his wife, Victor’s brother and wife, Victor’s two sons and two daughters, and his brother’s four kids — one girl and three boys. It was a lot of mouths to feed, and the family was always stealing.
Tonight, there were seven family members in the casino along with Nico. All smart cheaters did their homework, and Victor Boswell had recognized that Carnivale was so focused on whales that cheaters employing simple scams would fly under the surveillance radar.
Two Boswell boys were playing Three Card Poker and sat next to each other at the table. As the boys looked at their cards, each stole out a card using a move called a gambler’s palm, brought his hand beneath the table, and switched it for his brother’s card. A few tables away, two of the other Boswell boys were performing the same scam at a different Three Card Poker game.
The Boswell boys were well trained. Not once did Billy see their thumbs wiggle when they palmed their cards, nor did their bodies sway when they switched cards beneath the tables.
The other three members of the clan were female and were scamming the slot machines. This was a smart play, as the majority of slot players were female.
Modern technology had made slot machines vulnerable. A light wand jammed into the coin hopper would cause a machine to overpay. Or zapping a machine with an electromagnetic pulse would make the random number generators become not so random in picking winners.
The Boswell ladies were working a new scam. Whenever they inserted a dollar bill into a slot machine, it registered as a hundred dollars in credit. Billy had never seen this scam before, and he guessed there was a special coating on the one-dollar bill that tricked the machine’s internal mechanisms. Leave it to Victor to come up with something new.
The Boswell ladies weren’t greedy; smart cheats never were. Each of the ladies cashed out after winning a few grand, walked to the cage with their winning slips, got their money, and took a leisurely stroll toward the elevators. Once upstairs, they’d turn over their winnings to Victor, who managed the cash. Every crew operated this way, including Billy’s.
The last Boswell lady to cash out was a girl with a silver ring through her nose and purple streaks in her hair. Facially, she bore a strong resemblance to Victor.
Billy followed her onto an elevator. She had her head buried in her cell phone and was unaware she was being tailed.
The passengers got off on different floors. Billy stood in the corner and stared at the blank face of his Droid. Victor’s daughter still hadn’t noticed him. Good cheats had eyes in the back of their head; this girl wasn’t using those on the front of her face.
On the twenty-seventh floor, the doors parted and the girl got out and took a sharp right. The thick red carpeting muted Billy’s footsteps as he trailed behind her.
At the end of a hallway, she halted and removed a plastic key from her purse. Billy tapped her on the shoulder and she spun around. You had to be twenty-one to gamble in a casino, and she hardly looked it. Her eyes studied his clothing, trying to determine if he worked security.
“Leave me alone or I’ll scream,” she said.
“That’s a cute scam with the dollar bill,” he said.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“You just won two grand playing with the house’s money.”
Fear tinged the corners of her eyes. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“I need to speak with your father.”
“My father isn’t here.”
“Your father is in that room counting all the money your family just stole. Go tell him Billy Cunningham wants to say hello.”
“Who the hell are you?”
“A friend. I’ll wait right here.”
Thirteen
Victor’s daughter didn’t believe Billy was a friend of her father’s. The more likely scenario was that Billy was an undercover cop about to put the squeeze on her family. Undercover cops were notorious for catching cheaters inside casinos and extorting them. The girl fumbled keying the door, her hand trembling.
Billy waited in the hall, admiring the plush carpets. The color scheme was ugly as sin, just like every other casino in town. Urban legend had it that the owners purposely made their carpets unappealing to force patrons to look up when they walked through the casinos.