“Just calling it the way I see it.”
“My father and I have a question. You said you worked for a Strip casino. Which one?”
Grimes had told the Haneys he worked security for a Strip casino. He hadn’t wanted them to know he was with the gaming board for fear they’d extort him down the road.
“MGM Grand,” Grimes said.
“The MGM owns a bunch of casinos, don’t they?”
“Their parent company owns twelve casinos,” Grimes said.
“Is the Bellagio one of them?”
“Yes, it is. Did Cunningham scam the Bellagio?”
“Now that you mention it, he did. We found evidence that Cunningham scammed the Bellagio for a major score, and the casino doesn’t know about it,” Junior said.
“Define major score,” Grimes said.
“A hundred grand.”
“That’s nonsense. Management at the Bellagio would have to know of the theft. The loss would show up on the spreadsheets at the end of the shift.”
“Cunningham figured out a way to keep the losses hidden.”
“And you and your father know how.”
“Yes, sir. Saw it on the computer in Gabe Weiss’s house.”
Grimes’s job performance was based upon how many scams he uncovered during the course of a year, and the Bellagio scam might very well be his ticket to a bonus.
“How much do you want for this information?” Grimes asked.
“Five hundred bucks,” Junior said.
“That’s a little steep.”
“Forget about it, then.”
“No, I’ll pay.” Grimes paused, trying not to act too anxious. “So what is it?”
“You’ve got to pay to play. There’s an ATM in the bar next door. We’ll wait.”
Grimes paid a visit to the seedy bar next door and made a withdrawal from his personal checking account. Most bars in town had a couple of slot machines and, as a result, also had ATMs. He returned to the table and slapped the bills onto Junior’s hand.
“This had better be on the level,” Grimes said.
“It is.” Junior added, “You’re going to like this.”
Grimes thought he knew every conceivable way of stealing from a casino. Listening to Junior explain the Bellagio scam, the special agent realized he was wrong.
By Nevada law, casinos were required to follow a set of strict procedures regarding keeping inventory of chips. Chips were as valuable as money and tightly regulated.
Chips were kept inside the casino cage, which was monitored 24-7 by security cameras. To prevent a casino from running out of chips, casinos were required to keep more chips inside the cage than were actually needed. The largest denomination was black hundred-dollar chips. Every casino had hundreds of thousands of dollars of unused black chips in their cages. These chips sat in the back of the chip drawers and were rarely touched.
The heist at the Bellagio had occurred during a long holiday weekend. Cunningham and his crew had come into Bellagio’s casino and bought fifty thousand dollars’ worth of chips at the cage. Then they’d visited one of the Bellagio’s gourmet restaurants and eaten dinner.
Their meal done, they’d returned to the cage and spilled the chips they’d bought earlier through the bars to the cashiers. It was a lot of money, and the cashiers had jumped.
At that moment, the cage manager had opened a drawer containing black chips and begun replacing real hundred-dollar chips with stacks of plastic fakes hidden in his pockets.
“So the cage manager was involved in the scam,” Grimes said.
“He sure was,” Junior replied.
Cunningham’s crew had pulled this stunt eight different times over the long weekend, and it had gone off without a hitch. The cage manager had hidden the stolen chips in a gym bag in his locker, which he’d later brought out and given to Cunningham.
To launder the chips, Cunningham had used a gang of strippers from a local men’s club. Strippers often received chips as tips, and the girls had come into the Bellagio over a period of several weeks to cash in the stolen loot.
“When did this heist take place?” Grimes asked.
“Last Fourth of July weekend,” Junior said.
The Bellagio was required to keep the surveillance tapes for twelve months, so a video of the heist still existed. Cunningham and his crew had probably worn disguises and would be hard to identify. But the cage manager could be identified and tied to the theft.
Grimes felt himself getting excited. He’d pay a visit to the Bellagio this afternoon and review the surveillance tapes. Once he had his evidence of the cage manager switching in the fake chips, he’d bust the creep and sweat him until he got a confession. Making a thief’s life miserable was the best part of his work, and his day didn’t seem so gloomy anymore.
Grimes rose from his chair. “Call me when you whack Cunningham.”
“You’ll be the first to know,” Junior replied.
Through the hookah bar’s tinted front window, they watched Grimes pull away in his Jeep Cherokee. Junior picked up a rubber tube connected to the hookah and filled his lungs with sweet-tasting smoke called shisha. “Bowl’s almost empty. Want some more?”
His father grunted yes.
“We need a refill,” Junior called to the back.
The Turkish owner appeared and handed Junior a hand-printed menu. Junior picked a concoction called baja blue, just for the hell of it. Soon he and his father were puffing away.
“Do you think he knows we’re playing him?” Junior asked.
His father grunted no.
“Then here’s to getting rich together,” Junior said.
Junior and his father had decided not to whack Cunningham. They’d been whacking cheats for twenty years and had saved the casinos plenty, yet had little to show for it. That was about to change. Tomorrow afternoon, Cunningham and his crew were going to take down the Carnivale for a major score, and the Haneys were going to get a big fat cut.
The Haneys’ allegiances had shifted. The casinos were no longer their friends. Billy Cunningham was their friend, and was about to afford Junior and his father a lifestyle that up until this point in their sorry lives they’d gotten glimpses of only by watching TV. Beautiful homes with manicured yards, sports cars designed like rocket ships, oceanfront Mexican villas. It was in their grasp if they played their cards right.
“Had enough?” Junior asked.
His father grunted that he’d had enough.
Junior settled the tab and scooped up the disguises. The money they made off Cunningham’s scam would buy more than just pretty stuff. It would give Junior the means to get his old man straightened out. It was no fun living with a person who never spoke and barely communicated with his own son. Maybe with the right doctors, the walls would come down and his father would start acting normal again. Junior certainly hoped so, as there were things about his past that he knew nothing about. Like his mother, who’d died when he was an infant. The faded snapshots showed a pretty, smallish woman with dancing eyes. Where was she from? Did she have brothers and sisters? Maybe Junior had cousins out there who he might connect with. Anything was possible.
Junior also wanted to hear about his father’s life in Dallas. There was a history to his father’s violent ways, a secret scorched deep in the recesses of his soul, and Junior wanted to know what had driven his father to make so many brutal choices in his life. It was no fun not knowing his family’s history. No fun at all.
They went outside to the parking lot. A door was about to be opened, and Junior realized how excited he was.
“I’ll drive,” he announced.
His father grunted okay and threw him the keys.
Twenty-Nine
Billy was sitting by the pool when he got a text on his cell phone from Misty.