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“I still don’t trust him,” Doucette said.

  Billy’s heart was pounding. He couldn’t read Doucette and didn’t know what the casino boss was thinking. Shaz stood behind her husband’s chair and patted his shoulder while gazing at Billy with a twisted smile on her face. He hadn’t figured out her deal, either.

  Doucette came around the desk and stood in front of Billy’s chair. For a long moment he simply glared. His hand came out of nowhere and slapped Billy’s face.

  “Do you know why I did that?” Doucette asked.

  “No,” Billy said.

  “Neither do I. Now, here’s the deal. I want you to stop the Gypsies from ripping off my casino. Do that, and I won’t have Crunchie turn your friends over to the law. You in?”

  Billy tasted his own blood. It seemed a perfect prelude for selling his soul and ratting out another group of cheaters to save himself and his crew. “Yeah, I’m in.”

  “Good. If you try and double-cross me, I’ll kill you.”

  “I get that.”

  “I bet you do. Now, here’s the ground rules. Thomas Pico’s identity is established in the casino’s computer system. I want you to continue to impersonate him. That means wearing those funny-looking glasses you had on earlier and dressing like a nerd. Is that understood?”

  “Your boys knocked off my glasses.”

  “So get another pair. You stay in disguise.”

  Billy nodded compliance. He was beginning to get the picture. Gaming agents regularly visited the casinos to check up on things. By having Billy wear a disguise, Doucette was making it harder for a gaming agent to recognize him. And if an agent did by chance make him, Doucette could claim that he hadn’t known who Billy was. The casino boss was covering all his bases.

  “Tomorrow afternoon, you’ll check into the hotel using Pico’s ID, and will be comped into a high-roller suite in the main tower,” Doucette said. “Your suite has got hidden cameras and is wired for audio as well, so don’t even think about screwing with me.”

  “How about the john? Are you going to film me taking a crap?”

  “We just might.”

  He wasn’t surprised to hear the high-roller suite was wired. Many casinos wired their high-roller suites to make sure their wealthy customers didn’t go play at a competitor’s tables.

  “You’ll also be comped your food and drinks, and will be given twenty grand in chips to play with,” the casino boss said. “If you decide to cheat us, don’t even think about cashing in your chips, because you’ll be killed. Got it?”

  “You think I’d cheat you now?” Billy asked incredulously.

  “Damn straight I do. Cheating’s in your blood.” Doucette paused, then said, “You’re also going to have an entourage. Ike and T-Bird will act as your bodyguards, and will accompany you wherever you go. They’ll also be staying in your suite. If you stray, they’ll take you down. You’re going to be in our crosshairs every moment you’re here. You with me?”

  “Yeah, I’m with you.”

  “Good. If you’ve got any questions, ask them now.”

  He had questions, but he’d decided it was more important to get the hell out of here before Doucette or his crazy bride had a change of mind. They impressed him as the kind of people that could flip on a dime and turn into animals, and he didn’t want to be around when that happened.

  “I’m good,” he said. Then he added, “You can count on me.”

  “Why is it every time you talk, I think you’re lying to me?” Doucette said.

  “Beats me.”

  “Get him out of here,” the casino boss said, and went onto the balcony with his bride.

  “Let’s go, pardner,” Crunchie said.

  Billy rose from his chair and followed the old grifter out of the office. He had no idea how this was going to turn out, but as they rode the elevator down to the main level, he promised himself that he was going to pay Crunchie back for setting him up.

  The valet stand was jamming, and they waited in line for his car. The cool desert air was bringing him around, and he could not purge the idea of revenge from his mind. Perhaps he’d throw the old grifter under the wheels of the next vehicle that came up.

  “Stop looking at me like that,” Crunchie said.

  “Who said I was looking at you?” Billy said.

  “You think I don’t know? You want to kill me.”

  “Doesn’t everybody?”

  Ike and T-Bird laughed contemptuously. Billy edged closer to the old grifter. Feeling threatened by the proximity, the old grifter’s watery eyes narrowed with distrust.

  “You lied to me when you said you were talking to your daughter tonight,” Billy said. “You were talking to that crazy bitch, weren’t you?”

  “How’d you know that?” Crunchie asked.

  “You showed me three calls on your cell phone with a 310 area code, which is Southern California. Shaz told me she recently relocated from LA. Two plus two equals four.”

  “You don’t miss a trick, do you?”

  “Is she running things?”

  “Fuck no. Doucette’s running the show. She’s just window dressing.”

  A car came up that wasn’t his. There was something eating at Billy, and he decided to get it off his chest. “Why did you let her torture Ricky Boswell, and bash his head in with a baseball bat? Why couldn’t you have just shot him? The poor kid didn’t need to suffer.”

  “Who told you she tortured him?”

  “She made me watch a video of it. You were in it. Why didn’t you stop her?”

  “I couldn’t.”

  “I thought you said she wasn’t running things.”

  “It’s complicated. Do yourself a favor, and steer clear of her. If you don’t, she’ll end up snuffing you like that little bastard Ricky.”

  “Ricky was one of us. You don’t do that to your own. You broke the code.”

  “Let it go,” the old grifter said.

  The Maserati appeared with a distinctive roar, the valet a budding NASCAR driver. Billy instinctively reached for his wallet, and came away empty.

  “Give me my wallet back,” he said.

  “Ike’s got your wallet,” the old grifter said. “Come by tomorrow afternoon at three, and we’ll go over things. Remember, if you mess with us, we’ll destroy you and your friends.”

  Crunchie limped back inside. At least the story about his arthritis acting up had been true. Ike tossed Billy his wallet. Billy flipped it open to give the valet a tip, and found the billfold empty. Ike had cleaned him out. Laughing, the punishers went inside as well.

  Billy burned rubber out of the valet stand. Traffic was light, the late hour thinning out the herd, and he punched the accelerator as he headed north on the neon-infused Strip, desperate to put as much distance between himself and Galaxy’s casino as possible.

  He felt ready to explode. He hadn’t screwed up this badly since college. At the intersection of Sahara Avenue he pulled a wild-ass stunt, and with tires screaming, cut across four lanes and hung a sharp left. There wasn’t a traffic cop in sight, and as he sped down Sahara, he realized it was the first lucky break he’d caught all night.

  He was doing eighty when he hit the entrance ramp. With the wind blowing in his face, his fear ebbed away, and he told himself that he could beat these bastards. He didn’t know how, but he could do it. They’d tipped their mitts and revealed their hands and given him enough information to mess with them real good.

  Doucette was a coked-out fool, and so was his psycho bride, and neither one of them knew a damn thing about running a casino. If they had, they’d never have asked a known hustler to help them catch a gang of cheats. Only in the dumb movies did casino people do that.

  Ike and T-Bird were a pair of washed-up jocks and dumber than a box of rocks. Stupid people were easily played. He was going to have fun with those two mu
tts.

  Last was Crunchie, who’d screwed with him in so many ways that Billy had lost count. But there was a reason for it. Age had caught up to the old grifter, and Crunchie no longer had the confidence in himself to do the job that he was asking Billy to do.

  Each of them had an Achilles’ heel that he could stick a dagger into and twist around real good. They’d picked the wrong guy to fuck with, and he couldn’t wait to pay them back.

  FOURTEEN

  THE HOT SEAT: SUNDAY, MIDDAY

  At noon the gaming agents broke for lunch. Trays of food were brought up from the jail’s cafeteria that weren’t fit for a dog. Billy thought the session had gone well, and he sipped from a can of ginger ale while watching LaBadie, Zander, and Tricaricco chow down on baloney sandwiches on Wonder Bread and cups of greasy potato salad. Bad food was part of a cop’s daily existence, and the gaming agents made sure to clean their plates.

  “You haven’t told us how Maggie Flynn plays into this,” LaBadie asked when they were done. “That was part of our agreement.”

  “Mags didn’t come into the picture until Thursday night,” Billy explained. “I didn’t want to jump ahead of myself.”

  LaBadie also had a briefcase, although not as pretty as Underman’s. Placing it on the table, he popped it open, and removed a glossy eight-by-ten photograph of Billy and his crew taken inside Galaxy’s employee parking garage a few hours before they ripped the joint off.

  “Yesterday afternoon, you and eight other people were secretly photographed by one of our agents inside Galaxy’s employee parking garage before the casino was robbed,” LaBadie said. “We know the two black guys in the photo worked for Doucette. I want you to tell me the other six people’s names.”

  “That photograph isn’t want you think,” Billy said.

  “Really. Then what is it?”

  “Well, I was doing a job for Marcus Doucette. Doucette thought some cheaters were staying in his hotel, and asked me to sniff them out. I asked six friends of mine to help me find them, and on Saturday afternoon we met in the employee garage to talk things over.”

  “You honestly don’t expect me to believe that, do you?”

  “Ask the woman who runs the bridal shop. Lucille Gonzalez. She knows all about it.”

  “This Gonzalez woman will back up your story?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  LaBadie looked stymied. If Lucille Gonzalez backed up the story—which Billy believed she would, considering how they’d left things—the gaming board would not be able to charge him with conspiracy, which seriously weakened their case against him.

  LaBadie pointed at the photo. “These six friends of yours—are they part of your crew?”

  “I don’t have a crew,” Billy said.

  “Don’t get smart with us, Billy. You’ve been running a crew for years.”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “You had a crew when we busted you at the Hard Rock. You met with them yesterday afternoon in the employee parking lot, and conspired to rip off Galaxy’s casino.”

  “My client was never busted at the Hard Rock,” Underman said.

  “He was released on a technicality.”

  Billy leaned forward and brought his mouth next to the tape recorder. “For the record, I’ve never had a crew that worked for me, and I wasn’t busted at the Hard Rock, and I did not conspire to rip off Galaxy’s casino with my friends.”

  LaBadie looked ready to pull his hair out. Billy decided to shut him down.

  “Want to hear the rest of my story?” the young hustler asked.

  LaBadie slammed the briefcase and dropped it on the floor. He sat down in his chair hard, making the hinges sing. The expression on his face was anything but friendly.

  “Start talking,” the gaming agent said.

  FIFTEEN

  THURSDAY, TWO DAYS BEFORE THE HEIST

  Billy awoke the next morning sprawled across the leather couch in his living room. His body was a feverish mass of hurt from the beating Ike and T-Bird had inflicted upon him, his skin covered in bruises of every shade, from mauve to lilac to violet to plum.

  In the bathroom he downed eight hundred milligrams of ibuprofen while examining his face in the mirror. He had the beginnings of a world-class shiner. How did Doucette expect him to impersonate a whale looking like this? His job had just gotten that much tougher.

  He kept a collection of designer shades in his bedroom, well over a hundred pairs. He rummaged through them and settled on a pair of mirrored Ray-Bans that could have belonged to Steve McQueen. When he’d first come to Vegas, you couldn’t wear shades inside a casino without drawing heat. Then the poker craze had started, and wearing shades became cool.

  In the kitchen he brewed a pot of coffee and drank a cup. It had been years since he’d risen this early. Normally, he slept until noon, exercised in the building’s health club or worked on his golf game, ate an early dinner at a good restaurant, and started swindling the casinos at six, his work lasting until the small hours of the morning. The next three days were going to be different. He was going to have to keep a schedule and follow other people’s rules, no different than a regular job.

  The coffee brought him around, and he stared at the coffee grinds swirling in the bottom. Kismet, the religion of all gamblers, was calling to him.

  Three days.

  There was a significance to that number, an event which occurred every three days inside a casino that had once been very important to him. Now, not as much.

  Three days.

  A minute slipped away. Nothing clicked.

  Casinos were models of efficiency and worked on systems that were predictable and exploitable. Smart cheaters knew these systems inside out, and he was going to kick himself until he remembered what it was that happened every three days inside a casino.

  The landline rang. Caller ID said it was Travis. The big man called once a day to talk shop; outside of that, they rarely communicated. Travis had recently gotten hitched and his new wife had two young sons. Karen knew about the thieving but the boys were in the dark, and Travis wanted to keep it that way.

  The call went to voice mail. The enormity of Billy’s fuckup suddenly hit him, and he pulled a chair out from the kitchen table and sat down. If he returned the call, Travis would want to know if the heist of Galaxy’s salon was still on, and that would lead to a conversation that Billy wasn’t ready to have. But if he didn’t call back, Travis would get worried, wondering what had happened to him.

  The phone rang again. If not now, when? Billy asked himself. He took the receiver out of the cradle and in a calm voice said, “Hey, tough guy.”

  “Jesus, Billy, I was starting to think you were in jail or something,” Travis said. “You okay? I called your cell phone, and some asshole answered it, so I hung up.”

  Billy shuddered. Crunchie had answered his fucking cell phone. The damage was done, and he was going to have to tell Travis what had gone down last night.

  “I had a little problem last night. What are you doing up so early?”

  Travis also slept in, and rarely awoke before midafternoon.

  “Karen called. Stevie got hit in the face with a soccer ball at school, and she’s taking him to the hospital so they can X-ray his nose. I’m going there once I get off with you.”

  “Is he okay?”

  “Yeah, he’s a tough little fucker. Oh, shit, there’s Karen calling me. Let’s talk later. I want to hear how things went.”

  Breathing room. Billy needed some of that. It would give him time to construct the story he’d tell Travis and the rest of his crew. He started to say good-bye, then remembered that he had a question for the big man. “I need to ask you something. What procedure takes place every three days inside a casino? I know there’s one, but I can’t remember what it is.”

  Travis was the only member of the
crew that had worked in a casino, and was what people in the industry called a gamer. If anyone knew the significance of three days, it was him. Travis took the call from his wife, then came back on the line.

  “Is this a big casino or a little casino we’re talking about?” Travis asked.

  “Does it matter?” Billy said.

  “In a big casino, nothing happens after three days. The smaller joints are different. Every three days they erase the surveillance tapes, and use them over. It saves a ton of money.”

  “How about the Four Queens? Would they erase their tapes after three days?”

  “Sure. All the joints on Fremont Street do.”

  Billy walked into the living room with the cordless phone pressed to his ear. His crew had ripped off the Four Queens on a Wednesday. By Saturday night, the surveillance tapes of their misdeeds would be erased, and the evidence would disappear. The same was true of the gaffed-chip scam he’d pulled at Slots A Fun. By Saturday night, the tape would be blank. All he needed to do was last until Saturday night, and he and his crew would be home free.

  “Did we slip up last night?” Travis asked, sounding worried.

  “Last night ran perfectly,” he said.

  “Come on, Billy, I wasn’t born yesterday. First some asshole answers your phone. Now you ask me if I thought the tapes from last night will be erased. What the hell’s going on?”

  Billy cursed himself. He hadn’t phrased his questions right, and now Travis was suspicious, as he should have been.

  “I don’t want to discuss this right now. We’ll talk about it later, okay?”

  “Are we going down?” Travis asked, not hearing him.

  “Who said anything about going down?”

  “Are we?”

  “No.”

  “Are we at risk of going down?”

  “I don’t want to talk about this right now.”

  “Fuck it, Billy, give me a straight answer, will you, man?”

  There was a click on the line. Travis said, “There’s Karen again,” and stuck him on hold. Billy sat on the couch, feeling his world starting to implode. He hadn’t come clean with Travis, and the big man knew it. If Travis didn’t trust him, he’d go work for someone else. The rest of the crew would find out, and they’d leave as well. Hustling was all about trust, and right now, his was wearing thin. Travis came back on.