Wild Card

He parked on the street, and entered Resorts’ casino from the Boardwalk entrance. The casino was packed, with customers standing five deep at every table, waiting to place a bet. Most of the customers looked like working Joes, gambling with their paychecks. Out in Las Vegas, the casinos depended upon wealthy gamblers, called whales, to make their nut. In Atlantic City, a whale was a sanitation worker with a hundred bucks to burn in his pocket. He felt a tug on his sleeve and stared into the face of a security guard.

“You’ve got a call,” the guard said, pointing at a house phone by the elevators.

“Thanks.” Valentine went and picked the phone up. “Valentine here.”

“I’m up in the catwalk,” Doyle said.

“What have you got?”

“A card-counter,” his partner replied.

Valentine took an elevator to the second floor, walked down a long, windowless hallway, and punched a code into the combination lock of a steel door. The door swung in, and he entered a dark, cavernous space.

“Over here,” Doyle said.

Valentine found his partner hanging over a metal railing, staring at the blackjack pit through a camera with a wide telephoto lens. Located in the ceiling above the casino, the catwalk let security personnel watch the games through two-way mirrors, and gave a feel for the action that surveillance cameras could not provide.

“Where is he?” Valentine asked.

“Table number 46, guy at third base,” Doyle replied.

Resorts had seventy-two blackjack tables. At any given time, a handful of card-counters were scattered around those tables. Card-counting altered the house edge by two percent. It didn’t sound like much, but if enough people did it, it could bankrupt a casino.

Counters were intense people, and often wore baseball caps to hide their faces from the eye-in-the-sky cameras. What gave them away was the way they bet. For hours, they would bet the table minimum. Then, the shoe would get rich in high-valued cards, and their bets would grow twenty times. Casinos called it bet fluctuation.

Doyle handed him the camera, and Valentine stared through its lens at the suspected counter. The guy fit right in with the other players: gold chains, white leisure suit, red silk shirt. A true polyester prince. What stuck out was his bronze skin when everyone else in the casino was pasty white. They’d been seeing a lot of counters from Las Vegas, and Valentine pegged this guy as one of them.

Handing the camera back, he walked to the end of the catwalk, found the phone, and called down to the floor. He spoke to a pit boss, then rejoined Doyle.

“Bill Higgins taught me this trick,” he said. “Watch.”

Down below, a pit boss approached table 46. A velvet rope hung behind the table. Reaching over the rope, the pit boss took his thumb, and drew an X on the card counter’s back. The counter scooped up his chips and left the table.

“What’s that called?” Doyle said.

“The brush,” Valentine replied. “They use it out in Vegas. It tells the card counter they’ve been spotted, and it’s time to leave.”

“I like it.”

They started to leave the catwalk. Something caught Doyle’s eye, and he pointed down at the cage. “What’s Mickey Wright think he’s doing?”

Valentine grasped the catwalk railing and looked down. Mickey was standing by the cage in his signature maroon jacket. He was talking to a customer, an Italian with a thick mane of slick-backed hair. The customer looked like a mobster, but so did half the guys inside the casino. As they watched, a cashier slid two racks of purple chips under the glass. Mickey signed for them, then presented the racks to the customer, who shook Mickey’s hand and sauntered off to the blackjack pit.

“How much money do you think that is?” Doyle asked.

Purples were worth a thousand dollars apiece.

“A hundred grand, easy,” Valentine said.

Doyle whistled through his teeth. “What do you think Mickey’s up to?”

Valentine had no idea. The casino occasionally offered lines of credit to high-rollers, letting them sign for chips they were legally responsible for paying back to the casino. If the high-roller didn’t pay, the state went after him.

The problem was, Mickey Wright didn’t have the authority to approve credit lines. And, he wasn’t supposed to be on the casino floor. Resort discouraged surveillance employees from entering the casino, and fraternizing with employees, or customers.

Maybe Mickey had slipped. Maybe the guy was from the old neighborhood, and Mickey had seen him on a camera, and run downstairs to say hello. Or, maybe something else was going on.

“Get a picture of this guy,” Valentine said. “We’d better find out who he is.”

Chapter 21

Leaving work that night, Valentine remembered that he was supposed to bring food home for dinner. It was Wednesday, which meant Chinese take-out. To stay within their budget, he picked up a quart of wonton soup and three egg rolls to go with the chow mein Lois made at home. It made dinner special, and didn’t cost a lot of money.