Free The Mirror Thief by Martin Seay Page A

is not a lot of money, not for a joint like the Spectacular. And there’s a hell of a difference between delinquent and irrecuperable. Your friend won’t take any heat for writing that marker. Sure, it’s cute that he’s worried about Stanley—but at this point Stanley is a celebrity, a goddamn institution. Casino hosts and credit agents from one end of this country to the other will comp him six ways to Sunday just for darkening their door, no matter whose black book he shows up in.Casinos love professional gamblers, Curtis. They’re great for business. They’re like saints. Proof that salvation is really possible.
    Curtis looks up, doesn’t say anything. He knows there’s more coming, and he’s just going to wait for it. A raven strides into view from under the tables, disappears again. The wind shifts. From somewhere in the mountains he can hear the engines of a lowflying A-10; he thinks about the Gulf again, but only for a moment.
    Kagami eases his glasses back onto his face. I heard an interesting story recently, he says. About two weeks ago, a team of cardcounters hit a string of casinos in Atlantic City. Like you’d expect, the bosses are being pretty tightlipped about how much these guys won, but the rumor mill’s been throwing around some pretty goddamn unbelievable numbers. In any case, the managers could look at their counts at the end of the night and see right away that something bad had happened. Do you know how often cardcounters make hauls like that without getting burned, Curtis?
    No idea.
    Never. In all my years, I’ve heard of it happening maybe three or four times. Always to a
single
casino. These guys clobbered four or five places inside of twelve hours. That is unprecedented.
    Kagami lifts his wineglass, drains it, refills it from the bottle. I’m bringing this up in the present context, he says, because—funny thing—the joint that got nailed worst of all was the Spectacular. What strikes me as
really
strange is that the Point was also the
last
joint to get hit. Hours after the other ones. Is this ringing any bells with you?
    You just keep going, Curtis says. You’re doing real good.
    I have it on pretty solid authority that security at the Point was tipped off in advance that these guys were coming, and they thought they were ready. All hands were on deck. In AC, of course, you guys aren’t legally permitted to bar counters the way we do out here, but there are other defenses, as I’m sure you know. From what I hear, the Spectacular threw out the whole bag of tricks: lowering table limits, reshuffling decks, the works. Pissed a lot of people off. And they
still
got massacred. From whereI sit—and I’m speaking now from the perspective of a casino manager—that does not look too good.
    Yeah, Curtis says. You could say that.
    Kagami grins, shakes his head. I’ll tell you a secret, he says. I’m jealous as hell of these guys. I used to put teams like that together, you know. Some of them were pretty good. But these guys! This was the kind of score people make Hollywood movies about. Weekend before Mardi Gras. Right? Very heavy traffic at the tables. Way I hear it, they were dropping out of nowhere. Tracking shuffles, cutting cards to each other, moving counters and spotters around as much as bettors. Totally invisible. At our best, we were never anywhere close to that good.
    Kagami snaps his fingers, as if suddenly remembering something. But, hey! he says. You know who
could
put a team like that together?
    Don’t make me say it, Walter.
    Stanley goddamn Glass, is who. And now you’re telling me that your buddy, Damon Blackburn of the United States Marine Corps, loaned Stanley—a notorious professional gambler and known associate of hotshot cardcounting teams like the very one we’re talking about—ten grand of his casino’s money just six weeks before they got their asses kicked up and down the Boardwalk. And I’m wondering if maybe right about now Damon isn’t a little