Free The Night Monster by James Swain Page B

consisted of seven players, a dealer wearing a tuxedo, and some bystanders watching the action.
    “This is Jack Carpenter and his dog,” Harry said to the group.
    None of the men took their eyes from the monitor.
    “You’ll go blind doing that,” I said.
    One man turned his head, a thin smile on his face. He was in his early sixties and Italian, with salt and pepper hair and a nose that had been broken a few times but hadn’t lost its character. His face was best described as intense.
    “You a cop?” the man asked.
    “Ex-detective,” I replied. “I used to run the Missing Persons Unit of the Broward sheriff’s department.”
    “My name’s Tony Valentine,” the man said. “I’m a consultant. I help casinos catch cheaters. Do you know what grift sense is?”
    “Never heard of it.”
    “It’s the ability to spot a con or someone who’s a crook. Think you can spot a crook in a crowd of people?”
    “Sure,” I replied.
    Valentine turned to the others. “Want to give him a shot, guys?”
    “Why not?” one of the men replied.
    Valentine turned back to me. “Here’s the deal, Jack. The guys on the monitor are a gang of professional cheaters. They’ve been swindling the Hard Rock for a month, and have stolen over three hundred thousand bucks.”
    I whistled through my teeth. The seven guys at the table wore baseball caps and colorful T-shirts and were swigging bottles of beer. They looked like a bunch of regular Joes, and did not fit the image that I had of professional cheaters.
    “What are they doing?” I asked.
    “They’re using paper.”
    “What’s that?”
    “They marked the casino’s cards, and put them back into play.”
    “Can I see them?”
    Valentine removed a worn deck of playing cards from his pocket and gave it to me. The deck had a red diamond design along with the Hard Rock’s distinctive logo.
    “The casino subjects its dealers to polygraph tests every month,” Valentine said. “One of the dealers got tripped up in a lie, and confessed to taking several dozen decks out of the casino, giving them to the gang to be marked, and slipping them back in.”
    “Is this one of the decks?” I asked.
    “Yes.”
    I examined the cards but saw nothing out of the ordinary.
    “How are they marked?”
    “They’ve been stained with drops of water,” Valentine said. “The gang only stained the high value cards, which are the most important cards in blackjack. The stains let the cheaters know the value of the cards the dealer is holding. That knowledge gives the cheaters a fifteen percent edge over the house.”
    I removed the ace of spades from the deck, and held it up to the dim overhead light. When viewed from the right angle, the stain on the card was plainly visible.
    “Why don’t you arrest them?” I asked.
    The men fell silent, as did Valentine.
    “Did I say something wrong?”
    “The dealer who snitched was found in the trunk of his car with his throat slit,” Valentine said. “Without his testimony, we don’t have a case.”
    “So you’re letting the cheaters play in the hopes of catching them,” I said.
    “Exactly.”
    “How can I help?”
    “One member of the gang is reading the marks, and signaling the information to the others,” Valentine said. “That’s how marked card scams work. We need to figure out who the reader is, arrest him, and make him talk. That’s our best chance of nailing the gang.”
    It was common when the police were stymied in a case to bring in a fresh pair of eyes to examine the evidence. I didn’t know anything about gambling or cheating, but I was good at picking slime-bags out of a crowd.
    “I’d be happy to give it a try,” I said.
    Standing in front of the wall-sized monitor, I tried to pick out the reader.
    Cheating at blackjack wasn’t hard. Each player at the table received two cards, as did the dealer. The object was to get close to twenty-one, without going over. The dealer went last, and had the advantage of receiving one