Harry shot him a look. Mid-sixties, thin and morose-looking. She glanced at his hole cards, lying face down on the table, one on top of the other. And at the single red chip that tagged their bottom corner.
The back of Harry’s neck tingled. A lot of players protected their hole cards with chips, but to a cheater the exact placement was key. It signalled the value of his hand to an accomplice at the table.
Collusion-cheating. Effective, and tough to prove.
Harry guessed the guy was using the simplest set of signals: top-left corner for a pair of aces; top-middle for kings; top-right corner for queens, and so on. His cohort was probably the blonde seated two places to his left. Between them, they could raise and re-raise the stakes if one of them had a good hand, forcing bigger bets out of the other players.
Harry stared at the man with the gloomy mortician’s face and felt her insides droop. Force-out teams could bleed you dry, but this guy wasn’t Chavez.
She wheeled away. What the hell was she thinking? Casinos didn’t care about poker cheats. Why should they? The money they hustled belonged to the other players, not the casino. This wasn’t the scale of cheating her client had in mind, and she knew it.
Harry headed back out towards the main floor, not caring to admit that the poker room had been some kind of refuge. She reminded herself that Chavez couldn’t know she was watching, then strode back to the roulette table she’d left a few minutes before. The fat guy was still there, clacking his chips.
‘No pongan más apuestas, por favor.’ No more bets.
The ball curled into the spin. The punters around the table grew quiet, though most gave in to the urge to fiddle with something. The fat guy picked at a scab on his chin. Beside him, a woman twirled a lock of hair so tight it had to hurt.
The ball tick-ticked into a slot.
‘Treinta y cinco, negro, impar.’
The dealer plonked his marker on the winning thirty-five and the table seemed to exhale. People shifted and resumed murmured conversations. The hair-twirler pouted. The fat guy shrugged, rubbed his eyes and went back to playing percussion with his chips.
‘Well, shit, would you look at that?’
Harry jerked her head up. A heavyset man had approached the table, jabbing a finger at the layout.
‘Number thirty-five! Yessir!’ He punched the air with his fist. ‘Five hundred euros straight-up on thirty-five! I believe that makes me a winner!’
His cheeks were flushed and hamster-plump. He whooped and swiped at the air some more, spilling his drink in the process. The crowd fussed over him, mostly speaking Spanish, which he didn’t seem to understand. Even the hair-twirler smiled and stroked his sleeve, probably hoping some of his luck would wipe off from it. Rubbing the holy relic, Harry’s father used to call it.
Harry’s eyes strayed to the dealer. He’d summoned the floorman, who seemed to be giving him a hard time. The lucky winner beamed at them and raised his glass.
‘Looks like I hit the jackpot this time!’
The floorman managed a stiff smile, then nodded and stepped away. The dealer turned to make the payout: €17,500.
Harry studied the winner as he stacked his chips. He was probably in his mid-fifties, his hair dusted with grey and thick as an old badger’s pelt. The suit looked expensive, and from his accent she’d pegged him as a native of some southern US state.
She stared at his chips. The payout was high, but it happened now and then. Usually, the punter would lose it back to the casino in a matter of days. She watched the American place another €500 bet, this time on number thirty. Half a dozen players followed his lead, the simpering hair-twirler among them. The ball swished around, then rattled into number fifteen.
A groan eddied along the table. The American beamed at his new friends.
‘Hey, you win some, you lose some.’
Harry noticed that no one was meeting his eye. He shrugged and gathered up his chips, pushing a generous tip towards the dealer. Then he strolled off in the direction of the other roulette tables.
Harry followed him across the Colosseum-sized room, and watched him lose another €500 on a table at the back. She shook her head. At this rate, the casino would get its money back inside the hour. She sighed, massaging the nape of her neck. Stupid to think he might have been Chavez. He was just another chip-happy tourist.
Her back suddenly prickled, like an onset of rash; a tip-off from her skin cells that somebody out there was watching her. She did a quick 360-degree scan of the room. The place was busy, the punters working hard to look as rich as their surroundings. Sequinned evening gowns skimmed the marble floors; dinner jackets looked classy against the claret-toned furnishings. But none of them were paying any attention to Harry.
Her gaze drifted upwards, past the crystal chandeliers to the private mezzanine floor. Her client, Riva Mills, was watching her from the balcony.
Harry tensed. The last thing she needed was someone checking up on her. She turned her gaze back to the table, aware that her raised hackles were due to a lack of progress on the job. Maybe tomorrow she’d terminate the arrangement. Riva seemed to think she needed her services, but Harry wasn’t so sure.
They’d met by appointment the previous day and talked while Riva patrolled the mezzanine floor.
‘Someone’s cheating my casinos, Ms Martinez,’ the woman had said. ‘And I want to know who it is.’
Harry had kept pace with her, studying her profile. She looked to be in her forties, maybe ten or twelve years older than Harry. Her features were fox-like, small and pointed, and her blonde hair was threaded with grey.
‘His name is Chavez,’ Riva continued. Chips snapped and clattered on the tables below the balcony. ‘Franco Chavez.’
‘Then you’ve already identified him?’
The woman threw her a stony glance. ‘I know his name. That doesn’t mean I know who he is.’
Riva swept ahead and Harry followed in silence, resisting a childish urge to pull a face behind her back. She’d done some digging before the meeting and had to admit, the woman’s history was a little intimidating. Raised by her mother in a trailer in Ohio, Riva had left school on her fourteenth birthday and hitch-hiked her way to Wisconsin. She’d lied about her age and got a job as a bunny girl, then lied again to become a casino dealer in Nevada. She’d bought her first casino at the age of twenty-one. Over the next twenty years, she’d built a powerful casino empire, expanding it across the States and into parts of Europe.
Harry eyed the uncompromising set of Riva’s back. She guessed you didn’t succeed in the corporate gaming world by being all soft and nurturing.
Riva came to a halt at the short side of the mezzanine and leaned her elbows on the railing.
‘This Franco Chavez clown is cheating his way across Europe, and my casinos are next.’ She glared at the floor below. ‘Maybe he’s already here.’
Harry moved beside her. Up close, she could see how age had loosened Riva’s skin, blurring a jawline that had probably once been heart-shaped. She tried to picture the underage bunny girl, but her brain shut the image down.
She cleared her throat. ‘Can I ask where you got your information?’
‘My Chief of Security, Victor Toledo. He’s got sources out in the field, and one of them tipped him off. It’s my guess this Chavez is using a computer. Some kind of gadget.’
‘Is that what your informant said?’
‘No, but that’s what all the new cheaters try these days. That’s why I want you.’ She turned a pair of flinty-grey eyes on Harry. ‘It’s what you do, isn’t it? Technology investigations?’