“That cop with you?” Vinny asked.

“My bodyguard, courtesy of my father,” Gerry said.

“Your old man still watches out for you, doesn’t he?”

Gerry nodded.

“That’s nice. My old man hardly talks to me any more. You said over the phone you wanted me to look at some photographs.”

Gerry removed an envelope from his jacket pocket, slid it across the table. “Some mobsters are running a blackjack scam in town. They’re working for our friend, George Scalzo. I was hoping you’d look at these photos, and see if you know any of them.”

Vinny took a cigarette out of the ashtray, and blew a monster cloud of smoke in the air. You weren’t supposed to smoke in Harold’s, but people did anyway.

Two hookers at the next table started hacking their lungs out. Vinny ignored them.

“You trying to take Scalzo down?”

“I’m working on it,” Gerry said.

“You going to pay him back for what he did to us in Vegas?”

“Yeah, and for killing Jack Donovan.”

Vinny flashed a crooked smile. He was a skinny guy, with pocked skin and bad teeth. What set him apart was his ability to talk. Opening the envelope up, he said, “Walk up to the cash register, and see if it doesn’t send you down memory lane.”

“What am I looking for?”

Vinny laughed through a mouthful of smoke. “Our first scam together,” he said.

Gerry slid out of the booth and went up to the register. He kept his eyes to the floor, avoiding the working girls’ sideways glances. The first pretty girl he’d ever seen was a hooker trolling the Atlantic City Boardwalk. He’d been eight, and his mother had told him this was not the type of girl he wanted to know.

The cashier was a wizened old man with half-dead eyes. He had a tic in his neck that didn’t quit. It was the only way you could tell he was alive.

“Need something?” the cashier asked.

Gerry spotted the ultraviolet light sitting next to the register and nearly burst into laughter. He’d done a lot of dumb things as a teenager, and selling ultraviolet lights to every store owner on the island had been one of them.

“I need a menu,” Gerry said.

Gerry returned to the booth with a menu and a smile on his face.

“Pretty funny, huh?” Vinny said.

“We should tell the guy,” Gerry said.

“No, we shouldn’t,” Vinny said.

Back during their senior year in high school, Vinny had purchased several boxes of ultraviolet lights from a merchant on Canal Street in New York. Then he and Gerry had pooled their money together, which had amounted to eight hundred bucks, and Vinny had gone to the bank and exchanged it for eight new hundred-dollar bills.

Vinny had painted the hundred-dollar bills with ultraviolet paint, which when dry was invisible to the naked eye. Gerry’s job had been to go to different restaurants on the island, and spend the hundred-dollar bill on a meal. A few hours later, Vinny would come in, posing as a salesman. He’d tell the owner that a lot of counterfeit hundreds were floating around, and that the special light he was selling could detect them. He always offered to give a demonstration.

The owner would take the hundred-dollar bills from his register, and run them beneath the light. The doctored bill would light up like it was radioactive. Vinny would tell the owner that by federal law, he had to confiscate the counterfeit and turn it over to the FBI. He’d pretend to feel bad for the owner’s situation, and offer to sell him the ultraviolet light at cost, which he claimed was fifty bucks. The owner always said yes.

“That was some summer,” Gerry said.

“I bought a car,” Vinny said, pouring through the photographs.

“So did I.”

“Mine was nicer.”

A waitress took Gerry’s order. He asked for the whore’s special. She raised a disapproving eyebrow while tapping her pencil on her pad.

“You some kind of comedian?” she asked.

“He’s a native,” Vinny said.

“One whore’s special it is,” she said.

Vinny continued poring over the photographs. Like Gerry, he’d flunked out of college, but had plenty of street smarts and a good memory. Shaking his head, he slipped the photographs back into the envelope. “Don’t know them. They must be from off island. What’s the deal with the baseball caps?”

Gerry lowered his voice. “There’s a receiver and three LEDs sewn into the rim of the cap. The cards at the table are nail-nicked. A member of the gang reads the nicks, and knows what the dealer is holding. He electronically transmits the information to the guy wearing the cap.”

“Wow,” Vinny said. “You got the cap?”

Gerry hesitated. Vinny was, and always would be, a scammer. He didn’t want to be giving him any ideas, especially when it involved a case he was working on.

“It’s outside in the car,” Gerry said.

“Get it,” Vinny said.

“I can’t.”

“Why not?”

“The detectives working the case are in the car.”

“So what? I’m trying to help you bury Scalzo, aren’t I?”

Gerry’s food arrived. Three eggs sunny-side up, a gristly piece of ham, and a mound of hash fries swimming in bubbling grease. The cook hadn’t lost his touch.

“How can you help me bury Scalzo if you can’t identify these guys?” Gerry asked.

Vinny lit a cigarette off the one he was smoking. He blew another cloud at the girls at the next table and got them coughing. “Easy. I’ll find out who made the cap.”

26

I t doesn’t get any better than this,Karl Jasper thought.

Jasper stood at the rear of the crowd in Celebrity’s poker room, chewing an unlit cigar. The scene was absolutely beautiful. Skip DeMarco was beating the pants off the competition and the spectators were cheering his every move. The kid was going to be known in every home in America by the tournament’s end. Every home.

Jasper watched the action while trying to calculate how much money DeMarco would make in endorsements. He’d cut his teeth working for a Madison Avenue ad agency, and could not look at success without equating it with a dollar figure.

Only trying to figure out DeMarco’s worth was tricky. The kid was an overnight sensation, and advertisers tended to be wary of those. But DeMarco appealed to that all-important demographic—males eighteen to forty-nine—which meant he could endorse anything from condoms to cars, and be a hit.

Finally Jasper hit on a number. Twenty million in endorsements the first year, not including any deals from Europe, and that was being conservative. He would have to talk to Scalzo about managing the kid.

The crowd had grown quiet, and Jasper stood on his tiptoes to watch. A monster pot was building, with three players in the hunt. Fred Rea, an amateur player from Vero Beach, Florida, “Skins” Turner, a seasoned pro from Houston, and DeMarco.

Rea was the short stack at the table with four million in chips. It sounded like a lot, only his opponents had more. By declaring himself “all in,” Rea was putting his tournament life at stake.

Skins called him, and shoved four million in chips into the pot as well.

DeMarco immediately called Rea and Skins. The kid had a special savoir faire that Jasper loved. The five community cards had already been dealt and were lying face up on the table. Each player was allowed to use his two cards plus the community cards to make the best possible hand.

Rea turned over his two cards. He had two pair, fours and sevens.

DeMarco turned over his cards. He also had two pair, kings and sevens. He’d beaten Rea, and the crowd broke into wild applause. Jasper clapped along with them.

When the applause died, Skins Turner cleared his throat. “Afraid I’ve got you beat, son.” Skins turned over his cards. He had three kings, or what gamblers called “a set.” He raked in the pot while laughing under his breath.

The crowd let out a collective groan, and so did Jasper. Even though he didn’t know how Scalzo’s scam worked, he knew that DeMarco couldn’t lose. Yet somehow, DeMarco hadlost. Jasper stared at the electronic leader board hanging over the feature table. DeMarco was now in third place.