Loaded Dice by James Swain Page A

“Amin, that you hiding in there?”
    Something resembling a smile crossed Amin’s lips. He didn’t do that very often. For Amin it was no booze, no butts, and no staring at naked chicks. Real introspective, but also a real wizard with numbers. He could do basic math in his head as fast as a computer.
    “I really fooled you, huh,” Amin said.
    Amin had flared his nostrils with pieces of plastic tubing, lowered his forehead by combing his hair straight down, and painted a mole where none had been before. He was a master of disguise, and he had to be. His face was in a database of known card-counters called FaceScan. For a fee, a casino could e-mail a player’s picture to FaceScan and find out if the player was a counter.
    “Sure did,” Gerry said. “But you need another name. No more celebrities.”
    “But it has to be a name we can both remember,” Pash chimed in. He had a problem with American names, except for those he’d seen in the movies. “How about James Dean?”
    Gerry nixed that with a shake of his head. “That’s going to attract attention. You want something that won’t seem out of place. How about John Dean? He was a character in
All the President’s Men
.”
    “Ohh,” Pash said. “
John Dean.
Yes.”
    Amin worked his mouth up and down the way he did when he was thinking. He stepped in front of the dressing mirror that hung next to the bed and appraised himself.
    “John Dean,” he said. “Yeah, that will work.”
             
    That night, they took two cars into town. Pash and Amin shared one while Gerry followed in his rental.
    Amin parked across the street from Mandalay Bay, and Pash hopped out. They did not want to be seen entering the casino together, or even being in the same car near the casino. Casino surveillance cameras were extremely powerful, especially those used on the outside of buildings. A license plate could be read from a block away.
    Pash strolled over to the Glass Pool Inn and stopped to stare at the kidney-shaped, aboveground swimming pool in the parking lot. The pool had seven portholes, allowing bystanders to see the limbs of underwater swimmers. It had been used in many movies, all of which Pash had seen. Amin beeped his horn and drove away.
    Gerry pulled off to the side of the road to wait. Tonight they were going to hit the MGM Grand, and the surveillance there was top-notch. Better to take his time. That way, he would not be seen with Pash or Amin until he was inside the casino.
    Ten minutes later, he pulled into the MGM’s valet area. It was twelve cars wide and looked like an auto show. While he waited for someone to take his car, he took out his cell phone and powered it up. There was a message in voice mail. He retrieved it.
    His father, saying he was coming to Las Vegas.
    “Just what I need,” Gerry muttered.
    He erased the message, then turned the phone off. He’d considered calling his father the last four nights. Each time he’d gone into a casino with Pash and Amin, he’d whipped his cell phone out and considered asking his old man to bail him out.
    He hadn’t made the call.
    He wasn’t sure why. Maybe it was the invisible pressure of fatherhood that had gotten a stranglehold over him the past few months as Yolanda had grown bigger, and his problems had started to include those that hadn’t been born. What was his father’s expression? It was time for Gerry to stop trying and start doing.
    Maybe that was why he hadn’t called his old man.
             
    Gerry entered the lobby a few minutes later, and paused dutifully to stare at the wall of movie screens at the check-in that showed acts playing in the hotel. That was what everyone did, and he didn’t want to appear any different.
    He took his time, going first to the bar and ordering coffee, then heading across the casino, stopping occasionally to watch folks lose their money. Pash had picked the casino tonight, and now Gerry realized why he’d chosen this one. The MGM was owned