Buzz Cut (3 page)

An hour later Butler Jack exited the Palmetto Expressway onto the Tamiami Trail, drove a few blocks east, and stopped at a Cuban market. Butler went inside, walked straight back to the storage room. There he traded the two trays of casino chips to a smartly dressed young woman for fifty-one thousand dollars in used twenties.

Loaves and fishes. Water to wine.

"Cruise ships?"

"Yeah, you know, those big white things, like
Love Boat.
Gopher and the gang."

"Gopher?" Thorn said.

"
Love Boat.
It was a TV show. People always falling in love on this big white cruise ship." Sugarman looked out at the glassy flats. Cast his lure thirty feet out, the six-pound line melting against the still water with barely a trace. "Jeez, never mind. I forgot for a second who I was with. Only guy in America never heard of
Love Boat.
Mr. Pop Culture himself."

"Hey, I try to keep up. But it's hard."

"Yeah, without a TV, a radio, newspapers, I expect it is."

"I read books," Thorn said.

"Like I said, totally out of it."

Thorn picked up his paddle, realigned the canoe so they were facing away from the early afternoon sun.

For most of August and September Thorn had puttered in his downstairs workshop, trying to construct the canoe without benefit of blueprint or model. Just a vague image in his mind. The canoe had emerged after a month of trial and error. Bending the water-soaked slats of birch until they bowed. Stretching the canvas across the birch. Twice he'd misaligned the keel, cut the canvas short, snapped innumerable ribs. But finally it came together,
everything
flush, riveted tight, ready for its shakedown cruise.

Neither he nor Sugarman had fished from a canoe before, but they were getting the hang of it. No leaks. Well balanced. Of course, later on this afternoon would be the real test, returning to the docks at Flamingo. Five miles of open water.

Thorn's back muscles were burning already, a blister had broken open on his right thumb from the trip out. Sugarman soaked through his khaki shirt in the first ten minutes as they'd paddled through the cool dawn.

But they didn't complain. It was worth the effort to fish those southern Everglades flats, a place no powerboat could reach, not even the shallowest draft skiff poling with its engine tilted up. On those secluded shoals there were large areas with barely enough water at high tide to dampen the sand, closer to a beach than a bay. But some of the finger channels that webbed the sand were chocked with fish. Grouper and trout, redfish and snapper. Even a few tarpon were laid up back there.

"How the hell you get hooked up with a cruise ship company?"

"Out of the blue," Sugar said as he drew in line. "Last month the head of security for Fiesta Cruises calls up, wanted to know if I'd hire on for a month or two, work undercover. I asked him how he picked me, he wouldn't say. Just that my name wound up on his desk."

"You got a mysterious benefactor."

"Appears that way."

Thorn watched his lab puppy sleeping under the center seat of the canoe. Leaning forward, Thorn waved away a mosquito that had settled on the dog's nose. Add that to the list of good reasons for having a dog around—mosquitoes preferred their blood to humans'.

"Fiesta Cruise Lines," Thorn said. "That's Morton Sampson's company."

Sugarman swung his head around, peered at Thorn. "Jesus! How the hell . . ."

"Hey, I know a few things. He's famous. Morton Sampson, the guy with the missing daughter. Monica."

"You never heard of Gopher,
Love Boat,
but you know Morton Sampson."

"Handbills," Thorn said. "You remember. Someone dumped a stack of them in the ditch out by the highway. Back when they were looking for the girl, couple, three years ago. I used those posters to light the evening cook fire for about six months. Pretty girl. They ever find her?"

"No. Her old man must've spent a million dollars on posters, private eyes, TV ads."

"Damn good-looking young lady. It bothered me to light her up every night. But I couldn't just throw those things away."

Thorn watched a hawk strafe the mangroves to their east warding off some interloper.

"This new job," Sugarman said, "I get all the free cruises I want. Except it's wasted on me. I never had any aspirations to cruise. Big ship like that, it's like some skyscraper's fallen into the bay and floated off. And, man, the ships smell like damn Greyhound buses. Too many people been there, the upholstery, the rooms, everything reeks of body odor. Smell you can't get out. Every week the boat docks, passengers get off, cleaning crew comes aboard, dusts and waxes the floors, an hour later more passengers are lined up to get on. Thing never has a chance to air out."

"That what they hired you for? A body odor detective. Catch who's stinking up the place."

Sugarman looked up at the empty sky.

"I'm after a thief," he said.

Rover woke and began to whimper. Thorn reached over, lifted him up and suspended him over the side of the canoe, and a moment or two later the dog let go of a stream of pee. Damn good boat dog. When he was done, Thorn set him back on his pillow.

"This guy, he's been hitting this one ship for around fifty thousand dollars every month for the last seven months. The M.S.
Eclipse.
Uses a different approach every time. They think it's somebody in the crew, so they brought me in. Want to keep it all hush-hush. Bad for business otherwise."

"High adventure on the high seas."

"High seas is right," Sugar said. "Couple weeks ago I'm prowling the casino all night. Boat's tossing and pitching in that tropical storm Edgar. Twelve-foot swells. But does that stop the goddamn gamblers? No, nuh-uh. Room is full. They're pulling the slot machine arms like one set of robots making love to another set. They can barely stand up, but they're keeping at it. Place is smoky as hell. That's the worst part. Gamblers gotta have their cigarettes."

Thorn leaned forward and scratched Rover's ears. The puppy groaned with pleasure.

"Middle of that tropical storm, I notice this guy. I don't know why. He's dressed like everybody else, with his plastic cup full of coins, same as all the rest. But there's something about him. Way he moved, I don't know."

"Furtive gestures," Thorn said.

"Yeah, something like that. Guy had sneaky eyes. He wasn't looking around, glancing over his shoulder or anything. In fact, maybe that's what caught my attention. Just kept his eyes down. Dark glasses, baseball cap. He'd work one machine for a long time, a half hour or so, he'd move on to the next one. Going like that all night, one machine to the next."

"Yeah?"

"It was an accident I caught on. He left a quarter in the payout tray. I picked it up, and bingo bongo, I know he was pulling something."

"He was using slugs."

"No," Sugarman said. "Much better."

"I'm supposed to guess?"

"You'd never get it. Even after I had the thing in my hand, it was a few more days before I figured out how he was working the scam. By then the cruise was over, the guy had disembarked, long gone."

Thorn picked up his paddle, sculled them away from the small island they were drifting toward.

"Don't you want to know what it was? The scam."

"I'm all atwitter."

Sugarman said, "He milled the edges off the quarters."

Thorn looked over at him.

"The rough, serrated edges, you know. Smoothed them off."

"And what the hell would that accomplish?"

"Exactly," Sugar said. "What difference does it make, grinding the edges off the quarters? The casino people had no idea, so they fly in one of their hotshot engineers, he meets us in Nassau, one of the stops. This kid, he looks like a movie usher, long greasy hair, some loser you'd find hanging around a video game room, but no, he's their resident electronic genius. Smug little bastard.

"So anyway, we sat around, dropping that quarter into machines. It registered like any other quarter. No difference. Bing, bing, pull the arm, you get two cherries and an apple. Nothing. Open up the machine, take it out, try it again on another machine. Same thing."

Thorn watched the puppy sleep. His paws jerked as he chased a rabbit through the tall grass of his dream.

"The video kid, he gets out his laptop computer, starts banging away, doing computations, analyzing the specs. The cruise people are yammering among themselves. So, I get up, walk around looking at the slots. I've been mulling this thing over for days, coming up with nothing, but then out of nowhere it hits me. I don't know diddly about the mechanics, except the little I just overheard as these guys were talking. But what I do know is the win rate is four percent on slots, but on that particular cruise the win rate went up to seven percent. Either a lot of people got real lucky, or somebody was rigging things.

"So without completely understanding it, I go back over and announce that I know how the guy pulled it off. They all look up. And I hear myself, I'm off to the races but hell if I know how I know any of this.

"I say, look, what if the milled quarter goes in, registers like the real quarter. But its weight is just enough different from a real quarter that maybe, for some reason, it doesn't register when it comes out."

"I'm not following this."

"See, the machines are set to pick up slugs or foreign coins. They have a very precise measuring scale for entering coins. So a scam artist couldn't adjust the coins too much, or the machine won't take them. But just milling the edges off, apparently that isn't enough to trigger the alarm."

"I guess I'm just dense," Thorn said.

"Okay, the crook comes in with a bucket of milled quarters. He goes up to a machine, starts playing. Puts them in, loses, loses, loses. His milled quarters are in the machine now, circulating among the real ones. Then he wins a small jackpot, four or five real quarters. He keeps on playing, feeding the machine the milled quarters, and he loses, loses, loses. Then finally when he hits another winner, this time in addition to the eight or ten real quarters he's supposed to win, one of his milled quarters is in line next to them and it slips out too. Only it doesn't register going out. Its smooth edges allow it to slip past the exit counter. The exit counter isn't so precise. If you catch the slugs going in, there's no need for the exit to be finely tuned.

"So what happens, instead of winning eight quarters he wins nine. Eight of theirs, one of his. Keeps feeding the milled quarters, and whenever he wins, his special quarters don't stick. So he keeps playing one machine long enough, he's got all his milled quarters back and he's milked most of the real quarters out of the machine too.

"Then he moves on to the next one and does the same thing. Careful to keep his customized quarters separate from the real ones. Very patient. Very low tech. No big jackpot or anything. But little by little over the course of an evening, he can walk out of there with a sizable take. Do seven thousand a day for the whole week of the cruise, he's got his fifty."

"Fifty thousand. It's this guy's magic number?"

"That's been his take. Poker or slots or roulette. Then last weekend he got away with eight thousand bucks' worth of chips. He sells them somewhere, makes sixty, seventy percent of face value. So there it is again, hitting around that same figure. Fifty thousand. That was the trip one of the casino workers was killed, slashed open. His shirt was stolen."

"That's connected?"

"The bad guy used the shirt to impersonate a casino worker."

"Killed a guy for his shirt."

"Yeah, it looks that way."

Thorn stared out at the still water for a while. "How'd you figure it out? The milled quarter thing."

"That's what they wanted to know. All of them looking at me suspiciously, you know, like maybe I was in on it. But I couldn't tell him. I heard it come out of my mouth, babbling away like some part of my brain figured it out, while the rest of my brain didn't understand it. A gift from the gods."

Thorn nodded. He knew a little about those.

"Anyway, we tested it out. Went into the ship's machine shop, filed off the edges on fifty quarters, played them, and sure thing, they didn't stick in the machine. If they were in the chute next to a payout, they came out too. You keep playing long enough with money that slips out on its own, you could skim every quarter out of that whole casino."

"Impressive," Thorn said.

"It would've been," Sugarman said. "Except the guy got away. His face didn't come out on the video cameras. We checked and the guy kept his head down, very aware of being watched. Had on that baseball cap, big dark glasses. He was tall, that's all we could tell.

"The cruise ship people, they were happy I'd figured out the quarter thing, sure, but it didn't get them any closer to the guy. Then a week later he stabs this guy to death. So now it's serious. Not just money anymore."

Sugarman ran his finger through the water, seemed to be writing a word there.

"I had no idea how much money flows through those ships, the casinos. Hell, every Saturday those ships leave port with two and a half million in the casino bank. A week later they come back with close to three mil. All you need, the average passenger loses fifty dollars a day for a week, there's your half million. So somebody steals fifty thou, it's chickenfeed really, compared to what's actually on the stage coach."

"Chickenfeed? Hell, I'm in the wrong business."

"You're not in any business, Thorn."

Thorn smiled. "Yeah, well, thank God for that."

Thorn watched a small hammerhead sliding along the bottom.

They broke for lunch. Drank a couple of icy Foster's and swallowed down the peanut butter and jelly sandwiches Sugarman's wife had packed. Big gooey things that leaked around the edges.