The Select (26 page)

"Open the trunk," she said. "I'm out
of here."

He grinned. "Only kidding!"

"You'd better be, otherwise you're
going to be one very disappointed medical student."

"Let's go."

As Quinn moved toward the passenger
door, she heard a car behind her. A black Celica GT-S pulled into
the neighboring spot on her side. With all the empty slots around,
she wondered idly why it had to park so close to them. A big blond
fellow got out and gave them a friendly nod. He looked vaguely
familiar, then Quinn recognized him as someone she'd seen around
the security desk in the Science Center. Why was he parking in the
student lot? She noticed him looking past her, directly at Tim,
almost staring. Then he slammed his door and strode up the incline
toward the Administration building.

I wonder if he knows we're going away
overnight? she thought. Probably. Everyone else seemed to. You
couldn't keep too many secrets at a place as small as The
Ingraham.

And everybody seemed to think they
were indeed going to AC for the wild night Tim had kidded about
before. Judy Trachtenberg had caught her in the hall just a few
moments ago, winking and nudging, speaking in a very bad Cockney
accent: "Gettin' away for a bit o' the ol' in an' out, are
we?"

Quinn supposed it was a natural
assumption. She and Tim were seen together a lot, and now here they
were going off with overnight bags.

She settled into the front
seat, belted herself in, and looked at Tim as he started the
engine. She liked Tim, liked him a
lot
. She had a sense that his
occasional sexist remarks and bluff attitude were a male thing, a
front to hide the sensitivity perking below the surface. She was
sure it was there; he'd let the facade slip a couple of times and
she'd caught glimpses of it. Why did he feel he had to hide
it?

Romance with Tim, a little sexual
cuddling, or even sex...would that be so bad? There was an empty
spot in her life, a void that she'd never managed to fill, a
subtle, aching loneliness that she kept submerged in the torrent of
activity that consumed her daily life. But in quiet moments,
sometimes in those early morning hours when she'd awaken before her
alarm clock, she'd feel the pang of that hollow spot.

She wasn't a virgin. That had ended in
high school with Bobby Roca. She'd been sure he was the love of her
life. They'd made lifelong promises to each other, and had wound up
in his bedroom one Saturday night when his parents were away for
the weekend. Her next period had been late and she'd been scared to
death. She'd seen her whole future in medicine swirling down into a
black hole and she was desperate for some support, some comfort,
someone to lean on, just a little. Bobby had offered all the warmth
and comfort of a snake. Worse, he actually blamed her. When her
period finally arrived, a week late, she'd told Bobby to take a
hike.

There'd been nobody since...nobody
important, anyway. Not that there hadn't been opportunities, but
she'd never let a relationship get off the ground. She wasn't sure
why. Why did she take sex so seriously? So many of the girls at U.
Conn had been so casual about it. They went out once or twice and
sex just became part of the relationship. Male and female—what
could be more natural? She knew it wasn't always so great for them,
but neither was it the hardest thing in the world. Why wasn't it
easy for her? Why did she attach so much importance to
it?

Hadn't most of them been raised the
way she'd been—the right man, the right time and place and
circumstances?

Tim might be the right man, but this
wasn't the right time in her life, and a freebie hotel room in
Atlantic City after a night of watching Tim gamble would not be the
right place and circumstances.

And overriding all of it was the
weight of her concern for her career. She couldn't afford any sort
of distraction now. This was not the right time in her life for a
serious relationship—the only kind of relationship she knew how to
have. Later. There would be plenty of time later. For now she had
to remember to keep pulling back from Tim and keeping her eyes—and
the rest of her—focused on the future.

No foreign entanglements.

But snuggling close to him tonight,
his arms around her...a nice thought, a warm thought. But it would
remain just that: a thought.

*

"You're sure you saw it?" Verran
said.

He was standing with Elliot and Kurt
on the rise overlooking the student parking lot.

Kurt nodded. "It was there, right
where Elliot said it was—same coat, same place. I could've reached
out and grabbed it."

"That you'll do later on. In AC.
Follow them there. Watch them. Stay out of sight. Be patient. Wait
for your chance and make it a good one. You got what you
need?"

Kurt nodded. "Reversible jackets,
gloves, ski masks, the works."

"Isn't there another way we can do
this?" Elliot said.

He'd been quiet and edgy all day.
Verran knew Elliot was picturing himself in a jail cell, but he
didn't want to pussy out so he was hanging in there with
Kurt.

"This is no big deal, Elliot. And it's
perfect if it happens up in Jersey. That way The Ingraham isn't
involved in any way. And should there be any question, you were
both here with me all night. Now get going. You don't want to lose
them."

Verran watched them get into their
separate cars and roar off. By tomorrow morning he'd have the
missing bug back and he could rest easy again.

*

"Mmmmmm," Tim said as they came off
the Delaware Memorial Bridge and turned onto New Jersey Route 40.
"The road to Atlantic City. I can smell the money
already."

Quinn looked around at the surrounding
darkness as the four-lane blacktop quickly narrowed to
two.

"Pretty desolate."

"This is mostly farmland.
If you think it's dark here, my dear, wait till we get into the
Jersey Pine Barrens. A million acres of nothing.
Then
you'll see dark. AC
is still almost sixty miles off, so now's as good a time as any to
plan our strategy."

"Strategy?"

"Sure. We're both going to
play."

"Oh, no. I don't know the first thing
about gambling. And I can't afford—"

"You'll be playing with my money.
Here's how it works. In the casinos, blackjack is
dealt—"

"Blackjack? I've never played
blackjack."

"Sure you have. It's twenty-one. The
guy who gets closest to a twenty-one value in the cards he's dealt,
without going over, wins. Number cards are face value, picture
cards are worth ten, and the ace can be worth one or eleven—your
choice. You get dealt an ace and a picture card—say a queen—that's
twenty-one. That's blackjack, and you win
automatically."

"Win what?"

"Money. If you just plain beat the
dealer, you double your money. So if you bet ten bucks, you get
your ten back, plus another ten. A blackjack pays even
more."

"Who pays you?"

"The house."

"Whose house?"

"The casino! Quinn, where've you been
for the past 22 years?"

"I've been lots of places." Why was
Tim getting so worked up? "I just haven't been in
casinos."

"That's obvious. And that's probably a
good thing. But..." He wrinkled his nose as a pungent odor seeped
into the car. "Whew! What's that?"

Quinn recognized it immediately.
"Cows," she said. "Somebody's got a herd along here. You don't grow
up on a farm without knowing that smell."

"Yeah? Well, they do call this the
Garden State. But let me lay the situation out for you. We're going
to be customers of the casino, and since the casino's business is
gambling, we're going to be called gamblers."

"I'd rather be a customer."

"Bear with me, Quinn. We're going to
go into the casino and sit at the table with other gamblers. But
we're not going to play each other. We're going to play the
casino—the house. The house will be represented by the dealer. The
dealer is nothing more than a guy—or lots of times a woman—who is
paid to be a machine."

"I don't get it."

"Dealers have no decision-making
powers. If the cards they've dealt themselves total sixteen or
less, they deal themselves another card. When the cards total more
than sixteen, they take no more. The casinos have calculated that
this strategy gives them the best odds of staying ahead of their
customers. And they're right."

The whole concept baffled Quinn.
"Well, if you know the casino—excuse me, the house—is going to win,
why bother gambling at all?"

"An excellent question, Quinn. A
question many gamblers have asked themselves countless
times."

"It sounds to me like you should
simply walk into the casino, hand your money to the dealer, and
walk out again. You'd save yourself all the sweat and apprehension
and maybe you could do something useful with the extra time you
had."

Tim stared at her, awe in his voice
and a look of utter amazement on his face.

"You're not kidding, are you? You're
really for real, aren't you?"

"The road, Tim," Quinn said, pointing
through the windshield. "Please watch the road."

He faced front again. "How about
excitement, Quinn?"

"What's exciting about losing
money?"

"But that's just it. You
don't
always
lose. Sometimes you win. And it's not so much the winning or
losing but the process itself that matters. It's a chance to beat
the system—or at least
a
system. And everybody likes to beat the system.
Especially me."

"I think we've had this conversation
before."

"Right. While we were waiting to hear
if The Ingraham was going to accept you. That was when I told you
that I can beat the casinos' system."

"Isn't it an old joke that if someone
comes up with what he knows is a sure-fire, fool-proof, can't-lose
gambling system, the casinos will have a car waiting for him at the
airport to take him directly to their tables?"

"Right. Because the casinos have got
their own system: the structure of the pay outs, the ceilings on
the bets, the simple mathematics of the law of averages—everything
is geared toward guaranteeing them the lion's share of the action
that crosses their tables. But no casino's system is set up to
handle a wild card like me."

Dustin Hoffman's face suddenly flashed
before Quinn's eyes and she laughed. "You think you're Rain Man,
don't you."

"I beg your pardon, Miss Cleary. I may
be an idiot, but I am not an idiot savant. Rain Man and I work
differently. His brain was number oriented, mine is picture
oriented. But the end result is the same: after a few decks have
been played, we both have a pretty good idea what's left in the
shoe."

"Now I'm completely lost."

Tim sighed patiently. "Okay. Casinos
don't deal Blackjack from a single deck anymore since a bunch of
people worked out a counting system that gave them a decent edge
over the house."

"But—?"

He held up a hand. "Let me
finish. So the casinos started shuffling up to eight decks at a
time and loading them all into this hopper called a shoe and
dealing from that. Most folks can learn to keep track of a fifty-
or hundred-card deck, but not
four
hundred cards. But I can."

"Your photographic memory," Quinn
said.

"Yep. I remember every card that's
been played."

"But what good is that?"

"Not much until you get down to the
end of the shoe. But when we do get down to the last hundred cards
or so, I usually know exactly what's left in the shoe."

"But if you don't know the order
they're in, what good is it?"

"I don't need to know the
order. All I need to know is if there's a predominance of high
cards or low cards. If those last hundred or so cards are tilted
heavily in either direction, that's when I make my move.
That's
when I make my
killing and beat their system. And you're going to
help."

"What do you mean?"

"Know what this is?" He
held up his right hand; his thumb and forefinger were extended, the
three middle fingers folded down. He wiggled it back and forth.
"It's the Hawaiian hang-loose sign." He wiggled his hand again.
"
In hoc signo vinces
."

She knew the translation, but..."I
still don't get it."

Tim reached over and patted her knee.
"You will, Quinn. By the time we get to AC, all will be clear. And
then we'll both beat the system."

*

Atlantic City wasn't at all as Quinn
had pictured it. The postcards and photos she'd seen over the years
had shown sunny beaches, tall, new, clean buildings, and a wide
boardwalk filled with smiling, happy people. The city she saw as
they came in from the marshy salt flats was old, worn, battered,
and beaten, with vacant store fronts, peeling paint, rotting
shingles, and broken windows. Equally dilapidated people—most of
them black—shuffled or slunk along the narrow, crumbling, littered
sidewalks in the halogen glow of the streetlights.