Where the Rain Gets In (12 page)

“And now they do?”

“Yes,” said Mike, “and I’ve persuaded
them to invest in this trip.”

“So whatever we win,” asked Katie, “we
have to give right back to them?”

“They want a fifty percent return on
their money.”

“Fifty percent! We’ll never do that; the
best we ever made was about thirty.”

“But we’ve never had access to these
kinds of funds before.”

“How much?”

“A hundred grand.”

“They’re giving you a hundred grand to
gamble with in Las Vegas?” asked Katie. “And you have to come home with a
hundred and fifty?”

“I’m not coming home,” said Mike, “at
least not to Manchester. “But I do hope to pay them back, yes. I think they’d
find me, even in Belfast.”

“But what security have you given them?”

“The magazine,” said Mike. “If they
don’t get their hundred and fifty then I sign the magazine over to them. I
could simply have sold my part of the magazine but it wasn’t enough and
besides, I needed them to get the money into the country. You can’t just walk
into the States with that kind of money on you.”

“So what, you meet a contact who hands
you over the money?”

“And who keeps an eye on me while I’m in
Vegas,” said Mike. “And of course, who I give the one-fifty back to when we’re
done?”

“But what if you lose?” asked Katie.
“Or, what if you don’t win that amount – ”

Katie stopped and did the maths in her head.
She looked at Mike.

“You have more than the hundred grand
from the Chinese,” she said. “You’ve sold the magazine anyway – Jesus Christ,
Mike!”

“It’s a risk, I admit,” said Mike, “but
it won’t be a problem so long as I get them their one-fifty back.”

“Mike,” said Katie. “All this, just so
you can prove some card-counting theory of Eugene’s might work?”

“We know it works; we’ve just never done
it on this scale before. And you know that’s not why I’m doing it – okay, I’ll
admit that’s part of the reason, but you know the real reason is Bruno.”

“But you don’t owe him anything,” said
Katie. “He’s an adult – he has to learn to look after himself.”

“You know he won’t last two minutes once
I’m gone from Manchester. He won’t keep his job now I’ve sold the magazine –
he’s unemployable in a world of unemployment. I don’t owe you anything either,
but I want to do this one last thing – the three of us together.”

“Well, count me out,” said Katie. “I’ve
always known you were mad but this fucking takes it. You can’t earn that amount
in the casinos and it’s not like it is here, you know – it won’t be baseball
bats they come at you with.”

“Vegas isn’t like that any more,” said
Mike. “It’s all big-business, huge corporations; they can’t afford to have
their customers rough handled in public.”

“Exactly,” said Katie, “in public!
They’ll take you to some back room and shoot you. You’re fucking crazy, Mike.”

“They can’t touch us,” said Mike. “What
we’re doing isn’t illegal. And if there’s any trouble, we just walk – with our
winnings, of course.”

“But don’t you think they’re wise to
card counting over there too?” asked Katie. “And they have much better
monitoring systems, hidden cameras – everything!”

“That’s why I need you and Bruno to help
play the tables,” said Mike. You two can distract them before I step up with
the big money.”

“No,” said Katie, “you can forget about
me; I won’t do it.”

They sat in silence for a while, their
own silence amidst the noise of the pub. Katie knew this was as much about her
as it was about Bruno; it was Mike’s way of coping with it coming to an end.
He’d spent four years trying to reach Katie and now he was accepting defeat.
Well, if he couldn’t help her in that way, at least he could set her up with
some money – he could always do that. She wouldn’t have been surprised to learn
that Mike intended splitting the money equally between Katie and Bruno.

“You don’t have to prove anything,
Mike,” she said. “You’re right – you don’t owe me a thing. In fact, you’ve done
more for me than I had any right to expect. But we both know – and Bruno knows
– that we each have to make our own way from here.”

Katie knew that she and Bruno could
quite easily lose it out there, alone in the world, and that Mike hoped somehow
to be always there for them. But it was unrealistic to believe he could protect
them forever.

“I’ll get some drinks,” said Katie, and
went up to the bar. When she returned, Mike had placed two magazines on the
table, one his own and the other a university medical periodical.

“What are these?” asked Katie.

“Would it help if I told you the casinos
were only a part of what I have in mind?” said Mike.

Katie looked at the two magazines.

“What?” she asked.

“Here,” said Mike, and pointed to the
university periodical. “This article on research being carried out at the
University, funded by Halibro.”

“I’ve never heard of them.”

“I’m not surprised – they’re an American
pharmaceutical firm.”

“From San Diego?” asked Katie. The
article mentioned similar research into heart disease in San Diego. “What of
them?”

“Well, the research doesn’t exist.”

“So, why the article?” asked Katie. “And
why follow it up in your own magazine?” Mike’s piece – written by one of his
staff – was presented as a scoop of investigative reporting. “Won’t the company
simply deny it?”

“They already have,” said Mike.

“So what’s the point?”

“No point, unless someone starts
investing large sums of money in Halibro, and then the more they deny it, the
more people will think it’s true.”  

“And their share price will rise – ”

“From a current low of just below two
dollars per share,” said Mike.

“But nobody’s going to find these
articles,” said Katie. “They’re too obscure for the American stock market to
care about.”

“You know as well as I do that if
there’s a large enough investment from somewhere then traders will find out
why.”

“And this is what you intend to do with
the hundred thousand, or two hundred thousand?” asked Katie.

“A bit of both, actually,” said Mike,
and smiled. “I want to increase our stake money in the casinos, and then shock
the stock market into reacting.”

“You’re mad!”

“I know, but it’s so much more fun than
being sane.”

“Seriously, Mike. You’ll never trade
again – or they could arrest you. What if the share price doesn’t rise?”

“It will,” said Mike, “you know it will.
People are so greedy, and by then I’ll have sold my shares and left the
country.”

“You’re mad,” said Katie again. “They’ll
never let you back in the States.”

Mike shrugged.

“I was only born there,” he said. “I’ve
no particular ties to the States, but my citizenship does allow me to own
shares in their stock market.”

“Everything about you is crazy,” said
Katie. “How can you be a citizen of three countries? It’s impossible!”

Mike smiled.

“It’s too good not to try, isn’t it?”

K
atie smiled at the thought of what she
was doing: driving a Lincoln Convertible from Phoenix to Las Vegas.

She’d come a long way. She wasn’t being
entirely truthful when she told Mike when they’d first met that she’d never
been out of Manchester, but she wasn’t going to mention her annual trip to
Blackpool for fear he might understand it meant she’d once been in care. This
though – this was something different, and it was a measure of how much she’d
achieved since leaving care at the age of eighteen. Six years later and she had
a first class degree in law, a job lined up for the end of the summer in London
and – if this trip went according to Mike’s plan – she was about to become
financially independent for the rest of her life.

The moment wasn’t entirely perfect. She
wouldn’t have chosen to have Bruno as a passenger in the car, for example; it
would have been nice to be with Mike or, even better, alone. And she wouldn’t
necessarily have chosen this destination for her first trip to America, but
then she wouldn’t have been here at all if it wasn’t for Mike, so here she was.

Las Vegas was the obvious destination
for Mike, but it took him the four years of college before he got there. He was
itching to try out Eugene’s card counting theory in Vegas, but couldn’t before
he was twenty-one. It killed Mike to wait. He’d often been refused entry into
casinos in Manchester – some had a door policy of twenty-one rather than
eighteen, and Mike still looked very young to be out gambling. Unlike Katie,
who was a couple of years older than most of their class, Mike was a year
younger.

“Maybe that’s why they sometimes call
blackjack twenty-one,” suggested Katie.

“Very funny,” said Mike. “It must be
wonderful to be so mature and grown-up.”

Mike hadn’t been able to let go of the
idea that the casinos could be beaten, that it was possible to take their money
by using his brain. If any one thing had dominated his time in college then it
was this idea, yet to be fair Mike hadn’t allowed it to take over his life. He
too was about to graduate – not with the same scarily high marks as Katie, but
it was a law degree all the same. Mike had too many wide-ranging interests and
ideas for gambling to have become an obsession. Yet he knew, and Katie knew,
that he’d never rest until he’d tried it in Vegas.

Well, thought Katie, Mike’s time had
come. He was about to find out if it could be done.

The three of them – Katie, Mike and
Bruno – flew together to Newark and spent a few days in Atlantic City. The idea
was to become accustomed to the gambling scene in the States; they made a
little money, but viewed it as a holiday. From there they flew separately on
internal flights – Katie and Bruno to Phoenix where they hired the car as a
couple, and Mike to Vegas.

“From the moment we leave Newark,” said
Mike, “the fewer connections they make between us, the better. You and Bruno
check into the MGM Grand and I’ll see you at the tables.”

They’d chosen the MGM Grand because it
was due to close down, or relocate, in a year or so, and Mike thought their
surveillance systems might be less sophisticated than some of the newer hotels.
Katie and Bruno were to play the tables and signal to Mike when the count was
good; this way Mike didn’t waste time and money on playing losing hands. They
were also to act as a distraction – Bruno was to make as much trouble as he
could, playing the part of the unhappy loser, and Katie was to be Bruno’s
long-suffering girlfriend. Katie and Bruno were to bet with only small amounts,
so the priming of the tables would actually cost them relatively little – for
all Bruno’s noise and complaints. Mike was to check in separately to a motel
out by the airport in Vegas, and they were all to meet up there once they’d finished
playing; there was no way Mike was hanging around the MGM Grand having taken so
much of their money. Katie and Bruno were to act pissed at losing and check out
early; they hoped that with over two thousand rooms in the hotel, nobody was
likely to notice, let alone care.

That was the plan and that was how Katie
came to be on the highway from Phoenix to Vegas. The sun was scorching her arms
but it seemed crazy not to have the top down. She looked across at Bruno; his
skin seemed to be fine, as though it suited the sun. He wore a simple black
T-shirt and Katie had to admit he looked good – if only he wasn’t wearing a
huge cowboy hat down over his face. Even this though seemed to make sense in
the sun and she envied him his ease with the heat. She pulled the car over to
the side of the highway and the sound of the gravel beneath the tyres disturbed
Bruno. He pushed the hat up with a single finger and looked across at Katie.

“I’m burning in the sun,” said Katie. “I
need to put some more lotion on my arms.”

As the car stopped, Katie became aware
of the silence. But then she realised it wasn’t the silence she’d noticed, but
the sounds of the desert. She was in a foreign country a long way from home,
and she was alone with Bruno. While they were travelling, the motion of the car
had reassured Katie that this was simply the next stage of Mike’s plan, but she
felt isolated out here, and didn’t particularly like it.

Katie opened the car door and stepped
out on to the perfect surface of the road. There were no cars visible in the
heat haze hanging over the perfectly straight line of the highway. She opened
the boot of the car and reached into her bag for the lotion. She poured it
along the length of both arms and then across her shoulders. As she rubbed it
in she caught Bruno looking at her in the rear view mirror. She wiped the
remaining lotion on her hands across her face and forehead. She pulled out a
light long-sleeved shirt and put it on, though it was clingy and uncomfortable
on her arms.

“What’s the point of putting lotion on
if you’re going to cover yourself up?” asked Bruno, when Katie got back into
the car.