Sin City by Harold Robbins Page B

fixing a tire,” he explained.
    Cards were his life—his sex life, his children, his filet mignon. And poker was his game.
    â€œPoker’s the only real game of skill in a casino,” he said. “All the rest are just pits where you throw your money because the odds are always with the house. With six decks, blackjack’s become a game of chance to all but a few freaks who can count that many cards. You can have runs of luck with poker, good and bad, but you have the same odds as everyone else at the table. With the odds neutral, it comes down to who’s the best poker player.”
    Embers knew everything about poker—including how to cheat. He started teaching me to play and to watch for cheating.
    â€œYou can’t play poker timidly, you have to be completely fearless. A poker table is a battlefield in which no quarter is asked or given. I’ve played poker all my life. Played my first game in Helena, Montana, in the back of a saloon when I was sixteen. I’ve seen men lose their homes, jobs, families, and their lives at the turn of a card. Poker is my poison and my aphrodisiac. The only hand I won’t bet on is aces and eights. It’s the bad-luck hand Wild Bill Hickok was holding when he got shot in the back by Dirty Jack McCall.”
    He showed me how to cheat.
    â€œWith a false shuffle and cut, the cards look like they’re being mixed, but they don’t change order,” Embers told me. “You then deal out the cards in a prearranged order from a cold deck. Slipping aces to the bottom and dealing them to yourself is another easy scam. Dealers will peek at the top card, see it’s something they want, and deal the next cards or off the bottom until they can drop the good card on themselves or their buddy. When playing blackjack with a single deck, one of the swiftest moves is to gather up the cards on the table and
slip some back on the top where you want them rather than on the bottom where they belong.
    â€œMarking the back of cards with your fingernail so you can identify them later is the easiest cheat. Another trick is to hold back a couple of aces, hide them up your sleeve, and pull them out when you need them. A trick used by some small-time grind joints is to use decks with fewer ten-count cards than smaller cards, that way the dealer doesn’t go bust as often when he’s forced to hit a sixteen. But the easiest way to cheat is simply to use a marked deck.” He spread a deck out on the table we were sitting at and pointed at a card. “What’s that card?”
    â€œI dunno.”
    â€œAce of diamonds, queen of hearts, jack of spades—in this deck, the aces and face cards are marked. Watch.” He bent the end of the deck and let them flow by his thumb at high speed so I could see the pattern on the back in motion. “You can tell the deck is marked because there are interruptions in the pattern on the back of the cards as I fan them.”
    I picked up one of the cards and examined the familiar design on the back.
    â€œPaul, this is the deck you pulled the ace from to beat me out of an extra month’s rent. You cheated me.”
    He stared at me like I’d just accused the pope of bigamy. “Of course. This is Las Vegas.”

20
    LAS VEGAS, 1975
    I met Janelle at a lap-dance club. I had just turned twenty-one, my phony license said I was twenty-three, and I could pass for twenty-five. Sometimes even I forgot how old I really was.
    The last several years had gone by as if I was operating at jetsetter speed. My bagman job with Morty Lardino lasted until a drug dealer high on his own supply pulled a Saturday night special on me when I asked for Morty’s cut. I was out of the North Las Vegas alley and halfway to the Strip before he got it cocked and locked. I don’t know what happened to the guy—the word on the street was that Morty cut off his balls, stuffed them in his mouth, then buried him up to