Mr. Lucky Read Online Free Page B

you’ve gotten me addicted to this stuff. I’m up to three cans a day.”
    “Sorry.”
    “Where’s Mabel? You know, we talk all the time, but I’ve never met her.”
    “She has the day off,” Valentine said. “She’s been working a lot of weekends, and I figured I’d better give her a vacation before she quit.”
    Valentine saw Bill’s eyes scan the living room. Piles of casino surveillance tapes were on every piece of furniture and every table. Attached to each tape was a note from the casino’s head of security, describing the alleged cheating taking place. The notes always came with a check, and Bill whistled through his teeth.
    “Business must be good.”
    “It’s picking up. How about you?”
    Bill drained his can and wiped his mouth on his sleeve. “Lousy. I’ve gotten myself in a real jam and need to ask you a favor.”
    “Sure.”
    “Don’t agree just yet. Hear me out.”
    Valentine stretched out in his La-Z-Boy. A young kid had tossed him hard at judo class the day before, and he’d woken up that morning feeling like a one-legged man after an ass-kicking contest. “Go ahead.”
    “I’m sure you’ve been following the Ricky Smith story in the newspapers.”
    He nodded. Ricky Smith was an overnight media sensation. After jumping off the balcony of the burning hotel into a swimming pool, he’d waltzed into a casino across the street called the Mint, borrowed twenty bucks from a retired bookkeeper, and proceeded to win more than two hundred thousand dollars playing blackjack. From there, he’d gone and played roulette, won another quarter million bucks, then went to the craps table and won another three hundred thousand. He capped off the evening by playing poker with a legend named Tex “All In” Snyder and beat the pants off him. It was an amazing streak even by Las Vegas standards, and the newspapers had dubbed him the world’s luckiest man.
    “I got a call from the owner of the Mint that night,” Bill said. “He didn’t have enough cash in the cage to pay Ricky off. Ricky agreed to come back the next day for his money. The owner decided to put the time to good use and asked me to check him out.”
    “Just in case he was cheating,” Valentine said.
    “Exactly.”
    “Was he?”
    “Ricky Smith is a straight arrow; no criminal record of any kind. I got a credit card company to pull up his files. He lives in a little town in North Carolina called Slippery Rock. This was his fourth trip to Las Vegas since January. Each time he was here, he stayed at the Riverboat. That was all I had to go on. Four trips in the past year.
    “I got the Mint to give me the surveillance videotape of him beating them. I watched it for a few hours. Everything appears normal. He sits down, places a bet, and wins. No hanky-panky on anybody’s part. It looks like he got lucky, plain and simple.
    “For the heck of it, I decided to call around and see if he’d played at any other casino during his other trips. Come to find out, he did. He played blackjack at the Bellagio two months ago. Guess what? They pegged him a card counter.”
    “Did they ban him?”
    Bill shook his head. “He was losing, so they let him continue. But they kept a file on him, just in case he decided to come back.”
    Valentine tossed his empty soda can into the trash. “Let me guess. You then looked at the tape of him playing at the Mint a little differently.”
    “I sure did,” Bill said, leaning forward in his seat. “And I found a discrepancy. When he played blackjack at the Mint, he didn’t card count. Matter of fact, he didn’t adhere to Basic Strategy. He played like a moron, yet won every hand he played.”
    “Every hand? No losses?”
    “Not a one.”
    Basic Strategy had been developed by a mathematician named Edward Thorp and was the optimal way to play blackjack. Card counters knew Basic Strategy like the back of their hand and never deviated from it. For Ricky to have stopped using Basic Strategy was like saying