“Your dealer is just being attentive,” the man said. “One of the other players seemed to have a moment of panic. Very strange.”
Like he hadn’t had a hand in it.
Ryan said, “Why don’t you take a break, Julie? Get something to eat, come back in an hour.”
She didn’t need a break. She wanted to flush the last ten minutes out of her mind. If she kept working, she might be able to manage, but Ryan’s tone didn’t invite argument.
“Yeah, okay,” she murmured, feeling vague.
Meanwhile, the man in the white shirt was walking away, along the casino’s carpeted main thoroughfare, following the woman.
Rushing now, Julie cleaned up her table, signed out with Ryan, and ran after the man.
“You, wait a minute!”
He turned. She expected him to argue, to express some kind of frustration, but he remained calm, mildly inquisitive. As if he’d never had a strong emotion in his life. She hardly knew what to say to that immovable expression.
She pointed. “You spotted it—you saw she was cheating.”
“Yes.” He kept walking—marching, rather—determinedly. Like a hunter stalking a trail before it went cold. Julie followed, dodging a bachelorette party—a horde of twenty-something women in skin-tight mini-dresses and overteased hair—that hadn’t been there a moment ago. The man slipped out of their way.
“How?” she said, scrambling to keep close to him.
“I was counting cards and losing. I know how to count—I don’t lose.”
“You were—” She shook the thought away. “No, I mean how was she doing it? I couldn’t tell. I didn’t spot any palmed cards, no props or gadgets—”
“He’s changing the cards as they come out of the shoe,” he said.
“What? That’s impossible.”
“Mostly impossible,” he said.
“The cards were normal, they felt normal. I’d have been able to tell if something was wrong with them.”
“No, you wouldn’t, because there was nothing inherently wrong with the cards. You could take every card in that stack, examine them all, sort them, count them, and they’d all be there, exactly the right number in exactly the number of suits they ought to be. You’d never spot what had changed because he’s altering the basic reality of them. Swapping a four for a six, a king for a two, depending on what he needs to make blackjack.”
She didn’t understand, to the point where she couldn’t even frame the question to express her lack of understanding. No wonder the cameras couldn’t spot it.
“You keep saying ‘he,’ but that was a woman—”
“And the same person who was there yesterday. He’s a magician.”
The strange man looked as if he had just played a trick, or pushed back the curtain, or produced a coin from her ear. Julie suddenly remembered where she’d seen him before: in a photo on a poster outside the casino’s smaller theater. The magic show. “You’re Odysseus Grant.”
“Hello, Julie,” he said. He’d seen the name tag on her uniform vest. Nothing magical about it.
“But you’re a magician,” she said.
“There are different kinds of magic.”
“You’re not talking about pulling rabbits out of hats, are you?”
“Not like that, no.”
They were moving against the flow of a crowd; a show at one of the theaters must have just let out. Grant moved smoothly through the traffic; Julie seemed to bang elbows with every single person she encountered.
They left the wide and sparkling cavern of the casino area and entered the smaller, cozier hallway that led to the hotel wing. The ceilings were lower here, and plastic ficus plants decorated the corners. Grant stopped at the elevators and pressed the button.
“I don’t understand,” she said.
“You really should take a break, like your pit boss said.”
“No, I want to know what’s going on.”
“Because a cheater is ripping off your employer?”
“No, because he’s ripping off me.” She crossed her arms. “You said it’s the same person who’s been doing this, but I couldn’t spot him. How did you spot him?”
“You shouldn’t be so hard on yourself. How would you even know what to look for? There’s no such thing as magic, after all.”
“Well. Something’s going on.”
“Indeed. You really should let me handle this—”
“I want to help.”
The doors slid open, and Julie started to step through them, until Grant grabbed her arm so hard she gasped. When he pulled back, she saw why: the elevator doors had opened on an empty shaft, an ominous black tunnel with twisting cable running down the middle. She’d have just stepped into that pit without thinking.
She fell back and clung to Grant’s arm until her heart sank from her throat.
“He knows we’re on to him,” Grant said. “Are you sure you want to help?”
“I didn’t see it. I didn’t even look.”
“You expected the car to be there. Why should you have to look?”
She would never, ever take a blind step again. Always, she would creep slowly around corners and tread lightly on the ground before her. “Just like no one expects a housewife or a businessman from the Midwest to cheat at table games in Vegas.”
“Just so.”
The elevator doors slid shut, and the hum of the cables, the ding of the lights, returned to normal. Normal—and what did that mean again?
“Maybe we should take the stairs,” Julie murmured.
“Not a bad idea,” Grant answered, looking on her with an amused glint in his eye that she thought was totally out of place, given that she’d almost died.
Down another hallway and around a corner, they reached the door to the emergency stairs. The resort didn’t bother putting any frills into the stairwell, which most of its patrons would never see: The tower was made of echoing concrete, the railings were steel, the stairs had nonskid treads underfoot. The stairs seemed to wind upward forever.
“How do you even know where he is? If he knows you’re looking for him, he’s probably out of town by now.”
“We were never following him. He’s never left his room.”
“Then who was at my table?”
“That’s a good question, isn’t it?”
This was going to be a long, long climb.
Grant led, and Julie was happy to let him do so. At every exit door, he stopped, held before it a device that looked like an old-fashioned pocket watch, with a brass casing and a lumpy knob and ring protruding. After regarding the watch a moment, he’d stuff it back in his trouser pocket and continue on.
She guessed he was in his thirties, but now she wasn’t sure—he seemed both young and old. He moved with energy, striding up the stairs without pause, without a hitch in his breath. But he also moved with consideration, with purpose, without a wasted motion. She’d never seen his show, and thought now that she might. He’d do all the old magic tricks, the cards and rings and disappearing box trick, maybe even pull a rabbit from a hat, and his every motion would be precise and enthralling. And it would all be tricks, she reminded herself.