“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?