The Specialists by Lawrence Block Page A

thousand, and at a quarter to three in the morning he had a fifty-dollar bill in his shoe and no chips at all in front of him.
    An assistant manager bought him breakfast, told him to forget his hotel bill, and bought him a bus ticket to L.A. Manso cashed the ticket at the bus station. He took a five-a-week room in downtown Vegas and got a job in an automatic car wash. He spent every night at the downtown casinos. He played as small as he could and never lost more than five dollars in a night. Most of the time he watched.
    He ate out of cans and saved his money. He talked to people, he read books. He thought things out very carefully, and he finally concluded that you couldn’t beat the tables, but he kept going to the casinos and watching the play and betting nickels and dimes while making larger bets in his mind. After a few more months he changed his mind. You could beat the tables, but only if you had three things. You needed the knowledge and the capital and, most important of all, the attitude.
    Even so, you weren’t likely to beat the casinos’ brains out. But you could learn to tune yourself in, could develop the knack of sensing when your luck was coming so that you could ride the hot streaks and go home the instant they cooled. You couldn’t get rich that way, but if you had a thick enough bankroll, you could do about well enough to live fairly well without working for a living.
    It took Manso a long time to save a thousand dollars. When he hit that figure, he was ready. He went back to the Sands. He was in the casino for eighteen hours straight. He would make small bets at the crap table, waiting for the feeling to come, and when it didn’t, he would kill time at a nickel slot machine waiting for the mood to shift. At three in the afternoon, after sixteen hours, he was about three hundred dollars ahead. He was also out of nickels, so he moved on down the line to a quarter machine, dropped in his only quarter, and caught the jackpot on the first shot.
    He went straight to the crap table and pushed his luck straight up to five thousand dollars. He couldn’t do a thing wrong. When his roll stood at five grand, he had the dice rattling in his hand and a thousand of his dollars on the table, a limit bet on the pass line and another on the eight. He was set to roll when something happened inside his head, some message reached him, and he held up in midroll and pulled both bets back and dropped a five-dollar chip on the Don’t Come line.
    “You’re betting against yourself,” the croupier said.
    The dice came up ace-deuce craps. He cashed in five thousand and five dollars. He settled his bill from before and reimbursed the assistant manager for the bus ticket. He was on the next plane to Los Angeles. When the colonel called him, he was working on an assembly line at an aircraft factory and thinking about getting back in the service.
    There was never any question in his mind about what to do with the proceeds from the first job they pulled. He had acquired two of the three necessities earlier, the knowledge and the attitude, and now he had the requisite capital. Now, with all of that cash in his kick, it didn’t really matter whether he won or lost.
    Since then he lived the ideal life. He drifted from Vegas to Puerto Rico to Nassau and back again. Sometimes he went to Europe, but the casinos there didn’t have it for him. Everything was too formal, too stuffy. He liked the life in the American casinos. Plush, wellstaffed hotels, the best night life in the world, beautiful and eager women, fine food, and action whenever he was in the mood. He won a little more than he lost, and when his luck went sour, he knew enough to stay away from the tables. He didn’t need twenty-four hours a day of gambling. There were enough other things that he liked about the life.
    The one thing he didn’t like was the gangsters. You couldn’t have gambling without them, it seemed. They were all over Vegas and the Caribbean. Manso