Vegas Vendetta

At the same moment, another man ran panting and wild-eyed into the main lobby to tell a breathless story of murder and kidnapping.

Bolan had swum away from the cops once, but that had been at Miami Beach and in the Atlantic Ocean. Now he was wondering if he could do as well treading water in a hotel pool at Vegas, with four dutiful attendants to keep reminding him how sweet life could be.

He felt a soft body gently gyrating against his beneath the water and a warm voice with a barely noticeable French accent was telling him, "You are a very attractive man, to be a killer."

For some odd reason, Bolan at that moment thought of Carl Lyons and of something the cop had said to him during that soft run into town such a short while earlier.

The busty blonde was hanging onto his shoulder and playfully touseling his hair. "Some killer," she said. "He didn't even bring his gun."

The breathless French accent protested, "Oh, but I think he has a very nice gun."

"Oh well," Bolan said to no one in particular, "we do."

Chapter Seven

Big wi

Vito Aposti

Vito Aposti

This latter consideration was most important. The skim off the top, much of it, was used to settle off-the-record interests of owners who could not be issued casino licenses due to a narrow-minded state law which forbade the licensing of persons with criminal records. The Gold Duster was carrying more than a dozen such undercover partners, each of whom was provided weekly accountings and off-the-top payoffs. They got their regular profits too, of course — through their fronts — along with the other stockholders at dividend time, but there was always a need for black money in the lucrative cash markets of the underworld. The casinos provided an ever-flowing river of cash — hard cash — for quick opportunities and even larger profits in those market places.

Skim was also routinely fu

Vito was a consummate skim artist. He had worked out a detection-proof system which would make a stage magician sick with envy. Vita's— system was no ordinary sleight-of-hand routine, however. It was built upon an elaborate code of signals between the dealers, the pit bosses, and the backroom accountants, and it involved a constant juggling of "fill" and "draw" records for each table in the casino. A "fill" constitutes a sum of chips and silver added to a table during a particular shift. A "draw" is the opposite case, the removal of excess table stakes. Paper currency flows across the game tables, also, from patron to dealer, the patron buying chips from the dealer and the latter immediately depositing the currency through a slot into the lock-box at the bottom of the table. It is this particular bit of action upon which Vito's "system" is based. Through an elaborate signalling arrangement, a constant tally was kept of the amount of currency going into the lock-boxes, making possible the pre-juggling of balance sheets for the official counts.

The three soberest moments of the day for most professional Vegans are the shift-changes; these are the times for "the count." State law demands that a balance sheet for each gaming table be prepared at the end of every shift. All the action stops while the silver and chips are counted, the "fills" and "draws" calculated, and the currency from the lock-boxes removed for counting behind locked doors and under extreme security conditions.

For Vito Aposti

Five o'clock to seven were his "paperwork hours," during which time he studiously reviewed shift audits, pit averages, and reports on high rollers and big losers. In gambling parlance, a high roller is a patron who consistently bets heavily at the tables.

At seven o'clock Aposti

At eight o'clock he presided over the final count of the day and began his own official workday, remaining on the casino floor and personally supervising the action until the 4 a.m. count. Vito was the hardest working boss on the strip — or anywhere in the valley for that matter — and he was generally acknowledged as such. The forty-eight-year-old bachelor maintained his only residence on the premises in a specially-constructed efficiency apartment above the casino, and he literally lived on the job — rarely going into the adjacent hotel except to pay respects to a visiting dignitary or to use the eighteen-hole pro golf course. He was soft-spoken, articulate, apparently well educated, and he was generally respected by his employees.

With a strong instinct for image-making, a week never passed when Vito did not appear at some civic function, always with a staff-publicist in the close background taking notes and pictures. He was "generous" in his regular donations to local churches and community service organizations, and at least once every day he "came across" for a heavy loser who had gone broke at the Gold Duster, providing the victim with a non-negotiable airline ticket and a hundred dollars in cash, deliverable at the airport boarding gate by a staff publicist with camera. Of such frail and insignificant charities was fostered the image of "Heart of Gold Vito," a romantic reincarnation of the old Mississippi gambling men who would never let a victim slink away stone broke.