Merlin's Pawn: A Doubled-Down Runner in Vegas

By James Nathan Post

The life of a working-class shape-shifter in Las Vegas, a high-rolling sports-book bet runner and low-flying dope runner, and his amorous adventures with a woman who is a child in bed, and vice versa. Cool professionals to crack-crazed crackpots, small-time cons to working carnies, Merlins Pawn is a fast-paced ride through of one of Americas most exciting cities.

• Language: English
• Publisher: iUniverse
• Release date: Nov 13, 2001
• ISBN: 9781469793634

James Nathan Post

James was born Aquarius 1943, raised in southern New Mexico, son of a rocket engineer and an artist. In high school a science-fair winner, and thespian, he became a winning swimmer, gymnast, and martial artist in college. After two years at remote New Mexico Tech studying geophysics, he entered Marine Corps jet pilot training, and eventually served as a helicopter gunship pilot with the 101st Airborne in Viet Nam, where he was highly decorated, including the Distinguished Flying Cross, but drummed out for smoking marijuana. [The novel SACRIFICES is about this time.] After going from the DMZ to Woodstock in 1969, James tuned in, turned on, dropped out, and moved to the ghost town of Jerome, Arizona to write. Three quick divorces. Sex, drugs, rock'n'roll, and religion. Psychedelics, Scientology, Wicca, Tao, and Jesus. Folk music composer, actor, singer, playwright, TV show host, occult publisher's editorial assistant, and founder of The Scribes Of Osiris. [The novel LOST ILLUSIONS is about this time.] In 1980 he returned to his home town Las Cruces, and worked various jobs raising daughter Nieve (politics and finance) and son Nathan (art and music). James now lives in Las Vegas, where he is writing another novel, MERLINSPAWN, about being a dope runner pilot, and sports book bet runner.

Book preview

MERLIN’S PAWN

A Doubled-Down Runner In Vegas

James Nathan Post

Writers Club Press

San Jose New York Lincoln Shanghai

MERLIN’S PAWN

A Doubled-Down Runner In Vegas

All Rights Reserved © 2001 by James Nathan Post

No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any

means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording,

taping, or by any information storage retrieval system, without the permission

in writing from the publisher.

Writers Club Press

an imprint of iUniverse, Inc.

For information address:

iUniverse, Inc.

5220 S. 16th St., Suite 200

Lincoln, NE 68512

www.iuniverse.com

This book is entirely a work of fiction.

No character is intended to represent any real person.

ISBN: 978-1-469-79363-4 (ebook)

ISBN: 0-595-20743-X

Printed in the United States of America

Contents

1: THE BET RUNNER

2: MEETING LUZI

3: JESSIE AND ROY

4: BILL GARRETT’S OFFER

5: THE GREAT LONGUINI

6: LUZI’S SECRETS

7: BLACKJACK

8: THE MILLENNIUM

9: LOUIE RIZZI

10: THE BACCHANAL AMERICAN TEMPLE

11: DOING BARBIE

12: THE DOPE RUNNER

13: A WRECK AND A WRAP

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

For Suzi.

1: The Bet Runner

Dawn doesn’t come up in Las Vegas. It’s been up for a long time already.

I’ll take you on this first run personally, since it is kind of a stage-setting tour, but you might expect to see some Dave did this and Dave said that passages too, if the exterior viewpoint enhances the experience. Shifting viewpoints is kind of stock in trade with me, a kind of magic I might use, like seeing through illusions, or creating them where needed. My job is all about that, a great job for a working-class shape-shifter like myself. I am called upon to be a master illusionist, a guerrilla performer working theater-in-the-round at the eye-to-eye range. The downside is nobody knows it but me.

Sun is coming up when I turn off Lake Mead onto 95E, and head for The Strip. It’s a cold, clear day in the fall of ‘99. I pull the visor down, park my left hand up to block some more of the sun, and settle into the white leather seat of my buck-ace Las Vegas road rocket, which happens to be a 1970 Eldorado. It is red, really red, and I prefer to keep the hubcaps off and the rims painted black, which gives it a kind of downtown tough look I like. With five hundred cubic inches of growl under the hood, and its sharky chisel-point very-un-Caddy-like rear end, it is the closest thing to a sports car Cadillac ever produced. I like thinking that back in 1970, Ross Perot and Ted Turner were both driving this car. License plate says SO PHAT.

I pick the lane that will take me to the 15S exit, and I enjoy the smooth power of the big engine, and I reflect that the ride is a lot like cruising to a mission in the cockpit of the A-6 jet bomber I flew for a couple of years back when I was Lt. David Wood, US Navy. Airplane buffs like to call the P-51 the Cadillac of fighter planes, but it isn’t really appropriate. Not that the Mustang isn’t the classiest fighter of World War II, but that as fighters go, it is more like it’s automobile namesake, light, high-powered, and nimble. My Eldo is more like the Jug, the mighty P-47, big, heavy, enormously powered, and lots more agile than its competition expects.

I pick up 15S, taking care to wait until I’m all the way past the end of the white lines before changing lanes. Las Vegas has very aggressive and very good police, and the fines for such minor traffic violations are huge. We have a quarter of a million people here every day bringing their money and their dreams, and the place has got to be safe for them. That kind of safety doesn’t come cheap. One thing you learn quickly about Las Vegas is those who are in control are IN control, and the cops are definitely among them. I think of it as like a machine that squeezes out the cheese, and trims it off. The trick living here is not to be the cheese.

I fell into my job like hitting the Megabucks, pure luck. Or maybe as I have come to like to believe, the spirit of this town likes me. I came here three years ago when my kids graduated from high school back home in San Manuel, New Mexico, and their mother decided to divorce me and run away to launch an herb tea business in Costa Rica. An old friend of ours from home had moved here several years ago-a wild-ass little blonde secretary type named Jessie Betts-and she was working for a real-estate guy who had just sold a house to another guy who needed somebody for a kind of errand runner. Did I want the job? Sure. It had been a very long time since I had worked as a pilot, my nominal profession, and I had no intention of starting again, so I had no real expectations about what I might do here, maybe try to find work as a performer. But what the hell, when a flying saucer lands on the front lawn, I’m inclined to be the kind who doesn’t run or throw rocks, but gets on.

So I met Dino, a nice enough fellow in his early forties maybe, with an ordinary looking if thick athletic body, and standard Italian full-face features. He lived in a nice house on the west side of town. First time I showed up at his work place, he was renting an apartment a block off The Strip, which he had set up to be the base of operations. He had a big desk and a row of computers in the back room, where he and Ron the Geek, his in-house computer wizard, took information from the internet, like the live-time odds published by Don Best and ilk, and input it to a program Ron had created using all the statistical data ever assembled about the National Football League. The result was used to pick which football games were most likely to win, and to create groups of bets using Parlay Cards. I had never seen one of those, of course.

In the front room, a group of four women sat around a big table with huge stacks of strange printed cards, about four inches wide and a foot and a half long. From each card they tore a five-inch perforated ticket containing rows of little circles, each numbered. Using sheets printed out by the computer, they were filling in a few circles on each card. One of them asked me if I knew what they were, and when I confessed I did not, she explained that each number represented a bet on one of the football games being played that week. They were either bets on which team wins a game, or on whether the sum of the scores in a game would be over or under some given number.

Bea, I think her name was, told me, A parlay means you bet on more than one number, and all of them have to win for the parlay to win. But since the odds are multiplied, the more games you pick, the bigger the payoff. Sometimes we bet cards with only four numbers each, sometimes up to nine. Ron’s program creates a handicap, a power factor number, which rates all of the teams in order. You take the power factor times the line…that’s the odds being offered by the sports book, and you get what’s called an EV…that’s for expected value. We take the high-EV games and make up groups of them. She showed me one of the computer sheets. Here’s a program for a group of one hundred cards, seven-team parlays. Let’s say you really like one team, Minnesota Vikings maybe, so you want it on lots of your cards, fifty or sixty of them maybe. Another team, San Diego Chargers say, you only want to put on a few cards. So you make up lots of combinations of maybe the best twenty-five numbers you think are good. And all the cards have to be different.

So you beat the odds that way? I asked her.

Nobody beats the odds, Dave, she said. This card pays one hundred to one for a seven-team parlay. That means we have to pick seven numbers that all win, out of maybe a hundred possible bets on the card. You play one hundred cards, so if one of them hits, you break even. If several of your key teams win you can get a lot of winning combinations all at once.

That can amount to a lot of money, Dino pointed out, enough the casinos don’t like high-volume parlay-card players like us. They keep us out of some sports books, and they’ll give you a lot of shit about you can only play this much on each card, or we’ll only take so many cards. So you just play as many as they let you. Doesn’t matter which ones.

He handed me two packets of the cards which the girls had finished filling in. Here’s two fifty-card packs, of seven-team parlays at one hundred each. You take them to the sports book at MGM, and try to bet them all. My head starts running, doing the math. He opens a drawer and hands me a bundle of new money, about three quarters of an inch thick, with a strap around it. Ten thousand bucks. Cash, bam, just like that, like grocery money.

I managed to jack my jaw back up, nonchalantly zip the bankroll into my black nylon flight jacket pocket, and start for the door. Oh, by the way, I asked him, where is the MGM?

They still give me a bad time about that at parties, but I guess it does make for good legend. When I started my first day as a high-rolling Las Vegas bet runner, I had to ask where the MGM was. Right on Tropicana. It’s the big green one.

Now I cruise past The Strip in the shimmering dawn, still moved two seasons later by the splendor of the world’s greatest carnival, though I have become a regular part of the show myself, daily making my route through the dozen greatest hotels on earth, playing the part of some scruffy-looking eccentric sports book bum with enough money to bet all the books will take. To my surprise, that turned out to be a lot less than I would have expected, but that came later. When I said greatest carnival, that’s exactly what I mean, and nothing more or less than that. There is nothing here that isn’t in every carnival that ever happened. You ride the rides, ogle the pretty girls, eat the hotdogs and cotton candy, and throw your nickels at the plate. The difference is the scale.

With the sun coming up behind it, the Stratosphere Tower looks like a rocket taking off. Keeping one eye on traffic, I watch the top of it, waiting to see if someone is already up riding the Hot Shot. The Strat is a concrete tripod with a rotating twelve-story building on top of it, built by maverick self-made high-roller Bob Stupak. On top of that, a thousand feet up, is a thing that looks like a TV broadcast tower, taller than the rotating building it is on. It is not an antenna. It is a ride. You sit on a narrow bench strapped to the side of that tower with a harness over your shoulders, and when they kick it off, up you go. I see the ride go zooming up, and have to laugh to myself remembering it. It does not gently lift you up. It boots you in the ass at about forty miles per hour, shoots you straight up one hundred and sixty feet, then cuts you loose at one thousand, one hundred and fifty feet over The Strip. That’s higher than the top of the Empire State Building. You drop back about ten stories in free fall, and there is no way you can keep your ass in the seat. You see what I mean. It is just a carnival ride, and does little to serve or edify mankind, but it is the greatest ride of its kind ever built.

That’s Las Vegas, a city wholly and gloriously devoted to folly. There is nothing else going on here, no agriculture, no industry, zip. Yet the world proves every day that our particular commodity is nonetheless valuable enough to keep the jets landing and taking off every two minutes round the clock out at McCarran Airport, and the dozen largest and grandest hotels in the world are all right here, shoulder to shoulder.

If you think of that as voting with your dollars, lots of people are expressing their agreement with our way of doing things. It’s my impression if government treated the citizen as well as the casinos treat their customers, politicians would not have to sell their offices for money to buy media propaganda to get people to vote for them.

Traffic is open, cruising seventy. I hang one lane right of the fastest, keeping my head up for the Imperial Cruisers. To my left passes Treasure Island, where several times a day a full-size galleon sails into a fortified Caribbean island port, blows the place up with cannonfire, and is sunk in flames by a pirate ship as its crew leaps into the water from the yardarms. This is not a high-ticket stand-in-line show. It’s free and open to the public, right on Las Vegas Boulevard. It’s just the ballyhoo, the come-on to get the rubes in the tent where the games are.

I like the graceful and refined architecture of The Bellagio, the latest masterpiece of The Vegas Visionary himself, Mr. Steve Wynn. Caesar’s gives us the ancient Rome, and Bellagio gives us the Classic Italian Rome. To produce the spectacle of a reflected palace, Wynn started by building an eight-acre lake in the middle of the Nevada desert. Rumor has it he bought an ancient Caesarian quarry in Italy—all of it—so he would have enough of the right marble to make the place authentic. It came in at one-point-eight billion. That is one thousand and eight hundred millions of dollars. Some carny joint, hey…

There is New York New York, a single hotel designed as a fifty-story Big Apple skyline, with a roller coaster track looping between the skyscrapers like a Fritz Lang fantasy, complete with tour helicopters like taxicabs in formation. Past it rise the pennant-topped towers of King Arthur’s Excalibur, where every night a ninety-foot dragon swims the moat erupting forty-foot plumes of real fire. Past the half-scale Eiffel Tower at Paris, the laser-tipped obsidian pyramid of The Luxor, and the shimmering gold walls of Mandalay Bay rises the town’s newest wonder, The Acropolis. Apparently Wynn had