Writ of Execution (18 page)

The sun showed no sign of setting yet. It still had a couple of hours to go, but the light was late, long, a soft gold very different from the radiant blasting sun of midday in the mountains.

She turned onto Kulow Street and immediately spotted Bob and Hitchcock. In the pine needles and dirt that constituted their tiny front yard, the two had a unique game of fetch going. Bob threw the stick, a hard job, because then he had to chase Hitchcock to get it back. They came to greet her as she parked in the driveway. She rolled down the driver’s-side window and Bob stuck his head in and Hitchcock put his paws on the door and did likewise.

She looked at their eager faces, thinking, I am the luckiest woman alive.

“Let me out,” she said, laughing. They went inside and she changed into shorts and did the quickie cleanup. The three of them then took off through the hazy shimmer of a summer evening to the Big Rock. On National Forest land not far from the house, the rock sat amid a group of warm granite boulders in a field of tall ponderosa pines.

Now the light was growing dimmer, softening. She wished she had a camera, but contented herself with letting the beauty of the moment imprint itself on her memory. Bob ran on ahead with Hitchcock.

The Big Rock had one angled side that they could scramble up easily, even Hitchcock, and a small ledge at the top where all three of them could sit, heads in the trees. Nina scratched Hitchcock’s back as the dog lay beside her. Bob sat with his knees drawn up. Nina noticed with a small shock that he had very hairy legs in the space between the bottoms of his pants and the white socks.

“Mom?”

“Uh huh.”

“How was your day today?”

“My day? Oh. Fine. Lots of court stuff.”

“Did you win?”

“Not this time. How was your day?”

“Good.”

“Uh huh. What did you do?”

“Not much.”

“Like what?”

“Hung out on the computer with Taylor. After lunch we went on our bikes to town and we had snow cones.”

“Was anybody else with you?”

“Not really. Oh, Nikki showed up.” Nikki was a girl, too old and too wise for Bob. Nina waited, but heard no more.

Bob was galloping fast toward fourteen. He had shot up to about five-ten in the past year, but he was still a child, and when she looked at him she saw the whole parade of years in his changing face, the towheaded baby crying at nap time, wanting to play on right through his exhaustion; the toddler who grabbed her leg and clung like lichen, loving her madly through an entire circuit at the Kmart; the excited kid on the way to the Monterey Aquarium, swearing he felt okay, throwing up in the back seat of her new truck.

And now this, an odd phase of life, half innocent, half sophisticated. Nina put her arm around him. They sat peacefully for a minute. The birds had gone to bed and twilight had come.

“Hungry? Let’s go fix supper,” Nina said.

At three A.M. she woke up. She wrote the dream down in her journal: she was swimming a women’s marathon down a long dark lake, a primeval lake, with night-brush along the side, swimming with wonderfully fast and powerful strokes. She couldn’t see the other side. Other women were swimming too, and there was one beside her chatting. They swam along the bank but Nina said, There are too many obstacles, we are constantly having to avoid hippos and debris—let’s go out to the middle. She wasn’t really racing, she just had to finish. She swam so smoothly and so strongly it was like a video game.

After a while she looked back and saw how the backwash—the waves produced by the women—pushed the boy children out toward the sea, where they could become independent.

15

GABE HAD A very loud voice which he deployed in the jackhammer range when he got frustrated, and naturally he did get frustrated being confined in a cage. However, Kenny was not about to let this roller-and-tumbler out anywhere near an electrical cord, a toilet, or a bug, so in the Portacrib he would stay for now. Jessie was in the back room getting ready to go out.

Gabe emitted a scream, a happy primate scream related to some private emotion occurring in connection with a white stuffed lamb he was trying to tear limb from limb. Hard to believe that only a few days ago, Jessie had rushed him to the Carson Valley Medical Clinic. Nobody could get that fever down, and then next day, like magic, Gabe had woken up fine.

He shouldn’t be that strong at nine months, but then, Kenny thought, look at his mother, who had filled up some plastic gallon laundry jugs after breakfast and used them as weights so her arms wouldn’t get stale.

Stale. Her word. She used slang Kenny hadn’t heard outside of movies from the fifties, Marine Corps language. Like describing the experience as “outstanding,” when she returned from a run through the scorpion-infested desert at sunset.

The sleeping thing had gone well, if you wanted to stay a virgin forever. Jessie slept in the back with the baby and Kenny curled up on the vinyl dinette bench that folded out into what Nina had optimistically called a bed. He rolled himself up in the blanket and lay awake for a long time thinking that someone else, the mythical man in the magazines that he was not, would have taken her in his arms long before bed and then the baby would be the one out here with the coyotes.

After lunch he called Nina, who told him that the pale-eyelashed man sitting on the stool next to him had been murdered.

“With a Glock?” he asked.

“My question exactly. They didn’t find the gun. They have the bullet but the test results won’t be in for a few days.”

“Murder,” Kenny said. “The man in the hooded sweatshirt.” He felt cold fear.

“Man or woman, you said. There may not be a connection. We don’t know that it was your gun.”

“Well, I’m sure glad, Jessie and I and—that we’re out here in the desert.”

“Me too. You’re being careful?”

“Absolutely.”

Nina said, “Are you learning anything? Could Kemp have had a reason to think he would win the jackpot?”

“I’m on it. I’ll call you right away if I have something.”

“Kenny?”

He was looking at the baby, and he was afraid. “What?”

“Hurry.”

He got the laptop booted up, though without a surge protector he could crash anytime, Nina’s electrical system being what it was. Jessie came out wearing her jeans and sweater and they talked about Charlie Kemp.

“What does it mean?” Jessie said.

“The shooter is at large, but we don’t know why Kemp was shot,” Kenny said. “Maybe it has nothing to do with us.”

“Come on. He came after us too.”

“I know. I’m glad we got out.”

“So what now?”

“Keep on doing what we’re doing, I guess.”

“Well, since there’s no McDonald’s on the corner, I still have to lay in food,” she said. “What kind of tea do you want?”

“Lipton’s. We’re only thirty miles from Minden, where the body was found. Maybe we should go together. But I have this work I have to do for Nina.”

“I won’t be long. I’ll go to Carson City.”

“Take the rifle.” He couldn’t believe he was talking like this. “Take the rifle,” like in an old Western.

“I don’t like leaving, but we have to eat. You and Gabe are safe here. No one could find us here. Don’t be afraid.”

“I’m not afraid. Except for you and Gabe.”

“You know something?”

“What?”

“Now that the worst has happened, Potter has come at me hard, people are getting killed, I feel better than I have in a long time. I feel relieved. Waiting for the war is so much harder than the war. I know what I’m doing now. I’ll check the booby traps on my way out.”

He heard the car start up and roar down the sandy road. She hadn’t even mentioned the money. With her, Potter was still the focus.

He put the Portacrib right by the computer and explained a few things to Gabe, who seemed to enjoy watching the screen. When he jumped into the Net, Gabe was right there with him.

Kenny wanted to know all about Charlie Kemp. As to how Kemp had ended his life in a dumpster in a small Nevada town not half an hour from the trailer, there was too little information to form a hypothesis, so he abstained. The
Nevada Appeal
and the
Reno Gazette
reported the murder with few details. A shooting behind a pizza place. No witnesses to the shooting, but police had some leads they weren’t talking about. Kenny learned that Kemp was a welder from Nottingham, England, age forty-two, on an unexpired work visa.

Kemp’s nationality posed a problem. Kenny couldn’t find anything on his background in England.

He put Kemp aside for the moment and started working on the list Nina had given him. Her logic made sense. On what basis could Global Gaming show the jackpot was invalid?

The only answer would be cheating. But Jessie hadn’t cheated. She was many things, but technologically hip she was not. Slot machine cheating would involve hacking into the microchip that controlled the machine. She couldn’t do that. Supposedly, nobody could do that.

The wins had to be random. It was all in the doctrine of fair play Nevada guaranteed.

However, thinking about it, he was quite interested in the psychology behind the spinning reels. The reels came so tantalizingly close to lining up on a perfect hit so often. Could they actually program the microchips to do that? Make two sevens stop and the third go by? And was that legal, anyway?

There was lots of news about past jackpots on the Global Gaming site. A California woman had won more than eight million at the Tahoe Hilton in Crystal Bay at a Megabucks machine, lining up four eagles. In Las Vegas, someone had won over twenty-seven million at the same kind of progressive slot machine. The casinos and gaming technologists were taking advantage of the big news to offer up some of their own, a new game called Super Megabucks which would average fifteen million dollars per win. Just this year, the payoff had already surged up to over twenty-nine million at Harrah’s Lake Tahoe.

The slots were now the dominant revenue-producing devices in the gaming industry. This was news to Kenny. He would have thought the gaming tables were the big moneymakers.

He found a site that discussed the computer chip inside the big-payout slot machines, called an EPROM chip. These chips used a program called a “random number generator.”

“Gabe, you won’t believe this,” he muttered. Gabe made inchoate noises and kicked the Portacrib. Kenny hadn’t been around children much. Gabe was a budding King Kong. Right now he was shaking the bars, trying to tear down the walls of his prison. The effort was grand but the effect was comic.

Back to the screen. Unlike the old mechanical free-spinning reels, video reels used a stepper motor which allowed stops to be programmed based on a secret “source code.”

Several of the Nevada clubs had asked the Gaming Control Board for permission to “set” some of their slots more “loosely” than the others, so their Red Carpet members would have better odds than the hoi polloi. How could anyone do that? In what way was this random?

He tried to think. The chips were set to stop and to consistently provide certain percentages, yet they did so in a way that could not be predicted. How?

Puzzled, Kenny went to the Web site on the Triple Eight court case. First of all, he admired the psychology of using eights as the winning numbers. In China eights were very lucky numbers. He himself would have wanted to play such a machine.

All right. Three eights, but they did not perfectly bisect the win line. Kenny examined a diagram of the positions of the eights on the reel. The eights all touched the central win line, but haphazardly. Then Kenny read that Global Gaming had proved it wasn’t a true jackpot by examining the random number generator, which indicated the machine wasn’t supposed to hit right then.

Jessie’s Greed Machine—he saw the three brown banks again. Right across the middle line. No problem there. But what about the random number generator? Jessie’s machine must have already passed that test too. The check only took a couple of hours.

Kenny scratched his head. What the heck was this thing they called a random number generator? Software, obviously, on a chip they could remove and examine. So far, so good. It generated random numbers. Uh huh.

The real question remained: what was this random number generator?

He read on. Nevada casinos were free to set their slot machines so that they paid out only 75 percent. And casinos did set their machines and changed the payouts whenever they wanted to. They weren’t supposed to change the random number generator program, though. Not
supposed
to?

The Nevada Gaming Control Board had six field inspectors for the state. In 1996, Nevada had 185,610 slot machines.

Kenny did the calculation. Say they could check one hundred machines a day—it would take them five years to do a round of the machines!

He had a sinking feeling in his stomach. He wished he had a strong cup of tea right now. Working at the computer was no joke without tea. This sinking feeling was a somatic expression of the thought he was having, that Jessie’s chances had sunk.

He went to Nina’s cupboard in another search for a tea bag tucked in a corner. No tea, but he found three kinds of coffee. Two more sacks of the stuff in the fridge. She ought to get hold of herself. He played with Gabe for a few minutes, then went back to work.

Cheating was as traditional as winning and losing in gambling. As weevils will always burrow into flour, the industry would never be able to construct a machine that was completely impregnable from the cheaters.

But a lot of the cheating seemed to be within the industry. He learned that it was legal in Nevada to program the virtual reels on the slots so that, for instance, three sevens would appear above or below the pay line. But it wasn’t legal to put two sevens
on
the payline and drop one below. In other words, programming a “near-miss” on a payline was illegal, a near-miss above or below wasn’t.

And since the player who saw too many blank blank blanks on the payout line might lose heart and leave, many machines were now programmed to detect that such a line was about to appear, and to insert a couple of encouraging winning symbols.

In other words, what the player saw on the machine wasn’t necessarily the actual result of his playing. If he won, he did still win, but if he lost, the programming tried to make the loss look like a near-win.

The old mechanical reels had been fixed in the traditional way. Every player noticed eventually that the winning symbols showed up much more on the first two reels. That was because the third reel only contained one winning symbol. This carnival-style scam had always been legal and universal.

But the new programming offered a new world of cheating possibilities.

Now Kenny was looking actively for slot machine cheating. Software microchips that were illegally modified were called “gaffed” chips. In 1989 a slot machine manufacturer called American Coin had been discovered to be fixing the chips in their video poker machines to reduce the number of royal flushes. The programmer who had programmed the gaffed chips had been shot to death at his house in Las Vegas just before he was due to give testimony in the case. Nevada had decided this kind of industry deception was illegal. But where was the line?

Kenny even found a case of a Gaming Control Board official who had reprogrammed the EPROMs in some slots so they would pay out when a certain combination of coins was inserted. He did the programming and handed the gaffed chips to the field inspectors, who unknowingly inserted the cheating program into the machines while trying to test them. He had been convicted of attempted theft by deception.

The interesting thing was, this guy had used co-conspirators, people who sat at the machines and actually won the jackpots.

He thought of Charlie Kemp again, and of the faceless men he had met the night of the jackpot who owned, maintained, and supervised the payouts on the slots. But Kemp didn’t seem to have any connection to the gaming industry, other than being a gambler. And being dead like that witness.

Kenny felt even worse. He was actually starting to believe someone could have somehow changed the EPROM on Jessie’s Greed Machine. The Gaming Control Board seemed to be thinking along the same lines. But they must not be sure, or Jessie would be arrested.

How could they not be sure? All they had to do, according to these articles, was run a test program on the chip. They would know right away if the program had been altered. Then they would nullify the win.

What was going on?

Then Gabe needed food, a graham cracker with jelly on it and a bottle, then Gabe’s diaper had to be changed, then Gabe had to be put down for a nap in the back room. Jessie had left written instructions, which Kenny carried out to the letter. And the little tyke lay right down and put his thumb in his mouth and went to sleep. Just like clicking off AppleShare and the ISP connection and shutting down.

Kenny tiptoed back to the front room. The ceiling fan whirred. He moved back to Charlie Kemp. He searched Lake Tahoe newspaper police logs for a few years, and found nothing. That didn’t surprise him. A police record would have been a red flag to the Gaming Control Board inspectors.

He sat back, arms behind his head, and focused on his memory of the night of the win.

Kemp had been taking notes, and consulting his watch. He had been nervous.

Provocative. Suspicious. But so many gamblers thought they had systems.

But Kemp had acted like he was supposed to win. Like the jackpot was
his
.

Kenny thought about Kemp’s speech, his level of intelligence as extrapolated from his vocabulary. Kemp hack into Global Gaming’s security systems? No way.