Excerpts
On the twenty-third roll, Mr. Royalty crapped out. Even accounting for his losing bets on the last roll, he had to be up more than two million. But now that his streak had been broken, maybe luck would start to swing our way.
I stared at the monitors. What was going on? Mr. Royalty was no longer asking for the dice. He wanted to cash out.
I was too stunned to think. Wherever he was, Tim had to be going crazy. When you’re The House, there’s only one thing worse than losing like that: That’s wondering if the guy who just beat you out of two million bucks will leave and head straight for another casino — where he’ll proceed to lose your money.
Mr. Royalty walked over to the cage to collect. He’d come into the casino with cash wrapped in plastic directly from the U.S. Mint. And he wanted to leave with money wrapped by the U.S. Mint.
Johnny D. met him at the cage and watched as two Golden Nugget shopping bags were filled with green bricks.
We always monitored our big players as they headed out the doors. We needed to make sure there were no hiccups. We needed to make sure that Mr. Royalty wasn’t confronted on the way out by anybody who’d watched him rake in the chips. We wanted to make sure the doormen and valet parkers treated him well. And we wanted to get an idea if he was headed to another casino or driving toward home.
We watched Mr. Royalty walk out the door. As Johnny D. would say: “Got his load, and hit the road. ”
In less than two weeks, Mr. Royalty had beaten us for nearly $8.5 million.
I headed up to Tim’s office feeling like frazzled brakes that couldn’t stop the wheels of an out-of-control car. Look, I wanted to tell him, the hotel is sold out. The casino is jammed packed. Every restaurant has a wait. We’ve pulled it off! And tomorrow morning we’re going to get the numbers and find out we got killed. What are we doing?
But telling Tim to take back the best gamble in town was like telling Tim not to be Tim.
On top of that, if we did take the special odds away from Mr. Royalty, we risked driving him off, never seeing our money again, and having him humiliate us all over town. “Ahhh, The Nugget’s too scared to take my bets,” would be Mr. Royalty’s cherry on top.
Did we want to go through all that? Or did we want to let him back in and pray he didn’t swamp us?
Tim was sitting behind his desk in front of an ashtray of dead cigarettes. His tie was loose, and he was staring at the ceiling. A fresh cigarette burned in his hand. Through the smoke curling in the air, I could read a sign on the wall, a sign that he loved, a sign that said: NO ACT OF KINDNESS SHALL GO UNPUNISHED.
Nobody wants to see a friend looking so alone.
Tim got up and grabbed his coat.
“I’ve gotta go,” he said.