Louie began to fit his clothes a lot better. “I can show you the whole dope,” he said. “There ain’t anybody in the West that knows more about ’em than I do. I know all the gangs, and there ain’t one of ’em can slip anything over on me. What’s more, the way I handle my mitts, I don’t need to take no run-around. When I see ’em cupping a machine, I give ’em the old one-two before they can ditch the evidence and—”
The manager coughed, a dry, significant, sarcastic cough.
Louie quit talking abruptly.
“Come on,” I said, and pushed toward the door. I looked back over my shoulder. Breckenridge gave me a slow, solemn wink, put his thumb and forefinger to his temple, and made little circles.
“Got a machine I can play with?” I asked Louie. “I want to take it to pieces. It’s five-fifteen now. I have half an hour.”
“Yeah. Down in the basement,” Louie said.
“All right, let’s go down to the basement then.”
We went down the stairs, across the casino to a back door, and down into a cool basement. Louie switched on lights. “What you want first?” he asked.
“How do they fix ’em?”
He said, “There’s lots of ways. They drill ’em right here and stick in a piece of piano wire. Then the machine don’t lock off after each play, and they can keep pulling the handle until they milk the machine dry.