The Scam by Janet Evanovich

left.”
    “I understand that, sir,” Goodwell said. “But I don’t trust Sweet and Porter. I’m worried that they are working on some kind of a big score.”
    “I’m certain they are, but I can’t let them take their fifteen million dollars and their future business across the street to one of the other casinos,” Trace said. “So we’ll welcome Sweet and we’ll keep our eyes on him. Just make sure that he knows the ground rules. We run the table and the chips need to be rolled three times.”
    That meant that Nick’s whales would have to gamble their chips at least three times, greatly increasing their chances of losing their initial stake and any winnings they got along the way.
    “Our dealer in the room will stay on top of it,” Goodwell said. “We’ll watch every chip and guarantee that the games are honest.”
    “When is this junket supposed to come in?”
    “Next Wednesday.”
    That was a week away. “What do we know about his guests?”
    “Nothing, sir,” Goodwell said. “Do you really want to know about them?”
    It was a sensible question to ask. It was often better not to know who was in the room, especially if the players were coming to Côte d’Argent Macau to launder their money. The junkets gave Trace plausible deniability if the money was used to finance the bombing of a U.S. embassy somewhere and the Justice Department ever started asking him questions. But Trace’s curiosity was stronger than his caution.
    “Get whatever information you can,” Trace said. “But make sure your inquiries don’t leave a trail of any kind back to us.”
    “Will do,” Goodwell said and walked out.
    Trace tapped a virtual button that activated the speakerphone on his digital desktop and called Garver, his enforcer and bodyguard. Garver answered his phone after one ring.
    “Yeah?” Garver replied. He was the only man who worked for Trace who didn’t feel the slightest need to grovel to him.
    “Pack your mallet,” Trace said. “We’re going to Macau.”

T hanks to the success of
The Lego Movie,
there was a mad scramble among Hollywood producers to make films based on children’s toys. So perhaps it was inevitable that Mr. Potato Head would inspire a new animated feature. But few people, besides savvy studio accountants, could have foreseen that it would be an all-potato adaptation of Charles Dickens’s
Great Expectations.
The novel was in the public domain, meaning that it was free to use, saving the producers the money, time, and creativity required to come up with an original story suitable for talking potatoes. The studio accountants were thrilled.
    The movie’s cast recorded their parts individually in a studio located in a small office building on Hollywood Way in Burbank. The studio had originally been a dentist’s office and still smelled like mint mouthwash. Not because the scent had tenaciously lingered through the remodeling, but because the voice actors were constantly sucking on breath mints and throat lozenges.
    One of those actors was Boyd Capwell, a fortyish man with great teeth, a strong chin, and perfect hair who behaved as if he was always playing to an audience or a camera, even when they existed only in his mind. Boyd was in a soundproof booth the size of a closet. He was facing the window into the control room, where the director and the sound editor were watching him.
    He’d been cast as the voice of Magwitch, the escaped convict that young Pip encounters one fateful, foggy night in a churchyard cemetery at the beginning of Dickens’s tale. Magwitch was described by Dickens as a fearful man in leg irons, wearing wet, filthy clothes and a dirty rag tied around his head, who’d limped and shivered, glared and growled. So Boyd was limping and shivering within the cramped confines of the booth as he recorded his lines into the microphone. He wore tattered clothes and a dirty rag on his head, and addressed a potato in his hand as if it were young Pip. It was a pose