“Wait a second,” Brandt says behind me. “What did you just say?”

I turn around. “You think I like working for a guy like McDonald? You think I’d go through all of this for a lousy hundred bucks?”

“You said two million.”

“McDonald’s a bully and a creep. The guy’s issues have issues.”

“You said two million,” Brandt repeats.

“Okay. Here’s the truth.” I glance down at my feet. “The only reason I’m still working for McDonald is because I know his online poker operation backward and forward. I’ve studied his process, I’ve seen how everything works, I’ve got friends on the inside”—and now I stare right at Brandt, directly into his eyes, dropping my voice to a whisper—“and I’m going to take him for all he’s got. Which is about two million.” I pause for dramatic effect. “You want in, you let me know. All you gotta do is meet him. You’d see.”

Brandt stares back at me coolly, his expression unreadable. “That’s a whole lot of risk to take just because somebody’s a bully and a creep.”

“Yeah, well,” I say, and now it’s time to sell it. “He dated my mom for a while and got rough with her. Knocked her around a time or two. The last time, he broke her jaw.” I narrow my eyes. “That’s when I decided to go to work for him.”

“Taking matters into your own hands, huh?”

“Let’s just say it’s personal with me.”

“You’re breaking my heart.” Brandt snorts and rolls his eyes. “You think I want to hear your life story?” he asks, but I can tell that something in his face has relaxed, and even though he doesn’t know it himself, I can tell that he’s beginning to trust me.

Which is how I know I’ve hooked him.

Twelve

“WHAT HAPPENED TO YOUR FACE?” DAD ASKS.

It’s Sunday morning, and I’m sitting on a lumpy mattress in the two-hundred-dollar-a-week room that he’s got at the Motel 6 in town, twelve miles from Connaughton, while he finishes shaving. The bathroom door is open just wide enough that I can see his half-lathered face in the mirror, his eyes reflected back on me, our conversation punctuated by the occasional clink-clink-clink as he taps the whiskers from the razor into the bathroom sink. The room smells like stale bourbon, dirty laundry, and somebody else’s cheap perfume. Put them all together and you’ve got a scratch-and-sniff Father’s Day card that basically comprises my entire childhood.

“Mind if I open a window?”

“Are you kidding?” He steps out of the bathroom, toweling off. “It’s twenty degrees out there.”

“Yeah, well, I can barely breathe in here.”

“Don’t change the subject.” Crossing the room, he picks up the Cumberland Farms coffee that I brought him, peels off the plastic lid, and takes a big gulp. “I thought you were living large over at that fancy school of yours. But you don’t return any of my phone calls all week, and now all of a sudden you show up looking like somebody’s been using your face for a catcher’s mitt. What gives?”

I take a deep breath. The next four words are going to be painful, but there’s no sense in delaying the inevitable. “I need your help.”

He grins. “At last, the boy sees reason. What’s the play?”

“I want to run the online poker con.”

“The online . . .” Dad stops smiling. He puts the coffee down, and his freshly shaved face now looks pale and hung-over. “That’s suicide, kid. You trying to get clipped?”

“You haven’t even heard my angle yet.”

He shakes his head. “Don’t need to.”

“It’s a solid grift.”

“I know it’s a solid grift, boy. I invented it.”

He’s wrong, but right now I don’t see any reason to argue the point. The online poker swindle is a modern-day twist on the prehistoric wire con that guys like us have been running since the invention of money.

Here’s how it works: You tell the mark about your boss, some shady character who runs an online gambling business out of a rundown office space. The specific type of gambling doesn’t really matter—it can be poker, blackjack, the ponies, whatever. You bring the mark by, in person, to see how the whole thing works and then tell him you’ve figured out a way to beat the system—all you need is a guy on the outside to place the bets. Naturally the mark is going to be suspicious of this, so you prove your trustworthiness by fronting him the money and letting him win a few small bets—a thousand here, a thousand there. Once he starts winning, the small potatoes don’t satisfy him anymore and he slaps down a huge bet with his own cash, a big enough buy-in that winning is going to bring the whole place down around your boss’s ankles.

And that’s when we all suddenly disappear, along with the mark’s money.

For a guy like Brandt, I’m thinking two million isn’t too much to expect.

Dad listens to everything I’m saying without adding a word. Finally he goes to the closet, takes a shirt off a hanger, sniffs the pits, and slips it on. “That scam got us clipped down in Trenton, in case you forgot. What makes you think it’ll work any better here?”

“We didn’t go wide enough with it in Trenton,” I tell him.

Dad sighs. “Kid, you tax me. You really do.” He rubs one freshly shaved cheek. “Who’s the mark?”

And I tell him about Brandt Rush.

“Two million? Seriously?”

That’s how I know he’s interested, because he’s already sitting at the wobbly, cigarette-marred table in the corner of the cheap hotel room, his coffee forgotten, while he works out the figures in his small, careful handwriting. “If he’s that rich already, what makes you think he’ll go for it?”

I hold up two fingers. “One, he’s greedy, and two, he holds a grudge. This is a guy who’s still creased that Moira McDonald turned him down for Homecoming last year, and he got twice as creased when I told him that her father sent me in to cheat him in his own casino. He’s ripe for the plucking.”

Dad thinks about that for a long time, looking down at the numbers he’s been adding up and then back at me.

“If we do it—and I’m saying if—we’d need a base of operations, computers, office furniture, and at least six guys who look like they know what they’re doing . . .” His gaze drifts slightly off to the right as he considers the necessary components of a swindle this size. “They’ll have to work on percentage. I don’t know if I can swing that.”

“I was thinking I could talk to Uncle Roy,” I say.

Dad grimaces but doesn’t argue, tipping me off that he’d already been thinking the same thing. For him, going to Mom’s side of the family for money is kind of like walking into a Boston sports bar wearing a Yankees cap. But if we need operating cash, Uncle Roy might be our only option.

“How soon does it need to be set up?” he asks.

“That’s the wrinkle.” I sit down across from him. “I need to pull the whole caper off before Thanksgiving.”

“Four weeks?” Dad scowls. “That’s nowhere near enough time to set the hook and make our play.”

“It’s going to have to be.”

“What’s your hurry?”

I don’t say anything.

“You might as well tell me, kid. I’m gonna find out anyway.”

“It’s nothing,” I say. “I just don’t want this dragging on too long, that’s all. It’s too much exposure.”

Dad just squints at me. He’s about to say something when there’s a knock. We both stand up immediately, our old instincts instantly activated, and I duck into the bathroom as he crosses the room to the door, careful to keep away from the window. “Hello? Who’s there?”

“Who do you think, silly?” a woman’s voice asks from outside.

I hear the lock disengage and the rattle of a chain.

“Hey, baby,” Dad says casually, in a voice that curdles the acid in my stomach. I’ve left the bathroom door open a crack, and I can see a woman step inside the room. She’s dyed blond, probably in her late thirties but with that finely wrinkled tiredness around the eyes that comes from hours spent at the end of a bar with a cigarette in her hand, getting guys like my dad to buy her drinks.