“Go ahead, William,” Uncle Roy says. “Lay it out.”

I draw in a slow breath and tell myself to take it easy. My heart’s still pounding hard, but I gradually manage to slow it down.

“Okay,” I say. “I don’t know how much my uncle’s already told you, but here’s what it looks like so far.” I reach into my U.S. Diplomacy textbook and pull out a photo of Brandt. “This is our mark, Brandt Rush—heir to the Rush retail chain. On paper he’s worth about sixty million dollars, and that’s not counting the shares in his family’s Fortune 500 company, which grossed about twenty times that in the last fiscal year alone. We’re going to take him only for about two.”

“Wait a second.” One of the guy’s eyebrows shoot up. “Million?”

“For starters,” I say.

Another guy, one of the Righteous Brothers, lets out a smoky chuckle. “You’ve got some oysters on you, junior, I’ll give you that.”

“He gets ’em from his old man,” a voice says across the room, and that’s when my dad steps in. “How’s it going, Billy? Did you tell them it was all my idea?”

Right away it’s like all the fun goes out of the room. Everybody stiffens, and I realize that Roy hasn’t told the others about my father being part of this play. Dad doesn’t seem to notice, though. He spins a swivel chair around and straddles it, settling in like he owns the place. I can smell the whiskey wafting out of his pores from here. For a second, nobody says anything. Then, from the reception area, I hear a pair of high heels clicking through the doorway, and a woman enters the room and stands behind Dad—the dyed blonde from his motel room.

“Wait a second,” Roy says. “Who’s this?”

“Rhonda’s a friend,” Dad says breezily, dismissing the question with a wave of the hand. “We need somebody at the front desk, and she’s got a secretarial background, don’t you, sweetie?”

The guys look at one another, then back at Uncle Roy, who’s already got his arms crossed. “No,” he says. “No way. No outsiders.”

“Come on, Roy,” Dad says, leaning back, “you’re gonna hurt her feelings.”

“I’m gonna hurt a lot more than that,” Roy says, “if you don’t swivel your girlfriend around and send her back to wherever you found her.”

Dad’s eyes narrow. “Hey, take it easy.”

“Take it easy?” Uncle Roy can’t seem to believe his ears. “Let’s get something straight, Frank. I didn’t even want you on this thing, okay? Carting your playmate in here just queered the whole deal.”

“Well, that’s a shame,” Dad says, “because she’s already in it. See, anything that I didn’t get a chance to tell her yet? She just heard the whole scheme through the open door. So . . .” His lips wrinkle back in a yellow, reptilian grin. “I guess we’ve got nothing left to talk about, huh?”

Uncle Roy’s nostrils flare wide open and I can see the war going on beneath the muscles of his face. He doesn’t want to walk out on this deal, but everything inside him—every instinct of self-preservation that’s kept him out of jail throughout his adult life—is screaming that this isn’t safe. Finally, he just shakes his head like a fighter shaking off a punch.

“You better vouch for her,” he mutters under his breath.

“Sure,” Dad says flippantly, and settles back as though the outcome was never in doubt. He turns to the other guys in the room, all of whom suddenly look as though they wish they were somewhere else. “You boys all know the online poker racket, or you need me to run it down with you?”

Uncle Roy shakes his head. “William’s gonna tell it.”

“Of course,” Dad says, and smiles. “I wouldn’t have it any other way.”

“It works like this,” I say. “I’m going to bring Brandt here and introduce him to the office. He’s going to sit down to play, and halfway through the hand, he’s going to get a text on his cell phone from one of you guys, telling him how to bet. The bet pays off, of course, and he doubles his money, so he wants to go again. In fact, because he’s already got it in for my fake boss—Brian McDonald—he’ll want to go big enough so that when he wins, he’ll put the whole operation out of business. I’m figuring two million.”

“Wait a second. One thing I don’t get.” One of the guys—Lupo Reilly, I think—shakes his head when I finish talking. “What teenage kid can actually get his hands on two million bucks?”

“I’ve personally seen it happen,” I tell him. “Since his dad’s accountants let him manage his own portfolio, Brandt has got an almost unlimited trust fund that he can draw from. They let him play the market. They say it’s good practice for when he takes over the family fortune. And best of all”—I take a deep breath—“Brandt already thinks that this McDonald guy is trying to get revenge on him for what Brandt did to his daughter Moira. So now it’s personal.”

“You’re sure about that part?” Uncle Roy asks.

“Trust me,” I say. “He’s vindictive as hell.” I turn to face the group. “Tomorrow night I’ll bring Brandt down here to check out the operation. He’ll see how it all works. Dad will play Mr. McDonald, acting like he’s still bitter about what Brandt did to Moira, but when Brandt puts down the cash I’m fronting him for the first bet, McDonald will start to change his tune and suck up to him. Hopefully it’ll just make Brandt want to scam him for even more.”

“I like it,” Dad says, and shoots a grin at Rhonda, who’s been busily chewing her gum. “Of course, I should. Since the whole thing’s my idea.”

Uncle Roy grimaces. “That’s my least favorite part of the whole deal.”

“I’ll need about two thousand in cash to front Brandt tomorrow,” I tell him.

“No problem.” Roy opens his wallet and peels off a crisp stack of hundreds, handing them over. “And I’ll have the boys here hook you up with some dummy credit cards. They bill to a shell corporation in the Caymans, so once the charges catch up to us in a few weeks, we’ll be long gone. Just don’t charge anything big. No real estate, nothing like that, you got it?”

“Got it,” I say, as Lupo Reilly hands me a Visa and an American Express. “In the meantime, I’ll get Brandt buttered up for the deal, let him know how much Mr. McDonald has been talking smack about him.”

“Good, kid, but don’t oversell it,” Uncle Roy says. “We don’t want Richie Rich hating us so much that he decides not to come back.”

“Believe me, I know this guy,” I say. “The angrier he gets, the deeper he’ll want to get involved.”

“Sounds like my kind of sucker.” Uncle Roy looks at me with narrowed eyes. “Is there anything else I need to know at this point?”

Andrea’s face flashes through my mind, but I decide now is not the time to bring up our bet. I shake my head. “I don’t think so.”

“So we’ll see you tomorrow.”

I nod and turn to go. “I’ll be here.”

“Hey, William,” Uncle Roy says, his hand falling on my shoulder, “you mind if me and the boys stick around for a while and talk through some of the details?”

“No problem,” Dad says, and grins at me. “I’ll drive him home.”

Nineteen

“YOU DIDN’T TELL HIM, DID YOU?” DAD ASKS, OUT IN THE parking lot.

“Tell him what?”

His face pinches. “Don’t play me for a patsy, kid. I invented this racket.”

For a second we just stand there in the exhaust-reeking, cold darkness outside the office building. Rhonda has already climbed into Dad’s old Chevy and now she’s sitting in the passenger seat, having swapped out her gum for a Marlboro, fiddling impatiently with the car radio.

“I know why you’re in such a hurry to pull off this scam,” he says, peering at me from under his eyebrows. “I know all about your Thanksgiving bet.”

I stare at him. “What—?”

“Your little friend from school paid me a visit the other day. What’s her name—Andrea? She must have seen you leaving my motel in town, because she came by later and told me everything.” He tilts his chin up so that I can almost see a ghost of a smile tucked into the corner of his mouth. “Gutsy move on your part, seeing who can fleece this Rush brat first.”