Текст книги "Con Academy"

Автор книги: Joe Schreiber

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Nine

IT TURNS OUT GETTING INVITED TO BRANDT RUSH’S ROOM FOR Casino Night isn’t nearly as difficult as I expected. All I have to do is act stupid, talk loud, and throw money around like water for the next couple days, and by Friday, my invitation comes looking for me.

It happens when I’m hunched over in a study carrel in Connaughton’s McManus Library, trying to cram a week’s worth of microeconomics into my skull. Shelves of books line the walls up to the cathedral ceilings, with ladders on wheels running up to the higher fixtures, and long, narrow hallways lead to different alcoves. The smells of old paper, parchment, and leather bindings are everywhere.

“Will Shea?”

I look up. The girl standing in front of me is a bronzed Malibu blonde, with a handful of errant freckles and the attentive smile of someone who’s heard interesting things about me and wants to find out if they’re true. Her school uniform looks custom-tailored to fit her, as if it’s been run through a half-dozen of the most exclusive design houses in Paris and Tokyo while she’s still been wearing it. After a second I realize she’s one of the girls who was dangling off Brandt’s arm when he staggered into Andrea’s room the other morning.

“That’s me,” I say, nodding. “And you are?”

“Mackenzie Osborne?” she says, like it’s a question.

I’ve heard of her. Her dad’s a big producer out in L.A. whose movies have made about a billion dollars worldwide. “Are you a friend of Brandt’s?”

“You could say that.” And she actually giggles. “He sent me by with this.” She holds out her hand and I see a single red poker chip, bright and heavy, embossed with the initials btr.

“Monogrammed poker chips,” I say. “Pretty swanky invite.”

“I know, right?” She lowers her voice to a whisper, because either she’s confiding in me or she’s just heard that’s what you’re supposed to do in a library. “Come by tonight: Crowley House, room two forty-four. The tables open at eleven. And you’ll want to bring that chip with you.”

“Why’s that?”

“It opens doors.”

“I’ll keep that in mind.”

“Good.” She looks around at the shelves, sniffing the air, and makes a sour face. “Ugh—how can you stand it in here?”

“What?”

“The smell of all these books. It smells like—”

“Knowledge?”

“Yuck,” she says, and tosses her hair. “You know, Brandt doesn’t invite over many new students like this. Especially scholarship cases.” And then, cocking her head a little: “You must have really done something to impress him.”

I seriously doubt that, but I don’t say anything. Up until now, impressing Brandt Rush has been a simple matter of mailing myself what looked like an enormous envelope of cash—really just a roll of cut-up blank paper with a hundred-dollar bill wrapped around it—and then talking loudly to everybody within earshot about what a stud I am at the blackjack table. Inquiring minds took care of the rest. Introducing a rumor into the Connaughton student body is roughly as difficult as introducing a flu bug into a class of sniffling kindergartners—one sneeze and it’s all over. Throughout the past three days, Andrea has kept her distance from me, but I could always sense her presence nearby, eavesdropping while I bragged to whoever would listen about the awesome fake ID that I’d used in Atlantic City last summer, teaching myself to count cards and saving up for my next epic success at the tables.

“Well,” Mackenzie says, “hope to see you soon.” And with that, she sashays off, no doubt vowing never to darken the door of this terrible place again.

Once she’s gone, I try to get back to studying, but I’m too distracted to concentrate, thinking about tonight and how I’m going to play it. After five minutes of futility, I gather up my books and carry them to the student behind the circulation desk, waiting while she checks them out and slides them across the counter to me.

“Due back in two weeks,” she says.

“Thanks.”

“Not that it’s any of my business,” she says, still looking at the screen in front of her, “but you might want to sit this one out.”

I look at her closely for the first time. She’s wearing black-framed glasses with lenses that reflect the screen in front of her, and her dark brown hair is pulled back into a ponytail. Her lips are full and coral-pink, and her eyes gleam bluish gray, slanting just a little. Is she smiling? From this angle I can’t tell.

“Excuse me?”

“I don’t know you”—she looks up at me, and I feel the intensity of her gaze—“but you really don’t want to get involved with Casino Night. From what I hear, Brandt only invites people he knows he can fleece at the tables.”

I glance back at the carrel where I’d been sitting, halfway across the stacks. “You heard all of that?”

“What can I say?” She points to the sign reading quiet please. “Some people don’t know how to whisper.”

“I’m sorry.” I take a step toward the desk, trying to catch her eye. “Have we met?”

“Not yet.” At last she glances up from the monitor and extends one hand across the desk, her chipped black fingernails looking like they might have been painted with a Magic Marker. “Gatsby Haverford.”

“Gatsby.” It takes me less than a second to muse over what kind of parents would name their daughter after one of American literature’s most elegant train wrecks, and then decide I’d rather not ask. “Nice to meet you.”

“You too.” She nods at her computer, where my information is still up on the screen. “Will Shea. You’re the transfer student from the Marshall Islands.”

“Is that why you work at the library, so you can blackmail the students with their personal information?”

“I guess I just couldn’t resist the glamour of the job.”

“You’re a student here?”

“A junior,” she says. “We’re in the same English Lit class. But listen, Will. You seem like a decent-enough guy, so take my advice.” She leans across her desk and lowers her voice. “If you’re so determined to throw your money away, you should just flush it down the toilet. That way there’s at least a chance some of it might come back up.”

“Don’t take this the wrong way,” I say, “but we don’t even know each other. Why are you so concerned about me?”

“Maybe I just don’t like seeing anyone get taken advantage of.”

“It hasn’t occurred to you that maybe I’ll win?”

“No offense,” she says, looking me up and down, “but that seems highly unlikely.”

“Why’s that?”

“Let’s just say that when Brandt’s running the tables, the odds are forever in his favor.”

“Well,” I say, “I appreciate the heads-up, but I’m going to take my chances.”

“I figured.” Gatsby looks at me from between towers of books with a combination of fascination and pity. “But when you walk back in here tomorrow wearing nothing but a barrel and suspenders, don’t say I didn’t warn you.”

“Well, my barrel’s out for dry cleaning, so . . .”

Gatsby taps a few keys on the computer, scribbles a note on a scrap of paper, then stands up and comes around from behind the desk. “Stay here.” And before I can say anything, she disappears into the stacks, moving through the deep jungle of the Dewey decimal system with all the confidence and authority of a lioness.

While I wait, I find myself looking down at her workspace, at the half-finished cup of coffee and the cracked first-generation iPhone abandoned so trustingly next to the keyboard. I can hear music playing through the ear buds—it sounds like either punk or techno, with some twangy guitar mixed in—and for a moment I’m tempted to pick them up, just to see what she’s been listening to. But I’m glad I don’t, because when I turn around, Gatsby’s already back with an armload of books.

“What’s all this?” I look down at the one on top, an old hardcover that looks like nobody’s checked it out in decades, and read the title stamped in gold across the spine: Tips for Winning Poker. It’s resting on two even dustier tomes—The Mental Game of Poker and How to Win at Cards.

“Look, I appreciate all this, but—”

“Here.” She’s already checking out the three books, sweeping them under the bar-code reader along with A Beginner’s Guide to Self-Defense.

“What’s this one for?”

“Just take it,” she says, and checks out the last title, which I realize is an ancient edition of Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason.

“And this one?”

“Transcendental logic.” She smiles. “You never know when you’ll need it.”

“Thanks,” I say, shoving all the books into my backpack. “But I think what I really need is a bigger bag.”

“Happy reading,” she says, then goes back around to the other side of the desk, placing the buds in her ears and checking in books again.

Ten

BY THE TIME I GET BACK TO MY DORM ROOM, I’VE ALREADY forgotten about the books that Gatsby gave me. Mentally, I’m prepping for tonight, and my mind is so preoccupied that when the dinner hour comes, I have to force myself to eat. Voices around me are excited and laughing, discussing weekend plans. I don’t talk to anybody. I keep my head down.

After dinner I go back to my room alone, where I sit on the edge of my bed and stare at the wall, running through hypotheticals in my mind, trying to think of everything that could go wrong tonight and how I’d respond. Making sure I’m ready. Figuring the angles. This is the hardest time for me: the waiting.

Outside in the darkness, the hours drag by, doled out by the occasional distant chime of the bell tower. Sometime around ten o’clock, I remember the library books and get them out. Gatsby’s choice of the self-defense book and the Kant don’t make any sense at all, but I glance over the poker books, more to satisfy my own curiosity than anything else. As I expected, the strategies are fundamental, most of them so simple and outmoded that they’re totally useless. Opening the third book, I find a yellow Post-it stuck inside the front cover. It reads:

Will:

If you’re reading this, it means you haven’t written me off as a total whack job. If you still decide to go tonight, good luck. And be careful around Brandt. If you haven’t figured it out yet, he cheats.

—G

I peel the note off and stick it up on the corner of my empty bookshelf, then look at it for a second. Sometime later, the bell tower chimes again.

It’s time to go.

Students at Connaughton have a strict eleven o’clock curfew on Fridays, so I check to make sure the coast is clear before slipping out the window with my jacket buttoned up to my chin. The temperature’s already plunged to what feels like single digits, and late-October starlight is so sharp that it feels like I could snap off whole chunks of it and suck on them like icicles. My breath smokes out behind me as I duck below the eaves of my building, keeping to the shadows.

Crowley House is only three buildings away, but it still takes me ten minutes of island hopping to get there, since I’m trying to avoid stepping out into the open. When I reach the dorm, I stop outside the door and look in at the tall, red-haired campus security guard shooting me a look of dead-eyed indifference.

I hold up the poker chip and tap it against the glass, and he opens the door without a word.

“Thanks.” Stepping in, I can’t help but notice the guard has a dog-eared paperback propped up next to his stool, along with a styrofoam cup of coffee. The book is Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason. The guard sees me looking at it and scowls.

“Is there a problem?”

“That book,” I say. “It’s funny.”

“I think you’ve got the wrong author.”

“No, I mean, somebody just recommended it to me.”

“Yeah?”

I nod. “How is it?”

He takes a sip of coffee and glances down at the cover. “Well, I can’t say I’m crazy about his implicit assertion of transcendental idealism denying the reality of external objects.” He flicks his eyes up at me. “I mean, I suppose that you could argue that he refutes it in his discussion that self-consciousness presupposes external objects in space, but I’m not totally convinced.” Turning, he sits back down on the stool and regards me coolly. “Now, did you want to keep talking about philosophy, or are you ready to go lose all your money to that joker upstairs?”

“Tough call, but I think I’m ready.” For the first time I get a look at his laminated ID badge, which reads murphy, george. “Hey, George?”

His expression turns curious. “What?”

“You know much about him?”

“Kant?”

“Brandt.”

At the mention of that name, George’s whole face goes sour. “Put it this way,” he says. “I’ve sat here on this stool long enough to watch punks like you throwing your trust funds into his bank account in exchange for a few minutes of feeling like you’re some kind of postpubescent jet set.”

“So then how come you help him out like this? Serving as his personal doorman?”

“You’re new here, aren’t you?”

“My first week.”

“Let me fill you in on a little secret. There are only two types of people here at Connaughton—the kind that play along with Brandt Rush and his clan, and the kind that don’t last.” He takes another sip of coffee. “I happen to need this job. Not that you’d know a whole lot about something like that.”

“It might surprise you.”

“I doubt that,” George grunts, and picks up his book again, disappearing behind it until I turn and start upstairs.

Crowley House is even older than my dorm, but it wears its age well, like the cabin of a vintage luxury yacht. It’s eleven twenty as I head down the second-floor hall and realize that I’ve started walking faster, trying to keep time with my heartbeat. My pulse always speeds up when I’m getting ready to start a con. I used to worry about it, but at the last second I always cool off, so I’m hoping tonight is no different.

My mission this evening is simple: figure out how Brandt is cheating, and cheat better. I’ve got five of the most popular decks stashed in my pockets—Bicycle, Maverick, Bee, Streamline, and Aviator—matched up with the cards I’ve heard he’s most likely to use. It’s actually not particularly important that I don’t get caught, and at some point I pretty much want him to know that I’m cheating—just not right away.

After that, things are going to get really interesting.

I can already hear the hip-hop music and laughter coming from the corner room. And I wonder, what must it be like to be neighbors with Brandt Rush? Or did the housing office just give him his own wing?

I get my answer when the door opens.

The dorm room is actually three singles with the walls knocked down, creating one spacious suite overlooking the quad below. It’s already packed with students, thirty of them at least, gathered around the tables, talking and sipping drinks, savoring the occasion as if they were the European crème de la crème in the golden age of the French Riviera. Some are actually wearing tuxedos, and the girls have on cocktail dresses and heels. I find myself thinking of the Sigils. I’m assuming most of the students here belong. Is there some kind of secret handshake?

Nobody so much as glances up when I walk in. I make my way through the crowd, until I find myself face-to-face with Brandt.

“Yo, bro.” Grinning, he grabs my hand and shakes it. “Good to see you. I’m totally stoked you got my invite.”

“Thanks.” I don’t know if I’m more shocked by the warmth of his greeting and its ostensible authenticity or by the fact that somebody actually still uses the word stoked. Apparently we’ve come a long way from him sending me out to get his coffee. The miracle of money, I think, and smile. “I wouldn’t miss it.”

“You get in okay? Any troubles at the door?”

“George let me in,” I say. “But I think I interrupted his reading time.”

“Yeah, dude’s a trip, right? Thinks he’s Sophocles or something.”

“He never gives you any trouble about curfew?”

“Who, that guy?” Brandt says, and rolls his eyes. “He’s lucky to have the job. His son’s a student here, and the tuition assistance is the only way he’s able to keep the kid out of public school. He does as he’s told. Anyway . . .” Brandt grips my elbow and steers me hard to the left. “You want a drink? Bar’s over there. Epic Phil can hook you up with the beverage of your choice.”

“Great.” I follow him over to a long freestanding table full of bottles, where another student—the guy who helped me in our Global Risk class—is making three drinks at once, both arms blurring like an adrenalized octopus above a small forest of crystal stemware. “You know Epic Phil, right?”

“Hey,” I say, and the guy stops for a second to stick out his hand, which is cold and slightly damp from the martini shaker. His real name is Philip Van Eyck, but I guess he goes by a different moniker when he’s slinging martinis. “How’s it going?”

“Epic!” says Epic Phil, which I suppose must be his trademark. “What’re you drinking?”

“Hmm.” I make a big deal of perusing the selection. “Do you have Pepsi products?”

Phil and Brandt exchange a glance and then they burst out laughing, and Brandt pounds me on the shoulder so hard that I feel my sternum pop. “Good one, bro!” he hoots, and tosses a sidelong glance at Phil. “Get him whatever he wants, on the house. He’s my guest tonight.” Then he grabs my elbow again and steers me toward a table. “Hope you brought your rabbit’s foot with you,” he says. “Word around the campfire is that you’re a regular five-card stud. What’s your game?”

Blackjack is the word on my lips when I turn to approach the table and see the dealer standing behind it, shuffling the cards.

“You already met my girlfriend, right?” Brandt asks, and grins at Andrea. “Take good care of him, huh?”

And Andrea smiles back at Brandt and then at me. “Absolutely.”

Eleven

“I’LL GIVE YOU THIS,” I SAY, STANDING IN FRONT OF THE TABLE, close enough to whisper. “You are good.”

Andrea just keeps smiling, as radiant as the lights on Las Vegas Boulevard, as she shuffles the deck. She’s already on to the next thing: dealing in new players on both sides of me as they move in, stacking up chips and tossing crisp piles of twenties across the green velvet. Meanwhile, I’m trying to figure out what it means that she’s dealing cards for the guy that we’re both supposed to be scamming.

When she doles out my cards, I lean in again and whisper, “It didn’t take you long to make your move.”

“Turns out Brandt likes to jump right into new relationships,” she says. “Who knew?”

“So how long have you been dating him, thirty-six hours?”

She smiles. “You play him your way, I’ll play him mine.”

“My thoughts exactly.”

My mom was the one who taught me how to count cards. She’d been dealing blackjack at the Palms when she’d met my dad, and my lessons started back when I was eight years old; I was what you might call homeschooled at the time, so I guess that part counted as math. By the time most boys my age were playing Little League and swapping Pokémon cards, I was already dragging in massive pots in basement games against disgruntled, chain-smoking weekend warriors while my dad sat behind me in case anybody got irritated about losing his grocery money to a kid whose voice hadn’t even changed yet. People occasionally used words like “prodigy.” And “phenomenon.” And “cheat.”

When Andrea turns back to me now, I flick a fresh hundred-dollar bill onto the table like it’s the first one of a long night, even though it represents slightly more than a tenth of my current life savings. And just like that, I’m in the game, counting cards without really realizing what I’m doing. Even out of practice, I’m still quick enough that I can do it while holding up my end of the conversation.

And I win.

And win.

And keep winning.

Normally I’d take it easy, but I’m trying to get Brandt’s attention, and in a situation like this, there’s only one way to go about it. Nine hands in, I’m up a little more than six hundred dollars and feeling confident enough to slip some of my own cards into my hand, at which point even Andrea can’t ignore me anymore.

“What are you doing?” she hisses.

“I guess I could ask you the same question,” I say. “In fact, I’m pretty sure I did.”

“He’s already watching you. He knows you’re cheating.”

“Good. I want him to.” But before I can say anything else, Brandt drifts over, his joviality just slightly more affected than it had been.

“Yo, Willpower,” he says, slapping me on the back. “Looks like you’re killing it over here, huh?”

“What can I say?” I shrug. “Beginner’s luck.”

“Sure. You think maybe you want to pace yourself, give somebody else a chance?”

“Hey,” I say. “The way that I look at it, if you can’t take the heat, you shouldn’t be running a place like this, right?”

Brandt looks like he’s just swallowed one of his dad’s golf balls, and then he just grins. “Uh-huh.” He shoots a glance at Andrea. “Why don’t you take a breather, Dre?”

Andrea shrugs, then wraps herself around him for a long, slow kiss, then moves back when another girl steps in to deal. Right away I recognize the newbie—it’s Mackenzie, the blond L.A.-producer’s daughter who delivered my poker chip to the library.

“Wow,” she says. “Guess you remembered your lucky rabbit’s foot, huh?”

“Something like that.” Turning, I look over to where Brandt and Andrea are laughing with some other kids at the roulette table. “So how long have they been going out?”

“Three days.” Mackenzie glances up at me, this time in open amusement. “You’re not jealous, are you?”

“Oh, man.” I make a disappointed face, like she’s caught me in the act. “Is it that obvious?”

“She’s not his type,” she says, and shuffles the deck. “Besides, I heard she totally threw herself at him.” When Mackenzie deals the next hand, I can feel somebody standing behind me and figure that Brandt’s got a spotter sending signals to Mackenzie about my hand. Sure enough, when I glance over my shoulder, there’s my good buddy Epic Phil with a big grin on his face, passing me a glass.

“Pepsi?”

“Thanks,” I say, but when I reach for it, my hand slips, spilling soda across the floor. “Oh, dude, I’m sorry.” By the time Phil’s down on his knees soaking up the mess, I’ve switched out my hand with two other cards. I go big in that round and drag in another hundred and sixty dollars.

Two hands later, I’m up another three hundred and ready to collar up. It’s well past midnight, and when Mackenzie stacks up eleven hundred-dollar bills and three twenties in front of me, I can feel Brandt glaring at my back with a kind of radioactive intensity that nobody in the room is going to miss. Even Andrea looks interested in what’s going to happen next.

I walk right up to Brandt. “Thanks for inviting me. Anytime you feel like handing free money away, just let me know. I’m always happy to take it.”

His mouth tightens. His face is red, and I can see veins standing out in his temples. Self-control isn’t a natural state for guys worth as much as he is, and he’s barely keeping it together—picture a ten-thousand-piece jigsaw puzzle with an M-80 firecracker sizzling away underneath it. I’m turning away when Brandt grabs my elbow, hard, yanking me close enough to speak into my ear.

“How’d you do it?” he snarls.

“Easy.” I shrug. “I’m just a better cheater than you are.”

“So you don’t deny it?”

“Actually, I pretty much just confessed.”

“How? Counting cards?”

“A magician never tells his secrets,” I say. “It spoils the trick.”

“How come none of my dealers spotted it?”

“Maybe you should consider using smarter people.” I glance around the room. “I hear it’s supposed to be a pretty good school.”

He loosens his grip slightly and actually seems to consider what I said for about half a second. “If you cheated, then I guess you won’t mind paying me back what you took.”

“Sure.” I pull out the wad and fork it over—easy come, easy go—and watch him make a big show out of counting the cash, although what he’s really doing is deciding how furious to let himself get, being humiliated like this in his own place. The answer comes a split second later when he nods at a great swaggering glandular catastrophe of a kid—six foot three with close-cropped red hair and shoulders the size of former Soviet republics—who grabs me by the shirt, swings me around, and slams me up against the door hard enough to knock me through it, out into the hallway. I hit the floor, landing on my tailbone under a fire extinguisher. My arms go numb right down to my fingertips. On the un-fun-o-meter, it’s right up there next to dental surgery.

When I look up, Brandt and his pet mutant have stepped into the hall and are looking down at me. The guy’s got a lacrosse stick pointed at my face, so close that I can smell the grass stains.

“Give me one good reason why I shouldn’t have Carl use your face as a punching bag,” Brandt says coolly.

“Well, for one thing,” I say, “that’s a lacrosse stick, and you wouldn’t want to mix sports metaphors. And secondly . . .” I manage to get up, although it takes some time, and start rubbing the feeling back into my butt. “I’m not here on my own.”

“What?”

“See for yourself.” Digging into my back pocket, I whip out a sheet of paper with my photo and real name on it—my profile page from the New Jersey Department of Human Services—and toss it to him. “I’m not even really a student here. It’s all a scam.”

“What . . . ?” Brandt stares at the printout for a long time. Knots of muscle bulge in his jaw, and he cocks his head to one side, frowning. “You’ve got thirty seconds to explain yourself.”

“My boss sent me in here tonight to soak you for as much as I could get.”

“Who’s your boss?”

“Brian McDonald. He runs a crooked online poker game north of Boston. Mentioned settling a score with you over something you did to his daughter last year, a girl named Moira?”

Brandt shakes his head. “I don’t know any . . .” he starts to say, and then he stops. “Wait a second—Moira McDonald?” His whole face changes, and his eyes look like they’re about to pop right out of his skull. “What about her?”

“I don’t know. He just sent me to burn you—that’s it. Paid me a hundred bucks plus whatever I could win.”

“I guess you failed,” Brandt says, and nods at Carl, who hauls off with the lacrosse stick and whacks me in the face. It feels like somebody set off a cherry bomb in my jaw, and that turns out to be the best of it—when my skull slams against the wall, I don’t see just stars, I glimpse whole galaxies and nebulae erupting beneath my eyelids. From somewhere in the distance I hear Brandt say, “Break his nose,” and I’m aware of Carl getting ready to swing again.

“Wait.” I throw my hands up, just in time. “Hold on.”

Brandt gives me a look. “What?”

“I can’t go to Mr. McDonald like this. You already took your money back. If I return with a broken nose, he’ll never use me again.”

Brandt smirks. “Then I guess you should’ve picked a different guy to work for, huh?”

“I wish it were that simple.” I shake my head. “If it weren’t for that two million . . .” And I start slinking back down the hall toward the stairway.

“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.