Con Academy

by Joe Schreiber

  “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 j
ust 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 ey
es. “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.”