by Ben Mezrich
“On the plane, you asked me why I quit the swim team, the morning of the national meet.”
Charlie’s pulse quickened. This was going in a direction he hadn’t expected. He glanced around the pool area, but it was still deserted, the shadows from the volcano obscuring everything beyond ten yards.
“For years,” Finn said quietly, “for most of my life, really, I was obsessed with swimming. I’d wake up every morning at four, train three hours before school, then rush home after the bell, train another three. I was crazy about it; it was pretty much all I did. See, I didn’t have great parents like you; my dad works all the time at the bank, my mom left us when I was three. But I’m not trying to get all ‘after-school special.’ It wasn’t about that; it was about me and the water, and winning. See, I was good. Really good. And when I swam in a big meet and beat the other swimmers, it was the best feeling in the world. That feeling, it was everything. After a while, it was all that mattered.”
Charlie wasn’t an athlete, but that day he’d gotten a taste of that feeling, he knew what it was like to be better than everyone else, to win. It was an incredibly addictive thing.
“By the time of that national meet, I had been training so much, my muscles were on autopilot. I was swimming faster than I’d ever dreamed possible. I was unbeatable. Everyone knew it. The coach, everyone on the team, everyone at Nagassack. Even the other coaches and swimmers.”
Finn was so low in the water now, Charlie could only see his eyes, heavily lidded, piercing green echoes of the moon.
“The night before the national meet, my dad had to work late. Really late. Around midnight, I couldn’t sleep, so I biked over to the pool for one last dip in the water. The place was empty, I was alone.”
Finn slapped a hand against the side of the pool, sending up a spray of drops. Charlie jerked back so hard, he almost fell off the chair.
“Suddenly, it all drifted into place. The way my body moved, the water flowing beneath me, the speed, the energy, the focus. I realized then what everybody else knew—there was nobody who could beat me. The competition was over. And the next morning, for the first time in my entire life, I didn’t feel like swimming. People came up with so many reasons. I was scared. I was injured. I was a head case, crazy.”
Finn let his body float back from the wall so that he was barely hanging on to the edge with his fingers.
“But the truth is, I simply didn’t need to swim. I already knew I could win. There was no point. I had nothing to prove.”
Charlie stared at him. He wasn’t sure he understood, but he could see from Finn’s face that he was truly serious—maybe for the first time since Charlie had met him.
“For me, this isn’t about the money,” Finn said. “Or Miranda, or even the Carnival Killers. I’m doing this for me. I’m doing this to beat a beatable game. To prove that I can—to the only person I need to prove anything to. Myself.”
Charlie felt his legs numbing as the wicker dug into the backs of his thighs.
“You didn’t have a problem with any of it. I mean, when there wasn’t any money involved, yeah, it’s beating a beatable game to show that we can. But with fifty thousand dollars at stake—”
“It’s a matter of perspective. I don’t consider it cheating.”
Charlie wished he could be so cavalier, but now, knowing what he knew, he simply didn’t agree.
“Math to beat a beatable game, right? Brains to level an unfair playing field. But the wheel—well, that’s not just gonna take brains, and you know it.”
Finn looked at him for a full beat. Then he shrugged.
“You want to make me and Miranda the bad guys, Charlie? Okay. But I’m not the one with an iPhone in his pocket.”
With that, as Charlie digested the words, Finn pushed off with his arms, sending his body into a perfect backstroke, his hands slicing through the moonlit water with soundless ease.
Finn had a point, of course. Charlie had the iPhone in his pocket.
But he also had the inklings of a plan.
24
THE HAWK WASN’T WEARING any pants.
It was a stupid, silly thought, yet Charlie couldn’t clear it from his head; no matter how hard he tried, it just kept reverberating through his mind, jumping from cell to cell like a viral video across the web, pushing all logic out of the way as it threatened to consume every sparking neuron. The freaking hawk wasn’t wearing any freaking pants. He had an electric-green hat with a little tassel, a red scarf, a shirt with buttons and cuffs—and then he was naked from the waist down. It didn’t make any sense. He was a hawk and either he should have been totally nude, like in real life, or he should have been wearing pants. But there he was, beaky smile and jaunty crook in his tail, staring at Charlie from the lined-off section of the enormous wheel, two sections down from where the thick plastic arrow rested, ready to click away, waiting for the wheel to move, around and around and around . . .
“Anytime, Charlie. Just give it a good spin. No pressure. Forget the crowd, forget I’m standing here, forget the tickets and the money. Give it a good ol’ spin. It’s just a game of chance.”
Charlie nodded. The man with the gray hair was wearing a similar suit from the day before, but his tie was bright red and covered in little pictures of Incredo Land characters; Charlie knew, without looking, that all five of the creatures from the wheel in front of him were there, tiny replicants made of twists of thread. Loopy. The Frog. Dandy the Squirrel. Boots the Kangaroo. And that darn, pantsless Maddy.
But standing there, trying not to look at the crowd that had swelled to at least a hundred people at the base of the stage that had been set up across the midway point of Solar Avenue, trying not to see the sack of money on the table in front of the wheel next to the big Plexiglas Red Cross charity box—the one the bespectacled man had referred to the day before, for new donations, with the inviting slot—desperately wanting not to feel the weight of the phone in his pocket, he knew that the man was wrong. It wasn’t a game of chance at all. It was math, pure and simple. Numbers wielded like a sword, designed to kill any semblance of luck or chance.
It was almost too much to bear. Charlie felt his legs weakening, his knees threatening to buckle under his weight. Finn was wrong; he wasn’t strong enough to do this. He was weak, a geek, a nerd, he was Charlie Numbers, and he didn’t have the will to go through with it.
And then he heard a cough from the crowd and saw Jeremy, a head taller than the kids on either side of him, anticipation splashed across his freckled, reddish face. That was all Charlie needed.
He gripped the wheel with both hands, and using all his weight, spun it as hard as he could.
Up close, the click, click, click of the arrow was like machine-gun fire in his ears; the sound echoed through his bones, erasing the last trivial vestiges of half-naked water fowl from his thoughts. His eyes were intent on the wheel, the images in each defined section that blurred as it spun—but no so much so that he couldn’t pick out where one ended and another began. Loopy, Dandy, Boots, Maddy, there. The first revolution, and in that instant, Charlie brushed his hand against his pocket again, hitting the screen of the iPhone. The information was entered into his satellite tracking program, and then his eyes were refocused, picking through the blur. Loopy, Dandy, Boots . . . again. Charlie touched his pocket a third time, marking off the end of the second revolution. Three little flicks, that’s all it had taken, and in front of a crowd of over a hundred watching eyes. But nobody was looking at him, because right there, next to him, in swirling Technicolor, was the greatest misdirection one could ask for. A spinning wheel twice as tall as him, whirling round and round and round.
And then Charlie felt the vibrations against his thigh. Five little bursts, separated by a second between each one. It was his own design. He’d known that trying to actually look at the phone without anyone noticing would have been too risky, so he’d come up with a way that the phone could communicate with him secretly, using its vibrating ring. And now Ch
arlie knew, for certain, where the wheel would stop. He looked over at the gray-haired man, who was smiling at him expectantly, and Charlie cleared his voice so that nobody would mishear:
“Maddy the Turkey Hawk!” he said loudly. Of course, it would have to be Maddy, Charlie thought sardonically. The gray-haired man repeated the words to the crowd.
The wheel continued to spin. Still a blur, but second by second, slowing down, the friction in the air and the tug of the wheel’s axle eating away at its kinetic energy, joule by joule.
But by that point, Charlie was barely watching. He knew the math, he knew that the equation he’d plugged into the phone was sound, that the numbers wouldn’t lie. He knew, for a fact, that when that wheel finally stopped spinning—
“Holy smokes!” the gray-haired man shouted. “You got it! Maddy! You win! Charlie Lewis, you just won fifty thousand dollars, and eight lifetime tickets to Incredo Land!”
Charlie turned back toward the wheel, and there he was, Maddy, bare tail feathers up in the air, right underneath the plastic arrow, frozen for everyone to see. Charlie had done it. The Carnival Killers had won. They had beat the unbeatable game.
And then, in that moment, everything seemed to happen at once.
Out of the corner of his eye, Charlie saw Miranda hopping up the steps that led to the stage. She was clapping her hands and smiling and saying something to the gray-haired man about being Charlie’s guardian, his chaperone for the trip, and as he handed her the lifetime tickets, part of the prize for beating the wheel, she informed him she was going to hold on to them as well as the money until Charlie’s parents could pick him up at the airport when they got back to Boston.
But before she reached the top step, Charlie was already moving as well. With a single motion, he swept his black backpack off the stage by his feet, ripped the zipper open, rushed over to the table where the money was piled up—and started shoving the stacks of bills inside. He didn’t look up as he went, praying that the wheel and the gray-haired man were obscuring Miranda’s view, ignoring the crowd that was now pointing and laughing at what probably seemed to them, his overdramatic antics. Five thousand. Ten thousand. Twenty thousand. Fifty thousand.
Only then, every last hundred-dollar bill safely in the backpack, did he look up. Miranda had just gotten free from the man with the gray hair and was moving toward him. Her gaze moved from him to the bag, and then her smile froze on her face.
Charlie yanked the zipper shut and hoisted the bag over his right shoulder. It was way heavier than he had imagined, but he didn’t care. He gave Miranda one last look and then dove forward off the stage, taking the steps at full speed.
Miranda shouted something, frantic, high-pitched words that sounded like “Barry,” or “Gary,” followed by “get him!” But then Charlie was diving into the stunned crowd of people, his shoes churning against the ground, his body moving fast as a bullet, faster than he’d ever gone—
And then suddenly, he slammed headfirst right into Jeremy.
They went down in a jumble of arms and legs, both of them screaming as they went. The backpack flipped off Charlie’s shoulder as he crashed into the ground, and then Jeremy was on top of him, trying to untangle himself.
“Hey, man, get off me!” Charlie shouted.
“Ow, you’re on my ankle!”
“Just move!”
And then, less than a second later, Charlie was back on his feet. He reached down, grabbed the backpack out from beneath Jeremy, who was still down on one knee, and then Charlie was moving forward again. The crowd parted as he barreled through, and then he was speeding down Solar Avenue, feet churning as fast as they could go.
A few more yards, and then he dared to looked back—and that’s when he saw the two impossible shapes moving after him.
One looked like a giant mouse. The other, a mutated frog in oversize moon boots.
Both were wearing pants. And both were coming after him, murderous looks in their giant cartoon eyes.
25
BACK PRESSED AGAINST THE locked steel door, heart pounding in his chest, face frozen in a rictus of pure fear, the sickly sweet tones of singing robot children echoing down the narrow corridor, the words themselves twisted and torqued by the steam pipes and rusting gears jutting from the cinder-block walls. Charlie held the backpack out at arm’s length in front of him, his gaze pinned to the enormous headless mouse, and the even more terrifying frog, as they towered over him.
Loopy, or Barry, or Gary, or Scarface, as Charlie now thought of him, leaned forward so that Charlie could see the yellow of his teeth.
“Thought you could get away? That was real stupid, kid. Miranda promised me ten percent of that stash. And Loopy’s got to get paid. Understand?”
Scarface laughed at his own words, then reached out with a giant white glove and tried to grab the backpack by its strap. The huge hands swatted against the material, but the sausage-shaped fingers couldn’t close. The man cursed, and Charlie heard a loud guffaw echo out of the Frog costume.
“You gotta take off the hands, man. Loopy’s only got four fingers. Can’t grab much with four freaking fingers.”
Scarface glared at his buddy in the Frog costume, then went to work on the enormous gloves. It took him a full minute to get them unattached, then he flung them both to the cement floor.
“Let’s try this again,” he hissed.
He reached out and grabbed the backpack, this time getting the strap on his first try.
“Nice and heavy,” he said. “I like that.”
He showed the pack to the Frog, then grinned back at Charlie.
“Nobody beats the Mouse, kid. You should know that.”
Then he attacked the zipper, ripping it open with a single yank. Still grinning, he flipped the backpack over, aiming its contents toward the ground—
And then his gasp echoed off the cinder-block walls. Instead of thick stacks of hundred-dollar bills:
Diapers. Dozens of diapers, raining down from the backpack, piling up on the cement floor . . .
Scarface stared at the growing pile, then back at Charlie. His hand opened, and the backpack fell to ground, landing right on top of all the diapers.
“How?” he stared. Then he shook his head. “I don’t know what just happened here, but you better freaking start talking. Where’s the money?”
Charlie swallowed. He hadn’t exactly planned to get cornered like this; he’d hoped to just drop the backpack with the diapers somewhere in the amusement park, where security would eventually find it. The diapers had been Jeremy’s idea, both to make the bag look as if it were still full of cash, and also add a nice personal flourish to the job. His plan had worked, everything but the endgame. He reached his hands behind his back, pressing at the cold steel door again. Still locked. He looked around, beginning to panic as the two men lurched menacingly closer.
And then a familiar, if shocked, voice echoed through the corridor.
“Charlie Numbers? Dude, what the heck is going on?”
The Frog and Scarface turned as one. Charlie looked between them, and saw Dylan standing in the corridor about ten feet behind the two men, flanked by his two bozos, Liam and Dusty.
The corridor went near silent; the only sound, besides the music from the ride, was Dylan’s labored breathing. The hefty thug must have run pretty fast to catch up to Charlie and his pursuers. Charlie could see from the expression on Dylan’s face, the scene in front of him wasn’t at all what he’d expected. Obviously, Scarface and the Frog felt the same way. One kid in a desolate corridor they could handle, but a fifth of a school trip? This was more than either of them had signed up for.
Scarface looked back over his shoulder at Charlie and then spat toward the floor, missing the diapers by a few inches.
“Not worth it,” he grunted. “You can keep your stinking diapers.”
And then he turned and started back down the corridor. The Frog followed one big shoe-length behind. A moment later, they had squeezed past Dylan and hi
s groupies, and a minute after that, Charlie was alone with his least favorite classmates. But for once, Charlie was more than glad to be facing his usual tormentor.
“I think you just saved my life.” He gasped.
Dylan opened his mouth to respond, and then closed it again. His pasty cheeks suddenly filled with color. My god, Charlie thought, he’s blushing. Dylan had been a bully for such a long time, he had forgotten what it felt like to help someone out. He looked completely overwhelmed and confused, but it was obvious he liked the feeling.
“First time for everything,” he said. “I guess.”
He glanced at Liam and Dusty, then over his shoulder, at the now empty corridor. Then he turned back to Charlie.
“You know what, Numbers? Today, you get a pass.”
Then Dylan’s wide, pasty face broke out in a grin.
“I mean, after all, it is Incredo Land, right? The Cheeriest Spot in the Universe?”
At the moment, Charlie couldn’t disagree.
26
IT TOOK ABOUT TEN minutes for the crowd to dissipate, which wasn’t surprising considering the bizarre scene Charlie had caused. Picturing the whole scene was such a bizarre thought—a skinny kid in red sneakers scooping money into a backpack, then diving off a stage, Loopy the Space Mouse and the Frog in hot pursuit. When Charlie had rammed right into him, taking them both down to the ground, it had looked so real that even Jeremy had a hard time believing they had planned the whole thing at three in the morning. But like Charlie had predicted, it had worked perfectly. In the ensuing chaos, nobody had noticed that Charlie had lifted the wrong backpack off the ground. Nobody had noticed anything except that crazy kid running down Solar Avenue, a cartoon nightmare right behind him.
Still laughing, Jeremy gripped Charlie’s heavy black backpack and strolled up the steps leading to the stage. The gray-haired man was gone, as was Miranda and just about everybody else. Jeremy had no idea where that conniving fake teacher had vanished to, but he truly hoped he never saw her again. Just watching her as her face had gone cold, seeing Charlie with the money, it was enough to give you nightmares. Reaching the top of the stage, Jeremy glanced at the huge colorful wheel, still frozen in place the way Charlie had left it—the hawk up top, beak open in a wonderful grin. Jeremy felt exactly as that hawk looked as he crossed to the big Plexiglas charity box. Then he unslung the backpack from his shoulders and undid the zipper.
