Con Academy (6 page)

“Like you're being followed? Cops?”

“No, nothing like that.”

She doesn't look convinced, and I don't blame her. The truth is, I don't even want to think about what it means that Dad has already found me here, or what he could do to mess up my play with Brandt Rush—not that I have one yet.

Dad
is
a problem. Even if he weren't a gambling addict and constantly in debt to a half-dozen of New Jersey's less patient bookies for the worst run of luck in the history of horseracing, I got the vibe from him that his drinking is getting out of control again. He's an ever-expanding black hole of misfortune with a chronic habit of sucking in whatever's nearby, and at the moment that includes me.

“Listen,” Andrea says, seeming to read my mind. “I've already got three good reasons why conning Brandt Rush is a terrible idea. If you've got somebody gunning for you here, that's just one more argument for calling off this travesty now before you do some damage neither of us can walk away from.”

“I told you, I'm fine.”

“You're sure?”

“Positive.”

“Oh, Will.” She rolls her eyes. “You
are
a terrible liar.”

I give her my best innocent look. “You said something about three reasons?”

She still doesn't seem to believe me but presses on just the same. “I don't know if you noticed the plaque when we first came in?” she says. “Let's start there.”

the rush center for dance and performing arts
is what the plaque in the lobby turns out to say. And if you take the time to read the small print, you can actually see, for those too dense to grasp what the name means,
made possible by the generous donation of victoria and herbert rush.

“It's actually a twenty-six-million-dollar endowment,” Andrea tells me as we stand there, “to be paid out over the next ten years. Brandt's father and grandfather both went to Connaughton. They paid not only for this new arts center, but also the refurbished boathouse and athletic field house that's going up in 2017, on the other side of campus. All of which means—”

“They're swimming in cash,” I say. “I kind of figured that one out for myself, thanks.”

“It means,” the voice behind me says, “that they own this school.”

When I glance around, I see two men standing behind us. The broad-shouldered one is tall and bald, with a head like a hollow-point bullet, and the other is bearded and bespectacled, wrapped up in about twenty pounds of imitation Savile Row tweed. It takes me about five seconds to recognize them as the two that shook me out of bed last night and sent me running across campus with my backpack slapping against my shoulders.

“Friends of yours?”

“Boys,” Andrea says, “you've met Will.”

“Yeah.” I take a half step back. “At one in the morning.”

“No hard feelings,” Mr. Tweed says, with a little smile. Behind his specs, his green eyes sparkle like sea glass, and I realize that one of his pupils is cocked in a slightly different
direction. “Andrea asked for our help.”

“Chuck and Donnie are based out of New York,” Andrea says. “They were running a boiler-room scam in Queens, but I met them in Boston last year, glim-dropping out on Commonwealth Avenue.”

I take a closer look at Donnie's face. “You've got a glass eye?”

Donnie grins and pops it out so I can see it. I've never run the glim-drop scam myself, but I've heard of it. Essentially you've got a well-dressed one-eyed man who walks into a storefront looking for his missing glass eye, and when nobody can find it, the one-eyed man offers ten thousand dollars for its return. The next day, the accomplice “finds” the eye in the store and announces that he's going to return it, but the shopkeeper—thinking of the reward—offers to buy it from him for a few hundred dollars so he can turn around and clear the 10K for himself, but, of course, he never sees either of our boys again. Like all good cons, it works off the greed and selfishness of the mark. The wheeze is strictly nineteenth century, so old it's new, and afterward, nobody wants to admit he's been hustled by such an obvious ploy, meaning that if these two bozos play it right, they can run this game up and down the same three streets for weeks at a time before somebody calls the cops.

“So what are you doing up here?” I ask.

Chuck and Donnie exchange a glance. “Color tour,” Chuck says, deadpan.

“Yeah,” says Donnie. “We're leaf peepers.”

“The point is,” Andrea says, “we can't play Brandt Rush like some garden-variety sucker and then give him the brushoff. He gets away with murder at Connaughton precisely because his family has the whole administration in its pocket, and if he gets the slightest whiff of a scam, we're dead before we start. Which means he can't realize that he's been conned—even after the con is over.”

“What's the second reason?” I ask.

“He's smart.”

“Yeah,” I say. “I got to witness him this morning in my Global Risk class. He seems to know what he's doing.”

“That's putting it lightly,” Andrea says. “Did he talk to you?”

“We're practically best buds.”

“Check his GPA,” Andrea says. “He sets the curve in all his classes. Daddy sits on the board of Wall Street's oldest brokerage firms, and believe it or not, Brandt's actually inherited his old man's brains.” She glances up at Chuck and Donnie, then back at me. “Not that he would ever admit to it. He's way too busy for academics.”

“Doing what,” I ask, “training for the stringed-instrument demolition squad?”

Andrea shakes her head. “On weekends, he runs a casino out of his dorm room. It's invitation only, exclusively for upperclassmen. Occasionally he'll allow freshman and sophomore girls”—her face tightens with distaste—“but only if they're good-looking enough to meet his exacting standards.”

“Have
you
been there?”

Andrea doesn't answer my question. “It's strictly a Friday-through-Sunday shindig, and of course the administration lets him get away with it. He's got a blackjack table, a roulette wheel, and poker.” She pauses. “And he cheats.”

“How do you know?”

“Trust me.”

“Right,” I say. “So what's the third reason?”

Andrea takes in a deep breath and lets it out slowly. “He's
mean,
Will.”

“I hadn't noticed.”

She shakes her head. “I'm not just talking about what he did to my cello,” she says. “He's the most vindictive guy I've ever met.” She lowers her voice and leans in close. “Last year, when he was a sophomore, there was a girl here, a senior named Moira McDonald, who turned him down for Homecoming. At the time Brandt just blew it off like it was no big thing, but then the following spring, he must have sneaked a hidden camera into her room. The next morning there were photos of her on Facebook . . .” She closes her eyes and shakes her head. “You can imagine what kind I'm talking about.
Everybody
saw them. Moira was going to be valedictorian. She left school two weeks before graduation in total humiliation.” Andrea's staring straight at me now. “
That's
how Brandt Rush treats people he doesn't like.”

“Okay.” I shake my head. “Now I'm definitely going after him.”

“Bad call, Will. Take my word for it.”

“So you're backing out of our deal?”

“Wow.” Andrea doesn't move for a long time. Then I realize that she's started to smile. “You seriously don't have an ounce of self-preservation in your body, do you?”

“Look.” I shrug. “You can do whatever you want, but as far as I'm concerned, a schmuck like that was born with a bull's-eye painted on his back. I'm going to take him down on general principles.” I stand up. “And when I do, I'm expecting you to honor your end of the agreement—pull up stakes and leave.”

“Let's not get ahead of ourselves,” Donnie puts in, and shoots a glance at Andrea, even though one of his eyes doesn't quite go that way. “What are the terms?”

“Hold on.” I turn to look at the two of them. “This is between me and Andrea.”

“Andrea's a friend,” Chuck says. “We owe her one.” He takes a step closer to me. “You got a problem with us helping her out?”

After a second, I shake my head. We're all professionals here, and anyway, it appears that the specifics of this arrangement are just one more aspect over which I have no control. But that's fine. The first hints of an idea have already started to incubate in my mind, and I already know how I'm going to win.

“First one to get him to pay out ten thousand dollars cash,” Andrea says.

“That's sucker money,” I say, shaking my head. “He'll see through it. Make it fifty K, between now and Thanksgiving break.”

“Fifty thousand?”

“What, too rich for your blood?”

She cocks her head. “Please.”

“That gives us a month to make our play.” I extend my hand. “Are you in or out?”

Andrea smiles a little. Her expression is somewhere between awe and pity. “You're already in way over your head.”

She's so right. I
am
in over my head. At least it's nothing new.

I'm still holding out my hand, and Andrea's still smiling as she shakes it.

I
T TURNS OUT GETTING INVITED TO
B
RANDT
R
USH'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.