Con Academy by Joe Schreiber Read Free Book Online Page B

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.”
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    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.
    â€œIt’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—”
    â€œThey’re swimming in cash,” I say. “I kind of figured that one out for myself, thanks.”
    â€œIt 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.
    â€œFriends of yours?”
    â€œBoys,” Andrea says, “you’ve met Will.”
    â€œYeah.” I take a half step back. “At one in the morning.”
    â€œNo 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 differentdirection. “Andrea asked for our help.”
    â€œChuck 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.
    â€œSo what are you doing up here?” I ask.
    Chuck and Donnie exchange a glance. “Color tour,” Chuck says, deadpan.
    â€œYeah,” says Donnie. “We’re leaf peepers.”
    â€œThe 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.”
    â€œWhat’s the second reason?” I